Re: Re: VMs: Pleiades Occultation Further Date Refinement

["jan" <hurychj@xxxxxxxxx>]

Q??øÔ]?NuP?¢{^?Ôò¥ë^Æßé?¨§r«±ëb²?<çÝB¢{^?Ôëj{z±'r?b?Ú±î¸Hello Dennis,

I took your advice and searched the Net -  and no doubt some of those pictures can really
 give me  migraine or even splitting  headache :-).  But seriously, on one of those pages
 was quite an insight, I quote:

"The term 'art' is here employed in its most inclusive sense with no implication of aesthetic 
evaluation. It is not intended to imply by the concept of Migraine Art that there is an art of 
migraineurs which is characterized by a unique nature of artistic creation determined by the 
causative effects of the migraine condition, because it is assumed that, in this sense, an art of 
migraineurs does not exist, confirming a conclusion of the painter Jean Dubuffet who stated, 
for different clinical fields, that "there is no art of the insane any more than the art of the 
dyspeptics or an art of people with knee complaints".

So the term "migraine art" was more or less invented  "to illustrate the pain, the visual 
disturbances and the effect migraine had on their lives." This is of course different story - 
apparently we do  not get here  the true  "migraine visions", but artistic rendering. 

  I believe the flashes seen by migraine sufferer are generally the functional faults of nervous system  accompanied 
  by pain, while the flashes are secondary effects created in the optical part of the brain - so 
  our eyes really do not "see" the real flashes in the outside world but  rather  those generated 
  in the "optical computer" part in the brain. So it is nothing like dark spots one sees after 
  looking in  the bright light, having something to do with saturation  of  
  photosensors  in the eye. Neither they are  like schizophrenics 
  seeing  the "real"persons, hearing the "real" voices, etc.   We can  probably  limit the
 migraine pictures to rather narrow  group: sparks, haloes, color fog, flashes of all kinds, etc.. 
Taht is not to say they cannot be the inspiration, but only in mechanical sense mostly.

Sorry for detour, we were here talking about the redrawn pictures of flashes 
affeting the art, right? So how about the real art?    Let  me quote another M-A page:  "Van 
Gogh's famous painting, "Starry Night," was  
painted at the St. Remy Asylum in France in 1889, where he was being treated for his 
"Migraine personality."

The other site however quotes "Van Gogh was diagnosed, perhaps mistakenly, as a 
depressed schizophrenic". And  another site  says  "he battled depression and loneliness, 
suffered from severed right ear and what was diagnosed as ?epileptic fits at very infrequent 
intervals".

Now his official diagnosis was really EPILEPSY (per one medical journal) and I believe there 
is no such thing as "migraine personality".  While epilepsy visions may differ,  but let's say
 for the sake of argument he did  have some migraine aches. And  he named  picture has stars,
 there are some stars too and we are pretty close to what you claim for the VM.   
The distribution  of stars is not too far from those in the VM and superficially we have our case . . .  

However, if you look at that picture, you see mostly stars as round circles, and if you would 
not see them on the sky, you could probably never guess those are stars :-). Even so, if G. would not call  it "Starry night", one can imagine some UFO's on the sky. The whole 
picture has some waves woven in it, that could be visions too, the Moon has halo  and there is 
a dark village underneath. Again, superficial similarity.  Art? Undoubtedly - but migraine visions? One 
cannot see too much difference from 
other G. pictures, that is to be  able to say waht is migraine realted and waht is pue artistic imaginery.   Fortunately, we do not need  to, the whole picture is art and mainly art - no other painter would expressed 
it  such way: G. was artist first and migraine sufferer second. 
And there you have  it: you can add migraine into overall inspiration but you cannot separate it 
from the whole thing. 

With the VM, we have still another problem: the author definitely was no artist and very little 
of additional  inspiration would be masking the visions by migraine flashes. But we do know 
he had quite high imagination (see plant and nymph sections), certainly more than could be 
directly migraine related.  neither can be migraine effects directly associated with artificial 
script, well developed (maybe even designed) and well printed. So to the best, most of the pictures are not directly migraine related visions  and the rest can be also visions of  some other kind.

Similarly the other M-A quote  I found elsewhere:
 
"Sometimes artists affect how doctors articulate visual phenomena, such as specific sensory 
hallucinations, a.k.a., "Migraine aura."  Some medical researchers refer to scotomata, or 
scintillating aura, in Migraine as the Seurat Effect!  George Seurat, a French impressionist and 
believed Migraine sufferer, developed the pointillistic technique, seen in his many oil paintings, 
including "Courbevoie Bridge," circa 1886. "

Well, "believed sufferer" is of course just a wild guess, since  the Serrault name was 
associated with "migraine aura" due the superficial similarity with his technique only.  And  he 
developed his technique after careful study of the color mixture effects (say placing two colors from 
the opposte sides of the "color wheel" next to each other).
 
 Jan 
  

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