Visual Learner - Honeybun and the Fainting Goat of Wells Elementary
Chapter 12
My kindergarten teacher’s nickname was Honeybun. It has only been in the past ten years that I have learned that was not her real name. Honeybun strikes me as a legitimate birth name in this part of the country. Small towns have gift shops with names like Too Cute! or Holidays at Your Fingertips. For a mother to look at her newborn daughter and say, “She is just so sweet, I could eat her up. Let’s call her Honeybun,” is within the realm of possibility.
If I had to guess, I was an odd child in kindergarten. I was already a standout for falling through the jungle gym, but other quirks revealed themselves. My family ate at a seafood restaurant, and I kept my shrimp tails for show-and-tell. My 5-year-old mind worked it out that I was presenting an artifact of the sea to show my fellow students, not that I was taking chewed-on, discarded, fried food carcasses in a paper bag to pass around circle time.
I became emotionally overwhelmed in the library when our teacher announced that we had fifteen seconds to pick a book. I frantically grabbed something from the closest shelf. I looked at the cover, and it was an illustrated book about a girl who wanted to be a ballerina. Honeybun demanded we get in line. I broke down at the thought of being stuck with a ballerina book for a week. A friend snatched it from me, shoved it into a random spot on a shelf, and handed me a football book as I was unable to act for myself- undone and emotionally spent.
I wrote my name all over the covered walkway leading into the school. My friend and I were waiting for the bus to take us home. I found a red stick in the bushes next to the railing. Any average child would have realized they found a crayon, no longer encased in a Crayola wrapper, and tossed it back where they found it. I did not recognize it as a crayon but instead as a magical, unknown substance that made marks on the cement. I must have felt like the people who made the drawings discovered in the Blombos Cave in South Africa, except this was 1979, not 73,000 years ago. (1) I had used crayons before. Connecting the dots should not have been so difficult. A kindergartner's written vocabulary in the fall semester is limited. My friend and I drew all over the twenty-foot stretch of cement while waiting for the bus. We wrote the only words we knew (our names) repeatedly. It was not delinquent or malicious in intent. We were drawing, but we lacked paper. It did not take Hercule Poirot to crack this case. There was a phone call to my house. My mother and I had to scrub the walkway. My friend did not show up. Maybe he was smart and worked under a pseudonym.
The evidence was piling up that I was missing something that would make me fit for public consumption. I functioned. If nothing else, I have managed throughout my life to be, as Peter Buck described R.E.M., "the acceptable edge of unacceptable." It allows me to participate in both the art world and the non-art world, yet never feel entirely comfortable in either setting.
December of ‘79 rolled around. We wrote letters to Santa as a project to learn the rules for commas. "I would like a bicycle, a Pong console, a TIE-fighter with the pilot…." I did not understand the concept and interpreted it to mean that you put a comma at the end of each line of text. I still remember the teaching assistant looking at my page and shaking her head in worry.
The annual Christmas concert was approaching. All the kindergarten classes gathered in the auditorium to practice holiday songs in the mornings.
The school was a rickety building in 1979. The school is still open. I do not know what word could describe a building 40+ years removed from its “rickety” phase. Neglected? Underfunded? Hopeless. The auditorium was next to the cafeteria. We practiced until lunch. The latter half of rehearsal was punctuated with the sound of the screen doors at the cafeteria creaking open and slamming shut. The teachers arranged the kindergartners on a choral riser set up on the floor in front of the stage. For possibly the last year of my primary and secondary education, I was one of the taller boys, and therefore, I was asked to stand in the top row. We ran through a series of secular holiday hits. "Silver Bells" was late in the practice schedule.
Boys: “Silver bells!”
Girls: “Silver bells!”
Everyone: “It’s Christmas time in the city!”
Boys: “Ring-a-ling!”
Girls: “Ring-a-ling!”
Boys: “Hear them ring!”
Girls: “Hear them ring!”
Everyone: "Soon, it will be Christmas day!"
Everyone except me. My contribution to “soon it will be Christmas day” more closely resembled “soon it wiiiiiiiiiillllllunnnnnnnnnnhhhhhhh," and then my eyes rolled into the back of my head, and I fainted.
I assume it was a combination of dehydration, low blood sugar due to the proximity of lunch hour, and locking my knees while standing on the riser. There is a debate about whether one falls forward or backward when they faint. The answer is you fall. Gravity will determine the direction. If I had fallen backward, I might not be capable of formulating this sentence in my brain or typing it. I would have gone off the back of the riser and landed on my head. Fortunately, I did not tumble onto the floor behind me. I fell into the three rows of children in front of me. Legend records that my last move before falling was to stick my arms straight out in front of my body and push the other children aside as I fell forward, rolling onto the linoleum tile below. This cannot be true.
