Appointment w/ My Neurologist
“Have you fallen yet?” she always asks,
In her gorgeous scarf and white lab coat.
“Been feeling dizzy? Spit caught in your throat?
Frustrated that you can’t do daily tasks?”
She makes me tap my fingers, tap my toes,
Then follow with my eyes her roving pen.
Up and down and side to side it goes:
A font of jokes for a comedian.
Well, Parkinson’s is not some morbid joke,
Yet in her office all these tasks evoke
A childish sense of humor. Soaring mirth
That doesn’t flag or fling me down to earth.
What have I learned from my movement disorder?
‘Tween mirth and death, it’s just a hazy border.
– Bruce Ballard
OK, first off, my neurologist is great. Tremendous. Furthermore, I’m healthy.
Second, I write sonnets as a hobby, but I don’t think they’ll get really good until I’ve written a hundred or so. Please stay tuned. For earlier sonnets click here, here, here and here.
Third, I normally don’t post the background info on the art works that the Metropolitan Museum of Art allows people to download, but I’ll make an exception this time. It’s quite interesting:
Electro–Physiologie, Figure 64
Artist: Adrien Tournachon (French, 1825–1903)
Artist: Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne (French, 1806–1875)
Date: 1854–56, printed 1862
Medium: Albumen silver print from glass negative
Background: In compiling a scientific treatise to aid artists, the physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne used electrical stimulation of the facial muscles to elicit expressions of the principal emotions. Wanting his transcriptions to be exact, he collaborated with Adrien Tournachon (brother of the famous Nadar), a photographer who specialized in portraiture. From the negatives they made together in 1854, Adrien produced a single set of carefully crafted prints that the doctor mounted in a large album (now École des Beaux-Arts, Paris). Later, on his own, Duchenne copied and cropped the images to create illustrations for his book Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine; ou, Analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions applicable à la pratique des arts plastiques (1862). In the volume, Duchenne wrote that the subject of this image seems terrified of the idea of imminent death or torture: “This expression must be that of the damned.”
