on head injury
At the end of January, I was concussed by a hard punch to the head. This was a situation I put myself in willingly at my boxing gym. I’m pretty stringent about risk calculation, but as this situation reminded me, mitigation strategies don’t eliminate risk.
The first few days post-concussion were marked by hypersomnia. I slept as much as I wanted, about fifteen or sixteen hours per day. I rolled around in bed listening quietly to Grisham’s The Firm audiobook and watched movies inattentively on the Criterion Channel. I couldn’t work, couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t do much of anything. The doctor told me walking was good for recovery. Once the hypersomnia passed and I shifted into insomnia, I started spending my days walking.
I had a strong sense of the brain as a fleshy muscle I had tweaked. The doctor told me to avoid “deep thinking” the way a coach might recommend you lay off the weight training for a while. I was agitated and irritable like a teenager. External stimuli also created threatening almost-headaches, and I learned quickly to back off. Music was one of those stimuli. I couldn’t process anything with vocals, nor guitars, so as a result I walked miles and miles and miles listening to Mendelssohn concertas. I landed on concertas because I remembered vaguely that classical musical was good for the brain, or something like that. (In my non-concussed life, I’m more of a jazz listener.)
But Mendelssohn had been on my mind prior to the head injury. I’d been reading the Patricia Highsmith Ripliad, and protagonist Tom Ripley turned to Mendelssohn for encouragement and calm. Then I’d turned to Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete, which, to my surprise, centered on Mendelssohn--sort of. The protagonist, an obsessive, monied, isolated man, is so obsessed with wanting to write about his favorite composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy that he can’t ever bring himself to begin. He circles the project, but is too paralyzed psychologically to write it. His life is organized around Mendelssohn, and his failure is both cause and symptom of every problem in his inert life. The music is totemic, an intimidating artistic greatness someone as foolish as a writer cannot hope to reach or even understand. (Music is like that for me, too.)
So, I listened to the concertas on my walks. Music, like head injury, is sensorial. I struggle to describe it. Like head injury, it can pull unfamiliar or forgotten emotions to the surface with ease. Violin Concerto in E Minor Opus 64 mvt i captured me. I looped it. The sound was like an ice bath on my injured brain. I tried to describe it, too, against the doctor’s recommendations of deep thought. Up and down a staircase. Fast, then slow, then slower, step by unsteady step, until a singular high pitched note stretched like a hand toward a light just out of reach. Beautiful and paralyzing.
Athletic training requires patience, and I was grateful to be well-practiced in recovery. After two weeks of walks, I was back to work. After a month, the headaches were gone. I still have some lingering sensitivity to loud sound, but it’s nothing a pair of earplugs can’t prevent.
At the time of concussion, I was sparring as a research strategy. I’m writing a fiction project about boxing, and I wanted more of the physical sensation of the sport on the page. Right after I was hit, I took notes.
physidal notes from sparring today - sparring but not expecting every punch to be that hard, each hit jarring knocking off balance and reducing my ability to slip, continuously eating the punches and unable to get inside - last hit was an overhand 2 - dizzying, world slowing down, like a vibration all the way thru the head, vision off balance and everything slow, intensity of sensation - the intensity unlocked something emotional, stress, not shame but just sudden access to feelings i’ve been sidestepping
Like music, I can’t truly capture it. But I can try to get close.