Letters, p.56
Letters, page 56
I find myself both agreeing (on some points) and disagreeing (on others) with Gardner,[*15] Damasio, etc. I have myself seen all sorts of skills (including artistic ones) preserved, or largely preserved, even in the advanced stages of dementing diseases (such as Alzheimer’s)—indeed I think this preservation, if not of artistic skill, at least of aesthetic and artistic feeling, fundamental—so much so that at hospitals where I work we have art therapists of various sorts (music therapists, drama therapists, visual art therapists, etc.) to “bring out” the still-preserved artistic potentials of our Alzheimer patients, and to show a path, or way of access, into these minds which may otherwise be so impenetrable to the usual verbal and conceptual channels. A colleague of mine specializes in this and has some remarkable paintings done by people with Alzheimer’s so advanced that they have become incapable of verbal expression, and (manifestly) damaged in (many) cognitive and conceptual capacities. Such paintings are not mere mechanical facsimiles of previous work—but can show real feeling and freshness of thought. And this in patients who are not even artists, or who were, at most, “amateurs” before becoming ill.
With a master, and a genius, like de Kooning, I think it may be very difficult to dogmatize—for if “ordinary” people can show so much painting skill, and feeling, and spontaneity, despite advanced cerebral disease (I am assuming, at the moment, that this is what de Kooning has), tho’ it is far from clear to me from such accounts as you give (one remembers how Pound, for example—or Swift, for the matter—retreated into a terminal silence, but a willed silence, not an incapacity for language)—if ordinary people can do unexpectedly fine painting in face of advanced disease, what may the potential of a de Kooning not be? (Similar thoughts arise, I think, with some of the late sculptures of Henry Moore, when he was into his eighties, and “not quite all there” in certain ways.)
What the neurological basis of such preservations may be I will not hazard—but obviously there must be one, if such preservations occur. I doubt if one can think in the simplistic terms of left and right brain or frontal vs. occipital etc. But even in face of diffuse brain damage, there can be sudden, remarkable, if transient “restitutions” of function—I describe this in Awakenings (xerox enclosed), and always find it astonishing. Importantly, the electroencephalogram (EEG), which may be very slow or disorganized in such patients, may become virtually normal in these (usually) brief periods of restitution.
What it comes to, finally, is that, whilst avoiding anything “mystical” (all thought, all consciousness, all art, so far as I am concerned, must have some biological basis), one must equally avoid all dogmatism—and perhaps hold off premature interpretations or speculations until one has deep and reliable observations. At the moment we cannot say, we do not know, what is going on in de Kooning’s mind, or his latest productions—and (to quote a phrase of William James in another context) “they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”
With all best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Oliver Sacks
PS I don’t know if you have correspondence columns. But if you do, you should (after checking with me) feel free to publish this letter in whole or part.
To Jane Gelfman
Literary Agent, John Farquharson, Ltd.
November 8, 1989
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Jane,
[…] The film of Awakenings is moving ahead—they are shooting every day (sometimes for 16 hours a day!), and do so till the end of January. It is a vast enterprise, organized like an army or battleship—at least I keep being reminded of this: Captain Penny at the wheel, the great cameras swivelling like gun-turrets, the AD’s like First and Second Mates ordering people around, with a strange lingo heard nowhere else (“Lock it up guys! Respect for the actors!!”), and the order “Roll!!!” resounding from deck to deck. It is very exciting seeing this strange half-surreal half-authentic thing made real—in particular I am fascinated by the actors’ ways of conceiving and imagining, the acting investigation, so akin to, yet so different from, a scientific investigation.
I hope you can come on the set one day—filming is mostly in an old hospital in Brooklyn. […]
Otherwise, I have been travelling and talking, to and fro, in relation to Seeing Voices.
I cannot judge if it is a “success” in commercial terms—it is selling very well, but not wildly, so I gather—but then I never conceived it, nor “success,” in these terms. I believe I have written a good book, and a powerful one, and that it may cast an unexpected light and make people think. Certainly the Deaf themselves feel I have done something which a hearing person rarely does—enter their world, listen, begin to understand, try to represent. It has certainly demanded an odd shift of perspective.
I have been very exhausted these days—with the demands of book promo, and the film (where they seem to want me on the set all the while, and I have to try and disengage)—and eager to get back to my own real work, whether it be my so-long-incubated (and perhaps “doomed”) Tourette book, or a series of studies (with artist-patients or artist-subjects of various sorts) on “the neurology of the imagination.” […]
Anyhow—thanks for everything—and hope to see you on the set!
