Things we consider intelligent have some order of communication: a way of receiving the necessary facts of the world and then delivering an appropriate response. When regarding a plant, most people do not see a being capable of thought or sensation. This perception might be traced back to Aristotle’s claim that while a plant may have a kind of soul, it can only be of an ersatz variety. A plant does not complain when hurt, does not flee, does not yearn or grieve, does not hunger. A plant appears to accept its immediate conditions.
Even when early experimental botanists observed phototropism—plants gradually turning and growing toward the sun—the movement did not seem like an intimation of purpose, representing any choice, or ambition. The plant’s turning was seen as simple physics, like metal bending under heat. Later experiments, however, showed that long after a light source had been removed, certain plants—grass, cress, pea seedlings—continued to bend toward where the light had been. It was as if they had turned back to the memory of it; it was as if they hoped for the light to return.
The first neurologist I see is convinced that I know his son. I’m seventeen, and his son, a few years older than me, apparently went to the same high school. It is only when the doctor gives a milky smile—the squareness of his jowls and the lips that seem to move only horizontally—that the face of the boy he is talking about flashes in my mind. The neurologist tells me that nothing irregular showed up on the scan he ordered, but he has tracked the dysfunction to a part of the brain stem, the little adapter cable from the mind to the spinal cord. He shows me an informational diagram of a brain during a migraine, pointing at the slow wave of unusual activity rippling through it, the blood vessels twisting erratically.
One distinctive feature of migraine as a neurological condition is its unpredictability, its multiformity. The triggers are diverse: caffeine or hunger or stress or wind chimes or sex or limes or movie screens or changes in barometric pressure. There is also a kaleidoscopic array of symptoms: some people cannot see, some cannot hear, some cannot speak, some vomit, some fall over, some feel fatigue; others get confused, get goosebumps, forget their names, pee relentlessly, want sex, recoil from touch, believe they are horses, believe they will shortly die.
Migraines tend to cluster like earthquakes; one migraine makes it more likely that I will get another. For me, the earliest sign of an impending migraine is a small, glittering hook of light. The hook initially appears as a mistake, as if some fragment of an image has caught, left over from a previous glance. It is usually fixed just below and to the right of the focal point of my vision, so when I try to look at it closely, it moves away, then away again. Then it expands, turns into a ring, a shape made of shimmering that must be looked through in order to see other things, and I cannot focus. My mind has already started to float away. The shimmering lasts around thirty minutes. When the light disappears, the pain begins.
When my first migraines came, they came with a fury. For weeks, I was in and out of pain so severe that I forgot I was a person who existed beyond the blossoming sensation of my head. To vomit more efficiently, I started lying on the floor next to the toilet, and my mother would rinse a cloth in cold water, then place it like an offering on the dark table of my forehead.
Migraines are genetic, and because women are three times more likely than men to suffer from them, some believe they are matrilineal, passed from mothers to daughters, shared among sisters or nieces. Neither my mother nor my sister gets migraines, though an aunt we no longer speak to is rumored to suffer from them. And then there is my mother’s mother, who used to get severe undiagnosed headaches after sewing for many hours. Her pain, according to my mother, forced her into solitude and a dark room—though this solitude was also something she had long sought, and the line between necessity and desire became increasingly indistinguishable. In death, she has been put into a small, dark box, where she may not give any more answers.
About my biological father’s family, I know almost nothing. My father left us decades ago, when I was only a few years old, and we left the country where I was born shortly after.
Phototropism is not as straightforward as the tending of life toward light. Plants may cluster in the bright part of a field, their leaves may turn toward the sun, but their different parts react differently. Their roots, for example, display negative phototropism, reaching further into the darkness. The complexity goes beyond roots and leaves. In Light and the Behavior of Organisms, published at the turn of the twentieth century, the scientist S. O. Mast argues that the established science of phototropism has oversimplified how and why organisms—plants but also certain sessile animals—orient themselves toward the light. Previous experiments failed to consider the complexity of how the subject receives the light, such as “the possible effects of the direction of the rays, of variation in light intensity on the surface of the [organisms], and of various internal factors.”
To think more astutely about the nature of phototropism, we must take into account that the organism’s body is its own uniquely arranged sensory device. Plants, Mast writes, frequently have a sensing part that is separate from a reacting part; in the light, an impulse is transmitted between them. There are territories of dullness, territories of acute feeling. And, of course, the body itself is opaque, so only certain parts of it may be in direct light, while others are set in shade, no matter how we turn.
