Make Mine a Migraine
St. Hildegarde of Bingen, Divine Inspiration, Writer's Block, and Dismantling the Binary Concept of Health, with some Betty White.
In a recent workshop I attended, someone mentioned that Substack has a word limit to which I chuckled heartily in a Rose Nylund kind of way: innocently and yet also wise. I’ve been to the land of the Substack warning and remain unafraid.
Did I tell you this information as a ruse to use a photo of Betty White as the cover of this post? Maybe. Mostly it’s a warning. Here in Utah, winter came early last year (October 24, to be exact) and stuck around for a while (last snow was mid-April). Expect this post to have similar characteristics.
What I want to do is talk about Hildegarde von Bingen (also known as of Bingen). There are plenty of comparisons to be made between Betty and Hildegarde. The two women are equally ethereal in many qualities but while Betty White is yet to be sainted for her incredible heart-based work here on earth, Hildegarde has been sainted, though a bit belatedly. She lived from 1098 to 1179, dying at age 81. Yet she wasn’t canonized until 2012. Nope. That’s not a typo, that’s 1000 years later, though it may have been due to an admin mix-up. That means when I learned of her in high school, she was characterized merely as a mystic or a church leader, never as a saint. A thousand years is a long time. There’s still time for Betty, ya’ll, so start a new petition. Surely one would work for “Saint” if it worked for “SNL Host.”
Lately I’ve met a lot of folks who live in the slash. They are writers/musicians/teachers. They are entrepreneurs/mothers/lawmakers. They are doctors/caregivers. A whole lot of slash seems to be cropping up lately, and we’d expect that from an economy teetering on the edge of a breakdown. What’s interesting is that we think the slash is a phenomenon worth noting, as if it is new. It’s not. No one stuck to one lane thousands of years ago. They just went and did. Which is how and why we here with Hildegarde. She didn’t just write her own rules, she wrote her own language. Two actually, she created the Litterae ignotae (an alphabet for better rhyming) and the Lingua ignota (a sort of secret language to rise above the mundane).
Saint H lived to be 81 when the life expectancy was about 33. While lots of infant mortality skews that statistic, we can agree that she knocked around considerably longer than most. Like some of those living in the slash, she didn’t get going on her passion projects until her mid-40s. She’d been having visions for decades before she finally, in her own words, decided to rise above her low self-esteem, throw off the traditional ideas around who should write, and get down to business. “…I refused for a long time the call to write, not out of stubbornness but out of humility, until weighed down by a scourge of god, I fell onto a bed of sickness.” And write she did, her three books were hugely popular in the areas now making up Germany.
I tell my students there is such a thing as “writer’s block,” and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now. All the frustration and nuttiness that comes from “Oh, my God, I cannot write now” should be displaced. It’s just a message to you saying, “That’s right, you can’t write now, so don’t.” We operate with deadlines, so facing the anxiety about the block has become a way of life. We get frightened about the fear. I can’t write like that. If I don’t have anything to say for three or four months, I just don’t write.
-Toni Morrison.1
Hils embodies the opposite of the Toni Morrison quote above. She has a call to write so strong it blocked her from any other direction. Both writer’s block and the call to write, in these two accomplished author’s words, are sacred. They are things to be respected. A call to do or refrain from something comes from outside the writer. Interesting, no?
Known now as the patron Saint of writers and composers the breadth of Hildegarde’s interests and competencies includes writing, composing, polymathing, being indicted and venerated, brewing beer, painting, music, greenery, philosophy, science, and herbalism. But she may be best known for her visions. She’s best known for her prophecies.
Hildegarde included gorgeous mandala-like illustrations of these visions in her books that detailed her prophecies. So yup, your girl went hard for the weird. But it worked, didn’t it? Her books were wildly well-received, so much so that she lectured throughout Europe. She was, in a way, a medieval
(perhaps Nadia is a modern day Hildegarde?). As a writer, coloring outside the lines served her purpose well. I would argue that Hildegarde (and Nadia as well) both succeed as writers and speakers not because they nail an algorithm or can pivot to the zeitgeist but because their purpose is in spreading an important point as far as they can through whichever publishing means they can.I have sweetness to share.
I have stories to tell.
I have God to announce.
I have green life to celebrate.
I have rivers of fire to ignite.2
Their point? We all fit here, on earth, together. The same god that made Betty White also made you, and did so on purpose. We belong, to the earth and each other, as beloveds of the thing that made us. Hildegarde’s belief in this was so strong that in her 80s, just prior to her death, she and her nuns were briefly excommunicated for refusing to exhume the body of a man who’d sought solace and grace prior his death. Shout out to her nuns for the medieval version of ride or die.
So if weird worked for Hildegarde, let’s dive into the mechanics of how her weird happened, because it’s essential to something bigger. Hildegarde is revered for her writing on the fire of the holy spirit. She writes of joy and jubilation as holy. She mixed art and writing and relied on associative logic, as with poetry and lyric essay. As Lillian Sizemore summarizes it: “Though she did not use traditional reasoning to arrive at her realizations, she presents us with subjective experience of the heart, through art, poetry, and music. Her work allows us to interpret and mold the ideas to our own personal experience and situation.” Hildegarde’s imagery usually focused on the dimensions and intensity of light. She wrote of flames and of burning fires within. It’s said that when she died, streams of light crossed the sky over her convent.
