Letters, p.73
Letters, page 73
Bravery, stoicism, humor, calmness (or “raging against the dying of the light”)—but especially noble reactions in the face of death and mortality—seems to me as high a subject for a book as any, for there can be few situations which test us more. Fermi died nobly, I have read, his unique self to the last, whereas von Neumann, at much the same time, died abjectly, superstitiously—though I think no-one can be taken to task for the way they die.
I enclose (I hope it can be enlarged for your eyes) the little masterpiece which Hume[*4] wrote, in a single day, when he realized (p. 278) that his illness was “mortal and incurable.” His calm in face of death infuriated Boswell and Johnson, who quivered with fears of dying (and visions of hell-fire). They expected him to cave in when he was in extremis, but he retained his calm, noble spirit to the last (this was in my mind when I last saw Crick, and he too died a sort of philosopher’s death, thinking, never complaining, to the very last hours of his life). […]
I now find myself with more than a sympathetic understanding of impaired vision, because in the last days of last year I had a sudden though partial loss of vision in my right eye—I thought it was a hemorrhage, or a retinal detachment, but it turned out to be an ocular melanoma, unfortunately very close to the fovea. It has been treated now with intense radiation—the eyeball was partly detached, and a plaque of radio-iodine attached to the sclera—it is reattached, and now the tumor will (hopefully) be killed, tho’ perhaps at the cost of some post-radiation necrosis of the retinal cells too. Unfortunately my left eye was never nearly as good an eye as my right, but perhaps it can be “tuned up” a little to compensate for it. I certainly had a sudden sense of mortality when the word “melanoma” was pronounced, but now I am assured that ocular melanomas carry a much better prognosis—but, as with you, magnified print, or a magnifying glass, may now have to become a part of life. But meanwhile I am back to writing on my music book, though it continually expands beneath me, and I do not know when it will see the light of day (spring of 2007, perhaps).
I greatly enjoy and value our correspondence, and look forward to hearing from you again.
With warmest good wishes for the New Year,
Oliver
To Nick Younes
May 20, 2006
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Nick,
Very good to get your fine long letter, your essay on “Kant & Poetry” (Kant and—so much else, really) and on Phedre. I don’t know that I can respond adequately (whatever this means) to any of them, but I’ll let thoughts come, for what they’re worth. They will mostly be associative and tangential. […]
Yr letter, and your thoughts on Kant, your gropings towards both “truth” and freedom, residing in Science/Reason/Nature, but free to take off into the worlds of poetry, art, aesthetics, ethics (I do not see the word “religion”), the seriousness of your probings and gropings give me a sense of my own levity, or irresponsibility, or laziness, or perhaps (as you suggest) “maturity.” But they also bring back the Sturm & Drang, the intense philosophical/epistemological turmoil, which seized me in my twenty-second year. I had taken my degree at Oxford, seemed committed to a scientific/medical life, but felt that none of the questions that really mattered had been touched—and, unlike you, I was rather a loner, did not, as you apparently, have a group of passionately-seriously-minded fellow-students to talk with. Jonathan Miller, at Cambridge, did have such a group (the Apostles); and so did Maynard Keynes—do you know (if not, I will send it to you) his essay called “My Early Beliefs”? Anyhow, I would go for long runs on the towpath by the Cherwell every night, jump in, swim, run again, for hours and hours. And then I would write furiously, questingly, self-questioningly, in my Journal, sometimes till dawn. Meaning, meaning (I never think about “meaning” now). I did not have the philosophical sophistication and careful reading of texts that you have, but I certainly turned to philosophy—at least to certain philosophers—if not for “answers,” at least for help formulating questions. Coleridge saw all philosophy (“philosophizing,” as Wittgenstein would prefer to say) as “footnotes to Plato and Aristotle,” all men as “Platonists or Aristotelians”—though part of the unrest and “antinomy” with you, me too, was being both. But my tastes were much more for Spinoza and Hume. Hume relates how when philosophical inquietudes and melancholies got too much for him, he would go out, dine with his friends, play backgammon, make merry—feel human again. I, not so socially inclined, would retreat (or at least moor myself in) the body, in physical activity, in a (perhaps desperate) running and swimming—running to? Running from? Now I am far too arthritic to run (but I can still swim, and do, sometimes, try to “swim away” intractable thoughts). I was not really up to Kant then (nor have I ever been, really)—partly because of the severity of his style. Not that he isn’t good for great images and metaphors occasionally (“the crooked timber of humanity,” etc)—and, as is so central, clearly, for you—he does define the reality, the possibility, of freedom, and thus of poetry, etc. etc. […]
I have also, just this week—a lot of reading, come to think of it, my voracity not diminished by having to use a magnifying glass!—read a very hard-hitting (not to say militant) book by Sam Harris called The End of Faith. (Curiously, even before getting your essay) I had been calling it a Kantian “critique” of Faith; and a much more civil book by E. O. Wilson called The Creation, which takes the form of an extended letter to a Pastor. “Dear Pastor,” he says (I am paraphrasing), “We grew up in the same little Southern town. We were altar-boys in the same evangelical church. But then—then I changed. But although we have fundamentally different world-views—yours religious, Biblical, mine secular, Darwinian—perhaps we can agree on some values, and some courses of action; that the diversity and richness of life is not only sublime but intensely important, intensely worth cherishing and conserving, otherwise it, and we, and living creation here will go to hell.” So he is reaching across.
