Letters, p.66
Letters, page 66
Glad you’re enjoying school now—and what a lovely picture of your sister and yourself. I should have replied earlier, but I delayed because I wanted to send you a copy of my book, and the copies have only just come in. So here, with my love, is Uncle Tungsten, which is (partly) a portrait of my life and family etc. when I was about your age (and a little older).
Let’s see each other again soon!
Oliver
To T. J. Hymson[*49]
Correspondent
November 23, 2001
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Mr. Hymson,
Thank you for your intriguing letter.
I am not surprised that you experience the sort of visual patterns and elaborate scenes that you describe because I too am subject to somewhat similar ones. I refer to this (on p. 39 of the paperback of my Island book) when I write of “a strange visual excitement such as I am sometimes prone to, especially at the start of a migraine—endlessly moving vistas of breadfruit trees and bananas on the darkened ceiling,” and then, later, with the superadded effect of “sakau” (kava) “floating over coral-heads. Lips of giant clams, perseverating, filling whole visual field. Suddenly a blue blaze. Luminous blobs fall from it. I hear the falling blobs distinctly” etc (ibid pp 89–90). Not mentioned here is how, walking back with an ophthalmologist friend in the inky darkness, I spoke […] of the incessant, intricate patterns weaving before me—and how he, to my surprise, said that he did NOT see anything when he closed his eyes, or was in pitch darkness. So that something I had taken as a sort of universal was, apparently, quite unusual.
Although I mention migraine, and drugs, in this context, and they can certainly heighten the imagery, I think I have it, to some degree, all the time—tho’ perhaps not as vividly, or elaborately, as you do. There seems to be a certain sequence in such visions, going from simple geometric patterns to complex “scenes”—and such sequences are seen in a variety of conditions (migraine, drugs, sensory deprivation—or just “naturally”). […] Some people are far more prone to such “visions”—there must be a physiological basis for this.
Further: Such “visions” seem to be produced less (as well as being less visible) when the eyes are open, and the brain receives a “normal” visual input. It is almost as if, in the (relative) absence of such input, the brain starts generating its own activity, unrestrainedly, and a very special form of this may now be happening with your superadded retinitis pigmentosa (I am sorry to hear about this). Such imagery with impaired vision was described by Charles Bonnet, and is sometimes termed Charles Bonnet syndrome—and here one is tempted to draw analogies with phantom limbs, and with the tinnitus (and sometimes musical hallucinations) which may occur with diminished hearing, especially “nerve deafness.”
All this emphasizes that the brain is not a passive thing, waiting to be stimulated by the senses, but incessantly active, incessantly generative (even “creative”) in its own right—the simpler patterns arising from spontaneous activity in the complex cyto-architecture of the visual cortex (and reflecting this), but the more complex images determined by the experiences, sensibilities, imagination etc. of the individual. The absolute marvel of the brain is the lesson of all of this—but whether this helps one to accept, or adapt, or “appreciate,” these unasked-for visions is quite another matter!
With best wishes,
Oliver Sacks
To Kay Redfield Jamison
December 22, 2001
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Kay,
I am reading your latest book[*50] with—I don’t know what words to use—a sort of appalled fascination (for I have lost many friends and others to suicide, and the lure and compulsion is one I have known on and off for most of my own life), and admiration at your bringing together so much, from personal accounts to medical statistics to historical descriptions etc. with such power and grace. Admiration too at your bravery, from your autobiographic Preface to your steadily outfacing the Monster for what must have been years of research and preparation. And all this at a time of especial personal distress—I hope this is a reasonable time (so far as any time can be in the circumstances) for your husband.[*51]
I enclose a copy of Uncle Tungsten, though I feel it may have a sort of levity which may not accord well with the gravity of your book—but you will find (what someone called) “a noisy subtext” under the lightness of the text. I don’t know whether I should have written of my brother’s psychosis—the more so as he is alive, but tragically depressed and delusional (he has had so little of a life, and was so blessedly gifted to start with); I often wondered if I was going to follow him into schizophrenia, or a bipolar illness, but I seem to have settled for “mere” neurosis. But I am very glad I was able to complete Uncle T, and I have some sense of connection, and reconciliation, now which I never had before. At a lighter level it has been great fun to write, and to re-live the early, almost Edenic delight in science—and I hope this communicates itself, and perhaps has resonances for you as well.
My warmest good wishes to you both,
Love,
Oliver
PS I had only read PART I of your book when I wrote the above; as I have continued to read I have been steadily more impressed—and shaken. The “case-histories”—of Meriwether Lewis, the young airman John Wilson et al—appall me. Chapters 8 and 9 equally—they should be compulsory reading everywhere. I think of friends—among them a notable number of physicians—who have made suicide attempts, and several who have achieved their aim. I wonder, specifically, about some of the patients I have been seeing at the NYU Clinic where I now work. And, very specifically, about people with severe Tourette’s, who besides the impulsiveness which so often goes with TS, are apt to have all their emotions amplified. To the list on pp 272–3 I would add those with severe Tourette’s, some of whom achieve particularly bizarre and terrible self-destructions—I think of one (adolescent boy) who climbed into a drainpipe from which he could not extricate himself—tho’ this was not perhaps “suicide” in the usual sense. His death sent a wave of horror through the Tourette community; and Touretters can be dangerously suggestible.
