An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

A great weakness, no doubt, for a person to consist entirely in a collection of moments; a great strength also; it is dependent upon memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment which it has registered endures still, lives still, and with it the person whose form is outlined in it.

  (Proust is only one of the great meditators on memory—wondering about memory goes back at least to Augustine, without any resolution, finally, as to what memory “is.”)

  This notion of memory as a record or store is so familiar, so congenial, to us that we take it for granted and do not realize at first how problematic it is. And yet all of us have had the opposite experience, of “normal” memories, everyday memories, being anything but fixed—slipping and changing, becoming modified, whenever we think of them. No two witnesses ever tell the same story, and no story, no memory, ever remains the same. A story is repeated, gets changed with every repetition. It was experiments with such serial storytelling, and with the remembering of pictures, that convinced Frederic Bartlett, in the 1920s and 1930s, that there is no such entity as “memory”, but only the dynamic process of “remembering” (he is always at pains, in his great book Remembering, to avoid the noun and use the verb). He writes.

  Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be so.

  Bartlett’s conclusion now finds the strongest support in Gerald Edelman’s neuroscientific work, his view of the brain as a ubiquitously active system where a constant shifting is in process, and everything is continually updated and recorrelated. There is nothing cameralike, nothing mechanical, in Edelman’s view of the mind: every perception is a creation, every memory a recreation—all remembering is relating, generalizing, recategorizing. In such a view there cannot be any fixed memories, any “pure” view of the past uncolored by the present. For Edelman, as for Bartlett, there are always dynamic processes at work, and remembering is always reconstruction, not reproduction.

  And yet one wonders whether there are not extraordinary forms, or pathological forms, of memory where this does not apply. What, for example, of the seemingly permanent and totally replicable memories of Luria’s “Mnemonist”, so akin to the fixed and rigid “artificial memories” of the past? What of the highly accurate, archival memories found in oral cultures, where entire tribal histories, mythologies, epic poems, are transmitted faithfully through a dozen generations? What of the capacity of “idiot savants” to remember books, music, pictures, verbatim, and to reproduce them, virtually unchanged, years later? What of traumatic memories that seem to replay themselves, unbearably, without changing a single detail—Freud’s “repetition-compulsion”—for years or decades after the trauma? What of neurotic or hysterical memories or fantasies, which also seem immune to time? In all of these, seemingly, there are immense powers of reproduction at work, but very much less in the way of reconstruction—as with Franco’s memories. One feels that there is some element of fixation or fossilization or petrification at work, as if they are cut off from the normal processes of recategorization and revision. 89

  89. Memory can take many forms—all, in their different ways, invaluable culturally—and we should only speak of “pathology” if these become extreme. Some people have remarkable perceptual memories, for example; they seem to take in automatically and to recollect without the least difficulty all the rich details of a summer holiday, the scores of people met, the way they dressed, their talk—the thousand incidents that make up a day on the beach. Others retain no memories (and perhaps lay down no memories) of such matters, but have huge conceptual memories, in which vast amounts of thought and information are retained, in highly abstract, logically ordered form. The mind of the novelist, the representational painter, perhaps tends to the former; the mind of the scientist, the scholar, perhaps to the latter (and, of course, one may have both sorts of memory, or varying combinations). Pure perceptual memory, with little or no conceptual disposition or capacity, may be characteristic of some autistic savants.

  It may be that we need to call upon both sorts of concept—memory as dynamic, as constantly revised and represented, but also as images, still present in their original form, though written over and over again by subsequent experience, like palimpsests. In this sense, with Franco, however sharp and fixed the original, there is always some reconstruction in his work as well, particularly in the most personal pictures, such as the view from his bedroom window. Here Franco brings into an intensely personal and aesthetic unity a range of buildings that cannot be seen (or photographed) all at once, but that he has observed, lovingly, at different times. He has constructed an ideal view, which has the truth of art and transcends factuality. Whatever photographic or eidetic power Franco brings to it, such a painting always has a subjectivity, an intensely personal cast, as well. Schachtel, speaking as a psychoanalyst, discusses this in relation to childhood memories:

  Memory as a function of the living personality can be understood only as a capacity for the organization and reconstruction of past experiences and impressions in the service of present needs, fears, and interests—Just as there is no such thing as impersonal perception and impersonal experience, there is also no impersonal memory.

  Kierkegaard goes still further, in the opening of Stages on Life’s Way:

  …memory Is Merely a Minimal Condition. by Means of Memory the Experience Presents Itself To Receive the Consecration of Recollection—For Recollection Is Ideality—It Involves Effort and Responsibility, Which the Indifferent Act of Memory Does Not Involve—Hence It Is An Art To Recollect.

