A splitting headache, or the effects of revolution on the brain

The title of this post comes from a bad joke. My high school history professor, one Mr. Vance Allred, an ex-polygamist teller of long tales and bad puns, one of my life inspirations and the first to truly interest me intellectually, used to tell it. The joke involved Comrade Leon Trotsky, who, one day, while in exile in Mexico, woke up with a 'splitting headache.'

Ha.

You see, Trotsky was stabbed in the head with an icepick by one of Stalin's henchmen. Hence the pun.

Lately, though, I've been thinking there is more to it than that. I think dear Mr. Allred hit on a profound truth. He encapsulated the fate of old revolutionaries. They all end with a 'splitting headache.'

That comes across strongly in Marquez' General in His Labyrinth. Bolivar seems, if nothing else, split--from his past, his companions, his own vision of himself. There's something inherent in the revolutionary process that creates division. Well, not something--everything. The effect hits the mind the strongest. One cannot revolutionize one's way of life, let alone the life of the surrounding society, without the mind feeling some disconnect, some struggle, loss, and division.

Trotsky himself laid this out, as others did before him. He called art a hammer, something that would shape the minds of the people into a form fitting their new lives; a hammer which, at the same time, would smash the bonds to the old. He should have seen it coming, I guess, that when he became part of the old, someone would take a hammer to him as well.

I felt this splitting headache myself, only a few nights ago. It came upon quickly, though preceded, in hindsight, with weeks of warning signs. A general anxiety which had been latently eating away at my guts and heart lept one afternoon straight to the left hemisphere of my brain. It sat there, gnawing away, sinking its teeth into the soft tissue in a slow but steady rhythm. His bits sent feelings of mounting hopelessness and despair into my soul just as they sent searing jolts of pain into my body. This lasted for hours as I sat, agonizing in the back of my class, slowly losing touch with everything. I stumbled to the train, blabbered to an officer, melted in the corner and fit in with the bums and psychopaths. I cried and wailed for him to stop but he kept on going, filling my head with his munchings and negative energies. I blindly drove home and managed to scream at my family before collapsing on my bed into a painkiller-aided slumber. As I slipped into sleep, I felt for a brief moment the pain stop. It was one of the most glorious moments of my life.

Little did I know the pain had stopped, but my anxiety monster remained. The next few evenings I would return home to collapse at 8, my energies sapped by this awful beast who took everything and left me only with despair and a looming insanity. I cried, finally, broke down and cried and wailed while watching the Jazz play, then went to bed again.

When I woke up I felt that he was gone. I didn't know why, just like I didn't know why he came. Then Mr. Allred's joke came to me.

I should have seen it coming too, I guess. I was becoming an old revolutionary. The monster came to rip a split in my brain just as my life was splitting below my feet. I was about to graduate. I was about to leave the country. Most importantly, I was about to leave Salt Lake, Utah, my childhood home, my parents, my society, friends, pillow, and cereal bowl, for the last time. Previously, my revolutions were always circular, with my Sandy home as the beginning and end. This time, I knew, I won't be coming back. I'm leaving here for Poland on May 7, and when I return it will be as a guest on vacation before starting my new life in Seattle.

This is my first true revolution, not in the old sense of a full circle but in the new one of a radical break. Its a revolution Ive been trying to make for years but never succeeded. Now I will. No wonder my head had to crack.

Why'd the pain leave, then? I guess it fused itself back together, or maybe the fracture seemed less severe, when I realized something. I hadn't escaped the cycle of circular revolutions. I hadn't entered into a true splitting revolution at all, because in truth there is no such thing. I can't believe I never realized it before: the contradiction I thought I had found, between the revolution as break and the revolution as circle, it just plain doesn't exist. Revolutions are spirals. They work not in two dimensions but three. When things abruptly change, they go into a spin which thrusts them to one extreme and then back towards the original position--but they never reach it. Circumstances return only to a newly formed version of what they were, perhaps the same on the X and Y axes but shot forward to a brand new Z, a new point as violently different from the old, despite its appearances, as from the wished-for new. As these spiraling loops continue, they get larger, more erratic. Eventually, you realize that even the X and the Y have changed. The spiral is spinning on a new axis. Things keep changing and staying the same but with a whole new point of reference.

I guess for me this point of reference has become Poland. I thought I was going back to something in January but I guess in the long run that was a beginning. It wasn't the beginning, but it was a beginning. Like any good beginning, you know it because you start there and you end up there too. My life will certainly keep on spinning after I leave it again, perhaps it will find a different beginning. Perhaps it might even flick back to the old one.

The only thing for sure is that it won't stay the same. Things will change and split.

I just hope that in the future I can avoid the headache.