Our family doctor has asked me to start keeping a journal. If I track my daily routines, I might be able to discern a pattern, to identify items or activities that trigger my migraines. The trigger may be unrelated to the specific sensations or symptoms I experience, and it may not necessarily be the thing that immediately precedes them.
After migraines occur on three separate days when I’ve had fewer than four glasses of water, I infer that dehydration is a possible trigger. Other triggers are harder to isolate. One migraine begins when I’m lying on my side, reading the Wikipedia page for La Niña, a climate pattern of colder sea surface temperatures, mirror image of El Niño. Is the trigger the phone screen? The encyclopedic formatting of the text? Or the depressing lurk of climate change?
The difficulty of identifying a trigger is a problem of correlation and causation. To say one thing is the cause is to make a deliberate cut in the deep tissue of experience, to privilege, say, a certain action above a sensation, above a feeling, above a memory, above the unknowable. It is possible to be correct for the wrong reasons.
I’ve come to understand the body as a depository of records—records of instinct, records of feeling and desire, etched in tissue and sinew, accrued over time. Each migraine is a record of its own significance, a moment when a set of circumstances triggered certain phenomena. Over a month, the records make a sequence; over a lifetime, a diagnosis; over generations, a correspondence.
Traveling alone, halfway through a sixteen-hour flight over the Pacific, I am trying to get some sleep, to adjust to the time zone of my arrival. My eyes are closed, but the lit screen of the passenger next to me begins to glow, pressing through my eyelids, and soon everything is glowing, the light swirling like a portal. The glimmering is like a rearview mirror in the corner of my eye. When the pain grows louder, it starts to knead the hours together, glitching into the near future, where a young flight attendant has guided me to lie down at the back of the plane because I have lost so much liquid from vomiting. We are in Houston, he says. Everyone else has gotten off. There is a wheelchair waiting for me at the end of the airbridge. Later, I write in the journal of triggers: Long flight. Started somewhere over the Pacific. I couldn’t lie down and shimmering just wouldn’t stop. As if the shimmering itself were the cause.
In literature, as in the everyday, light is rarely considered a presence in itself. It interests us mostly for what it does—which is to make clear, to articulate. And so the light may become a desire, an ambition: to “see the light” is to see more broadly, to know, to reach a place where seeing and knowing are so immanent that no further effort is required. But light itself lacks shape or texture. Like physical pain, it is difficult to articulate, averse to language. In 1965, to get at the lightness of light, Aram Saroyan wrote the following one-word poem:
lighght
More of an image than a text to be read, it is obvious and instant and suddenly there. There is lightness in the vowel, a single note that sounds in the thicket of consonants. But from another angle, the word is a creature, wormlike, engorged in the middle—too much light stuffed into its body to pass through. This is the closest I can get to describing the sensation of a migraine: being so full that there is no longer an inside or an outside, that it is no longer clear which parts, pains, thoughts, images are yours. Many times, I have closed my eyes and felt no edges to my body, just the sense that it was at once there and elsewhere, dispersed into many pieces, in places I could not know.
Lately, I have been imagining an organism that is fully transparent, a kind of matter in a kind of shape that lets the light run through it, like a knife through stillness. A flood of morning light through a valley, which is itself the morning.
At midnight, I am trying to memorize all the characters for my intermediate Chinese midterm, and the characters turn into light. I am at a celebratory lunch for my grandfather’s birthday when I stop being able to see anything except light. The restaurant staff lets me rest on a row of banquet chairs in the back, where I shiver and vomit under a tablecloth. I am at a poetry reading in a jazz bar, light rinsing the moments before I am meant to read my poems, and I insist on reading anyway, discreetly throwing up in the bathroom afterward. I dream that I am cultivating a small farm in a tropical climate but also having a migraine, and I wake up in lights with a mushrooming feeling in my stomach. I get so angry at my mother that I refuse to eat, just to spite her, and light starts eating me. I start a new medication, but a new doctor has accidentally prescribed me double the appropriate dosage, plunging my blood pressure to a level that indicates sleep or nonconsciousness.
“Sorry about that,” the doctor says. For three weeks, I see little lights everywhere.
During my migraines, there are periods of time I cannot account for. Inevitably, the migraines end with vomiting, an upheaval that so exhausts me I mercifully pass out. In this sense, a migraine is an exit condition.
There are periods of time I cannot account for. My father used to disappear often during the early years of my life, leaving for days, then coming back, then leaving again without a trace. When he performed his final disappearance, he called the utility company to shut off our electricity. He took the light with him, and we sat in darkness for nights. This is what my mother tells me. In truth, I do not remember it at all.
