An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

  84. This, too, was Dostoevsky’s attitude. “What if it is disease”, he asks, through Prince Mishkin. “What does it matter that it is an abnormal intensity, if the result, if the minute of sensation, remembered and analysed afterwards in health, turns out to be the acme of harmony and beauty—of completeness, of proportion? ”

  It was the conjunction of disease, or biological disposition, with individual creativity that excited Geschwind above all. 85

  85. Although the interpretation of the lives and works and personalities of eminent figures in terms of their supposed neurological or psychiatric dispositions is not new, it has become an obsession, almost an industry, at the present time. Eve LaPlante, in her book Seized, speaks of the characteristic “marks” of TLE and Geschwind syndrome not only in van Gogh and Dostoevsky, but in figures as various as Poe, Tennyson, Flaubert, Maupassant, Kierkegaard, and Lewis Carroll (to say nothing of such contemporaries as Walker Percy, Philip Dick, and Arthur Inman of the 155-volume diary). William Gordon Lennox (author of a massive 2-volume standard work on epilepsy) adds scores of others to this list, from Socrates, Paul, and the Buddha to Newton, Strindberg, Rasputin, Paganini, and Proust. The famous, sudden returns of memory in The Remembrance of Things Past are all seen by Lennox as hypermnesic or experiential seizures, brought on by particular stimuli evocative of the past.

  Other books and articles attribute Tourette’s syndrome to Samuel Johnson and Mozart, autism to Bartok and Einstein, and manic-depressive illness to virtually every creative artist: Kay Redfleld Jamison, in Touched with Fire, cites Balzac, Baudelaire, Beddoes, Berlioz, Blake, Boswell, Brook, Bruckner, Bunyan, Burns, and all the Byrons and Brontes as manic-depressive, to name only the ‘B’s. It may well be that many of these attributions are correct. The danger is that we may go overboard in medicalizing our predecessors (and contemporaries), reducing their complexity to expressions of neurological or psychiatric disorder, while neglecting all the other factors that determine a life, not least the irreducible uniqueness of the individual.

  The rather dry term “interictal personality syndrome” was to become “Waxman-Geschwind syndrome”, or sometimes simply “Dostoevsky syndrome.” I had to wonder whether the illness that Franco had in 1965, with its intensely vivid dreams, its seizurelike hallucinations, its mystical illuminations and transports, was not indeed the inauguration of such a Dostoevsky syndrome.

  Hughlings Jackson speaks of the “doubling of consciousness” that tends to occur in such seizures. And this is how it is with Franco: when he is seized by a vision, a waking dream, a reminiscence of Pontito, he is transported—he is, in a sense, there. His reminiscences come suddenly, unannounced, with the force of revelation. Though he has learned over the years to control them to some extent, to invoke them or conjure them up—as indeed all artists learn to do—they remain essentially involuntary. It is precisely this characteristic that Proust holds to be the most valuable: to his mind, voluntary recall is conceptual, conventional, and flat—only involuntary recall, erupting or conjured from the depths, can convey the full quality of childhood experience, in all its innocence, wonder, and terror.

  The doubling of consciousness can be confusing for Franco: the vision of Pontito, of the past, competes with the here and now, and on occasion can overwhelm it completely, so that he is disoriented, no longer knows where he is. And the doubling of consciousness has led to an odd doubling of life. Franco functions, lives, works in present-day San Francisco, but a large part of him—perhaps the larger part—is living in the past, in Pontito. And with this heightening and intensification of living in the past there has come a certain impoverishment and depreciation of the here and now. Franco hardly goes out, hardly travels, goes to no films or theaters; he has few recreations or interests other than his art; he used to have many friends but has lost most of them by his endless talking of Pontito. He works long hours as a cook in San Francisco’s North Beach,—he walks around all day, oblivious of the world, in a daze of Pontito,—and all his relationships have become attenuated with his obsession—all except that with his wife, Ruth, and this was based largely on her sharing his obsession. Thus it was she who opened a gallery in North Beach and named it the Pontito Gallery, she who obtained “Pontito” license plates for the car. The cost of Franco’s nostalgia and art, then, has been his reduction to a sort of half existence in the present.

  The psychoanalyst Ernest Schachtel, speaking of Proust, saw him as “ready to renounce all that people usually consider an active life, to renounce activity, enjoyment of the present moment, concern with the future, friendship, social intercourse” in his hunt for the “remembrance of things past.” The sort of memories for which Proust sought, and for which Franco seeks, are elusive, shy, nocturnal; they cannot compete with the full light, the bustle, of daily life—thus they must be invoked, conjured up, like dreams, in quiet and darkness, in a cork-lined room, or a mental state akin to trance or reverie.