Hildegarde, by all accounts, had a lot going on health-wise. She had visions of light and sound that began in her childhood, as early as age 3. She saw these as messages from God, not as sickness. During times of stress and conflict, she often struggled with her health. In one instance, she was struck by paralysis severe enough that she was unable to be moved. She was a student and author of health and wrote about keeping a sense of balance to all the emotions as well as sleeping well, having a healthy diet, keeping a positive attitude and using herbal remedies.
If our definition of health today is productivity and we define sickness as inability to work, which category does Hildegarde fall into? This is the part where her story is relevant and important.
For Hildegarde, her sickness became a window into her most profound productivity. There is no either/or dichotomy for Hildegarde on many things. She, like many of us, lived the slash life. She was a leader/musician/author/ mystic/ feminist. She was an herbalist/composer/Abbess. Importantly, she was an artist/patient.
Let’s dwell on that last slash for a moment. Roughly 1230 years after her death, British scientist/historian Charles Singer came upon Hildegarde’s work theoretically on his own while researching theories of contagion. Given that he was married to the established historian Dorothy Waley Cohen whose scholarly focus was on medieval times “found” Hildegarde seems a bit, untrue. So we’ll assume his “stumbling upon” Hildegarde went like this:
“Morning Charlie! I put a book by famous medieval scholar Hildegarde von Bingen by your tea. Enjoy!”
“Thanks Dot! I’m sure to win centuries of acclaim and be published in medical journals like World Neurology now with only a passing mention of you!”3
Singer’s backdated diagnoses of Hildegarde was later confirmed by Oliver Sacks. Other scientists agree that Hildegarde’s descriptions of her visions fall within the modern understanding of a migraine aura: visual changes that precede the “headache” portion of a migraine by many hours.
Plenty of migraine sufferers have produced influential and important works. In the ranks of migraine’s army, Hildegarde is joined by writer Joan Didion, Alice in Wonderland creator Lewis Carroll, Oliver Sacks (thus his interest in our girl Hildy), and Carly Simon. (Are you sure those are clouds in your coffee Carly, or might they be an aura?). The statistics are that as more than 10% of adults may suffer from migraines, which limit or interfere with social activities and work.
The neuroscience on migraines is absolutely fascinating. It involves mutations in genes involved in serotonin (your favorite neurotransmitter) and glutamate, which activates brain activity predominantly around learning and memory. Glutamate can aggregate and for some, that leads to a migraine. In sum, too much excitement can cause a migraine. This is why I get them in Costco: too much excitement, too many samples.
These facts, taken one way, point to an irregularity that creates pain, suffering, and disabling headaches resulting in shortened Costco trips.
Taken a different way, these facts point to a mutation that can lead to increased memory, facile learning, and enhanced sensory capacities. And let’s go one step further: the experience of a migraine may unlock an artist’s work.
Accomplished musical composer Jenny Giering describes her intense migraine battle as one calling to her musical talents. “My mind cleaved. I saw my thoughts pour out in a scrambled, encrypted wave that crested just beyond the back of my head. I was convinced that if I could decipher their code, I would unlock an artistic secret, a creative message.”
Good art is a bit untethered from reality. So too for good poems, good music, and especially good comedy. Migraines are great at untethering the senses. They can impact speech and cognition, creating brain fog, which potentially can limit word recall. Poets with migraines may find that in the midst of one they reach for odd words instead of more familiar ones, creating poetry with new associations. Others at a loss for a word may make one up. Listen, made up words can lead to outstanding writing - be it poetry or comedy. For example, our beloved (soon to be sainted?) Betty White on tubenburbles in this clip.
Was Hildegarde more productive and in some sense more revolutionary because she harnessed her migraines? Or was Hildegarde more prolific because she lived inside that slash, the herbalist/Abbess/musician/beer brewer/author life? Whichever it is, it shows us that people with potentially disabling conditions are more than a patient. When health is bound to a dichotomy of well or not well, healthy or ill, we leave people who are not well stuck with little options to find their way to productivity. They are blocked, but unlike that which Toni Morrison’s opines on, it’s not-so-sacred.
I say this in support of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which celebrated a milestone this week. But I also say it in support of changing how we think of those with chronic illness. If we dismantle the idea of health as binary (basically, on or off), we can open up more support and opportunities for folks who have ongoing health challenges. That change is generated not by doctors, but from those who write about health. So, step up writers, she is, after all, your patron Saint.
I have found this quote in a few places. Most recently I saw it here: https://lithub.com/toni-morrison-on-breathing-life-into-cliches/.
https://goodgroundpress.com/2020/06/30/hildegard-of-bingen-patron-saint-of-green-and-growing/
Kudos to Katherine Foxhall for her article in Journal of Modern Medicine on Singer and Hildegarde with proper attribution to Cohen.
So friggin cool. Right now open on my computer is a page of old school names for common illnesses from the past, and their associated symptoms that were described as above. So well written, friend.
Maggie, this is great! So fascinating