Best,
Oliver
To Jonathan Mueller[*16]
Neurologist
December 19, 1989
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Jonathan,
[…] Altho’ I am very honored and touched by your sentiments, and suggestion about an “Oliver Sacks Dept.” (or whatever), I think this is not what I want myself. One can’t make a comparison with the “Augustus S. Rose Dept”[*17]—he founded it, he was in charge of it for 20 years, and then he retired, while still taking much interest in it—it is properly called the “ASR” Dept. Whereas I have had nothing to do with the UCSF Dept, nor am I retired. I don’t think it appropriate to have a dept. named after myself. (Auden was embarrassed when they named his little street in Hinterholtz “Audenstrasse,” but then he lived there, was a part of the village.) […]
I hope I can avoid some of the evil weather here. It is very subzero, and snowing again, and my wretched unploughed street is a lethal slope of ice. I remember all too well practically being under house arrest for a whole February, once, when this happened before.
I had an amusing little role in the movie Tuesday night—was Santa Claus, bellowing “HO HO HO MERRY CHRISTMAS…HELP THE NEEDY…THANK’EE sir, thank’ee…GAWD BLESS YOU SIR” etc. I could not put on a Jolly Green Giant accent, and (to Penny’s annoyance) sounded more like the Monty Python show. Don’t know if this little Hitchcockian cameo will survive into the final film![*18] They take a week off Xmas–New Year, and then they complete the shoot in January. Meanwhile, with Kate’s help, I am trying quietly to get a 1990 Awakenings into shape, but find myself rather useless and exhausted all the while. I seem to have a very negative image of myself, Life, work—but am glad the Channel 13 portrait[*19] presented such a positive (and engaging) one. It almost made me like myself for a few days, and feel my absurd life might have a grain of use or sense. But now that glow has gone away.
Anyhow—to you, a Merry Xmas (ho ho ho!) and a really new and deeply fulfilling New Year—
Love,
Oliver
To Robin Williams
Actor
March 10, 1990
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Robin,
I was hoping very much I might see you in San Francisco, or perhaps visit your ranch—but the damn back which prevented my going to the wrap party has continued to plague me, and prevented my going to CA.
I find quite a sense of loss now the shooting is over—which surprises me, in a way, because I often cursed it when it was going on! But it was also very fascinating in a way, and a real delight—and honor—to work with people like you and Bob (etc.). And there was a real camaraderie on the set—it became a sort of a family, a sort of home to go to—which I quite miss now it is all over, and now I am back to my usual solitude (and writing).
I was very moved by getting your copy of the script (with all its evocative photos), and the beautiful leather-bound copy of Steve’s[*20] script, with your lovely inscription—thank you so much for both! I will certainly treasure them in my (chaotic) archives. […]
Various Touretters are going to be on the Geraldo [Rivera] Show of March 23 (I may have the date slightly wrong)—I declined to be on it myself. I hope it is decent and dignified—I have not been wholly reassured by Shows I have seen before. I think there is a great need for a real, full, free, hour-long Show or Treatment or Presentation of Tourette’s, uncontaminated by interruption, commercial pressures, or “bleeping”—such as you approached Cable TV about. I very much hope that it is possible for you to proceed with this. […]
I do find—this has been the case for many, many years—that my heart goes out, for some reason, to all these Touretters, who suffer so much, and get so misunderstood and isolated, but who are nearly all intelligent and brave and open and funny—I have long wanted to write a book about them (and had planned to do so as far back as 1975!), about—and also for them. (My book about, and for the Deaf, comes from the same impulse—but the feeling towards Touretters is stronger). And you, I suspect, may share a little of this feeling now, especially after meeting Shane,[*21] with whom you instantly found affinity and made contact, and who is, in the deepest sense, a sort of brother.
So I hope some of these things will be possible. […]
I am adding (part new material, part old) about 50,000 words to Awakenings—all in the form of Forewords, etc, Prefaces, and now (seven!) Appendices—the text (I hasten to add) remains the same. […] Appendix 6—which I have yet to write […] will be about the many (and all wonderful) dramatic representations of AW there have been: I will say the most of the film, for here (unlike the others) I could see in detail, and was sometimes myself even part of, the process—and it is the Process, the nature of the Dramatist’s and Actor’s Imagination and Presentation of Reality (too many Capitals!) that I want to give a glimpse of. […] Certainly all of these, but above all the film and the filming, have been for me quite extraordinary experiences.
And real ones too: as real in their way as working with the original patients, and as real as the thought and dialogue, the “scientific” model-making and world-making which followed.
But you—as actors, as dramatists—are also making worlds; and though these are “illusions,” they are also full of truth.
I have never known any actors before; nor have I been much of a theater- or film-goer; but I think these experiences have changed me (or will). […]
My warmest best wishes to you and Marsha—and hopes to see you in New York, or California, before long.
Love,
Oliver
To Jennifer F.
Hearing Mother of a Deaf Child
March 30, 1990
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Mrs. F.,
Many thanks for your letter.
My phrase may have been a bit too sharp—and I certainly appreciate the (above-all) complex and delicate (even paradoxical) situation of parents who find that they have a deaf child.
