Letters, p.52
Letters, page 52
We have to see each other one of these days.
All my warmest best wishes,
Fondly,
Oliver
To Francis Crick
January 11, 1987
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Dr. Crick,
When we talked at dinner in La Jolla several months ago, I mentioned the “kinematic vision”—seeing successive positions without intermediate movement—experienced by a number of my (migraine and chemically-excited) patients. You asked if this was ever a permanent condition; I could not answer.
I find now that it can be experienced on a permanent basis—this is beautifully described and discussed in a paper by Zihl et al. (“Selective disturbance of movement vision after bilateral brain damage,” Brain 1983, pp. 313–340).[*30] […]
I have now written up a longish report on my achromatopic patient: he is still totally color-blind a year after his accident. Only in the actual writing did I finally come to “see” various things—above all, how color is, indeed, a (cerebral-mental) construct, as movement is for Zihl et al.’s patient. I think I may have resisted this notion (for it is not at all “difficult” in an intellectual sense) due to some emotional cleaving to a naïve realism, a feeling that we are “given” color, form, the whole world—when, it is borne in on one in every way, one has to construct it (or perhaps “construe” it). I suppose this is a “Kantian” view (tho’ muddled by his unfortunate apriorism).
I have wanted to read Neurophilosophy,[*31] which you spoke so highly of, but have found it difficult to get a copy—I must do so, because so much of my own work (whether I like it or not) seems to be a sort of clinical epistemology (or clinical “ontology” or “neurophilosophy”).
I hope you received the copy of my book A Leg to Stand On, with its descriptions (for what they are worth) of some of my own (visual) problems (or illusions) at the time.
I hope you are in good health, and that I may have a chance to visit you when I am in La Jolla next month,
With kind regards,
Oliver Sacks
To the Editors, Social and Health Issues Review
January 26, 1987
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Sirs,
[…] I am, of course, most moved by, and deeply grateful for, your selection of me as your Writer of the Year award.
I confess, I do not find it at all easy to say why I do what I do, or what indeed I “hope” to do. Because I do what I do spontaneously and “unthinkingly”—at least without conscious deliberation or intention.
Perhaps this needs to be said—to be said in addition to, or in place of, the 300–500 words I have enclosed. […]
My writings are neither “popular” nor “academic,” not designed to be either; indeed, as I say, they are not “designed” in this sense at all, but come out, erupt, often very suddenly and unexpectedly, because of some inner need to articulate and communicate (something—I don’t quite know what) which is deep inside me.
I feel a need to write this letter by way of confessing the inner truth, or psychological truth, about my “writing”—whereas the enclosed statement, tho’ perhaps more suitable for publication, may be more conscious or superficial.
I have always found it difficult to say, or even think, why I do what I do!
Again, all my thanks,
Oliver Sacks
[Essay attached:]
I am sometimes asked whether I am a physician or a writer—I am both, always, I cannot separate them. I feel that my task, as a physician, not only includes the “usual” medical functions (diagnosis, recommendations, treatment, care), but extends beyond this—to an attempt to grasp, or “imagine,” the world of the patient, both those alterations induced directly by altered neural functions, and the altered life-situation, the predicament, he in consequence finds himself in. I want to grasp his predicament—and I want the patient too, if he can, to grasp it, so that all his resources (physiological, mental, and moral) may be mobilized for the act of survival, leading the richest possible life under and despite his altered circumstances. I want to imagine his “world,” and also to convey it, as best I can. Why? In order to enlarge the sympathetic imagination of those who may hear or read me; to make them feel that disability and patienthood are not remote or repellent, but integral parts of being-alive, being-human, adapting, and affirming. I want to assist—not by campaigning, but by careful description and analysis—a feeling of fellowship for the afflicted and ill, our sense of them as fellow-beings striving with adversity, as all of us do, in our different but kindred ways. I want finally, through these true tales and “parables” of affliction and survival, to illustrate human universals, our own situation, and (what I see as) the universal human condition.
To Elkhonon Goldberg
Neuropsychologist[*32]
April 18, 1987
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Nick,
It was a particular pleasure dining, talking, being with you last evening, and an illuminating one. […]
I feel a need in myself to turn away (at least for a while) from these (now-too-easy) narratives, and do some “hard” thinking. I also find a wish and need, almost unprecedented, to work with others, friends/colleagues whose minds and energies I feel congenial and complementary to my own. I was never able to work with anyone before, nor had I any desire to. There has been a very good collaboration with my old friend and (ophthalmological) colleague Bob Wasserman for a year now, centering on our achromatopic patient, but then spreading to thinking and working together on other aspects of visual processing. This has stimulated us both, “pollinated” us both, produced (and will produce) good work of a sort which neither of us, perhaps, could or would have done alone. Bob is also more “scientific” than I am, can wrestle with physical and physiological theory in a way which I cannot (or cannot any more), and I respect his powers here immensely; but, conversely, or complementarily, he respects my powers of vivid and dramatic (and even, as you put it, “captivating”) formulation and presentation. So we can make a good “team.” And I think, after last evening, that you and I could also make a powerful “team” (I was going to say “troika,” but that has three horses). Certainly, as a start, this matter of hemispheric adaptation[*33] (and “allocation”) is one which intrigues us both; is radically more interesting (and probable) than the conventional ideas of fixed and static roles; could be supported, at least suggested by an immense amount of clinical, experimental (and perhaps “personal”) data; and needs to be presented in a way which commands attention. For better or worse (or both) I find now that I can command attention. This pleases me a bit, but it also frightens me, because it lays an added responsibility on me. I feel I must be careful what I say, lest I (unwittingly) mislead others—or myself. Bob Wasserman, a man of absolute integrity as well as fine creative intelligence, has been an exemplar and reminder of intellectual responsibility in our working-together, and I think you would be the same.