Another experiment with light: This time, a source of light is directed through an opaque plate with two slits. A screen is set behind the plate, collecting the light that comes through. You might expect to see two shapes of light that mirror each of the slits, but instead the screen shows an interference pattern, with multiple alternating bands of darkness and brightness. Here, light behaves like a wave, the interference pattern similar to what you would see watching currents of water under a bridge—the waves sometimes building with each other, sometimes canceling each other out. But experiments also show that light exists as particles: individual, discrete units of energy called photons. That light may, in fact, possess two seemingly incongruous natures—diffuse and finite—gives rise to the field of quantum mechanics.
This duality is a quality of not only light but all matter. Even atomic particles such as neutrons and protons are shown, in certain conditions, to behave like waves. One interpretation suggests that a quantum particle is not in one state or another but exists in all possible states at once. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment to illustrate this: A cat is placed in a closed box with a vial of cyanide gas connected to an unpredictable radioactive source. When the radioactive source decays to a certain level, the vial will break, and the cat will die. But as observers outside the box, we do not know if the vial has broken or has yet to break. Until we open the box, Schrödinger’s cat is simultaneously dead and alive.
Our way of observing can tolerate only the singular. Our desire to know with certainty—to open the box, to shed light—will foreclose all other possibilities in a single moment.
Once a migraine trigger is identified, you can start to build your life around it—your abstinence from it, its absence. In this bid for a painless life, I stop drinking coffee, hydrate diligently, start sleeping early, discard a threadbare Snoopy T-shirt, take deep breaths, close my eyes when something is shining, avoid static, quit watching TikToks, and try, in general, to feel a little less forcefully. I try to find spaces and shapes that are habitable, to make myself a discrete, contained self. I wonder if this is why the aunt we don’t speak to avoids direct sun, why my grandmother preferred Minnie Mouse on her T-shirts. Did we share the same triggers? Did their pain feel like my own? Perhaps they had learned, over the years, to design their lives in a certain way. If we could speak, could they tell me how to better inhabit this body?
Many of those who knew my biological father have told me that I look exactly like him. When I was younger, I never knew whether this was meant as a warning or as something to help me fill in the negative space. Now I can see the resemblance, too, looking at photos of him and my mother when they were married, when he was around the age I am now. The moles on our chins in the same spot. The same slightly hooked posture when sitting forward. I have a strange memory that, slightly below his knees, he had patches of almost hairless skin; looking at my own legs, I sometimes have the feeling they are not my own. My father had wanted to be a writer, drifted aimlessly between jobs. From what I am told, the weight of our family was a burden on him. What was the breaking point? He withdrew further and further into himself until there was almost nothing left of him in our home, his self escaping into the other life he must have thought was possible elsewhere on his own. Sometimes, closing my eyes while riding a train, I can picture him sitting in the same place, in the same position. It’s as if I must follow his course into dejection in pursuit of some frictionless life.
When we were younger, my sister and I used to chase the moths that crept into our house. They gathered around the ceiling fixtures, thumping themselves against the light. We would swat them with rolled-up newspapers and collect their small bodies until someone told us that every moth was an ancestor coming back to visit us. What bad fortune it was to kill one. Now I lie awake wondering about my ancestors and whether they know where to find me. The young man in Melaka who painted his visions, tigers and forests in dense green. The woman who, after the war, swore to never eat another yam again. The unknown correspondent we find in a box of letters: I am in debt and I feel like that’s my destiny—crossed out and written in, twice. This is a night like the vast majority of my nights, in which I don’t have a migraine but worry about having one, about the light again drawing me to it.
There are days I cannot seem to enter, when I cannot shake the sense that I am on the border of myself. I suspect that I am on the verge of a migraine, even if it has been months since the last one. I suspect that I am in the aura of an aura, that this is the lightheadedness that precedes the bright shimmering that precedes the pain, because these are the terms I have to account for why my thoughts have become inaudible, my heart pale, my self-less body in the world now little more than a set of distances from every other thing.
I am waiting—sometimes with an ordinary fear, sometimes tending toward a dangerous longing—for the clarity that comes with being cleaved open. Later, I will call my mother, or she will call me because she sometimes just knows, and she will ask: Where did it hurt? How much? Is everything okay? Is it over?
Not all plants bend toward light. Some species have a changing relationship with light over their lifespans. The young shoots of certain vines will turn away into dimness. In the forest, this can steer them toward the deep shade of a larger organism, a bigger tree. The plants will reach for it, will climb the larger trunk, following its upward growth and touching it in a thousand places—toward the canopy, the sky, the light above boundless.
