Two Readings on Perception: Part I

Fresh off The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, I picked up a collection of clinical stories that had been recommended by a friend, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. This is the first book of Sacks' I've read, but I had high expectations as he consistently gets excellent reviews and had a moving NYTimes op-ed piece about his cancer diagnosis a while back: My Own Life

This book blew my mind. I never realized how little I knew about neurological disorders, and how bizarrely interesting they could be. Every chapter had a "WHAAAAT?" moment, to the point where I was getting distracted by Wikipedia tangents related to right hemisphere brain damage. And this book was published back in 1985! I would love to: 1) read an updated equivalent, 2) find out what happened to the patients, 3) what (if any) progress we've made with the disorders, and 4) see what else Sacks has written. So fascinating!

Agnosia in the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Of particular interest:
- "idiot savants" (now called "savant syndrome" for obvious reasons) and prime numbers; generally the idea that you would perceive the world only through numbers as a compensation for lacking the capacity for "normal" emotional connections. The closest I could come to imagining this was the scene in The Matrix where Neo sees the world in code. Yes, this is the second consecutive blog post dropping a Matrix reference.
- The soothing appeal of music and nature for many of the patients, to where some were only able to function with a degree of "normalcy" while humming a tune.
- This quote, in reference to a woman who vividly recalled a childhood memory she had previously never been aware of, which "suggested to Penfield that the brain retained an almost perfect record of every lifetime's experience" (p. 137). See also: Hyperthymesia. Pause to consider that a moment. Is this how your life flashes before your eyes in a near-death experience? Why can't we access all these memories anytime? (Because it would be too overwhelming and swamp the present?) Is this still the current theory? Actually mind-boggling. I also enjoy realizing the limits of current science when studying the brain; it's the deep-sea of the body. Unexplored science is always inspiring and humbling.

Also of particular interest, with regard to having a scientific/biological explanation for a condition: "This does not detract in the least from their psychological or spiritual significance. If God, or the eternal order, was revealed to Dostoyevsky in seizures, why should not other organic conditions serve as "portals" to the beyond or the unknown?" (p. 130). A potentially dangerous point, yet interesting in the context of ayahuasca, or DMT, which traditionally has been used for religious spirit journeys and has some epic hallucination stories (DMT: You Cannot Imagine a Stranger Drug or a Stranger Experience).

Bottom line: The brain is powerfully weird, people.

The Waves: Woolf Returns to the Beach

The Waves is my least favorite Woolf book thus far but also allegedly the one closest to her vision. To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway were dreamy and beautiful but held together by some semblance of plot scaffolding. Here, none of that. Woolf goes directly to the essence of the thing ("inner life") and, rather than a conventional novel, we get an abstract poem-play. Beautiful, but a bit too much on the dreamy side for my taste.

to the Godrevy Lighthouse, the waves in St. Ives Bay

The fuzzy "setting" is similar to Lighthouse, with the childhood garden scenes and then recurrent ocean/beach interludes as metaphors for time passing (To the Lighthouse and the Letter H). Themes from Lighthouse appear again here: the inadequacy of language and communication, and the acute presence of time through a combination of nostalgia and Being In The Moment. The book is five friends from childhood to old age ... but they all sound the same -- on purpose, because there is no narrator. Taking things a step further than Lighthouse, where the characters were always wishing to know what others were thinking, here all the characters are the same thing, i.e., an internal monologue divided into parts.

So, in absence of a plot, what the heck is this book about?  It's about the EXPERIENCE of reading Woolf's style, with the purpose of connecting with the characters' inner lives/life. (see: Susan Sontag, On Style)  To be right now In The Moment is to have sensual perceptions and impressions, versus: "this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional" (A Writer's Diary, 139).  Everything in the book -- places, people and even time -- then "exist[s] only in relation to the consciousnesses on which the novelist-poet concentrates exclusively"; basically, subjective rather than objective (Virginia Woolf and Her Works, 287).  Any event or place "exists only in the mind that is aware of it ... a single bundle of sensations, images and thoughts, hastily tied up and labelled" (VWHW, 288).  So, the complexities of friendships and life throughout the book are addressed indirectly but also MOST directly. 

As Guiguet notes in Virginia Woolf and Her Works, "a certain community of vision is undoubtedly necessary for the understanding of The Waves" (302).  I felt a better connection reading Mrs. Dalloway and especially To The Lighthouse; I tend to be uncomfortable with loosely structured books/poems/plays and really the style WAS the book here. Unanswered (unanswerable?) questions include: What is Percival representing and what's his point here? Why does Rhoda kill herself and what's with the pillar in the desert? Is there intentional symbolism for either of those or am I trying to over-interpret?

The book ends with Bernard, who, like Woolf, is the "phrase-keeper" -- although in the spirit of the book, Woolf is all of the characters and all of the characters are one another (i.e., different facets of the same entity). Bernard's pseudo-explanation at the conclusion is "enabled by means of phrases to shape life into groups and sequences and constructions" (VWHW, 294); in other words, talking about life rather than being in it, which is something he's pitied for throughout the book:

"We are all phrases in Bernard's story, things he writes down in his notebook ... He tells our story with extraordinary understanding, except of what we most feel" (The Waves, 70).

Bottom line: Stylized stream-of-consciousness, difficulty Class III rapids.

The Sense of a Memory

Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending wins Most Confusing Last-Minute Plot Twist, hands down.  Is that the point of the title?  To have the feeling of an ending but not understand it, and/or to suggest the lack of sense in the ending?  Strangely, the plot twist itself is inconsequential to the meat of the book.  This was my first experience with Julian Barnes and I'm pegging him as an author to revisit; I had plenty of "YES" moments during this book, though most of them were depressing or actually alarming.  If I would've read this book for the first time about 20 years from now, I'd be having a major case of the blues, so clearly does he crystallize regret of wasted youth.  On a lighter note, I also encountered a new word (susurrus; mumuring -- fun!).

Salvador Dali - The Persistence of Memory (1931)

Nutshell summary, the narrator is an older man, Tony, who is suddenly thrust into a situation involving an ex-girlfriend from his teen years and a long-dead friend.  The book begins by the narrator retelling his teen years, the fling with the girlfriend, his friend's suicide.  This is the kind of book where, once you know the ending, you need to return and read this first part again because foreshadowing is everywhere.  Underlying all of this is that the narrator is unreliable; if this isn't immediately apparent, it's okay because Barnes then beats you over the head with it:

"... the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened." (p.12)  [** side note: consider Eros vs Thanatos as 'primitive storytelling', imposing meaning on the affair and pregnancy (Eros; life instinct) followed by the suicide (Thanatos; death instinct)]

"We need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us." (p.13)

(A great movie with the same memory gist is Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" -- a story told retrospectively by a man who exaggerates and caricatures the past.) Towards the end of his narrative, Tony actually edits his memories, inserting people or situations that had previously been forgotten (or maybe really not there at all?).  How much do you trust your own memory, let alone Tony's?  These days it's probably easier to track the past just by scrolling through your Facebook feed, though even that you can delete and select memories for editing.

The two passages that really stuck with me long after I finished the book:

"But time ... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them." (p.102)

"Had my life increased, or merely added to itself?" (p.97)

That's some heavy reflection right there.  For both Tony and I.

Bottom line?  Highly recommend.  Like I said at the top, I'm glad I read this book young; there's still time to not be so safe and cowardly.  Julian Barnes: endorser of YOLO.