I fear (as I warned you) that I have probably just “taken off” in all sorts of self-indulgent directions. I should have said, at the start, that I am very impressed by your philosophizing. […] Your current reaching out now, I think, is much more than “a stage,” and may indeed represent, for you, a radical transformation in perspectives and action. […]
Enough. It occurs to me, though you do not mention it, that your birthday is in May—and last year (if I have not lost count) was scandium.[*5] So here, to celebrate 22, a sturdy screw of titanium from your old friend.
Oliver
PS love to all the family too.
PS Hope to see you in the summer. I am going to Peru (with Kate and family) in the second half of June, but otherwise have no special plans for the summer. My eye seems to have settled down, though its acuity and color-perception are somewhat compromised (I see fields of white dandelions with it, species I have never seen before), and I may need surgery for my bloody back.
PPS Forgive all the typos, I can’t see what I’m doing.
To Emilio Presedo
Physician
July 1, 2006
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Emilio,
I have just got back from Peru, where I spent the last two weeks, extraordinary weeks in which I realized some of the dreams of sixty or more years ago: seeing The Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu; the mysterious Nazca lines—giant geometrical figures, animals, zoomorphs, sometimes kilometers in length, on the tops of mountains, and only discernible from the air—but no-one was flying when they were made nearly three thousand years ago; and Lake Titicaca, at 4000 meters the highest (navigable) lake in the world, where I had a delicious but decidedly cold swim (9° C). I have brought back various things with me—including, alas! amoebiasis—which will, hopefully, resolve with treatment in a few days. But as yet I feel quite depleted and weak, low potassium, etc. […]
I will also add that while in Peru, I chewed coca leaves, and drank a fair amount of (delicious!) coca tea (mate de Coca). I did not note much in the way of systemic effects, but I had a striking enhancement of involuntary visual imagery whenever I closed my eyes, or in the dark. Nothing resembling teichopsia,[*6] but all sorts of kaleidoscopically-changing geometrical patterns—lattices, carpet patterns, moire patterns etc, which would sometimes seem to enlarge and “zoom” closer (macroptically), sometimes the opposite, and also to rotate, as if observed from different angles. Also—and this I almost never get with a migraine, which for me, at least, has primarily rather low-level geometrical patterns (“Geometrical Specters”) of the sort one gets with stimulation of primary visual cortex—also countless “scenes,” faces, images, landscapes—sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque—rapidly-changing (at perhaps five times a second), and so difficult to remember (and far too quick to make notes on). […] It seemed quite different from the imagery of hypnagogic—or [hypno]pompic states, which (for me, at least) always have a strongly dramatic and thematic quality, more akin to dreams. Also somewhat different from (though in other ways more similar to) the rapid play of images, patterns, colors, etc. one can experience with mescaline or LSD. With these I have much more impression of “the psyche” being involved—whereas with the coca I had more the feeling of a sort of unselective excitation or stimulation of visual cortex, and at levels of association cortex, color coding, etc, as well as primary. I am very struck by the speed of the perceptual changes—I do not know if I sent you my article called “Speed,” and so I enclose this as well. One feels there should be clear-cut neural correlates for this sort of visual “delirium,” but our current technologies (fMRI, PET, MEG, EEG) are not adequate to record neural phenomena of this order—hopefully they will be, in a few years. […]
Enough for this letter—I must go and rest my eyes now, and also my poor amoeba-ridden body.
With best wishes,
Oliver
To David Lee
Botanist
July 29, 2006
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear David,
Thank you very much for your letter (of 7/20) and “Chlorophilia.”[*7]
I cannot give you any systematic reactions (this may be as well), partly because my mind is very much on another, and not even visual, subject: viz, music. But here are a few wandering thoughts.
PERSONALLY, as you might judge from my fondness for ferns, mosses, cycads etc. I too am attracted to green, feel it as older, more elemental (in plants) than other colors. I have just been in Peru, partly drawn by the great Inca and pre-Inca ruins etc, but also by rain- and cloud-forest, tropical vegetation. Visually I find it the most satisfying in the world (I have photos of cool, green ferny glades all over my apartment), tho’ I am, unfortunately, very intolerant of tropical temperatures. And I have just been up-State, especially attracted to one road near Cooperstown which is one long arbour, a corridor of green. Alienness, as you say, is sometimes associated, in science-fiction, with other colors, e.g. the red vegetation of Mars in War of the Worlds. (I think this was in my mind when I lashed out in Oaxaca Journal against the Echeverias planted in front of the Cathedral, and spoke of an “uncanny, red-earthed Martian landscape.”)[*8]
Ed Wilson’s “biophilia,” as I understand it/him, is not just a love for, a being primordially drawn towards, living creatures, but also to living landscapes, landscapes of a sort our ancestors must have known (tho’ as you bring out, whether 5 or 50 million years ago is an open question). Is this “hard-wired,” you wonder—or a cultural acquisition? (With “Nurture through Nature,” of course, one has to think of genes being switched on in certain circumstances—perhaps we get switched on, genetically, with our first sight of green.)
