speaks of "photism" in this context). It is impossible to ascertain, in the vast majority of cases, whether the experience represents a hysterica] or psychotic ecstasy, the effects of intoxication, or an epileptic or migrainous manifestation. A unique exception is provided in the case of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1180), a nun and mystic of exceptional intellectual and literary powers, who experienced countless "visions" from earliest childhood to the close of her life, and has left exquisite accounts and figures of these in the two ma.n.u.script codices which have come down to us-Scivias and Liber divinorum operum ("Book of divine works").
A careful consideration of these accounts and figures leaves no room for doubt concerning their nature: they were indisputably migrainous, and they ill.u.s.trate, indeed, many of the varieties of visual aura earlier discussed. Singer (1958), in the course of an extensive essay on Hildegard"s visions, selects the following phenomena as most characteristic of them: In all a prominent feature is a point or a group of points of light, which shimmer and move, usually in a wave-like manner, and are most often interpreted as stars or flaming eyes [Figure B]. In quite a number of cases one light, larger than the rest, exhibits a series of concentric circular figures of wavering form [Figure A]; and often definite fortification-figures are described, radiating in some cases from a coloured area [Figures C and D]. Often the lights gave that impression of working, boiling or fermenting, described by so many visionaries . . .
Hildegard writes: The visions which I saw I beheld neither in sleep, nor in dreams, nor in madness, nor with my carnal eyes, nor with the ears of the flesh, nor in hidden places; but wakeful, alert, and with the eyes of the spirit and the inward ears, I perceive them in open view and according to the will of G.o.d.
One such vision, ill.u.s.trated by a figure of stars falling and being quenched in the ocean (Figure B), signifies for her "The Fall of the Angels": I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding mult.i.tude of falling stars which with the star followed southwards . . . And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals . . . and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.
Such is Hildegard"s allegorical interpretation. Our literal interpretation would be that she experienced a shower of phosphenes in transit across the visual field, their pa.s.sage being succeeded by a negative scotoma. Visions with fortification-figures are represented in her Zelus Dei (Figure C) and Sedens Lucidus (Figure D), the fortifications radiating from a brilliantly luminous and (in the original) shimmering and coloured point. These two visions are combined in a composite vision (first picture), and in this she interprets the fortifications as the aedificium of the city of G.o.d.
Great rapturous intensity invests the experience of these auras, especially on the rare occasions when a second scotoma follows in the wake of the original scintillation: The light which I see is not located, but yet is more brilliant than the sun, nor can I examine its height, length or breadth, and I name it "the cloud of the living light". And as sun, moon, and stars are reflected in water, so the writings, sayings, virtues and works of men shine in it before me . . .
Sometimes I behold within this light another light which I name "the Living Light itself . . . And when I look upon it every sadness and pain vanishes from my memory, so that I am again as a simple maid and not as an old woman.
Invested with this sense of ecstasy, burning with profound theo-phorous and philosophical significance, Hildegard"s visions were instrumental in directing her towards a life of holiness and mysticism. They provide a unique example of the manner in which a physiological event, ba.n.a.l, hateful or meaningless to the vast majority of people, can become, in a privileged consciousness, the substrate of a supreme ecstatic inspiration. One must go to Dostoievsky who experienced on occasion ecstatic epileptic auras to which he attached momentous significance, to find an adequate historical parallel.
There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony ... a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly . . .
PART FOUR.
THE WORLD OF THE SIMPLE.
Introduction.
When I started working with r.e.t.a.r.dates several years ago, I thought it would be dismal, and wrote this to Luria. To my surprise, he replied in the most positive terms, and said that there were no patients, in general, more "dear" to him, and that he counted his hours and years at the Inst.i.tute of Defectology among the most moving and interesting of his entire professional life. He expresses a similar sentiment in the preface to the first of his clinical biographies (Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child, Eng. tr. 1959): "If an author has the right to express feelings about his own work, I must note the warm sense with which I always turn to the material published in this small book."
What is this "warm sense" of which Luria speaks? It is clearly the expression of something emotional and personal-which would not be possible if the defectives did not "respond", did not themselves possess very real sensibilities, emotional and personal potentials, whatever their (intellectual) defects. But it is more. It is an expression of scientific interest-of something that Luria considered of quite peculiar scientific interest. What could this be? Something other than "defects" and "defectology", surely, which are of rather limited interest in themselves. What is it, then, that is especially interesting in the simple?