I think that you show here a combination of realism and understanding—“toughness” and “tenderness,” in James’ sense—I have never, or only very rarely, seen before. And your writing soars at such times, becomes as fiercely and compassionately eloquent as in your autobiography. Perhaps only someone who, like yourself, has actually been through it, and is a physician and a scientist (and a close reader of poetry and personal accounts and biographies etc) could write like this.
I feel almost afraid to read more—but cannot stop!
The (1994) Szasz case seems to me especially shocking—I did not know about it.
I am very glad (I am not organizing thoughts here, just darting about, as you see) that you have good words to say for ECT[*52]—I had one patient (she was also parkinsonian) whom drugs had not touched, who said to me, “Forget your ‘principles,’ your ‘distaste’ for ECT, for God’s sake, and treat me. Shock saved my life twenty years ago, and I need it now.” (She got it, and it did save her life.) So Himmelhoch’s words, which you quote on p. 251,[*53] seem to me exactly right.
I am especially glad to see your passionate defence of psychotherapy, therapeutic contact, as often crucial in addition to medication—and your quotation of Morag Coates’s words.[*54]
There is a very personal feeling here—I feel my own psychiatrist (to whom I have been going since 1966) has repeatedly saved my life. I have rarely been explicitly suicidal, but rather parasuicidal (a term which does not seem to be used much now, and which I do not find in your Index) with drug-overdoses, reckless and self-destructive behaviours of all sorts—none of my friends expected me to make it to 40, much less 50. I am more grateful than I can ever express at having made it, thus far—one has always to say “thus far”—to 68, somewhat scarred and battered (it is true, but, for the most part, alive and even creative). Those who do not know me well see me, imagine me, as successful, self-assured, stable, the demons exorcised—but I know better. They may rail at my “dependence” on a psychiatrist—but I know the thoughts, the behaviours, the very real dangers, which still threaten or lure me in his absence(s).
I didn’t intend to say this—but you, above all, will understand.
Now I have to complete your book!
Oliver
To Karl D. Stephan
Electronic Engineer
January 7, 2002
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Dr. Stephan,
Thank you very much for writing to me—one of the pleasures of writing Uncle T has been the great range of personal letters and “resonances” which have been sent to me, some from Londoners, some from evacuees etc.—but many from people like yourself (like us) who had “a love affair” with science or technology at a young age—the age which Faraday would address in his Christmas Lectures (designed for “a Juvenile Auditory,” which meant boys and girls of twelve). I was, as you say, extremely lucky, privileged, to have a large, curious, encouraging family—and to have the freedom (along with certain wise constraints!) to explore and follow my bent at a young age. This may, paradoxically, include the freedom of not being taught (in a formal, formulaic way, at school)—this is an issue which Freeman Dyson addresses in a wonderful, partly autobiographic essay “To Teach or Not to Teach.”
I end Uncle T. on a somewhat puzzled note—I was not sure, nor am I clear now, as to what “happened” at fourteen or fifteen, to break the almost trance-like love-affair with chemistry. I would like to say that it was followed by, or mutated into, an equally passionate “affair” with cells, genes, biological systems, organisms, but I don’t know whether this was the case. I think it was only years later (after the endless suppression of enthusiasm, playfulness etc in school, medical school, residency) that I recovered that youthful enthusiasm—tho’ now in the so different realm of human behaviour and its vicissitudes. I think I was probably “bright,” even very bright, but “brightness” is not enough to carry one beyond a “wunderkind” stage unless there is some deep, ongoing development and involvement; and it was this, I think, which miscarried when I was 14–15, and which I was only able to recapture, years later, in a clinical context, as a physician.
Despite a phantasy (or two), I do not think I would have made an adequate chemist. I do not think I had enough feeling for structural chemistry (and I am defective in powers of three-dimensional visualization). I suspect I could not have made a good research chemist (and later attempts to become a research physiologist did not fare well). It may be that, as a physician, receiving letters, questions, requests, from all directions, and free to follow this and that as I wish, that I have found my own desultory, agile, unsystematic identity and “role”—as a “fox” interested in many things, and not a “hedgehog” capable of pursuing one big thing.
I sometimes say something of the sort when I am asked to speak at Commencements—that one may misjudge one’s own proclivities and talents, and find all sorts of ambitions and aspirations disappointed; but that, on the other hand, one may discover all sorts of powers which one had no idea of. This has certainly been the case with me. Having said this, I do have a wistfulness (occasionally envy) of those who do seem to know at an early age what they want to do, and what they are capable of doing, and who then (often despite great obstructions) forge ahead and do it—it is this which seems to me heroic. And maybe this is genius.