Fainting is the closest to nothingness that people can experience. Movies do their best to depict the perspective of a fainting person, but I do not think anyone in the movie industry has ever fainted before, or they would do a better job representing it. It is always depicted as a blurred vision, followed by blurred double vision, and all sound becomes an echo, and then darkness. None of this is correct aside from the darkness.
I am not a doctor or a sleep specialist, but this is what fainting feels like to someone who has fainted on multiple occasions. If it is possible to feel instantly asleep, that is the first sign of fainting. You are alert, and then something in your brain immediately flips, and you sense your head losing its grasp on conscious reality. Sound does not become filled with the reverb customarily reserved for a ‘50s doo-wop group. Sound instead becomes exponentially louder. Everything in the room becomes the same, flat volume. A person twenty feet from you sounds as loud as the person next to you.
A noisy, ringing sensation accompanies this dissonance. It is an overload of your auditory senses, but your body has suddenly entered a sleep mode and is subject to its normal sleep paralysis, so you make no effort to cover your ears. Your body cannot move. Numbness, pins, and needles overrun it. The sensation is the physical equivalent of tinnitus in your ears. Your vision does not become blurred. It becomes cosmic. Whatever you are looking at is overtaken by darkness punctuated with pinpoints of light. It is the appearance of burnt film or a wavy night sky or whatever you see when you close your eyes and look at the sun. That consumes whatever is in your visual frame. It creeps in from the sides and behind what you are looking at and drowns it. Complete and total darkness then swallows your mind. It is without space. It is not a void because that implies an absence surrounded by something. It is the closest to nothingness that I have ever experienced. No physical sensation. No sense of volume. If I could not refer to it as darkness, it would be the closest thing to the concept of nothingness that a human being could experience or describe. Ancient cultures described nothingness as a dark, impenetrable body of water over which a creator god hovered or from which he emerged. That was their picture of pre-creation. My version eliminated even more from the image.
I was standing in the middle of the top row of a choral riser with sixty other children. I instantly felt as though I were asleep. Sixty children were singing "Silver Bells" equally loud, directly into my ringing ears. My brain transported me to a vision of the teacher leading the children into outer space. My body fell to the ground. My conscious mind left the room. There was no sleep-induced nonsensical narrative. There was complete, utter darkness. None of me felt present in the dark. I did not even notice my absence. Time was irrelevant. How long had I been here? Twenty seconds? A year? I was not in the darkness, but the darkness was there, and I was part of it. I had no presence within or separated from it. I only became aware of this as I regained consciousness.
Coming out of a faint is more like the Hollywood version. The darkness you are in slowly releases its grip. You hear before you see. Echoey sounds of distant voices penetrated the darkness. Time returned and became measurable. Infinite space formed before me, slowly giving way to an out-of-focus light. Form returned to my senses. I was no longer part of the darkness, but I was temporarily massless. The pins and needles returned overwhelmingly but quickly receded.
Sensation returned to my body, but had no location. I could feel the floor on the back of my head, but I could not attribute it to a specific spot on my body. It was an isolated sensation with no relation to the form of a human. My hand felt the cool of the floor as well. I did not know where my hand was compared to my brain. I was back in my body, but we were not in sync. Within a very long minute, I could determine that I was on the floor, and everyone had circled me. I tasted aluminum. I saw teachers' faces and heard their nervous calls to me. My mind and body reconnected. Sound returned to normal. Honeybun called my mother. She took me home. Because of the time lost due to my fainting, my classmates continued their rehearsal after lunch. Another boy pretended to pass out because he wanted to go home.
This event would not be the last time I would faint in elementary school. Some children have weak stomachs and vomit a lot. I passed out at least once a year in kindergarten, first, and second grade. Fortunately, I was at home when I passed out in first grade. My pediatrician told my mother that I needed to keep my blood sugar levels up and that I should always carry an emergency snack with me in case I needed a boost. I always had food in my backpack between first and fourth grade. Some kids have inhalers. Some have EpiPens. Others have insulin. I had a small box of raisins.
I passed out at my desk in second grade while waiting to be called to the bus line. By this point, I was a seasoned veteran. School was officially over for the day, so the teacher was not paying attention. I was one of five children remaining in the room because my bus had a later departure time than most. As I sat at the desk, I felt a faint overtaking me. I quickly laid my head down on the desk, covered my face and head with my arms, and hoped for the best. I passed out, but my body stayed sitting upright. No one noticed. I came to, regained bodily function, heard my bus number over the intercom, and went home.
I have found no equivalent to the void, whether in waking or sleeping states. I have had moments that trigger the memory of passing out or the act of recovering from the vacuum, but never the core experience where time, matter, and the sense of self disappear. There are few moments in life when complete darkness consumes someone. Being outside at night does not come close. I had to work in total darkness when spooling film into a canister for processing, but not many people have ever had to develop film. Also, the room was tiny. Even in darkness, your body could sense the edges of the space just by coughing or sneezing. I have never been in a deprivation tank, but I assume you are aware of the tank's size.
