{"id":730,"date":"2018-11-18T15:50:13","date_gmt":"2018-11-18T22:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/wordpress\/?p=730"},"modified":"2025-08-08T15:42:33","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T21:42:33","slug":"seeing-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/18\/seeing-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing Things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This past summer in Cheyenne my uncle Richard Hughes told me of his hallucinations. That a man going blind might also view visions seems an insult to injury. Yet his condition has a name\u2014Charles Bonnet syndrome\u2014after an eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist and philosopher. As profiled<\/a> in ACNR<\/em> (Vol. 8, No. 5, 19) Bonnet first listed his grandfather’s<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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silent visions of men, women, birds, carriages, and buildings, which he fully realised were \u2018fictions\u2019 of his brain. Bonnet himself later underwent visual deterioration and experienced hallucinations typical of the syndrome named after him [\u2026].<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>(Compare with “Blinky” Watts<\/a>, the sound effects technician character from David Lynch’s short-lived TV series On the Air<\/em>, who suffers from Bozeman’s Simplex, which causes him to see “25.62 times as much as we do.”)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Six months prior I came across a song by Richard Dawson, which I wanted to write about tonight only to find that he too sees things<\/i> (due to a genetic defect), but through a glass darkly, as Dawson told<\/a> The Guardian<\/em>‘s Michael Hann, who remarked, “There\u2019s an almost hallucinatory clarity to his writing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Felon’s Song<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

“The Felon’s Song” tends toward the clarity end\u2014not that it isn’t evocative. Dawson composed it and four others for a 2017 multimedia project at Hexham Old Gaol, England’s oldest (built in 1333), now a museum. With a marketer’s remarkable myopia, the museum offers<\/a> “a fun and educational experience for all.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Try our stocks (if you dare), visit the prison house and learn about Medieval crime and punishment on a day out with a difference. Did you know that suspected criminals were locked up before<\/em> their trial, or that those in debt often shared the Dungeon with the most dangerous criminals?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In what can be seen as a partial corrective, artist Matt Stokes<\/a>, who investigates music-as-social-catalyst, enrolled Dawson in telling the stories of five characters who would have had dealings with that Northumberland prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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