Strangely Wonderful

by Kathleen Melin

Mont Saint Michel, photo by Kathleen Melin

After two years, I was still learning to inhabit my body.
        It had resumed most of its former capacities, but I lived a short distance from it—a distance that was both pleasant and disturbing. I had hair again. I had put on some weight and didn’t look quite so tenuous. But like a ritual mutilation, two dents in my forehead streaked with incisions scarred silvery bright. Most days I forgot about them.

        Re-mind.

         In the burnished calm of autumn, I settled beside the plank table of my white clapboard house drinking tea with my farm intern. He had a bevy of friends with brain injuries. I was one of them. Wordlessly, we gazed at the tall grass of the prairie rippling with a fall aura of reds and blues until he split the silence.
        “Trepanation,” he said, leaning back in his chair and smiling, “pre-mortem perforation of the skull.”
         “Why would anyone do that?”
         “I don’t know,” he laughed.
         But I was not laughing. I was the one with holes in my head drilled by a surgeon to remove blood and relieve pressure from a brain hemorrhage of undetermined cause. The trauma and ecstasy of being softly exposed physically and emotionally had receded. Now vulnerability stunned me again.
         He said, “In the 1960s, a medical student in Holland trepanned his skull with a foot-powered dental drill. So did a man in England—electric handheld drill.”
         I couldn’t fathom that people would bore holes in their heads, much less with the same tool I use for farm chores.
        “A woman in England trepanned her skull, too. She and her boyfriend made an art video of it. One person fainted at the screening.”
        The next day, I scoured for information, trying to use my intellect to soothe my horror.
        The medical student, the English woman, her boyfriend, and other modern-day proponents of trepanation had drilled holes in their own heads or those of others. They advocated for the practice as a way to achieve increased cranial blood flow, more creativity, relief from depression or chronic fatigue or anxiety, a calming effect, a higher state of consciousness, treatment for addiction, a different ratio of blood to cerebral spinal fluid, or to limit the detrimental effects of aging.
         They weren’t doctors.
        These weren’t medically indicated surgeries.
         I couldn’t get my mind around it—that people had done this to themselves on purpose—the risks, lack of evidence, disfigurement.

        You act like you have a hole in your head.

        The holes in my head, two of them, five-eighths of an inch in diameter, three inches apart, and covered with the fabric of my skin, open to the soft tissue of my brain. When I press lightly, I feel the nearly round depressions that fit the tips of my fingers perfectly. I see them when I look in the mirror. Still, I deny I’m changed, much less transformed.
        I wanted to be back in my body. I wanted my previous sense of normalcy though I still had many of the symptoms and behaviors associated with brain hemorrhage—headaches, noise sensitivity, a slow decision-making process, aversion to crowds, and bouts of obsessive thinking. I sometimes blurted things out with a clumsy loss of social filters. Everything—everything—touched me, and I cried with small motivation and great abandon. I easily drifted into a liminal space neither here in my body nor there near the afterlife. In those moments I felt vague, more deeply absent than when daydreaming. A great distance existed from inside me to what I could express outwardly.

        She’s out of her mind.

        With a desperate need to understand and integrate my experience, I persisted in my search. Trepanation existed worldwide and across historical eras.
        In China, The Esoteric Scripture of the Yellow Emperor from the 5th Century BCE mentions surgically exposing the brain. In Greece, Hippocratic doctors detail trepanation in the treatise Wounds of the Head for removing blood or bone fragments. Around the year 1000 CE, Muslim doctor and surgeon Al Zahrawi wrote a thirty-volume medical encyclopedia. In it, he described neurosurgical diagnoses and treatments, including trepanation, for the management of head injuries. His drawings illustrate hundreds of surgical tools.
         I felt weirdly comforted by the historical reports of trepanation for medical reasons, an extreme procedure to remedy extreme circumstances, like mine.
        The record continues in the art of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. A proliferation of paintings and prints captures images of trepanation as a sincere medical procedure by a cadre of revered artists: Pieter Huys, Maerten de Vos, Pieter Bruegel, Pieter Jansz Quast, Jan Steen, Johann della Croce, Theodor de Bry, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The art shows hand-turned drills, bow drills, knives, swords, and scrapers poised over submissive and sometimes terrified patients in surgeries used to cure seizures, relieve migraines, and repair skull fractures.