  Franco’s Pontito is minutely accurate, in the tiniest details, and yet it is also serene and idyllic. There is a great stillness in it, a sense of peace, not least because his Pontito is depopulated, its buildings and streets are empty; the bustling, transitory people have been removed. There is something of a desolate, a postnuclear, quality. But there is also a deeper, more spiritual stillness. One cannot help feeling that something is strange here, that what is being recalled is not the actuality of childhood, as with Proust, but a denying and transfiguring vision of childhood, with the place, Pontito, taking the place of the people—the parents, the living people—who must have been so important to the child. 90

  90. In a late paper, “Constructions in Analysis”, Freud speaks of the fact that patients’ memories of certain highly significant events may show a strange conjunction of excessive sharpness and detail in some respects, and total deletion in others, with crucial elements (especially human ones) missing. Thus patients may recollect “with abnormal sharpness” the rooms in which an event of great importance happened, or the furniture—but not the event itself. He sees this as the result of a conflict and compromise in the unconscious, whereby important memory traces are brought into consciousness, but displayed onto adjacent objects of minor significance. He stresses that such reminiscences often emerge in dreams (and thereafter daydreams), as soon as the charged subject is forced upon the mind.

  Franco is not unaware of this and will in some moods talk of the reality of childhood as he knew it—its complexities, its conflicts, its griefs, and its pains. But all this is edited out in his art, where a paradisiacal simplicity prevails. One finds the belief in a happy childhood “even in people who have undergone cruel experiences as children”, Schachtel writes. “The myth of happy childhood takes the place of the lost memory of the actual experience.”

  And yet, we cannot reduce Franco’s vision to mere fantasy or obsession. There is not just a neurotic deletion in his Pontito paintings, but an imaginative bringing-out, an intensification. Eva Brann, the philosopher, likes to
call memory “the storehouse of the imagination”, and (like Edelman) to see memories as imaginative, as creative, from the start: 91

  91. T.J. Murray cites a similar observation made by the painter Robert Pope, who stresses also the time which must elapse between the original experience and its recreation—a time which, for him, averaged five years, but which, for Franco, was a quarter century or more:

  During this gestation period [writes Pope], the creative faculties act as a filter where personal opaque and chaotic data is made public, transparent and ordered. This is a process of mythologizing. Myth and dream are similar: the difference is that dreams have private, personal meaning while myths have public meanings.

  Imaginative memory not only stores for us the passing moments of perception; it also transfigures, distances, vivifies, defangs—reshapes formed impressions, turns oppressive immediacies into wide vistas—loosens the rigid grip of an acute desire and transforms it into a fertile design.

  And it is at this point that Franco’s personal, nostalgic feelings become cultural, transcendent ones. Pontito, he feels, is special in God’s eyes and must be preserved from destruction and corruption. It is special, too, in embodying a precious culture—a mode of building, a mode of living, that has almost vanished from the earth. He sees his mission as one of preservation: to preserve Pontito exactly as it was, above and beyond all vicissitudes and contingencies. That this is a central dynamic, or the central dynamic, is shown by a series of remarkable apocalyptic or “science-fiction” paintings, which he seems to do in periods of mental stress or distress. In these, the earth is menaced by another planet or a comet, by imminent or actual destruction, but Pontito survives: Franco shows the old church, or a garden, all green and gold, radiant, transfigured, in a beam of sunlight, miraculously surviving the all-encompassing destruction. (In another allegorical picture, he put a satellite dish on the church: a dish aimed at the stars—and at God.) These apocalyptic paintings have titles like Pontito Preserved for Eternity in Infinite Space.

  Franco gets up early each morning and knows what he has to do. He has his task, his mission: to recollect—to consecrate the memory of Pontito. His visions, when they come, are full of emotion and excitement—no less so than they were when they first came to him, twenty-five years ago. And the activity of painting—of walking again in recollection through the so-loved paths and streets, and being able to articulate this, in so masterly a fashion, with such richness and detail—gives him a sense of identity and accomplishment by giving his visions a controlled and artistic form.

  “I don’t feel that I deserve the credit for these paintings”, Franco wrote me in a letter. “I did them for Pontito—I want the whole world to know how fantastic and beautiful it is. In this way maybe it won’t die, although it is dying. Maybe my paintings will at least keep its memory alive.”

  Up to early 1989, I had seen Franco and visited him at his house in San Francisco several times; I had spoken with his friends there; I had met two of his sisters in Holland; and, above all, I had visited Pontito, which excited and teased Franco, for he was thinking now, more than at any time in the past twenty years, of visiting Pontito himself. His life had had, until now, a strange sort of stability, with living, eating, functioning—somewhat absentmindedly—in the present, but with his mind and art constantly fixed on the past. In this he had been greatly aided by Ruth, who, though herself an artist, had identified herself in the deepest way with Franco’s Pontitan relationship and art and did all she could to take care of the mundane necessities of life and to give him the protection and insulation he needed to dwell and work uninterrupted in his nostalgic art. But in 1987, tragically, she became sick, and, after a painful fight with cancer, she died, just three months before Franco’s Exploratorium exhibit. This was his first big show, and, along with his wife’s death, it stirred feelings that he could no longer go on as he had in the past—something new must happen, new decisions must be made. He sounded these themes in a letter he wrote me a month later:

  Very shortly I may be moving. Probably to San Francisco, but maybe back to Italy for good—My situation since my wife died has been difficult for me. I’m not sure what I should do—I must sell my house, look for a new place and job in San Francisco, or in the future go back to Pontito. So that will be the end of the Pontito memory—but not the end of my life! I’ll start a new memory.

