I have what I believe to be my first-ever ear infection. I have not verified the accuracy of this with my mother, but I believe this to be so. It started with a cold last Friday, then by Monday, my sinuses were full of crap, and on Tuesday I took a round-trip flight to San Francisco and thought the right side of my head was going to rupture like an Edgerton apple.

This, beyond discomfort, has caused partial deafness in the right ear, and a constant ringing known as tinnitus. While the doctor said my eardrum looked “angry”, he didn’t indicate any actual damage. So I expect that once all the swelling goes down my hearing will return to normal.

What’s interesting about all this, and the reason I’m writing a post about it on my studio blog, is that tinnitus is the ability to hear the process of hearing in the absence of adequate auditory inputs. So, in effect, since my hearing mechanism is still functioning fine from a nervous system perspective, but because my eardrum and middle ear aren’t right, my hearing is straining to hear, and when it strains like that, it hears itself.

All of this may not be dissimilar from the twitchy little visual quivers one gets (at least I do) when looking at a field where visual purchase is hard to come by. If the visual field is “slippery” or ganzfeld-like, then our vision plays similar tricks on us.

Because a still awareness of the act of seeing is part of what I am after when I paint, this little insight I got from my ear infection is the silver lining in the pain.