Letters, p.46
Letters, page 46
Sense of farewell. My mother died today, in 1972. I had forgotten, consciously, until I put the date on this letter—and thought “Christ, this is it. The very day. Incredible.” What is “incredible” I don’t quite know (I think Freud is wrong—that a mother’s death hits one harder than a father’s, is altogether more mysterious and fundamental). Eric was greatly, even decisively, changed by his mother’s death, and speaking to Thom Gunn, whom I spent yesterday afternoon with, it was clear what an immense effect—as Loss, as Liberation, as incitement to movement and creation—came with the death of his mother (but he was only 15). Deaths of mothers…
As I wrote the date 11/11 at hospital a couple of days ago, I suddenly thought of a particularly dear patient (Lillian W—she appears in a footnote in Awakenings)—whose birthdate, unforgettably, was 11/11/11. When she died, earlier this year, I felt it very keenly—I wept on and off for a couple of days—and felt her death as the death of my patients, the postencephalitics to whom I made a sort of vow 16 years ago, that I would be with them “till Death do us part”—but now Death has; 9/10th of them are dead (tho’ those who are alive are very much alive); and, with this, somehow feel my “work” here is done. The Epilogue, which I wrote in February, after Lillian’s death, has this sense of “Thank-you,” Farewell, Requiem. (I hope I am not distressing you—I know your mother is postencephalitic.)
In some sense, Shengold now is the only clear reason for remaining in New York—there are no longer specific (groups of) patients, or clinical opportunities. What work I do—if it is “work”—I suspect I could do anywhere at this point. And I have—quietly, and quite persistently—hated New York; or, to put it less hatefully, have never loved it as, in such different ways, I have loved the West Coast, and England—and even Canada. So—some stirring, some sense of movement, some sense of “A Move,” is afoot.
I ache for the West (Coast)—Thom’s visit this week […] sharpened the ache—the Pacific, the Desert, the sense of immense Space. I cannot write, cannot think, cannot feel properly real and alive, unless there is (this sense of) Space—and a (physical) world I can love. That I should have had to go to the Adirondacks to complete the leg book—this (increasingly) is typical: I need the grandeur (the quietude, the immense otherness) of Nature—the sense of the Good Mother, Mother Earth perhaps—to give me a sense of reality, to root me, sufficiently to write. (I think, wistfully, of your own lovely place, the garden, the hill, overlooking the Pacific—how rightly you chose. I hope, amid the fret of life, you allow yourself, give yourself liberty, and leisure, to enjoy it.)
Forgive—if you can read—this ranting (and it may be, self centered) letter; phone (or write) me soon. […]
A hug to the girls, and all my love to you,
Oliver
* * *
—
OS continued to be deeply interested in visual illusions, such as the sort his friend Richard Gregory studied, along with the mechanisms of stereovision, color vision, motion vision, and so on. He was struck especially by the “strobe” or “wagon wheel” effect; sometimes, while biking up and down City Island Avenue at night, he’d catch sight of his bike spokes, which appeared to be stationary or even rotating in the wrong direction. He would return to these questions often throughout his life.
During this period, he often discussed visual questions with Gregory or with his friend Bob Wasserman, an ophthalmologist he met soon after moving to New York.
To Robert Wasserman
Ophthalmologist
December 13, 1982
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Bob:
A brief “follow-up,” from my end, on the STROBE effects.
I think you must be right about mercury lights etc.—certainly the effects are most striking when I ride at night under these. Only then may I see the ridged pattern absolutely motionless for half a minute or so, or slowly revolving, or jerking, forwards or back, according to my speed.
However, I also get some “strobe” effects, though only momentarily, in uniform and steady illumination, in daylight. It is less easy to make observations here, for the “strobe” effect may last only a fraction of a second. Indeed I was not quite sure of it till today, when I saw it repeatedly under rather special conditions—viz. cycling along a tree-lined road in late afternoon, with the oblique rays of the sun (perhaps) being intermitted by the trees. But I also see it, more rarely, when there is no intermittency to the illumination. I also observe this with my bicycle chain—moments of absolute arrest. I incline now to think this is purely physical, and that the tread of the tire, or the links of the chain, create an intermittency of illumination; but I am not absolutely sure. In particular, it seems to me that there may be an odd “off” effect, so that in the moment of looking AWAY from the tire or chain, I suddenly see it motionless, arrested. Or, occasionally, if I just glance at it, rather than gaze. Perhaps a glance CAN “cinematize,” and fracture the continuity of perception.
Whatever goes on, it makes one realize what an achievement, what a synthesis, perceptually, “motion” is. One takes the sense of movement for granted, and it is only through these strange aberrant moments, these strobe effects, that one experiences perception stripped of any sense of motion and duration, and reduced to the raw physical or physiological—which has no true motion, or duration, but only (a succession of) motionless configurations. Perception is normally a stream—a sort of perceptual melody. It is fascinating—and frightening—to see this stream stopped. I suspect this often happens, on a purely physiological basis, with some of my postencephalitic patients.
Anyhow, what do you observe from your end?
Hope to see you soon—that last weekend was a delight.