My sole concern, like yours, is that there should be really good first language—given this, everything else can follow. Bilingualism, trilingualism, good intellectual development. The overwhelming danger is NOT achieving a good first language—or not achieving it before the age of (say) five. And this is all too common, tragically so, as you know, among the deaf, and a reason why the level of literacy may be so low among them.
I also think it very important—as you do—that the deaf child be at-home in the “dominant” culture of his own country, English, or whatever; so that he can belong to it no less than to his own (perhaps-more-limited) culture.
Where we differ has to do with the means of achieving this. It is not necessary to have spoken or signed English in order to acquire a good knowledge of English. One can become an excellent reader and writer of English without the use of spoken or signed English. One can acquire English equally well if one’s first language is Sign (say BSL).[*22] And Sign is much easier, even neurologically easier, for the deaf child to acquire—even though it may be a bit more difficult for his parents to acquire. A deaf child fluent in BSL can easily learn to read and write English as well. He becomes—bilingual: BSL and English can both be first languages (even though it is reading and writing, rather than speaking or signing, which gives him access to it). All fluent signers, in any case, will become fluent in signed English, or whatever, besides their own BSL (or whatever).
You do not make clear in your letter whether or not your child has much to do with other deaf people—and you write in terms of “owning” and “belonging” as if you felt he was in danger of being kidnapped by the Deaf Community. Your child does not “belong” to you (nor to anyone else)—but he will have the richest relation to you to the extent that he is able to grow up as a free and independent being, with a sense of his own language and community and culture, as well as yours. He can be, if you let him, a member and inheritor of BOTH worlds. Surely this, rather than any exclusive belonging, is the ideal solution.
But the problems are very profound, because they relate to questions of identity, and the way in which, perhaps, a (prelingually) deaf child needs to have two identities, not one. You love your child, he is your child, he is “yours”; and yet you are different, and he cannot be yours exclusively—he has also a need to develop in his own way. But this does not mean he gets lost to you, or taken away by another community.
With kind regards,
Oliver Sacks
* * *
—
Isabelle Rapin was a pediatric neurologist and one of OS’s closest friends. OS would often join Rapin and her family on weekends at their rambling house on the banks of the Hudson in Athens, New York. At times he would stay in their barn for days on end, writing, with periodic breaks to swim in the river or take the children for rides on his motorcycle. Rapin was also one of his earliest guides to the worlds of autistic people. She introduced him to Jerry C., a young man whom OS wrote about as “José,” the “Autist Artist” in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
To Isabelle Rapin
June 14, 1990
Grand Hotel Firenze, Florence, Italy[*23]
Dear Isabelle,
How nice seeing you again on Friday—we must have more evenings together: I wonder if we can thrash out autism the way we thrashed out deafness? (I think I must have more clinical experience, however; I was happy to renew contact with Jerry C. today, who is now doing VERY well in a residency in the Bronx. I will try to see him regularly, and perhaps sometime you might like to see him again too).
[…] I think, with Autism, I will (besides a piece on Stephen[*24]) try to make some wise synthesis, or simply an appreciation, of the five different books on the subject I was sent last year, drawing attention to their different virtues, and being (as Schein[*25] would say) sparing of criticism. I would certainly think Uta Frith[*26] may have grasped or unified the central cognitive deficits—but I am not persuaded the problems are merely cognitive (but it is even more certain that they are not merely, or at least primarily, emotional/dynamic/motivational). Uta, you remember, starts with an “exemplary” or prototypic description of autism—a “composite.” You, on the other hand, always speak of the range of disorders and behaviours one may see. She has a need (at times excessive) to discern a central or “core” disorder—and maybe this sometimes causes her to be selective, to force things into a unity, or omit things which seem outside it.
Can one have a syndrome which is ALSO a range?[*27] I think so—I think this is exactly what one has with Tourette’s, where no two cases are the same. (And where, perhaps, one would not speak of the same condition were there not innumerable intermediates and overlaps.)
As I write I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on how one defines a “game,” whether or not there is an essence of game (gaming). And his deciding there is no such essence, “no one thing common to all games, but rather a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing, sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail,” “family resemblances”—“games” form a family.
Perhaps it is like this with Tourette’s—and autism.
I am rambling—and it is late. And I have to be in good shape and good voice tomorrow to make a recording of Seeing Voices, a shortened (but not greatly shortened) version of the book for audio-tape.
See you soon.
Love,
Oliver
* * *
—
Stephen Wiltshire, another autistic artist, was passionate about drawing buildings, the more complicated the better. By the age of seven or so, he had been recognized as a child prodigy, able to draw a building from memory after seeing it for just a few seconds. When OS met him in 1988, Stephen was thirteen. He had just published his second book of drawings and had come to New York to draw famous buildings there.