The Cure of Folly, Heironymous Bosch


        But allegory appears in Hieronymus Bosch’s 1494 painting Removing the Stone of Folly, thus erasing any validation for medical purposes. In this painting, a slack-eyed man reclines, tied to a chair, in a landscape that folds away to the horizon. A flower, perhaps a tulip, grows from a hole mid-forehead. The surgeon stands behind him holding the drill and wearing a funnel for a hat. A woman with a book on her head and a monk with a tankard pose to the man’s left. The celestial blue sky opens like an umbrella slightly off-kilter. The painting, contained within a circle and surrounded by an ornate gilded frame, includes these words—”Master, rid me of this stone soon.”
        In surreal fashion, Bosch seems to acknowledge the dense foolishness of being human, dwelling in the unavoidable and compelling fact of having a body, existing in it, and facing its demands which collide with a reach for something metaphysical, spiritual, mystic.
        I grasped this. It was a clue that my surgery was more than a medical matter. I needed that clue because my trepanation had been a medical matter, but it had been more.

        Never. Mind.

        I have no memory of the hours following the hemorrhage or the day after, no memory of what happened, who was with me, or where I was. I have no remembrance of doctors, nurses, technicians; nor of lying on a cold table for an angiogram or submitting to a surgery; no awareness, memory, or consciousness of anything for twenty-eight hours.
        But in that time, I inhabited a comforting netherworld—neither here, neither there. I felt as if I were inside warm layers of lustrous silken gray that I couldn’t get through and didn’t want to. In that gray, I met the presence of those I came to call The Others. I felt them, but I never saw them. I heard them speak, but only two words: Not yet.
        I floated in and out of that netherworld during the days after the brain hemorrhage. But as I recovered physically, the encompassing bliss receded. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the strange and comforting experience. In a follow-up appointment when my doctor asked if I’d had a near-death experience, I said no.

        Closed-minded.

        My obsessive thinking, my need to understand and intellectualize the experience persisted. I had to know more and pursued obscure archeological research.
        Trepanned skulls exist in the anthropological record going back more than 8,000 years from Africa to China to Eastern Europe to Russia to Central America to South America. Skulls with holes in them—scraped, drilled, grooved; round, oblong, square; made with hand-turned drills, bow drills, knives, swords, and scrapers of obsidian, glass, metal.
        At a 6,000 BCE burial site in France, forty of a hundred and twenty skulls had been trepanned. In one region of Russia particularly rich in them, archeologists found thirteen in a mass grave from children around the age of ten to adults around fifty, male and female. Eleven of the thirteen showed signs of bone growth at the edge of the hole indicating the person lived for some time afterward. After archeologists combed the evidence for medical explanations such as injury, they were left with human skulls trepanned for no apparent reason. When other digs in the same region unearthed more trepanned skulls, most with healed bone at the rims, archeologists added this speculation—ritual purpose to acquire unique skills or achieve transformation.
        The suggestion of transformation, something more than medical necessity, seemed like a clue to my own experience.
        Through my recovery so far, I believed I would be the previous version of myself. I simultaneously recognized an inner shift that I couldn’t quite articulate. I was more awake to beauty, calmer, more delighted by the little moments of life, less anxious about my personal woes and the woes of the world. On a deep experiential level, I understood life was clearly out of control and random. Surprisingly, this placed me more firmly in acceptance and trust rather than fear. I had been somewhere and had come back, though I’d stayed in the same place.
         I let this clue recede. I got on with my practical human life. I forgot.

        Absent-minded.

