Putting holes in your head.... (fwd)

[grip at netcom.com]

I'm not sure why I believe that you will find this interesting, but I do. 
If I'm wrong, send me flames, and I'll get out the burn ointment.

I just have this crazy feeling that if TMP had seen this, it would have 
been woven into one of his works.

WARNING: Some of the following is not for the squeamish.

  THE PEOPLE WITH HOLES IN THEIR HEADS 
 
  Amanda Fielding lives in a charming flat looking over London's
  river with her companion, Joey Mellen, and their infant son,
  Rock.  She is a successful painter, and she and Joey have an art
  gallery in a fashionable street of the King's Road.  Another of
  her talents is for politics.  At the last two General Elections
  she stood for Parliament in Chelsea, more than doubling her vote
  on the second occasion from 49 to 139.  It does not sound much,
  but the cause for which she stands is unfamiliar and lacks obvious
  appeal. Fielding and her voters demand that trepanning operations
  be made freely available on the National Health.  Trepanation
  means cutting a hole in your skull.

  The founder of the trepanation movement is a Dutch savant, Dr.
  Bart Hughes. In 1962 he made a discovery which his followers
  proclaim as the most significant in modern times.  One's state
  and degree of consciousness, he realized, are related to the
  volume of blood in the brain.  According to his theory of evolution,
  the adoption of an upright stance brought certain benefits to the
  human race, but it caused the flow of blood through the head to be
  limited by gravity, thus reducing the range of human consciousness.
  Certain parts of the brain ceased or reduced their functions while
  others, particularly those parts relating to speech and reasoning,
  became emphasized in compensation.  One can redress the balance by
  a number of methods, such as standing on one's head, jumping from
  a hot bath into a cold one, or the use of drugs; but the wider
  consciousness thus obtained is only temporary.  Bart Hughes shared
  the common goal of mystics and poets in all ages: he wanted to
  achieve permanently the higher level of vision, which he associated
  with an increased volume of blood in the capillaries of the brain.

  The higher state of mind he sought was that of childhood.  Babies
  are born with skulls unsealed, and it is not until one is an adult
  that the bony carapace is formed which completely encloses the
  membranes surrounding the brain and inhibits their pulsations in
  response to heartbeats.  In consequence, the adult loses touch with
  the dreams, imagination and intense perceptions of the child.  His
  mental balance becomes upset by egoism and neuroses.  To cure these
  problems, first in himself and then for the whole world, Dr. Hughes
  returned his cranium to something like the condition of infancy by
  cutting out a small disc of bone with an electric drill.
  Experiencing immediate beneficial effects from this operation, he
  began preaching to anyone who would listen to the doctrine of
  trepanation.  By liberating his brain from its total imprisonment
  in his skull, he claimed to have restored its pulsations, increased
  the volume of blood in it and acquired a more complete, satisfying
  state of consciousness than grown-up people normally enjoy.  The
  medical and legal authorities reacted to Hughes's discovery with
  horror and rewarded him with a spell in a Dutch lunatic asylum.

    Joseph Mellen met Bart Hughes in 1965 in Ibiza and quickly became
  his leading, or rather one and only, disciple.  Years later he wrote
  a book called _Bore Hole_, the contents of which are summarized in
  its opening sentence: 'This is the story of how I came to drill a
  hole in my skull to get permanently high.'  . . . (a few paragraphs
  detail Joseph Mellen's early experiments with LSD, and how he finds
  out about Bart Hughes.) The time came when Joey felt he had preached
  enough and that he now had to act.  He did not agree with
  Holingshead that the third eye was merely a figure of speech,
  believing in its physical attainment through self-trepanation.
  Support for this can be found in archaeology.  Skulls of ancient
  people all over the world give evidence that their owners were skill
  fully trepanned during their lifetimes, and many of these appear to
  have been of noble or priestly castes.  The medical practice of
  trepanation was continued up to the present century in treatment of
  madness, the hole in the skull being seen as a way of relieving
  pressure on the brain or letting out the devils that possessed it.
  By his scientific explanation of the reasons for the operation, Bart
  Hughes had removed it from the area of superstition, and Joey Mellen
  proposed to be the second person to perform it on himself in the
  interest of enlightenment.

    Bart had become a close friend of Amanda Fielding, and they went
  off to Amsterdam together while Joey took care of Amanda's flat.
  This was the opportunity he had been waiting for to bore a hole in
  his head.

    The most gripping passages in _Bore Hole_ describe his various
  attempts to complete the operation.  They are also extremely gruesome,
  and those who lack medical curiosity would do well to read no further.
  Yet to those who might contemplate trepanation for and by themselves,
  Joey's experiences are a salutary warning.  It should be emphasized
  that neither he, Bart nor Amanda has ever recommended people to
  follow their example by performing their own operations.  For years
  they have been looking for doctors who would understand their theories
  and would agree to trepan volunteer patients as a form of therapy.
  Strangely enough, not one member of the medical profession has been
  converted.

    In a surgical store Joey found a trepan instrument, a kind of auger
  or cork-screw designed to be worked by hand.  It was much cheaper and,
  Joey felt, more sensitive than an electric drill.  Its main feature was
  a metal spike, surrounded by a ring of saw-teeth.  The spike was meant
  to be driven into the skull, holding the trepan steady until the
  revolving saw made a groove, after which it could be retracted.  If all
  went well, the saw-band should remove a disc of bone and expose the
  brain.