  And yet it would be reductive, absurd, to suppose that temporal lobe epilepsy, seizures of “reminiscence”, even if they do constitute the final trigger of Franco’s visions, could be the only determinants of his reminiscence and art. The character of the man—his attachment to his mother, his tendency toward idealization and nostalgia; the actual history of his life, including the sudden loss of his childhood paradise and of his father; and, not least, the desire to be known, to achieve, to represent a whole culture—all this, surely, is equally important. What seemed to have occurred, by a singular fortuity, was the co-occurrence, the concurrence, of an acute need and a physiological state. For if his sense of exile and loss and nostalgia demanded a sort of world, a substitute for the real world he had lost, his experiential seizures now supplied what he needed, an endless supply of images from the past—or rather, an almost infinitely detailed, three-dimensional “model” of Pontito, an entire theater or simulacrum he could mentally walk about and explore, capturing new aspects, new views, wherever he looked; this, clearly, depended equally on his prodigious, pre-existent powers of memory and imagery.

  As I put the events of 1965 together, I was reminded of the epileptic reminiscence that had “attacked” (but so deeply served) my patient Mrs. O’C.—which provided her, while it lasted, with long-forgotten memories of her past, memories of a most precious and significant kind. But in the case of Mrs. O’C., the epileptic reminiscence tailed off in a few weeks, closing this strange, physiologically opened door to the past and leaving her, for better or worse, “normal” once again. For Franco, however, the reminiscence was not to cease, but, if anything, swelled in intensity and volume, so that he was never, after this point, really “normal” again. Such a taking over, a possession or dispossession, occurs in a number of people with temporal lobe epilepsy—sometimes greatly heightening (but more often disrupting or destroying) their lives. In Franco’s case—and here again was a singular fortuity—there was the never-before-realized power to paint his visions, to convey a child’s vision with the powers of maturity, and to make of his pathology, his nostalgia, an art.

  One of Franco’s older sisters, Antonietta, now in Holland, remembers when the family returned to the house in Pontito after the Germans had occupied it, and found things defaced and changed. Franco’s mother was deeply upset, and so was Franco. This ten-year-old fatherless child said to his mother, “I shall make Pontito again for you, I shall create it again for you.” And when he did his first painting—of the house where he was born—he sent it to her; in some sense he was redeeming his promise to reconstruct Pontito for her.

  Franco’s mother was always seen by him, and by others, as a figure of peculiar power. “She have the power to cure the children—she taught the secret to my sister Caterina”, Franco told me. “She also have the power to hurt the body by looking.” Such magical thinking was common in Pontito. Franco was always very close to his mother, her favorite, and became much more so with the death of his father, when they seem to have reentered a sort of pre-Oedipal, almost symbiotic intimacy and
closeness. Franco sent copies of all his paintings to her, and when she died, in 1972, he was devastated. With this, he said, “I stopped completely painting.” He felt it was the end of him, of his life, of his art. He did not paint for nine months. Then as he emerged, there came an urgent need to find another woman, to marry, and now he met his future wife, a young Irish-American artist. “When I met Ruth, I wanted to go back to Italy. Ruth, she pull me back. I said ‘No more reason to paint now.’ But Ruth, she replace my mother. If not for Ruth, I never have painted no more.”

  Franco had a perpetual fantasy of going back to Pontito; he constantly talked about “a reunion” and “going home”, and sometimes talked as if his mother were still mysteriously alive, waiting for him in their home, waiting for his return. Yet though he had many opportunities to go back, he managed to sabotage them all. “There is something preventing his going back to Pontito”, Bob Miller said. “Some force, some fear—I don’t know what it is.” Franco was shocked when he saw photographs of Pontito in the late seventies—the loss of the fields and orchards, the overgrowth, appalled him—and he could hardly bear to look at the photographs that Susan Schwartzenberg took in 1987. None of this was his Pontito, the Pontito of his youth, the Pontito he had hallucinated and dreamed about and painted for more than twenty years.

  There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable—and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia—for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some sort of fulfillment, but an indirect one—the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an “aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia”—nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.

  There is no doubt that Franco is at once the victim and the possessor of an imagery whose power is difficult for us to conceive. He is not at liberty to misremember, nor is he at liberty to stop remembering. There beats down on him, night and day, whether he likes it or not, a reminiscence of almost intolerable power and exactness. “No one—has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo”, Borges writes in a sketch entitled “Funes the Memorious.” Such an intolerably vivid reality converges upon Franco, too.

  One may be born with the potential for a prodigious memory, but one is not born with a disposition to recollect; this comes only with changes and separations in life—separations from people, from places, from events and situations, especially if they have been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved. It is, thus, discontinuities, the great discontinuities in life, that we seek to bridge, or reconcile, or integrate, by recollection and, beyond this, by myth and art. Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we leave or lose the place where we were born and spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place, or the life, we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed. All of us, finally, are exiles from the past. But this is particularly true for Franco, who feels himself the sole survivor and rememberer of a world forever past.