It has to do with qualities of mind which are preserved, even enhanced, so that, though "mentally defective" in some ways, they may be mentally interesting, even mentally complete, in others. Qualities of mind other than the conceptual-this is what we may explore with peculiar clarity in the simple mind (as we may also in the minds of children and "savages"-though, as Clifford Geertz repeatedly emphasises, these categories must never be equated: savages are neither simple nor children; children have no savage culture; and the simple are neither savages nor children). Yet there are important kinships-and all that Piaget has opened out for us in the minds of children, and Levi-Strauss in the "savage mind", awaits us, in a different form, in the mind and world of the simple.*
What awaits our study is equally pleasing to the heart and mind, and, as such, especially incites the impulse to Luria"s "romantic science".
What is this quality of mind, this disposition, which characterises the simple, and gives them their poignant innocence, transparency, completeness and dignity-a quality so distinctive we must speak of the "world" of the simple (as we speak of the "world" of the child or the savage)?
If we are to use a single word here, it would have to be "con-creteness"-their world is vivid, intense, detailed, yet simple, precisely because it is concrete: neither complicated, diluted, nor unified, by abstraction.
By a sort of inversion, or subversion, of the natural order of things, concreteness is often seen by neurologists as a wretched thing, beneath consideration, incoherent, regressed. Thus for Kurt Goldstein, the greatest systematiser of his generation, the mind, man"s glory, lies wholly in the abstract and categorical, and the effect of brain damage, any and all brain damage, is to cast him out from this high realm into the almost subhuman swamplands of the concrete. If a man loses the "abstract-categorical att.i.tude" (Goldstein), or "prepositional thought" (Hughlings Jackson), what remains is subhuman, of no moment or interest.
I call this an inversion because the concrete is elemental-it is what makes reality "real", alive, personal and meaningful. All of this is lost if the concrete is lost-as we saw in the case of the *All of Luria"s early work was done in these three allied domains, his field-work with children in primitive communities in Central Asia, and his studies in the Inst.i.tute of Defectology. Together these launched his lifelong exploration of human imagination.
almost-Martian Dr P., "the man who mistook his wife for a hat", who fell (in an un-Goldsteinian way) from the concrete to the abstract.
Much easier to comprehend, and altogether more natural, is the idea of the preservation of the concrete in brain damage-not regression to it, but preservation of it, so that the essential personality and ident.i.ty and humanity, the being of the hurt creature, is preserved.
This is what we see in Zazetsky-"the man with a shattered world"-he remains a man, quintessentially a man, with all the moral weight and rich imagination of a man, despite the devastation of his abstract and propositional powers. Here Luria, while seeming to be supporting the formulations of Hughlings Jackson and Goldstein, is, at the same time, turning their significance upside down. Zazetsky is no feeble Jacksonian or Goldsteinian relic, but a man in his full manhood, a man with his emotions and imagination wholly preserved, perhaps enhanced. His world is not "shattered", despite the book"s t.i.tle-it lacks unifying abstractions, but is experienced as an extraordinarily rich, deep and concrete reality.
I believe all this to be true of the simple also-the more so as, having been simple from the start, they have never known, been seduced by, the abstract, but have always experienced reality direct and unmediated, with an elemental and, at times, overwhelming intensity.
We find ourselves entering a realm of fascination and paradox, all of which centres on the ambiguity of the "concrete". In particular, as physicians, as therapists, as teachers, as scientists, we are invited, indeed compelled, towards an exploration of the concrete. This is Luria"s "romantic science". Both of Luria"s great clinical biographies, or "novels", may indeed be seen as explorations of the concrete: its preservation, in the service of reality, in the braindamaged Zazetsky; its exaggeration, at the expense of reality, in the "supermind" of the Mnemonist.
Cla.s.sical science has no use for the concrete-it is equated with the trivial in neurology and psychiatry. It needs a "romantic" science to pay it its full due-to appreciate its extraordinary powers . . . and dangers: and in the simple we are confronted with the concrete head-on, the concrete pure and simple, in unreserved intensity.
The concrete can open doors, and it can close them too. It can const.i.tute the portal to sensibility, imagination, depth. Or it can confine the possessor (or the possessed) to meaningless particulars. We see both of these potentials, as it were amplified, in the simple.