    Joey's first attempt at self-trepanation was a fiasco.  He had no prev-
  ious medical experience, and the needles he had bought for administering
  a local anesthetic to the crown of his head proved to be too thin and
  crumpled up or broke.  Next day he obtained some stouter needles, took
  a tab of LSD to steady his nerves and set to in earnest.  First he made
  an incision to the bone, and then applied the trepan to his bared skull.
  But the first part of the operation, driving the spike into the bone,
  was impossible to accomplish.

    Joey described it as like trying to uncork a bottle from the inside.
  He realized he needed help and telephoned Bart in Amsterdam, who
  promised he would come over and assist at the next operation.  This
  plan was frustrated by the Home Office, which listed Dr. Hughes as an
  undesirable visitor to Britain and barred his entry.

    Amanda agreed to take his place.  Soon after her return to London she
  helped Joey reopen the wound in his head and, by pressing the trepan
  with all her might against his skull, managed to get the spike to take
  hold and the saw-teeth to bite.  Joey then took over at cranking the
  saw. Once again he had swallowed some LSD.  After a long period of
  sawing, just as he was about to break through, he suddenly fainted.
  Amanda called an ambulance and he was taken to hospital, where horrified
  doctors told him that he was lucky to be alive and that if he had
  drilled a fraction of an inch further he would have killed himself.

    The psychiatrists took a particular interest in his case, and a group
  of them arranged to examine him.  Before this could be done, he had to
  appear in court on a charge of possessing a small amount of cannabis.
  The magistrate demanded another psychiatrist's report and demanded him
  for a week in prison.

    There followed a period of embarrassment as the rumor went round
  London that Joey Mellen had trepanned himself, whereas in fact he had
  failed to do so. As soon as possible, therefore, he prepared for a third
  attempt.

     Proceeding as before, but now with the benefit of experience, he soon
  found the groove from the previous operation and began to saw through
  the sliver of bone separating him from enlightenment or, as the doctors
  had predicted, instant death.  What followed is best quoted from _Bore
  Hole_.

    'After some time there was an ominous sounding schlurp and the sound
  of bubbling.  I drew the trepan out and the gurgling continued.  It
  sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed
  out.  I looked at the trepan and there was a bit of bone in it.  At
  last!  On closer inspection I saw that the disc of bone was much deeper
  on one side than on the other. Obviously the trepan had not been
  straight and had gone through at one point only, then the piece of bone
  had snapped off and come out.  I was reluctant to start drilling again
  for fear of damaging the brain membranes with the deeper part while I
  was cutting through the rest or of breaking off a splinter.  If only I
  had an electric drill it would have been so much simpler.  Amanda was
  sure I was through.  There seemed no other explanation for the
  schlurping noises I decided to call it a day.  At the time I thought
  that any hole would do, no matter what size.  I bandaged up my head and
  cleared away the mess.'  There was still doubt in his mind as to whether
  he had really broken through and, if so, whether the hole was big enough
  to restore pulsation to his brain. The operation had left him with a
  feeling of wellbeing, but he realized that it could simply be from
  relief at having ended it.  To put the matter beyond doubt, he decided
  to bore another hole at a new spot just above the hairline, this time
  using an electric drill.  In the spring of 1970, Amanda was in America
  and Joey did the operation alone.  He applied the drill to his forehead,
  but after half and hour's work the electric cable burnt out.  Once again
  he was frustrated.  An engineer in the flat below him was able to repair
  the instrument and next day he set out to finish the job. 'This time I
  was not in any doubt. The drill head went at least an inch deep through
  the hole.  A great gush of blood followed my withdrawal of the drill. In
  the mirror I could see the blood in the hole rising and falling with the
  pulsation of the brain.'

    The result was all he had hoped for.  During the next four hours he
  felt his spirits rising higher until he reached a state of freedom and
  serenity which he claims, has been with him ever since.  For some time
  now he had been sharing a flat with Amanda, and when she came back from
  America she immediately noticed the change in him.  This encouraged her
  to join him on the mental plane by doing her own trepanation. The
  operation was carefully recorded.  She had obtained a cine-camera, and
  Joey stood by, filming, as she attacked her head with an electric drill.
  The film shows her carefully at work, dressed in a blood-spattered white
  robe.  She shaves her head, makes an incision in her head with a scalpel
  and calmly starts drilling.  Blood spurts as she penetrates the skull.
  She lays aside the drill and with a triumphant smile advances towards
  Joey and the camera.

     Ever since, Joey and Amanda have lived and worked together in
  harmony. From the business of buying old prints to color and resell,
  they have progressed to ownership of the Pigeonhole Gallery and seem
  reasonably prosperous.  They have also started a family.  There is
  nothing apparently abnormal about them, and many of their old friends
  agree in finding them even more pleasant and contented since their
  operations.  There is plenty of leisure in their lives, mingled with the
  kind of activities they most enjoy.  These of course include talking and
  writing about trepanation.  They have lectured widely in Europe and
  America to groups of doctors and other interested people, showing the
  film of Amanda's self-operation, entitled _Heartbeat in the Brain_.  It
  is generally received with awe, the sight of blood often causing people
  to faint.  At one showing in London a film critic described the audience
  'dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums'.  Yet it was not
  designed to be gruesome. The soundtrack is of soothing music, and the
  surgical scenes alternate with some delightful motion studies of
  Amanda's pet pigeon, Birdie, as a symbol of peace and wisdom."

=====End of piece=====

Don't know the source of this. If anyone is interested, I can try to find 
out.

grip