  I was struck by the way in which he equated a return to Pontito with the end of his memory, his identity, the end of his singular reminiscence and art. One saw now why he had sabotaged all previous opportunities to go there. Could the fairy tale, the myth, survive reality?

  In March of 1989, I spoke of Franco and his art at a conference in Florence. Invitations started to pour in on Franco—to give interviews, to send slides, to allow an exhibit, and, above all, to return to Pontito. Pescia, the nearest big town to Pontito, organized an exhibit of his paintings, to be held in September 1990. His long-standing inner conflict was magnified by this outside notice; a state of excitement and ambivalence and agitation grew. Finally, that summer, he decided to go.

  He had envisaged walking from Pescia—walking up the winding mountain road to Pontito, carrying on his back a wooden cross he had made, which he would place in the old church at Pontito. He would be alone, utterly alone, in this consecrated walk. He would stop at a spring, an ancient spring of fresh water, just outside Pontito, and put his face in the gushing waters. Perhaps after drinking the waters, he thought, he would lie down and die. Or perhaps, purified, born again, he would reenter Pontito. No one would recognize him, the grizzled stranger from afar, until an old dog—the old dog he had known as a child, now so old it could scarcely move (the dog, indeed, would have to be the same age as Franco himself)—until his old dog, recognizing him, would feebly lick him and then, its waiting over, would wag its tail and die. It was singular to hear this elaborate fantasy from Franco, this fantasy with elements of Sophocles and Homer no less than the New Testament, for he had never read, never heard of, Sophocles or Homer.

  In the event, his return was nothing like this.

  He had phoned me in a panic the evening before his flight. Innumerable thoughts and desires and fears were colliding inside him: Should he go, or shouldn’t he? He kept changing his mind. Since his art was based on fantasy and nostalgia, on a memory uncontaminated by updating, he was terrified that he would lose it if he returned to Pontito. I listened carefully, like an analyst, offering no suggestions. “You have to decide”, I said, finally. He took the red-eye flight later that evening.

  He had hoped that, first, he might meet the Pope and have his cross blessed before he walked with it to Pontito. But the Pope was away, in Africa. Nor was the Via Dolorosa walk to Pontito possible. The mayor of Pescia and other officials were at this moment, he was told, awaiting him in Pontito, and he was whisked off there, at high speed, in a car.

  The ceremony over, Franco took off by himself, going to his boyhood home. His first impression: “Oh my God, it was so small I had to crouch to look through my window. I see changes outside—but to me is no change.” As he walked around the town, it seemed uncannily quiet, deserted, “like everybody is left, like the town is mine.” He savored, for a little, this sense that it was his, and then got a sense of grievous loss: “I missed the chickens, the donkey shoes. Like a dream. Everybody left. You used to hear a lot of noise—the children coming up, the women, the donkey shoes. All gone.” No one greeted him, no one recognized him, no one was to be seen on the streets during this first walk. He saw no curtains in the windows and no laundry hanging, heard no sounds of life coming from the empty, shuttered houses. He encountered only half-feral cats slinking in the alleys. The feeling grew on him that Pontito was indeed dead, and he himself a revenant returning to a ghost town.

  He wandered out beyond the houses, into the areas that used to be lush with well-tended fields and orchards. Everywhere the ground was cracked and dry; there was neglect, and a huge overgrowth of parasites and weeds. Now
, it seemed to him, not only Pontito but the whole enterprise of civilization was in ruins. He thought of his own apocalyptic visions: “Someday it will be polluted, overgrown. There will be nuclear war. So I will put it in Space, to be preserved for Eternity.”

  But then, as the sun rose, the sheer beauty of the scene made him catch his breath: “I can’t believe it, it’s so beautiful.” There, rising up tier by tier on the mountain, was Pontito, his Pontito, all green and gold, the church tower at its crest glinting now in the early morning sun—his church, completely unchanged. “I went up in the tower. I touched the stones. Its age to me is like a thousand years. All different colors—the copper, the green.” Touching the stones, stroking them, caressing them, Franco grounded himself, started to feel again that Pontito was real. Stones have always played a crucial role in his paintings; they are portrayed with the utmost accuracy—every shade, every color, every convexity or crack, lovingly dwelt on and delineated. There is an extraordinary tactile or kinesthetic quality in Franco’s stones. Now, as he touched them, the actuality of “coming home” started to return, and for the first time during his visit Franco started to rejoice. The stones, at least, had not changed. Nor had the church, or the buildings, or the streets. Their feel, at least, was still what it had been. And now the villagers, many of them relatives, came out of their houses, excitedly greeting him, bombarding him with questions. Everyone was proud of him: “We’ve seen your paintings, we’ve been hearing about you—you’re coming back to us now?” And now he started to feel like the prodigal son. This, he said later, was a high point of his trip: “As a young child in Pontito, I thought, One day I’m going to grow up. Do something, be somebody, for my madre. Show the people in Pontito. After my father died, I had no shoes, all broke. I used to feel shame. We were despised.”