It may be, in some self-accusing part of my psyche, that “responsibility” gets equated with “respectability.” […] If others (some others) see me as a “pop” neurologist that is not my concern; but I must not see myself in that light; I must see myself as having some central seriousness and integrity; and one way of assisting this is to join forces, here and there, now and then, with others who do have the clearest seriousness and integrity, so that I can be recalled to my better self, and ascend with them to that elevation one needs, where the air is pure, the climb is fun, vast vistas unfold, and there is a ringing sense of reality. At such altitudes, which are the proper realms of the mind, there is a mixed sense of awe and humility, and transparency, and delight. […]
Best,
Oliver
To Susan Sontag
January 8, 1988
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Susan,
I meant to have written to you a few days ago—I was away (Holland, England) over the holidays, but found the New Yorker with your wonderful piece in it on my return.[*34] […]
You had, of course, said something of the incident—you told me of it (very briefly) some months ago, and I could not help thinking, “How extraordinary. My God, she must write this!”—and now you have, with extraordinary beauty and feeling, and a wonderful sense of irony and affection for that long-ago self. But I suspect that it has been, pretty much, “a secret,” for the most part (tho’ it evidently needed to “return” and come up, and come out—so rightly—now)—and I see why it should be: and am slightly reminded of an occasion in my far-off, fervid, science-intoxicated boyhood (I too must have been 14 at the time) when (with Eric Korn) I sought audience with the great Julian Huxley[*35] (he received us, our two precocities, with great courtesy and—I suspect—amusement, tho’ an embarrassed amnesia prevents me remembering anything else). And there were earlier times—I must have been 10 or 11 (for he died in ’45)—when I would hang around Hanover Terrace in Regents Park watching for a glimpse of my idolized H. G. Wells, and try and nerve myself, for hours, to knock on his door—I never did. But none of these experiences has the richness of yours, nor would say much—as yours says so much!—about such meetings and earlier selves…. And the continuity and chasm between “then” and “now”—Your one-but-last paragraph is the heart of the whole piece.
I can’t help wondering, now you have released this “secret,” whether there are not other scenes—and “secrets”—needing to be told. Your piece has the tone of the best autobiography.
I hope we can see each other soon—tho’ I think we have some difficulty, tho’ we are not (or are we still?) children, of dealing with our admirations now, for each other, so that a ghost of embarrassedness still makes our own intercourses a bit difficult. I feel this for me/you, as I do for Jerry Bruner, and as I did, most overwhelmingly of all, with Luria (correspondence with him was the most important of my life, but what I most desired—to see him—I could never make or allow myself to do).
* * *
—
I will be away, travelling, for several weeks, off and on—with a sort of playful travelling, a license, normally not “allowed,” but made possible, “licit” now, because my photographer-travelling-companion (Lowell)[*36] is also a Touretter, and our travels are also life-studies of Tourette’s, which will be embedded in, and take the form of, a travel-narrative (?“Travels with Lowell”). I have pen in hand, he has camera—I have never had quite a relationship or a collaboration like this before, and what will emerge (hopefully!) will be something new, a sort of travelling clinical anthropology, as I go here and there, seeing Tourette’s here and there, with Lowell whom I half see as a sort of Tourettic Tom Jones (or Tristram Shandy, perhaps, I don’t know what I mean). I have “written up” the Alberta experience[*37]—it was a not-wholly-coherent 25,000 words, which has been cohered (but perhaps also impoverished) now to 12,000; have all the “material” for the Holland-and-England section, and now want to go exploring and Touretting with him in Mexico and S. America, and maybe in a “primitive” culture (perhaps he has a “brother,” a ticcing witchdoctor in New Guinea). So, we’ll be on the road, I guess (from Jan 26) for 4–5 weeks.
* * *
—
I have (I suspect, thanks to you)[*38] these City Arts things in San Francisco and Portland, tho’ I don’t know what to do, how to present self/work, and feel somewhat uncomfortable. These will be among the last such talks/performances that I do, because I feel they are “bad” for me, emotionally and morally, and a (tempting!) distraction from the hard and solitary (but for me, ?for us) the only “real” thing—which is writing (whatever “writing” is—e.g. how complex a psychological act, and transcendence, you have made in writing “Pilgrimage”).