  Whatever Franco’s personal gifts and pathologies—his memory, his gift for painting, his seizures (perhaps), his nostalgia—he is also moved, and has been moved throughout, by a feeling and motive that transcend the personal; by a cultural need to remember the past, to preserve its meaning, or give it new meaning, in a world that has forgotten it. In brief, we see in Franco’s work the art of the exile. Much art—much mythology, indeed—stems from exile. 86

  86. Exile—from the tropical paradise where he had spent his earliest years—was to haunt Gauguin throughout his adult life, until, finally, he went to Tahiti and tried there to reclaim the childhood Eden he had once known.

  Exile (from the Garden, from Zion) is a central myth in the Bible, perhaps in every religion. Exile, of course—and perhaps, though hugely transformed, a sort of nostalgia—are central dynamics in Joyce’s life and work. He left Dublin, never to return, as a very young man, but the image of Dublin haunts everything he wrote: first as the literal background of Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and Exiles, and then as the increasingly mythologized and universalized backdrop of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s memory of Dublin was prodigious and was continually amplified and complemented by meticulous research; but it was the Dublin of his youth that inspired him—he had little interest in its later development. And so, in a more modest way, it is with Franco: Pontito is the background of all his thoughts, from the most personal, quotidian recollections to allegorical visions of Pontito as the center of a cosmic struggle between the eternal forces of good and evil.

  In March of 1989, I went to Pontito, to see the village for myself and to talk to some of Franco’s relatives there. I found the village itself, compared with the paintings, at once extraordinarily similar and totally different. There is an almost photographic fidelity, an amazing microscopic power of reproduction, in the way Franco recollects, thirty years later, the details of Pontito. And yet, at the same time, I was struck by the differences: Pontito is much smaller than one would think from his paintings—the streets are narrower, the houses more irregular, the church tower shorter and more squat. There are many reasons for this, one of which is that Franco paints what he saw with a child’s eye, and to a child everything is taller and more spacious. The literalness of this child’s-eye vision made me wonder whether, through some legerdemain of the brain, Franco was able, or even forced, to re-experience Pontito exactly as he had experienced it as a child; whether he was given access, a convulsive access, to the child’s memories within him.

  Franco’s first paintings of Pontito, done soon after his illness in 1965—the one at left is of the house where he was born.

  One of Pontito’s many steep, angled stairways. Though very accurate, Franco’s painting (below) broadens the perspective, adding elements that a photograph (left) is unable to do.

  The view from Franco’s window, again showing composite perspectives.

  Two of Franco’s apocalyptic or “science-fiction” paintings, showing Pontito “preserved for eternity in infinite space.” The first shows the intimate view from his bedroom window; the second, a green-and-gold fragment of the church garden beneath a looming planet.

  Precisely such an access to the past—a past preserved unchanged in the brain’s archives—was described to Wilder Penfield, so he thought, by some of his patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. These memories could be evoked, during surgery, by stimulating the affected part of the temporal lobes with an electrode; while the patients remained perfectly conscious of being in the operating room, questioned by their surgeon, they would also feel themselves transported to a time in the past, always the same time, the same scene, for any particular individual. The actual experiences evoked during such seizures varied enormously from patient to patient: one might re-experience a time of “listening to music”, another “looking at the door of a dance hall”, or “lying in the delivery room at birth”, or “watching people enter the room with snow on their clothes.” Because the reminiscence remained constant for each patient with every seizure or stimulation, Penfield speaks of them as “experiential seizures.” 87

  87. It is now clear that though there are repetitive or reiterative elements in such seizures, there are always elements of a fantastic or dreamlike kind as well. (One such patient, described at the turn of the century by Gowers, would always see “a sudden vision of London in ruins, herself the sole spectator in this scene of desolation”, before having a convulsion or losing consciousness.) Penfield’s findings are discussed, and submitted to a radically different interpretation by Israel Rosenfleld, in The Invention of Memory.


  He conceives that memory forms a continuous and complete record of life experience, and that a segment of this is evoked and played convulsively, involuntarily, during the seizures. For the most part, he feels that the particular memories activated in this way lack special significance, and are merely inconsequential segments activated at random. But on occasion, he grants that such segments might be more—might be particularly prone to activation because they are so important, so massively represented, in the brain. Was this, then, what was happening to Franco? Was he being forced to see, convulsively, frozen segments of his own past, “photographs” from his brain’s archive?

  The notion that past memories endure in the brain, though in a somewhat less literal, less mechanical form, is an idea that haunts psychoanalysis—and the great autobiographers, as well. Thus Freud’s favorite image of the mind was as an archaeological site, filled, layer by layer, with the buried strata of the past (but one where these layers may rise into consciousness at any time). And Proust’s image of life was as “a collection of moments”, the memories of which are “not informed of everything that has happened since” and remain “hermetically sealed”, like jars of preserves in the mind’s larder. 88

  88. In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust writes: