TMoP - Dostoevsky and the creative power of epilepsy

[Bekah]

On the mood swings, the spells, fits and seizures, the fear and  
shame,  I really think the epileptic seizures are very important in  
Dostoevsky's creativity and Coetzee, without belaboring the point,  
makes this clear.

Myshkin, the protagonist of The Idiot is a holy fool,  an epileptic:

 From The Idiot:

"[Myshkin)   remembered that during his epileptic fits, or rather  
immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two  
when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigour  
and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his  
anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever; these moments were but  
presentiments, as it were, of the one final second (it was never more  
than a second) in which the fit came upon him. That second, of  
course, was inexpressible. When his attack was over, and the prince  
reflected on his symptoms, he used to say to himself: ‘These moments,  
short as they are, when I feel such extreme consciousness of myself,  
and consequently more of life than at other times, are due only to  
the disease—to the sudden rupture of normal conditions. Therefore  
they are not really a higher kind of life, but a lower.’

 >>> snipped>>>
That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments,  
that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could  
not doubt, nor even admit the possibility of doubt. He felt that they  
were not analogous to the fantastic and unreal dreams due to  
intoxication by hashish, opium or wine.

(Part II,  Chapter 5)

*

And Dostoevsky's description of his own ailment from:  http:// 
www.charge.org.uk/htmlsite/dost.shtml:

" For several instants I experience a happiness that is impossible in  
an ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception.  I  
feel full harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling  
is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could  
give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life.
I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me.  I really  
attained god and was imbued with him.  All of you healthy people  
don't even suspect  what happiness is , that happiness that we  
epileptics experience for a second before an attack."


Bekah