Letters, p.35
Letters, page 35
She added, “It reminded me, in a way, of giving birth to my children. I had to struggle for them to be born, but they could not be born ’til they were ready for birth.”
This, in the most general terms, is “the continued miracle” (in our own person, in the world) of which Hume so ironically, but so accurately, speaks. The miracle of birth, the miracle of becoming, the infinite mystery of coming-into-existence: and the fight of the unborn to be realized, to be born, the struggle of the possible to become the actual. […]
Oliver Sacks
Skip Notes
*1 In the 1930s, Barbour introduced waterproof “Barbour suits,” for motorcycling in wet weather.
*2 Only fifteen months after Elsie’s death, Sam Sacks’s brother, Bennie, had also died, and his sister Alida was quite ill.
*3 “Dear Mr. A…. ,” published in a 1975 tribute volume edited by Auden’s close friend Stephen Spender and later adapted for On the Move.
*4 OS’s brothers Marcus and David, as well as David’s daughter Caroline, were general practitioners.
*5 Luria and OS had begun corresponding in 1973, after OS reviewed Luria’s work in The Listener.
*6 Korsakov’s (also spelled Korsakoff’s) syndrome can occur with alcoholism or deficiency of vitamin B1; it damages parts of the brain’s memory systems.
*7 This forty-nine-year-old man, whom OS would later write about in “The Lost Mariner”) had retrograde amnesia such that all of his memories after the age of nineteen had been wiped out, and he was incapable of forming new memories. But he could still recall his early life.
*8 Al Alvarez (1929–2019) was a literary critic who served as The Observer’s poetry editor from 1956 to 1966. A poet himself, he also published many nonfiction books, including The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1971).
*9 This is one of many letters that foreshadow OS’s own farewell letters in 2015. He was well versed in the vagaries of the end of life—both in life and in literature—and often related stories of how a great poet or scientist had died, their last words, their final acts.
*10 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
*11 A Greek term for “correct moments.”
*12 “Mount Carmel” was the pseudonym OS used in Awakenings for Beth Abraham Hospital.
*13 While this comparison is obviously exaggerated, OS remembered being beaten and starved at Braefield, and he often drew the comparison between his experience and George Orwell’s.
*14 Bruno Bettelheim’s work was generally well regarded during the 1960s and 1970s. It was only later that revelations of his plagiarism, misrepresentations, and bullying of patients led to his discrediting.
*15 Frankl, a neurologist and psychiatrist, was imprisoned at Theresienstadt concentration camp, where his father died of starvation and pneumonia. In 1946 he published Man’s Search for Meaning, about his experiences in the camp.
*16 One wonders whether OS’s rage over Ward 23 infected the Leg book, which would ultimately take a decade to complete. He rewrote the book many times over, stymied in part by the lack of a clear neurological explanation, in those days, for his experience. But he also attributed the blockage to the anger he felt when his surgeon dismissed his questions about proprioception and body image as unimportant. Once again, he was being ignored by his medical colleagues. And it is not difficult to imagine that such a sense of powerlessness and self-hatred (not to mention an inability to deal with authority) derived from his childhood at Braefield—certainly that is what both he and Shengold felt.
*17 Concepts and Mechanisms of Perception.
*18 Gregory’s work explored optical illusions and other visual phenomena, and he conceived the idea of “perception as a hypothesis”: that the brain does not simply register a scene as a given, but must use sensory input and actively try to construct a scene from it.
*19 OS uses this metaphor knowing that Richard Gregory’s father was a distinguished astronomer.
*20 OS had been fascinated by stereoscopic vision and other visual phenomena since boyhood.
*21 In On the Move, OS refers to the same place as Caenwood, using an older name for this grand mansion, which was converted to a convalescent home in 1955.
*22 See OS’s letter to the physiotherapist, Mrs. Miller, dated November 27, 1978.
*23 Luria had begun this letter by saying, “Thank you so much for your long and absolutely remarkable philosophical letter! It is astonishing that you should construct a whole philosophical system from the injury you had.”
*24 From T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.”
*25 This paragraph is obviously both true and not. OS cared a great deal about certain intellectuals and experts—sometimes ones who had received great recognition for their achievements: Nobel laureates and the like. But he saved his highest regard for those with “spacious” minds, capable of understanding things in a new way.
*26 The cousin OS is referring to, Madeline Gardner, had a catastrophic stroke when she was in her fifties, affecting movement as well as speech. She did not have formal speech therapy, but once she gained enough strength and stamina, she would force herself to sit up in bed and call various friends and relatives to talk on the phone. In essence, she devised her own speech therapy.
8
Atavisms
1975–1977
To Gunther Stent[*1]
Molecular Biologist
October 26, 1975
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Professor Stent,
I am moved to write to you through a chain of associations—and a recollection.
Yesterday I had lunch with Stephen Spender and Ed Mendelson (W. H. Auden’s literary executor), and our conversation turned on Auden’s scientific reading and interests, and the extent to which these continued during the later years of his life. I mentioned that he was a sedulous reader of the Scientific American, and often discussed various articles in it with great interest and animation.