During a tour of Mammoth Cave when I was 15, the tour guide turned off the lights in one of the largest open areas of the cave. (2) It went from a 140-foot-long, 40-foot-tall opening to a sheet of black non-space in a fraction of a second. The silence only lasted a handful of seconds before the guide started speaking and defining space with sound. There was nothing. We were not near any flowing water. There was just black. The void was there, but my body was still present. The tour guide said that an early explorer became lost in the room for three days. Apocryphal? Maybe. Possible? Absolutely.
Translating the totality of this act into a visual form is outside my skill set. Judging by the history of "fainting art," it is outside everyone's skill set. The National Gallery in Washington, DC has a painting, The Faint by Pietro Longhi. (3) A woman has pretended to faint to avoid losing a lousy hand of cards. On a scale of one to faint, it is a two. Most art that depicts fainting is an excuse to paint a reclining woman in a dramatic or saucy, societal narrative. The best are the paintings of Mary at the foot of the cross. It seems justified to pass out as you watch your son die. The worst possess a Sleeping Beauty quality, where servants and men tend to a high-society woman. Men do not faint often in paintings. The Ludolf de Jongh painting, Soldiers at Reveille, depicts a man fainting. (4) He is both laughed at and ignored by the others. All of this points to the scene surrounding the fainting person, not the event.
“Stendahl syndrome" is the term used to describe the act of fainting while looking at art, named after a 19th-century French writer who found himself constantly overwhelmed by the art he saw in Italy. Maybe he had an iron deficiency. It was not a singular occurrence. Every room he visited threatened to put him on the floor. The syndrome grips people at the Uffizi and other Florentine sites more than anywhere else. Long lines, large crowds, hot summers, and dehydration? Recently, a man had a heart attack while viewing Botticelli's Birth of Venus. I do not think anyone ever had a heart attack looking at the Portinari Altarpiece.
Sound triggers my memory of fainting. David Gorton has a string quartet composition called Trajectories. (5) I do not know the inspiration for this piece. The first movement comes close to capturing either the onset or the reemergence of the fainting sequence. A similar recall is triggered in me when the clarinetist playing Olivier Messiaen's Abyss of the Birds section of the Quartet for the End of Time holds the extended F notes. It seems that no work of art can capture the entire experience. Fainting triggers almost all of the senses. Vision is gone. Hearing is overwhelmed. Touch is saturated. Taste is adrenalized. Most art is about sensory experience, but the core of a faint is about the denial of all sensory experience. The heart of the experience sits in opposition to art, and the two appear to be irreconcilable.
I passed out a few years ago in a beach house while on vacation. My body violently shook me awake in the middle of the night, rejecting whatever seafood I had for dinner. I managed not to wake anyone else as I stumbled to the bathroom. I have only vomited once in forty years, so the solution would not initiate from the top half of my body. I sat down, doubled over, and waited. The bathroom floor was submerged in a dark, deep space punctuated by pinpricks of light. Pins and needles consumed my skin. There was no sound in the house, but a loud ringing overran my ears.
Complete darkness overtook me. Experience lacked mass. There was a muffled groan coming from the darkness, followed by the sound of labored breathing. None of it felt attached to me. I tasted metal. A cold sensation covered the left side of my face. I did not know where my face was compared to the breathing sound. A blurred beige color emerged. My left shoulder felt cold. My left arm felt cold. My left leg felt cold. The profile of my face collapsed against the floor. The muffled breathing resulted from the tile obstructing my nose and mouth. After my strength returned, I managed to stand. Nothing else happened. Nothing else required me to be in the bathroom. The pain was gone. No one woke up. No one knew what had happened. I went back to bed.
Blombos Cave is located in South Africa and is quite possibly the southernmost point of Africa. It contains what some consider to be the world's oldest art. There is an ochre rock with a diamond-patterned geometric design, and another rock with red marks on it, which more than likely come from a larger drawing.
Mammoth Cave National Park is located near Brownsville, Kentucky.
Pietro Longhi’s painting The Faint is part of the National Gallery collection in Washington, DC, but I would not make a special trip to see it.
Ludolf de Jongh’s Soldiers at Reveille is owned by the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC. It is a pretty good Dutch painting, but the museum also owns a Giotto and a great Roger Brown painting. It is worth the trip.
I can find no listing on the internet for David Gorton speaking at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville. My memory is that this occurred around 2015-2016. He carried on an informal talk with a composer from Vanderbilt, and students from the Blair School of Music performed some of their work. That is where I first heard part of "Trajectories."
You had me at Honeybun.