This is not a very coherent answer to your searching questions!
With best wishes,
Oliver Sacks
To Kalman Cohen[*55]
Mathematician, College Friend
January 8, 2002
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Kal,
Delighted to hear from you, and to learn something of your life in the 40-odd years since we met. It sounds like a very good life, a satisfying one, in work and love—though I cannot imagine anyone as intellectually driven as yourself being “retired” (and suspect you will use “retirement” to become more productive than ever). Last night, for no particular reason, I picked a biography of C. S. Peirce[*56] from my bookshelves, and started reading about his passion for logic—I suspect that a memory of the young you, the passionate mathematical logician, was behind my choice.
By another coincidence—or the one which put the young you in my mind—I have an archivist here who has been going over the myriad boxes of papers, letters, diaries and what-not which I have accumulated over the last half-century; he has just got to “C”, and yesterday came up with three letters of yours—I take the liberty of enclosing xeroxes of these. (No idea whether you kept copies of your letters—I, at least then, did not keep copies of mine, and wonder how I replied to yours.) You will be specially taken, I think, with your letter of 3/22/56 when you speak of your meeting, and becoming engaged to, your future wife! I was intrigued to re-read, in your 1955 letter, that you were working on a chess learning machine (did you envisage, then, that one day such a machine would beat a grand-master?)—in that same letter you ask “Why don’t you try to come to the United States, Ollie?”—as, five years later, via Canada, I did. I am touched by your memories of Seders at 37,[*57] and (in retrospect) by your “tremendous faith” in my intelligence and ability—a faith I was very far from sharing myself. I see, looking back through those old letters, how tormented I was by my “research”—it did, indeed, end badly, or inconclusively—and perhaps this did something to show me that if I had strengths, they were not in pure scientific research, or in anything academic—although it was only years afterwards, seeing my own patients, and finding myself outside Academia that I started to find my own “voice,” and to write the peculiar narratives/essays which I have been doing these last 35 years. I think I had to leave what I saw as the stifling, or rigidly-stratified atmosphere of academic Medicine in England to do this. And the States, for me (as Australia for my older brother) seemed to promise “space,” freedom, interstices in which I could live and work, in a way which England did not.
But I think the real impulse to come to America had much earlier origins than this—and dates back to a time soon after WW II—as I suggest in a couple of pages (pp. 278–280) of Uncle Tungsten, which I enclose. Or still earlier.
Am I an American now? Don’t know—though I felt like a New Yorker, with my fellow–New Yorkers, after 9/11. Am I English—I still have a UK passport. I must be some sort of amalgam, as all of us are. But I was oddly pleased, a couple of years ago, when Queen’s[*58] made me an Honorary Fellow, and I have enjoyed visits, and staying there since—which is how I got your address, and wondered if I might see you there again.
I do come to the Chapel Hill area every so often, and it would indeed be a special experience to see you again—and, of course, to meet Joan too—and other family of yours!
Affectionately,
Oliver
To Daniel Pinchbeck
Writer
October 20, 2002
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Mr. Pinchbeck,
Many thanks for your letter and book[*59]—I am glad our friend Ted Mooney suggested you send it to me.
I read it with a mixture of pleasure and disquiet—pleasure at your adventurousness and honesty, and at the excellence and charm of your writing—the man on p. 201, for example, with “an appealingly attenuated goat face”—but disquiet, increasingly, as the book went on, at your abandoning a neutral position, and becoming not just an acute and empathetic observer (or observer/participator), but—a believer. The line seems to me a very important one: there is no doubt, for example, of the depth of understanding and imaginative sympathy with which Gershom Scholem explores Kabbalism, but there is never the tone of convert or evangelist (any more than there is the tone of a sceptic). Thus I was fascinated by your accounts of iboga in Gabon, your sensitivity to culturally-mediated drug experiences, and your criticism of self-observations (from Weir Mitchell to Aldous Huxley, etc) which, however acute in themselves, are not in (or sensitive to the role of) a traditional and sacred context. But disconcerted at the way you yourself “go overboard,” and are more and more disposed to belief in a supersensible, supernatural world (and to a correlative disrespect, if I can so express myself, for the natural world). Thus when you speak (p. 265) of the visual organization of the DPT[*60] experience as “far beyond anything that the synaptical wiring of my brain could create,” I want to say, “What do you know about the potentials of your own synaptic wiring? Who are you to set limits to it?” I want to contrast this cavalier approach to the physical with Spinoza’s attitude. “No one,” he writes in the Ethics “has hitherto laid down the limits of the body…no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature…the body can, by the sole laws of its nature, do many things which the mind wonders at.” And this could include all your DMT/DPT experiences, and all the other experiences (yours and others) which you relate in your book. That they can be conjured up by the brain/mind is no disrespect to them, and (in a sense) irrelevant to their interpretation or “meaning.”
