blog 10

I found the readings in Hughes to be very interesting this week, especially chapter 9 which dealt with creativity and disease. “In antiquity, loss of sight was connected with prophecy and poetry: music and song exist independently of sight.” Hughes use the musicians Stevie Wonder and the late Ray Charles as examples to prove his point and I would definitely agree with him. In the case of these two artists the loss of sight led to their other senses becoming more acute. I don’t think that every person who is blind is automatically a good musician, but with someone who is already musically inclined there increased sense of sound may help them to produce better sounding music. Music may also help a blind person to be creative since they can’t really paint a visual picture. Ray and Stevie are able to express themselves musically through their pianos and be creative using sound as a painter may with his brush on a canvas.

I was surprised that Hughes brought the topic of migraines up when discussing creativity. My girlfriend suffers from severe migraines and when I talked to her about what Hughes said she did agree to a certain extent about experiencing some of the mild hallucinations. I asked her if she felt creative or inspired after having a migraine and she laughed in my face. I know from watching her deal with migraines that they are in no way pleasurable. Her main concern is to find a dark quite place to lie down and wait out the pain. She does experience hallucinations in the form of stars or flashes and the geometric forms in her peripheral vision and sometimes extreme tunnel vision. I guess if she was an artist she could use the hallucinations to inspire herself to paint something, but to her there is nothing good that comes from the experience.