All my love,
Oliver
To Lars Erik Böttiger[*39]
Physician, Writer
March 7, 1988
119 Horton St., City Island
Dear Dr. Böttiger,
Your previous letter did arrive, but I was away at the time, so not able to answer it. This has been, and is, a time of unusually intense travel, especially connected with my interest in Tourette’s syndrome, and my desire, among other things, to see it in many different cultures and situations, all round the world. Tourettological “house calls,” if you will, round the globe—or, perhaps, a sort of clinical anthropology. […]
Apropos of your question: I do not know what started me as an author—nor am I sure that I see myself as one. On the other hand, I cannot recollect a time when I did not “write,” when I did not have a need to cast or recast experience(s) into words. I seem to have had a pen in my hands since childhood (they are always inky, and have been so, now, for almost fifty years).
My “pre-clinical” writings, if I can so style them, especially took the form of travel narratives, landscapes, and “physiognomies”—portraits of people met on journeys (or, less specifically, on the “journey of life”). It seems to me that these narratives were the precursors of my clinical narratives; thus I think of a piece I wrote (when working/travelling as a trucker) which contained detailed (and, as it were, analytic) portraits or narratives of my two trucking companions—or, in effect, “case-histories” (perhaps cultural more than biological ones). These early writings are much in my mind now, for my Tourette-exploration is going hand-in-hand with travel, a sense of the patient (the “case”) contexted in space and time, and the case-histories (if I can manage it) will be embedded in a travel journal, perhaps in somewhat the fashion of an anthropological journal. This way I will try to fuse (without damage to either) the two sorts of writing I love: the sense of a (biological) “case,” and the sense of its human and cultural “context” (of course one has only to think of Sherlock Holmes’s London or Wittgenstein’s Wien to see how beautifully this can be done).
I hope I will be around to meet you.
With best regards,
Oliver Sacks
To Tim Murphey[*40]
Correspondent
March 30, 1988
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Mr. Murphey,
Many thanks for your rich letter, full of energy and ideas, and the papers you attach. In no special order: Yes, absolutely, the “other side” of body-image losses are all the incorporations (into body-image) of one’s skis or one’s scalpels—or, for that matter, the car or the plane one pilots. Nothing feels “natural,” “comes naturally” until it is incorporated. How right you are about the feelings when one takes one’s skis off!
In learning sports (or, for that matter, ballet-dancing, or pancake-tossing) one has, I think, to start with a “mimesis”—no abstract description or explication can be (to use our word again) incorporated as part of self.
I suppose something of the sort is operative in language acquisition—when people are said (for example) to “have an ear” for another tongue. My father had, has, a marvellous ear—and can (within minutes or hours) produce a sort of Swahili (or whatever) which sounds reasonable, and can communicate something, even tho’ it is totally defective in vocabulary and grammar. My mother, more intellectual, but with less of an ear, would laboriously acquire the syntax and words—but be unable to open her mouth, or understand anything, in another language at all. My father, I should add, has a particularly good melodic “sense” and memory.
I am intrigued at your suggestion about “tricking” [Chomsky’s “Language Acquisition Device”] into operation via music and song—you must tell me how the project goes. I do see (or rather hear) how many of my aphasic patients can “embed” (otherwise lost) language in recitatifs or songs. In a sense the “Man Who” was re-articulating all his actions by songs—“scoring” the world, his actions, as a musical script. And one sees again how Parkinsonians tho’ unable to walk, may be able to dance; and though unable to talk, may be able to sing. I describe this power of music with them in many contexts in my book Awakenings (indeed I quote one Parkinsonian patient, herself a music teacher, who said she felt she had been “unmusicked” by Parkinsonism, and had to be “remusicked” to recover her own (kinetic) melody).
I too hope I can write many (at least some) more books. They may not be the most “scientific,” but minute descriptions will always have value. Which is as well, because I am basically a describer.
With kind regards,
Oliver Sacks
To John Maguire
Reviewer
March 30, 1988
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Mr. Maguire,
[…] Many thanks for sending me your reviews of No Sense of Place[*41]—it looks quite fascinating, in all sorts of ways.
I do not have a television set,[*42] and have not thought too much about the nature of “authority.” But I found myself at an extraordinary event, just two weeks ago—the uprising of the deaf students at Gallaudet,[*43] their insistence on having a deaf President, and their saying in effect: “You hearing people stop legislating for us. We are not children. We are not incompetents. We will—thank you—decide for ourselves,” in effect terminating the long, paradoxical reign of paternalism here. They objected, amongst other things, to some physicians, notably otologists, on the Board—feeling that they were seen by them merely as defective ears, not adapting people. The question of the “old-fashioned” doctor who says “I know what’s best for you” may, indeed, be on the way out—I wrote about this, in a sense, in my book A Leg to Stand On (I was the patient here, and it is about “patienthood”). And yet a physician (or parent, or adult) needs authority. As someone who grew up in the pre-TV age, I see all sorts of social changes round me—I strongly suspect that the prevailing illiteracy is partly due to television—but had not really thought about other social changes. […]