This has suddenly brought back to my mind the last time I saw Auden, when I visited him at Christchurch in February of ’73. While we were at lunch he suddenly spoke of your article, and we talked about it, and the issues you raised, for most of the afternoon. He was extraordinarily fascinated by it—and suddenly I find myself wondering whether he knew you, or wrote to you at length personally. […]
I think he was often exercised by the notion of “prematurity.” Back in 1969, when I showed him the MS of my first book (Migraine—he later reviewed it when it came out in ’71), he said that he found Part V of the book very startling, and “premature” (this was the word he used); he felt that it might seem incongruous with the earlier parts of the book, and prove unintelligible or offensive to would-be readers (it was partly in consequence of his saying this that I completely excised Part V of the book. Indeed I completely forgot what I had written, and only “re-discovered” some of the notions several years later, when they came to me in a wholly different context. So maybe in ’69 they were also too premature for me!). […]
When I showed Auden the proofs of Awakenings, in February ’73, he again warned me about “prematurity,” but added, “Go ahead, and be damned, and publish!” He added, “Remember about prematurity, and don’t take it personally if it doesn’t meet with recognition,” and he cited your discussion of Michael Polanyi.[*2]
I am hesitating and hovering over another book at present (based on a very strange experience of my own as a patient). It was so strange that I found it incredible myself, and kept pushing it away from consciousness. I mentioned it in a letter to A. R. Luria of Moscow, who wrote “You must publish it…it is very important.” Luria added that he thought such a publication might provoke a major alteration in certain established and canonical medical approaches, but also that I should be prepared for it to have no effect whatever, because it might not be time yet for such a reconsideration to occur. Paradoxical business! I can’t help wondering whether, in some sense, every creative formulation is “premature” (although, in another sense, precisely appropriate—for how can anything be discovered unless it is time to discover it?).
Do forgive this rather rambling and not-too-coherent letter, but I couldn’t refrain from writing to you.
* * *
—
Israel Shenker, who in 1969 had written a New York Times article about the postencephalitics at Beth Abraham, had followed this up with a 1971 article about the tics such patients often had. As a result, OS began receiving letters from people with other conditions that produced tics, especially Tourette’s syndrome. One of these correspondents was the man he would eventually describe in “Witty Ticcy Ray”; another was a man with an extreme form of Tourette’s (OS sometimes thought of this as “super-Tourette’s”), and he wrote to Luria about this case.
To A. R. Luria
December 24, 1975
[No Address Given]
Dear Professor Luria,
[…] There has been something […] which has excited me intensely in the last ten weeks—namely, working with a most extraordinary patient, an extraordinary individual with an extraordinary disorder (Gilles de la Tourette syndrome). I have spent about forty hours talking and working with him, and very much more than this thinking about him. I don’t know whether you have encountered any of these patients in depth: I feel very strongly (and I have felt this since 1970, if not earlier) that there doesn’t exist, that there could not exist, any other neuropsychological disorder of comparable complexity, challenge, and fundamental importance. […] There is an extraordinary diffraction of attention (somewhat reminiscent of what one sees in “hyperkinetic” kids, and also in some ways suggestive of, yet also quite different from, what one sees in a distracted obsessive or schizophrenic patient). Within a few seconds, on entering a strange room, he will touch, smell, handle, and “test” dozens of objects in his immediate environment—a violence of inquisitiveness which can scarcely be conveyed (I use “inquisitiveness” here in a sense antithetical to a spirit of enquiry). He shows myriad, continual, involuntary, “automatic” imitations, impersonations, incorporations of others, and these others, these brilliantly eidetic and histrionic images, continually jostle in his stream of thought, and are continually manifest in a bewildering bursting-forth of different “faces,” “voices,” “tics” and “noises.” The complexity and speed of this “dissociation” is such that if I close my eyes, sometimes, when he is telling a story (he is a marvelous story-teller, and extremely witty, and becomes all the people he describes as he talks) I may get the impression of half-a-dozen people in the room (uncanny his powers of conveying, of being, many others—one may pick up several “personae,” or hieroglyphic noises and motions characteristic of them, all in the course of a single sentence).
