The Practice of Trepanation

tre·pan

trəˈpan/

verb

gerund or present participle: trepanning

perforate (a person’s skull) with a trepan.



In my nineteenth year, I undertook the therapeutic procedure of trepanning my skull. By severely limiting brain function, I grew dimmer than the man with a complete skull. I became less aware and fatigued all of the time. Yet, I appeared to be functioning better socially. My outbursts were over. My family discovered the benefits of my procedure weren’t worth the horrible side effects.

After trepanning, I passed the second test of adulthood.

There is the first and second test that determines a person’s adult life: the first is during schooling, and the second within your community afterward. I had passed the first test by graduating high school with A’s and B’s, and failed miserably in the other test due to psychosis. When I was committed by my close family members, I decided to try trepanation. I was still in the hospital with the other psychotics when I settled on it.

The unopened cro magnon man was stupid and insane. He used the environment to his advantage. But he was so absorbed in his own reality that nothing from the outside ever got in.

The one treated by trepanning had a generally higher standard of health. I knew this from my occult studies. The mental energies flowed into the skull, and out of the spirit-world, giving me a complete body.

In America at nineteen, my fascination with drilling and cutting into the skull was strange. Some saw it as body modification. It was more spiritual, less physical, more mental, and less—superficial. The others were wrong about my superficiality.

My story is only about how the others thought of me, not what I did or even what I thought. I was a mirror to the world.

The thumb could easily disintegrate the eraser. By rubbing my fingers, the eraser would ball up and drop to the floor like nose pickings. The fingernail collected shavings underneath. The thumb became an eraser in the process.

So I rubbed my thumb on the page, and smudged the penciling-in. I picked the dry eraser from under my fingernails, and rubbed it against the words, and it smudged again.

I could say the hole in my head made me do it.

I could say I needed help.

* * *

Dear Neighbor Joe,

My life has been shortened and interrupted by the process of trepanation. You must know this. The back of my skull is missing. I ask, do you know what it means to feel the universe in between your fingers, and pull it inside out? If you know, respond, and we will become strong high-beams of our world.

Sincerely,

Your trepanned neighbor

During my previous life, my frontal lobe was undamaged. My brain stem was undamaged so I maintained coordination of my body. I was missing something, and researched the occult. I learned of the spirit beings.

I divined their presence after trepanning.

The spirit beings told me I would later be cursed to a wheelchair, and that I would die of infection.

In trepanning, I had freed myself and erased my future.

Job responded to me in a letter.

Dear neighbor,

Thank you for the letter. I have been watching your progress in the past months and will allow you to come over on Wednesday evenings to watch a movie.

Sincerely,

Neighbor Joe

No, he doesn’t know what it is like. Raw spirit, raw brain, raw universe: opened, grotesque and beautiful. Inside out. Spilling out.

I had three years to live, when my cognitive ability would quickly diminish until I couldn’t survive. I would be afflicted with seizures for months before finally my brain would shut down. The doctors told my mom this, and before she could censor herself she told me directly. She was so shocked.

Three years was a long time for me to wait to die. I was already completely out of it, and it was going to get worse.

Neighbor Joe called my mother and said he was sorry.

Like being inside out, I told her I could already feel the hardwood backing of the afterlife, creeping into my brain.

The wait to die was torture.

There was no way to tell them I couldn’t care.

* * *

When working towards making a friend, the motive is emotional, physical, and spiritual. For the trepanned cro magnon, friendship is purely spiritual. The sexual need for a friend is gone.

A human is only a head, and a body, and on the head is a face, and on the body nothing. The body is meaningless. The face is the key to friendship. I couldn’t recognize faces after the trepanning.

I made one friend, and he was the same in everyone. He had different heights and voices and words, but he was the same always. He was explaining to the other versions of himself in the hospital the way that I had very little sensation of life left.

“He’s been severely damaged. It’s a miracle he’s alive, really.”

“How did he pierce the bone without medical equipment?”

I tried to answer. I wanted to explain how I grinded the anesthetized bone with a homemade apparatus. But time slipped away, and I found myself back in the car with my only friend.

“Do you greet death?” I asked. “Or are you afraid of the prospect of dying?”

My friend told me to eat the macaroni. I had teleported home, it seemed. The sensation was exhilarating.

“How do you follow me everywhere?” I asked him.

“I’m only in your dreams,” he said when I was in the wheelchair, apparently days later. I smirked.

“You dream for me, don’t you?”

“Should I stop?” he asked. He morphed and smiled and waved.

“Give me a dream about the sun,” I said. “I want to feel the burning hydrogen. I want to fall to the center of the sun.”

My friend was in everyone, and I heard three versions of him answer me at the same time.

“I can only dream if you do not speak of it.”

“The sun will not hold you.”

“I have a better idea.”

I tried to speak after the trepanning. I was highly articulate in my own mind, yet the caretakers and physicians never understood anything I could say, on account of the extreme speech impediment I developed.

I could communicate with four spiritual beings at once.

I morphed into their worlds and spoke of high beams of the human race, and how I had met one in my neighbor, my friend, Job or Joe, who battled the spirits with me, and dreamed for me (and I told the first and second spirit beings this).

Job became my neighbor and caretaker.

The other two beings were nonverbal and explained the fallacies of modern society through idea thoughts. The sun-cake being (of frosted solar storms and hydrogen clouds) told me I was being controlled by cigarettes in my previous life, before the trepanning.

I was caught in a behavior cycle of taking medication and smoking cigarettes during this previous life. The medication heightened the effect of the cigarettes, which caused the outbursts, and so the doctors were also wrong.

The bowl which contained my brain was like a well for the essence of these beings, who travelled through my body in arteries and bones and made me feel good for the first time.

The euphoria was a simple change for the better, despite slowly running out of time on Earth.

Job saw me for who I was.

* * *

The modern cro magnon couldn’t change his beliefs, so I didn’t watch the movie with my neighbor.

The trepanned cro magnon manifested his beliefs in spirit worlds all around him.

The letter fell into the trash, and days swept into weeks. I approached death. Painful seizures filled my days. I met my friend Job for movies on Wednesday.

“I thought you weren’t coming?”

I had surprised him.

The spirit being compelled me to open my skull further inside his house, where my mother Job was called. I spoke to him who said I must be getting home, and to not talk of trepanning.

Trepanning was the only word my neighbor picked up from my own speech. He said his name was Joe.

“Job,” I said. “Do you fear me?”

The process of demonizing my body modification began.

In front of the television, I saw Job again. This time he was on the screen. I left with him.

In time, I discerned the difference between Job and my mother, only barely.

Leaving my brain hanging by rope below a lamp, my body folded down onto the ground.

My brain felt nothing.

I jumped into the heavenly rivers of grey matter.

I asked, “Why couldn’t I speak of my open-ness?”

I did this all in my wheelchair.

So what does the reader say about my choice to resurrect the practice of trepanation?

Does he believe I’m lying about the spirit beings and Job?

Maybe I am just like him, and there’s something we’ve each done to ourselves that has shortened or interrupted our lives. I’ll be celebrating the end of mine with an exposed brain.

In my twenty-third year, I’ve found a different world.