Once I finally learned about musicogenic seizure activity, the veil that had been draped over these ultra-mysterious and spine-tingling spells of mine was torn open so that, once again, science could explain the heretofore inexplicable activity that had made me feel so unique. How humbling.
They began when I was in my early twenties and, so far as I can recall, they did not initially get triggered by chord combinations that my once half brother and I referred to colloquially as swamp chords; E and A minor, principally. But at some point these events, that I refer to as "spells", began occurring only during those specific haunting chord combinations on a flat top acoustic guitar, or "box" as we used to call it.
Now, about those spells. Words. I need words. "Haunting" is one. "Familiar" is another. "Intimate", yet another. "Reversion" to a time and place specific, where darkness and stomachy pleasure inbred passionately, creating a paradoxical amalgam of simultaneous pleasure and internal discomfort. The same place. The same time. Always the same. The spells takes root in the gut and distribute upwards into the backboned spineworks and brainplex. I am consumed with the time and place. I am taken back, as if into a vague and recurring dream that I only experience when I'm awake and tending to the chord combinations that alarm the sleeping stage and cause velvet curtains to unbunch and shed sensory images from a well-rehearsed play, directed by some ancient hand. The pleasure is both intense and exhausting. Butterflys with sharp glassy wings and needle junkie proboscuses fly round and round my the inner sanctum of my gut, while I sit catatonic and perfectly captivated until it all passes, and my serial recovery from the experience begins once again. It will be thirty minutes or so until the residue is completely withdrawn into the inner dark stars from which the spell was born. The enigmatic play that is directed from entirely within by neurological circuitry has now suffered a scientific label and mystery surrounding it has been attenuated for the most part. This is the history of all myth and mystery.