        Three years after the brain bleed, I traveled with friends to Mont Saint Michel in France. As we drove down from the buttressing cliffs on the mainland and curved around the tidal flats of the bay, Mont Saint Michel, a dusky promontory, appeared on the horizon. We got closer over the duration of an hour. The rock outcropping with the abbey on top loomed larger.
         Once on the island, after crossing the causeway, the mighty presence hovered over us. We wound through the city to the top along narrow streets, unevenly cobbled, past lodgings, and a zig zag of crepe shops. A monk whisked by with a stack of liturgical books in his hand. A nun billowed along a walkway in the brisk March wind. In an upper courtyard, a row of pillared arches captivated me with the illusion of infinity, perhaps an architectural trick, or perhaps my watery post-brain bleed vision. Within the stone enclosure lay a shocking square of living green grass. We continued, ascending through escalating chapels. On one of the high terraces, I stood at a dizzying ledge and looked out at shining water and to another infinity where gray water met the gray horizon.
         Mid-afternoon, our guide led us away from the open and airy passages, halls, and chapels, down narrow dark stairwells, to the base of the foundation. We stopped. I lay my palms on the cool, pink-tinged rock of the island where it merged with cut gray stone and buff mortar.
In this low cavern, a high relief sculpted image adorned a wall above us. Nine chunky panels depicted the warrior angel Michael standing over a man who lies supine on the ground, propped on an elbow, his eyes rolled back and his lips slightly open.
        Michael, dressed as a gladiator, but with a bare and tattooed torso, faces forward, giant wings spread behind him. His right arm floats at shoulder height as if he’s just landed. Waves of billowing hair flare from his head. Fissured stone at his face suggests straight thin lips, a nose, eye sockets, and perhaps a crown. Artificial light from above illuminates the flat smooth disk of a halo surrounding his head.
         “There is a legend of the founding of the Abbey Mont Saint Michel,” our guide said, in excellent English with the murmur of an accent.
         I listened superficially, absorbing what I could. It had been a long day, and on one level, I felt saturated already. On another, although I was truly impressed, I couldn’t imagine anything significant to me in the creation myth of this Catholic edifice.
        “A cleric named Aubert was in the hermitage on this rock island called Le Mont Tombe around 700 A.D.,” he said. “According to legend, the Archangel Michael appears to Aubert and tells him to build a chapel in his name.”
        That must have been mind-boggling, even for a cleric—even someone spiritually inclined, even in mystic times. Aubert agrees and then forgets, or perhaps he discounts the vision, mistrusts the reality of his own experience.
        The guide continued, “Michael appears again, and again. Aubert agrees and does nothing.”
        I suspect Michael felt weary and frustrated with this soft human, this Aubert who, according to legend, was raised in a privileged family, fond of drinking wine and eating oysters and local cheese.
        “For the third time,” the guide said, pointing to Michael’s strained outstretched left arm detailed with veins, and the thumb protruding from the fist, “the warrior angel swoops in, and this time pokes a hole in Aubert’s head.”
        In imitation, our guide stretched out his arm with the thumb extended—“So”—and pressed the air.
        I gasped.
        “Michael once again tells Aubert to build a church and name it after him. This time, he does.”

        How can I get through your thick skull?

        My surgery was at midnight. I imagine the careful procedure: my head shaved, and purple grid lines like ancient tree symbols drawn on my sun-deprived scalp. Over them, a wash of golden yellow disinfectant, the cut of the scalpel, and then the scent of dark blood and cauterized skin. The skin would be retracted, and the drill applied, like the one I use to bore holes in live trees for maple syrup in the spring. Like the trees, the skull opens with white bits in a fluffy circle around the auger, swept away before the next stage of surgery—piercing the dura and poking stiff tubes through the gray matter to collect uncontained blood from cavities at the center of the brain.
        As I lay in ambiguous mystery, held by the near presence of The Others, my friends and family wrapped around me with an outpouring of love I didn’t know existed. After three weeks in the hospital, I returned home where their human care continued, and, little by little, I regained life; little by little, The Others faded.
        Now, like the dream that recedes on waking, I no longer live in the sensory experience of the quiet dark, the deep comfort and contentment, the complete perpetual feeling of being absolutely, unequivocally, inarguable loved. But like these permanent holes in my head, I carry the mystery of it, a mystery that comforts me and eases my existence now.
         I know I have been to the crossroads. It is there, just ahead, but out of sight, where the end is the beginning.

Saint Michael and Aubert, Mont Saint Michel