Some sort of barrier, all sorts of barriers, seem to be abnormally permeable in him (and have been, I think, since his earliest days). The filtering, the selection, the discrimination etc. which has to develop with the growth of the self, which has to develop if the self is to have any differentiation and boundaries, and not to be overwhelmed by a thousand stimuli at once—this sort of boundary or barrier seems missing or at least strangely deficient […]. So, in a way which is uncanny, and almost incredible, one can see and hear the very genesis of thought, the rudiments, the beginnings, of perception/thought/action. It is like looking through a sort of magical and transparent window, into the very heart of thinking and the creative process. […]
Despite his grotesque and severe disorder, he is a most intelligent man, and holds a highly responsible (though uncreative) job. Also—and this seems to me an essential aspect of his cerebral and existential “style,” and I have seen it in varying degrees, in all other patients with Tourette’s I have seen—he is inventive, playful, imaginative, witty and surprising and spontaneous, to a remarkable degree. Typically the drug haloperidol (which inhibits dopamine-action), whilst curing the over-reactiveness, the impulsiveness, the tics, etc. also “cures” the inventiveness, the playfulness, the imaginativeness, the wit. So, we have a pretty problem, with this pandemoniac but in its way profoundly productive and creative disease. How can we effect a re-organization of his remarkable but chaotic powers so as to produce a potent and creative person—as opposed to a pharmacologically dulled “zombie,” who has been rendered impervious to all the sources and roots of creation (as impermeable as the patients were originally over-permeable). I know your great fondness for puzzles and riddles, and I think of you (amongst so many other things) as a great Detective who is, equally and necessarily, a great Reconstructor. I think this man is as complex as the Rosetta stone (or far more complex than it): and that if one could “crack” all his enigmatically disguised expressions, and all their determinants and co-relations, one could accomplish a fascinating and fundamental neuropsychological task, as well as help to reconstitute a deeply disabled and suffering fellow-creature.
To F. Robert Rodman
christmas Day, 1975
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
My dear Bob,
It was very good hearing from you a while back—(both your phone call(s) and your good letter of Nov 24) and, especially, hearing that you are at last finding it possible to pour out, and articulate, some of your feelings on paper.[*3] The terrors, the anguish, the loss, the bereavement, are probably the deepest and most far-reaching experience you have ever had to go through. I know how close it came to “unhinging” you, and to knocking away from under your feet the most basic securities, the very desire to live. I’m sure, in a sense, that one never recovers from such experiences as these: but then, it is not a question of “recovery”—but of surviving an abyss, a complete rupture of one’s deepest securities, of that which gave life most of its meaning and value. Lots of people are broken by such breaches; you haven’t been, and won’t be, but assuredly you will henceforth be a very different person. Nobody who has known the Exile, the Abyss, can ever be the same again: the simple, innocent immediacies are gone, and they can never be regained (except in regression and phantasy—or in a sort of spurious and sentimental Art which is, essentially, evasive and nostalgic). I sense, from the tone of your voice, and the quality of your attitude to what you are doing, that you are facing and making art of a fundamental reality—and not fuzzing it up with false sentiment and rhetoric. I think that the whole experience, and your writing of it (and it may not be relevant whether you publish or not—it is the writing, the externalization, the honesty, which counts) has to form the most important turning-point and crisis in your life.
I don’t know that such experiences make one “better,” but assuredly (if one lets them) they make one more profound.[*4] One grows up with them, one sheds one’s first innocence, one faces the profoundly questionable quality of existence. Suddenly, so vividly I thought I had left the radio on, I hear a Brahms song playing in my mind: one of the Opus 92 songs, I think, I’m not sure, but is so obviously written, and sung, by men who have known death, and who have somehow transmuted the anguish into rapture, but without losing so much as a dot of the pain: and suddenly, on the heels of this musical association, a couple of lines of Auden come to me, something like:
Remember, no metaphor can express
A real historical unhappiness.[*5]
No, no metaphor can. Perhaps certain symbols can—but only in the universal way which symbols do. In particular I am thinking of the profound and tragic symbols of Loss-and-Restoration, Exile-and-Return, etc. (Galuth and Tikkun) explored by the extraordinary Safed Kabbalists of the mid-sixteenth century, above all by the profound poet and mystic, Isaac Luria of Safed.[*6] I have been dipping into this virtually-forgotten and almost-always-misrepresented beautiful and mysterious development in Jewish sensibility and thought. (Have you read any of the remarkable works of Gershom Scholem?)[*7] For the first time in my life, I find myself clearly able to delineate what previously I could only vaguely and blunderingly intuit: the genuine roots of Jewish consciousness, in particular history and universal myth, as opposed to the senseless, dehumanized, legalisms and pedantries which—for the most part—constituted the pseudo-religious atmosphere in which I was brought up, and to which I have spent a lifetime submitting and rebelling; but never, never, finding any real nourishment or meaning. But in the beautiful and profound symbols of the desolate soul, the soul-in-exile, the soul which has been shattered and cut-off from its origins, and the vision and practice of healing the soul, one’s soul, and others’. By right activity, by Tikkun—here, for the first time, I find something which corresponds to my own experience and also, equally, to my clinical experience. I think I shall be drawing heavily on this astonishing richness and depth of these Lurianic ideas (which, in a sense, have been forgotten for almost four centuries) in A Leg to Stand On, and also in another book which is taking shape in my mind, based on a recent and current exploration and relation with an incredible patient (with Gilles de la Tourette “disease”). I won’t say anything about him now, but will simply indicate that I think (this may be the most outrageous claim or phantasy) that I am discovering things about him, about the development and constitution and sicknesses of the Self, comparable in importance to Freud’s work on Dreams (and also his wonderful, and funny, and so rarely-read book on Jokes). […]