In general, in the plant world, one associates green with health, though when I was on Lake Titicaca I saw large areas, the most polluted, covered by an almost fluorescently-brilliant green algal slime—almost too green, it spelt danger! An unrelated association, image, comes to mind: the beautiful, moss-covered trees in the Southern island of New Zealand, which I adored.
We are hardwired to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate—though this is usually associated with the perception of motion—of autonomous, animal motion, as opposed to/distinct from movement of/by physical forces. But the recognition of plants is primordial too—I once saw some deeply demented patients, with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, unable to use (or recognize) knives & forks, cutlery, etc. planting a garden—and never putting in plants upside down. Their recognition of plants had long outlasted their recognition of human cultural artifacts.
On healing, it is crucial to have windows, views of nature, landscapes, and gardens. I do not know whether green is a crucial feature here, I imagine it is, as part-and-parcel of the ensemble which we recognize as plant life, “Nature.” (Your section on horticultural therapy etc is especially good and detailed.)
But I do not think we have anything corresponding to a phytochrome.[*9] A counter-thought (or maybe it’s not counter) comes to mind—the deep pleasure in their island landscape, their recognition of everything, by the totally colorblind people in Pingelap (see my Island of the Colorblind pp. 32–33).
Writing about the “universality” of music—all cultures, all ages, etc.—I find a certain embarrassment in thinking of the deaf, who cannot hear, and in a sense cannot imagine, music.[*10] What then of the totally colorblind—the achromatopes—who cannot perceive, or imagine, green or any other color(s)? Perhaps they have some equivalent of “green.” But the vast majority of us are NOT colorblind or deaf, so I think one may generalize without being too held up here.
Going back to “therapeutic landscapes,” gardens etc. I think of my own experience as a patient (see A Leg to Stand On, paperback, p. 131): “A peculiar delight suffused the garden outside my window. There had been no real outside before, no daylight…no grass, no trees, no sense of life. Like a man parched, I gazed thirstily, yearningly, at the green quadrangle, only now realizing how cut off from life I had been, in my sterile, windowless, artificial cubicle. No picture sufficed. I had to see…the garden,…the real world…outside.”
Where you speak of the destruction of natural landscapes, I think of visiting Sao Paulo, back in ’96, and seeing not a single tree on the enormous drive from the airport to the city. Partly for this reason, I found it the ugliest, most frightening city I had ever seen (there is, as you probably know, a wonderful garden, an oasis of green in the city, but in general, and in Lima too, there was not enough green).
* * *
—
I see how you have brought together all sorts of strands—natural, ecological, physiological, cultural, personal, mythical, aesthetic, therapeutic etc. etc. in this, your final chapter.
It has elicited associations in me—but no coherent “critique.” So I look forward the more to seeing your entire manuscript, and not just the summation or synthesis of its final chapter.
With all good wishes,
Oliver
* * *
—
OS kept almost all of the letters he received, variously organized by topic or correspondent. Though he answered many immediately, others he might keep for years on end, until he had a relevant reply. As he began to work on Musicophilia, he consulted his files and resumed epistolary conversations begun years before, such as this one with Andrea Bandel, an Italian violinist.
To Andrea Bandel
Violinist
November 13, 2006
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Signor Andrea Bandel,
You wrote to me nine years ago about the problems affecting your left hand while playing the violin, and how these had eluded diagnosis, been unimproved by various interventions, and were threatening your career. I suggested then that you speak to my colleague Frank Wilson, who was especially interested in the problems of performing musicians—but I heard no more.
I am writing, basically, to ask how you are now—and whether you are aware of the important advances in understanding and treating such disorders which have emerged in the last few years.
The disorder now has a name—neurologists call it “task-specific focal dystonia”—and there have been various recommended treatments: in Europe various forms of retraining are often used, but here in the States the situation has been very hopefully changed by the introduction of botox (botulinum toxin), which, given in the right doses and the right way, can make the dystonia much milder, and (at least in some people) permit them to return to their musical careers. You have probably heard of the great pianist Leon Fleisher; he was disabled, in his right hand, for nearly forty years by a dystonia—he could only play with the left hand, but now, since receiving (periodic) botox treatments he has recovered (almost) complete use of the right hand, and is again giving concerts with both hands.
I do not know how things are in Italy, but here in the States there is now great attention to these (dystonic) problems as they affect some performing musicians, and their treatment.
Do, if you receive this letter, let me know your current situation.
I will add that I have been writing a book about Music and the Brain and have a section on focal dystonia which ends with Leon Fleisher’s story. But I have introduced the whole problem by quoting from your eloquent, detailed and brave letter of 16 July, 1997, which has always remained in my mind. I hope this is agreeable—I am happy to use either your own name, or a pseudonym, whichever you wish.
