"It's not dark yet..."
Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused, | And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill. | All he believes are his eyes | And his eyes, they just tell him lies.
English musicologist Clive Wearing's 1985 loss of all but a few seconds of present-time memory to herpes encephalitis changed his life.
Stripped of his sense of identity, Wearing is a prisoner of his immediate consciousness. Incapable of appreciating his life's narrative, he describes his predicament. "I am completely incapable of thinking." Lost forever in the present, his view is grim. "I haven't heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything," he would say. "It's like being dead."
Oliver Sacks's article in The New Yorker, The Abyss: Music and Amnesia, chronicles and examines the tortured twenty-year struggle endured by Wearing and his wife Deborah to come to terms with the musician's bewildering, fear-filled, near-total amnesia.
It's a compelling, touching story. Wearing's appreciation of Deborah's love for him and his ability to find solace in music now form a bridge spanning the chasm forever separating his 'now' from 'then' and any imagined future. His newfound repetitive loquacity connects moments, lending him a sense of time.
Sacks does more than tell the musicologist's story. By researching his strange 'condition' of living new to every moment, he gives the reader an appreciation of the delicate, ephemeral, and multilayered nature of our lives' most mysterious storyteller, memory.
Left with something of a residual memory 'about' rather than 'of' the past, Clive Wearing makes us ask questions of our own memories. He owes much of his ability to function to a subcortical 'implicit' — rather than a higher-level 'semantic' — memory, an unthinking awareness of that which he knows rather than that which he knows he knows.
Even were his semantic memory or general knowledge intact, his ability to use facts to reflect would be incapacitated by his near absolute lack of a malleable, ever-changing episodic, or conscious, memory.
Quoting neuroscientist Neal J. Cohen and a paper published in Neuro-Psychoanalysis by Oliver J. Turnbull, Evangelos Zois, et al., Sacks attributes Wearing's love of his wife to his little-understood emotional or 'associative' memory, rather than any implicit or unconscious appreciation of her significant role in his life.'
A parallel explaining his musical skill is found in Scoville and Milner's 1957 patient, H.M., "...rendered amnesic by the surgical removal of both hippocampi, along with adjacent structures of the medial temporal lobes." Deprived of his past, H.M retained the ability to practice previously learned skills and, importantly, to master new skills.
Unlike procedural or episodic memory, both implicit and emotional memory are formed early, and both are etched deeply into our limbic systems.
It is the interplay of these memories, the implicit, the semantic, the episodic, and the emotional, that intrigue me. Although, as Sacks points out, no two amnesias are the same, without memory, we become Clive Wearing. We lose our identity. With bewilderment and terror too frequently our only companions, we experience the death of our selves.
With memory and, most important, with emotional memory tempered by our ability to frame context through long-term consciousness or filtered episodic memory, we become ourselves through other people — shaping them as they shape us.
Were my implicit and episodic memories to chart a trail on a map of my mind, they'd be thinly dotted lines meandering vaguely towards the top. My short-term memory is shot and my connection to large areas of my life are not repressed — they're beyond recall.
I tend to march along broad paths of emotional and semantic memory crossed here and there by context-sensitive trails of episodic deja vu.
On the one hand, I cannot remember a movie immediately after viewing it; the lyrics of a song, the plot of a novel, the thrust of a poem, or the taste of a meal. Because of this, my wife's cooking is a constant delight and I eat like a pig.
I seldom remember my day's work and...well, yes, I go beyond absent minded.
On the other hand, my so-called general knowledge is excellent and I can be relied on for the dumbest, most inconsequential facts. I intuit situations and their implications or consequences, relying on what I feel to be an informed empathy for those unknowingly "in the know".
You don't think Lee Bollinger planned Ahmadinejad's "ambush" alone, do you?
"...but it's getting there."
Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool | And when he sees his reflection, he's fulfilled. | Oh, man is opposed to fair play, | He wants it all and he wants it his way.
We're all, to a greater or lesser extent, woven by strands of memory — some plaited, some thicker than others, yet others frayed and worn.
I used to suffer migraine and, one night, experienced such aphasia and amnesia I could not remember my family members' names, could not recall the words starting the sentence I was completing, could not remember what I was doing or where I was going, and could make no sense of what my wife was trying to tell me.
Worse, I couldn't remember who the hell I was. My remarkably resilient yet, paradoxically, remarkably pliant memory had deserted me. I was left without a narrative to explain myself to myself.
Disconcerting as it was, it wasn't such a bad gig. I was doing karate at the time and was probably dehydrated. I went blind (as one does with migraine), drank a lot of water, and decided to go along for the ride. I also allowed a still-functional inner observer examine from within the symptoms of my sudden and incapacitating idiocy.
It's not that we might all become Clive Wearing — in so many ways, we already are. Mr. Wearing is different to most people and, given that he suffered encephalitis, his case is marked by his being different to himself.
Not that he'd be in a position to remember that.
So what is it about Clive Wearing's story that makes Oliver Sacks's article so compelling? I suspect it has something to do with choice. As with death, the Wearings' had little say in the nature or timing of Clive's disease. Its onset terrified and bewildered a forty-something master musician who died before his own eyes.
It's a tragic story redeemed by love.
It is also an extraordinary story. Today, hundreds of millions of capable people choose to suffer Wearing's disease. Saturated by information, we have become inured to the narratives of our times. Numbed by media, we are compelled to forget so that we may feel.
Yet, having turned memory and forgetting on their heads, we continue to lose ourselves and our identities — seeking continuity and meaning by turning to the Internet in much the same way Clive Wearing turns to his piano.
Lacking casus belli in the multi-billion dollar run up to war with Iran, engraving a single phrase, i.e. "You are a petty and cruel dictator" onto the superficial memory of 300 million was a small but necessary operation.Our denial of memory — our refusal to face the horror we have created might allow us indulge increasingly small pleasures a while yet. However, it won't be long before all that which we have chosen to forget will return to crush us.
Lee Bollinger is not a stupid man. Given the scale of the present campaign, his ludicrous 'performance' was not difficult to arrange.
Strangely, his biography appears to have been erased from Columbia's servers.
And those who would take advantage of our state of living death, effacing our remaining memories to replace them with others, delude themselves. They too are locked into our greater Danse Macabre.
Today, we've lost sight of how deeply our manageable memories matter to our essential being. In our rush to forget, we have surrendered our memories to others. We've told ourselves that what they allow us to think matters more than that which we remember as true.
And they are free to use this knowledge as they please.
When all is said and done, we all suffer Wearing's Disease.
Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there as the night grows still. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
Bob Dylan | Licence to Kill
Afterthought: That Dylan's apt lyrics are taken from his albums Infidels and Time Out Of Mind is no coincidence. Nor is it synchronistic or serendipitous. Bob Dylan consistently taps rich seams, deep veins, or thick threads of memory to bring us to ourselves. Consciously or subconsciously, we make necessary associations and act on them — or use them to engineer situations suiting us or others. Coincidence, i.e. "The chance concurrence of two events having a peculiar correspondence between them", is way overrated. The word is frequently used dismissively, derisively, or pejoratively. Like so many other words, it has become part of our lexicon of forgetting.