Love,
To Richard Gregory
January 11, 1983
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Richard,
Lovely talking to you just now on the phone—how few people one can, one would dare to, phone in this way! But you were wonderfully friendly, and instantly acute—to anticipating my implied thought of perceptual flashes or frames. This matter has been in my mind for four weeks or so, and hits me again every time I go out on the bike (as I had just done, a few minutes before I phoned you). I wrote to an ophthalmologist friend about it (I take the liberty of enclosing a copy of my letter) and he too had thought of saccades, but could only guess, and had no experience (I don’t suppose these phenomena are “symptomatic” in the ordinary course of life, though since noticing them a month ago, I catch them, now, all the time.)
I am both sorry (and relieved) that there is no evidence for perceptual discontinuity or “frames.” If this is the case, I am going to have to confront a massive task in re-interpreting all sorts of clinical data which come to me, which would seem to suggest a sort of “atomized” perception—atomized in time, space, or both (what I have tended to call “cinematic” and “mosaic” perception). And, more generally, the quality of delirium, which is (described as, and seems to me) essentially discontinuous, a sort of perceptual/conceptual flutter. And the sort of thing I have called “freeze-frames,” “stills,” “perceptual arrest,” etc. in Awakenings. It may be that there are discontinuities of attention, not perception; or some incoherence in aspect perception, so that instead of seeing something steady and whole, one confabulates or fancies or hypothesizes scenes “based” on some fragmentary or figmentary (mis)perception. Such perceptual deliria—I especially think of the productive visual paragnosias seen with right parietal occipital lesions—beside their quality of superficiality and flutter, are curiously devoid of affect or tone. […]
For me “kinetic melody” is not just a turn-of-phrase, but a precise and irreduceable characterization of animal motion. Similarly I want to talk of “perceptual melody”; and I am very conscious of the melodious movement of my thought (that is, when I can or do think!). In short, I cannot dissociate the idea of ACTION from music (and, specifically, melody). […]
Whenever I do anything—ride a bicycle, or think—I am proceeding in a way which is beyond procedure: that is, beyond any definable or describable procedures. I cannot tell anyone HOW to do anything—even something as simple as riding a bike: I can only say “The way to do it is to do it.” I can, indeed, give him information, instructions, suggestions, procedures—but these do not come together until he suddenly “gets the feel,” “gets the hang,” “gets the idea,” and then what he gets surpasses all procedure: or, rather, reflects a personal proceeding or procedure which he cannot describe (“What CAN be shown CANNOT be said,” etc.).[*28] […]
What especially challenges me in patients is to evoke the power of, the stream of, Doing, despite severe impairments of perceptual/conceptual procedures e.g. getting an apraxic[*29] patient into a complex continuous task, even though he has fundamental difficulties in programming and sequencing. My “method” here is Play—or Art, which, I feel, can embed procedures. Again, my method is to engage the Person, the Actor, the active acting Self, which can achieve a unity of action, even where there is severe neurological disunity. Leibniz, comparing Animals to Clocks, speaks of “an active Principle of Unity” (this strikes me as an anticipation of Kant). Hobbes, on the other hand, at least in the metaphor of Leviathan, is concerned with “artificiall Life” and Automata—a sort of seventeenth-century anticipation of Cybernetics. I know how interested you are in the “A.I. enterprise.” […] I sometimes feel you are describing artificiall Life, Man, or Intelligence—and not “Natural” (I feel my own function, in a sort of dialectic or dialogic complementarity to yours, is to study the nature of Naturalness). […]
Do reply—it is so long since we’ve written. And I will hope to see you in March.
Love,
To Gerald Stern
Neurologist
September 14, 1983
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Gerald,
I have just got your good letter of the 7th, for which I thank you immensely. It sharpened my sense of regret and annoyance, however, that I didn’t manage to see you when I was in London last week. It was a very frantic week. […]
I am glad you liked the “Hat” piece[*30]—there is a special sort of pleasure in writing such things (they bring back the image of a patient in affectionate and vivid detail, and there is a sort of fidelity, and rightness of feeling, as are built in to the clinical contact), and, hopefully, in reading them—at least to “old-fashioned” clinicians like ourselves. I have just written (but not even titled) a Korsakov piece,[*31] about a delightful intelligent man with not only the most devastating anterograde amnesia, but a retrograde one which has erased him back to 1945—so he is very much marooned in the past (not, of course, that he feels it as “past”—his early memories are quite startlingly “immediate” and distinct). I hope it will get published here, and will send you a copy when/if it is. (Have you seen such Korsakov patients? Are they common? The syndrome, including gross retrograde amnesias, is described by Luria, though most of his patients, of course, have midline tumours, rather than “ordinary” Korsakov’s. For myself, curiously, though I see a lot of alcoholics, I have not too often seen classic Korsakov’s.)
Quite why I wrote this piece—or the “hat” one for that matter—I don’t know: they just came to mind. I think, however, that almost everything which just “comes to mind” now has something to do with organic alterations of identity; and perhaps the body-image book I was thinking of will include histories like this, and illustrate (what I suppose is becoming my central interest, in a way)—what one might call “The Neurology of Identity.”
