Down to Earth
by Kate Wagner
One of the earliest effects a miracle has on the person experiencing it is speechlessness, the futility of language. This is especially true of miracles of the mind by whose power all other things are transformed. There are very few such documented miracles in the medical literature, though they abound in stories and scripture: clairvoyance, ecstatic visions, synesthesia. One day a nun in the 12th century wakes up and is able to commune with the divine. A schoolteacher has a dream about the car accident she will end up in two weeks later. A child, domed by a softball, is able to see music for a few months. These events defy language, and yet they are forced to rely on language—inadequate as it is—to communicate their nature to others, which only renders the failure that much more acute. A miracle itself renders the chasm between experience and understanding positively Himalayan.
Miracles of healing occupy their own corner of speculation. The inner world of a stroke victim who, after some time, regains their faculties of speech and movement, is one example. Before he was posthumously disgraced by accusations of widespread fabrication, neurologist Oliver Sacks told many stories of people who, despite having sustained gruesome injuries, or having been born with parts of their brains missing or incomplete, were still able to live a normal life. In the dour world of medicine, such miracles of the mind are either reparative or resilient in nature. They are easier to understand because they are undergirded by mechanisms that can be named, yet they are just as difficult to describe. They are spectacular tales, nonetheless.
More routine forms of mental transformation—through time, therapy, rehabilitation or medicine—are lacking in that kind of dramatic appeal, despite being just as miraculous. The total simultaneity of transformation, the all-at-onceness of becoming different or new or well or special, to wake up in a different state of being than the one we fell asleep in, these are more often than not cruel fantasies of the ill and of those who love them. But not always.
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