whether made to feel as an immobile cockroach seated motionlessly , by his mandate , on my fathers stool , or without any warning , especially during nightly self-studies or when at work on the farm ( sometimes observed by my father and other times , when he was employed elsewhere in construction projects , cowering unobserved in the clods of the field , inanimate as they were ) , i would experience petit mal seizures , or something of this nature , to which volition was snuffed out and in the vacuum all other familiar forms became figments of alterity , morphing from the real and palpable to representational abstractions as though images in a movie with no particular meaning and of little substance .