..is a condition when a person undertakes writing as if it were an autonomic feature of the brain like breathing. It is a sickness in the sense that it overwhelms and replaces other forms of expression available to human beings. Hypergraphics write in toilets papers, table napkins, on their clothes, on their arms, on post-it notes and virtually everywhere, at a pace parallel to the activity of their brain, which means all the time.
So goes the article written by Maria Isabel Garcia in The Philippine Star. She was referring to the research findings of a doctor specializing in compulsive writing disorder. This doctor mentioned the great writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov-ones I've read), whose literary gift may have been a result of a temporal lobe epilepsy, which means very distinct changes in the activities in the temporal lobes of the brain. He must have been a hypergraphic.
Now, who wouldn't want to have a "sickness" like that??
The way of blogging is fast becoming a contagion, at least amongst those who know about it- and if this predilection is one sign of hypergraphia, if not otherwise a good excuse for indolence--then there must be one dostoevsky in every million bloggers, somewhere in the dark recesses of the blogosphere, ranting and rambling with a genius of wit and insight that will put all our most impassioned philosophic waxings to shame.
Ten years ago I have been more prolific in prose and poetry as though I woke up perpetually from a surfeit of dreams that couldn't wait to be ranted on paper. Depression and deprivation perhaps have been the muses of my musings, and I'm sure many other minds would agree that circumstances like these would have inspired them to put pen unto paper, never settling down until everything from the mind is exhausted and ascribed.
There are as it happens zillions of hypergraphics, thinking thoughts this very minute and every waking minute, maybe writing up their sleeves, or up the walls of their minds, or probably sweating over blogger now, happy in their drudgery- although no published work to their credit, but to where terms genius and writer rightfully belong.
As far as I'm concerned, my creative juices in the times of yore have already been wasted by the many years of domestication and fretting over inane little affairs. All that's left is an emaciated brain trying very hard to understand the elegant wisdom behind the blogs of an imperturbable London call girl.
Isabel Garcia capped off her column by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes:
A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension.Touche'.