The frenzy in London, and my long (and I fear rude) silence for many months both had to do with A Leg to Stand On, or whatever I shall call the “Leg” book. I was driven half-crazy by my editor-publisher in England taking six months to edit and retype the book, when I had thought it pretty much done in March, and expected to get the retyped version in April, and to see it published this month. Although I am a terrible procrastinator, actually it was a very difficult (and tricky) editing job, because, among other things, it was necessary to reduce the length from 240,000 to 70,000 words—nothing like this was done with Awakenings. But I think now, finally, that there is a taut narrative—which won’t make impossible demands on the reader, and a nice Epilogue, which really amounts to a sort of intellectual history and critique of Neurology. I only got the Epilogue right on my last day in London. Now, at last, I feel comfortable with the book—comfortable, not exuberant (it has wearied and worried me for far too long to allow this)—and somehow, comfortable, or resolved, in relation to the clinical experience, and in relation to Neurology and Neuropsychology. Feeling “reactionary” or “counter-enlightenment” is not the right feeling; what I hope came out is the feeling of a great (and necessary) sweep a century and a quarter long—from “preconceptual” neurology (exemplified by Weir Mitchell),[*32] to “classical” (“Sherringtonian”) neurology (exemplified by Head),[*33] to neuropsychology (exemplified by Luria and Leont’ev) to…to an “Existential” neurology, or neurology of identity, which seems to me now to be demanded and due in describing syndromes and situations which defeat any description in terms of Function or System, and demand description in terms of (altered) Self or Identity. This was the case with “Dr. P.”[*34] and with so many of the right-hemisphere syndromes one sees; it is the case with my Korsakov patient; it was the case with my own body-image, body-ego, disturbance. I am sure we contain circuits, puppets, etc, and that one has to have a neurology of these; but I am sure we are not just puppets—at least in health (though pathology may make us so; as described in the fascinating self-account you sent, in which Schooling[*35] speaks of periods in which his limbs behave “as if controlled by a drunken marionette master”), and that one needs a neurology of freedom, of health, of a Self, transcending a neurology of reflexes, systems, cybernetics and puppets. […]
I am verbose—this letter is too long—but it is partly because there is so much to be said! Anyhow, thank you, sorry I missed you, hope to see you soon.
Yrs,
Oliver
To Lawrence Weschler
[September 1983]
[Blue Mountain Center][*36]
Dear Ren,
I should be writing “the book”[*37]—but my only impulse is to write a letter—yet the two feelings are always very close for me. I have a vivid sense of readers as individuals—I wish I could address them, each and every one, as Kierkegaard does, as “Thou” (I always felt that Kierkegaard was actually writing to me, such is the authentic magic of his “Thou”). Conversely, every time I do address myself to a “Thou”—a particular individual—I tend to find myself writing a book! At least, if there is a subject to write on, something which vitally interests us both—Indeed these are my favourite sort of letter. […]
I love the “scientific” or philosophic letter—this was the sort of correspondence I had with Luria; there was a medical or scientific or philosophic subject, often lots of them; yet the letters were also between us, personal. I like letters to and from “patients” or readers—patients, a long way away, who’ve read my books; or readers who, if not patients, respond with a peculiar resonance of their own. Auden liked to “draw me out,” liked me to write long letters about my work—he had an inexhaustible interest in patients, and strange clinical and human experiences—as seen through the patient’s or doctor’s mind and heart. Much of what later became Awakenings started as conversations, and correspondence, with him. He was also interested in my “philosophic” reflections on these—tho’ less so than Hannah (Arendt), whom I knew a bit. There were times when it was to her that I especially wanted to write—and I regret that I was always too diffident to do so. And now they’re all dead—these good “parents” whom I loved—and now I too am older,[*38] and am less turned to “parents,” and more turned to contemporaries, friends, and sometimes “sons.” We have become close in the two years we have known each other—and yet, in an important way, we are quite different, we are “strangers”; and I find, involuntarily, that my pen turns, and my mind and heart open, to you.
I love letters which deal with investigations and problems; but I also love narrative and narration in letters; and what I love most is to have them combined—a problem, problems, embedded in a tale—a narrative Philosophy, a narrative Science, in which the Riddle and the Tale are one. I suppose this is what one means by “case-history”—and, in its universal form, what Luria meant when he spoke (as he frequently did) of “Romantic Science”—his case-histories, or Freud’s, for example, are studies, and investigations, presented as tales (and perhaps they could be presented no other way). This, very clearly, is the case with my “Leg” book—and my piece (“The Leg”) in the London Review.
But what I have written, and what I have published, and what I have spoken of to you, only go as far as the first walk[*39]—I have said nothing yet of the rest of the story.
And it is this, now, which floods into my mind (partly because this is where I have “got to”)—not least because of these idyllic surroundings, the whole feel of this place (an old Manse, in a village, surrounded by lovely country) which reminds me so intensely of the Convalescent House in ’74. And it is precisely the same time of year—a wonderful Indian summer of September–October, with the long, warm, lucid golden light, and the leaves turning and carpeting the ground.
