Theory is Autobiography/ The Weeping Woman

I was giving my son dinner tonight when the aura of migraine began its vision experiments. It's difficult to describe, as, I suppose, ones particular perceptions of the world often are. First a small strobe light pulsing, a little blurry and glowing kind of jazzy, Keith-Haring-like hole in the middle of things. Not too intrusive, though the first time I experienced it, I thought, Aha, a stroke. Then more, further, vaster. The pulsing hole spreads, or it is several pulsing holes--throbbing, maybe is a better word. Looking becomes difficult. And faces are perhaps the most difficult objects to look at under these conditions, to see.

Felix's perfect face became a Picasso. The whole plane of features was off; I was seeing in more dimensions or fewer; the distortion was almost unwatchable.

Later, I googled "Picasso migraine," and, of course, Bingo. According to the BBC a, Dutch neurologist presented a paper in 2000, stipulating that Picasso's Weeping Woman series and other later works are in fact extremely similar to works done by lay migraine sufferers asked to draw what they see in the throes. A snooty rebuff in the Guardian cried foul: "A headache is not a substitute for inspiration."

I wonder. Is Picasso's work made somehow less-so if it represented what he saw, and not just an Idea? Even as a fiction writer, I am sometimes disappointed to learn that what appeared to be an amazing riff of imagination in a novel instead came from the novelist's life. To have made it up--well, that's inspiration. The rest is just headache, I guess.

But to describe lived experience--through paint, words, sound--in such a way that others see it too, feel it too, isn't that the hardest thing?

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes of discussions with John Gregory Dunne over whether some fellow writer "got it right."

A seductive notion, that there's such a thing as getting it right when it comes to perception. We all feel that, that moment of recognition, that, Yes, that's just how it was.

But I had the experience recently of visiting a house I love, a house I have spent many happy days in over many years, and finding it suddenly chipped, in need of scrubbing, sagging. It's true, the house is in a state of disrepair, but I had been there just weeks before and found it as pretty as always. What had changed was not the house, but the people in the house. And what was happening between the people within the house made the house, suddenly, uglier.

All this has me thinking of the falseness of getting it right, the impossibility of rendering the headache. I want to write a story about a shift in perception, a sudden change in seeing, a revelation, perhaps, or a distortion. I like to write about houses, and I'm still thinking about that house I love. I am thinking about a house beginning to change on its inhabitant. Not a Repulsion-style full-on horror show, but a horrifying change none-the-less, as a woman who has spent her whole adult life, her marriage, her raising of children, her retirement, in a home that she loved, only to find it becoming, day by day, at the end of her life, a thing of great ugliness to her.