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I’m away from home, ostensibly idling. But still I’m on deadline, for a regular gig I’ve got here. As a result of research I’m doing for this job, I’m reading: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures). Visiting E. here, she notices the book, asks me about it, and after hearing what I’ve got to say about it, says I should post about it. Her suggestion makes me aware again of how regularly I don’t post about the stuff of my life. Of how, though I’ve kept blogs for a number of years, I haven’t come to (or perhaps “succumbed to,” says E.) filtering dailiness in terms of [blog] audience. Her suggestion leads me down the path of my continued work/theorizing about why lit fiction writers don’t blog. Poets, yes; fictones (as we call/ed them), no. Self-consciousness and “acceptable levels” thereof. Internal editors. First drafts and how, formally, fictones are taught no first draft is ready for anyone’s eyes… (Yes, my internal editor is well aware of the popular view on the use of ellipses in such instances as precedes this parenthetical. I am ignoring the internal editor.)

Back to the book. My internal editor makes me want to believe that everyone but me knew about the Hmong people and the Secret War, but just in case not (and because E. says she did not and thinks quite a few others may not know — after all, the Secret War…) the CIA had the Hmong, a hills tribe in Laos, fight for the US in Viet Nam, then when the US pulled out of VietNam, the Hmong were avenged, victims of genocide. The Secret War was actually the largest U.S. covert operation prior to the Afghan-Soviet War, with areas of Laos controlled by North Vietnam subjected to three million tons of bombing, representing the heaviest U.S.-led bombing campaign since World War II. Read Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992, by Jane Hamilton-Merritt (Indiana University Press, 1993. Of those that were able to escape, some settled in, most notably, California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The book I’m reading is about a family in Merced County, California, to whom a daughter is born who experiences her first epileptic seizure at 3 months old. The girl dies at four years of age, but I haven’t read that far.

The title, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, refers to qaug dab peg, the Hmong translation for epilepsy. “The spirit referred to is a soul-stealing dab; peg means to catch or hit; and qaug means to fall over with one’s roots still in the ground, as grain might be beaten down by wind or rain.”

The Hmong consider qaug dab peg to be an illness of some distinction.

Hmong epileptics often become shamans. Their seizures are thought to be evidence that they have the power to perceive things other people cannot see, as well as facilitating their entry into trances, a prerequisite for their journeys into the realm of the unseen.

…

Becoming a txiv neeh ["person with a healing spirit"] is not a choice; it is a vocation.

…

Although shamanism is an arduous calling that requires years of training with a master in order to learn the ritual techniques and chants, it confers an enormous amount of social status in the community and publicly marks the txiv neeb as a person of high moral character, since a healing spirit would never choose a no-account host.

I’ve really just started the book, but my imagination is captured. (My internal editor tells me that most people will have heard the interesting info about epilepsy, but because E. says she had not heard it all and because it’s fascinating stuff anyhow…)

The Greeks called epilepsy “the sacred disease.” … [the baby joined] a distinguished line of epileptics that has included Soren Kierkegaard, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Falubert, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dostoyevski, all of whom, like many Hmong shamans experienced powerful senses of grandeur and spiritual passion during their seizures, and powerful creative urges in their wake. As Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin asked, “What if it is a disease? What does it matter that it is an abnormal tension, if the result, if the moment of sensation, remembered and analysed in a state of health, turns out to be harmony and beauty brought to their highest point of perfection, and gives a feeling, undivined and undreamt of till then, of completeness, proportion, reconciliation, and an ecstatic and prayerful fusion in the highest synthesis of life?”

Time for a visual. So, I do a Google image search for Flaubert. Talk about loving the work, through some anomaly, the search turns up Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man.

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Now my internal editor tells me — enough. Enough of the internal editor, I am not a photographer, as has been already established, and am not well-versed in the history of photography, and maybe you aren’t either. Here’s what I learned about Bayard and this photo:

[Bayard] was one of the earliest photographers in the history of photography, inventing his own photography process known as direct positive printing … and was persuaded to postpone announcing his process to the French Academy of Sciences by François Arago, a friend of Louis Daguerre, who invented the rival daguerreotype process. Arago’s conflict of interest cost Bayard the recognition as one of the principal inventors of photography. He eventually gave details of the process to the French Academy of Sciences on February 24, 1840 in return for money to buy better equipment.

As a reaction to the injustice he felt he had been subjected to, Bayard created the first staged photograph entitled, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man. In the image, he pretends to have committed suicide, sitting and leaning to the right. Bayard wrote on the back of his most notable photograph:

The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life….! … He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.