Enhanced powers of concrete imagery and memory, Nature"s compensation for defectiveness in the conceptual and abstract, can tend in quite opposite directions: towards an obsessive preoccupation with particulars, the development of an eidetic imagery and memory, and the mentality of the Performer or "whiz kid" (as occurred with the Mnemonist, and in ancient times, with over-cultivation of the concrete "art of memory"*: we see tendencies to this in Martin A. (Chapter Twenty-two), in Jose (Chapter Twenty-four), and especially the Twins (Chapter Twenty-three), exaggerated, especially in the Twins, by the demands of public performance, coupled with their own obsessionalism and exhibitionism.
But of much greater interest, much more human, much more moving, much more "real"-yet scarcely even recognised in scientific studies of the simple (though immediately seen by sympathetic parents and teachers)-is the proper use and development of the concrete.
The concrete, equally, may become a vehicle of mystery, beauty and depth, a path into the emotions, the imagination, the spirit- fully as much as any abstract conception (perhaps indeed more, as Gershom Scholem (1965) has argued in his contrasts of the conceptual and the symbolic, or Jerome Bruner (1984) in his contrast of the "paradigmatic" and the "narrative"). The concrete is readily imbued with feeling and meaning-more readily, perhaps, than any abstract conception. It readily moves into the aesthetic, the dramatic, the comic, the symbolic, the whole wide deep world of art and spirit. Conceptually, then, mental defectives may be cripples-but in their powers of concrete and symbolic apprehen- *See Francis Yates" extraordinary book so t.i.tled (1966).
sion they may be fully the equal of any "normal" individual. (This is science, this is romance too . . . ) No one has expressed this more beautifully than Kierkegaard, in the words he wrote on his deathbed. "Thou plain man!" (he writes, and I paraphrase slightly). "The symbolism of the Scriptures is something infinitely high . . . but it is not "high" in a sense that has anything to do with intellectual elevation, or with the intellectual differences between man and man . . . No, it is for all . . . for all is this infinite height attainable."
A man may be very "low" intellectually-unable to put a key to a door, much less understand the Newtonian laws of motion, wholly unable to comprehend the world as concepts, and yet fully able, and indeed gifted, in understanding the world as concrete-ness, as symbols. This is the other side, the almost sublime other side, of the singular creatures, the gifted simpletons, Martin, Jose, and the Twins.
Yet, it may be said, they are extraordinary and atypical. I therefore start this final section with Rebecca, a wholly "unremarkable" young woman, a simpleton, with whom I worked twelve years ago. I remember her warmly.
21.
Rebecca Rebecca was no child when she was referred to our clinic. She was nineteen, but, as her grandmother said, "just like a child in some ways". She could not find her way around the block, she could not confidently open a door with a key (she could never "see" how the key went, and never seemed to learn). She had left/ right confusion, she sometimes put on her clothes the wrong way- inside out, back-to-front, without appearing to notice, or, if she noticed, without being able to get them right. She might spend hours jamming a hand or foot into the wrong glove or shoe-she seemed, as her grandmother said, to have "no sense of s.p.a.ce". She was clumsy and ill-coordinated in all her movements-a "klutz", one report said, a "motor moron" another (although when she danced, all her clumsiness disappeared).
Rebecca had a partial cleft palate, which caused a whistling in her speech; short, stumpy fingers, with blunt, deformed nails; and a high, degenerative myopia requiring very thick spectacles-all stigmata of the same congenital condition which had caused her cerebral and mental defects. She was painfully shy and withdrawn, feeling that she was, and had always been, a "figure of fun".
But she was capable of warm, deep, even pa.s.sionate attachments. She had a deep love for her grandmother, who had brought her up since she was three (when she was orphaned by the death of both parents). She was very fond of nature, and, if she was taken to the city parks and botanic gardens, spent many happy hours there. She was very fond too of stories, though she never learned to read (despite a.s.siduous, and even frantic, attempts), and would implore her grandmother or others to read to her. "She has a hunger for stories," her grandmother said; and fortunately her grandmother loved reading stories and had a fine reading voice which kept Rebecca entranced. And not just stories-poetry too. This seemed a deep need or hunger in Rebecca-a necessary form of nourishment, of reality, for her mind. Nature was beautiful, but mute. It was not enough. She needed the world re-presented to her in verbal images, in language, and seemed to have little difficulty following the metaphors and symbols of even quite deep poems, in striking contrast to her incapacity with simple propositions and instructions. The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol, formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter. Though conceptually (and "proposition-ally") inept, she was at home with poetic language, and was herself, in a stumbling, touching way, a sort of "primitive", natural poet. Metaphors, figures of speech, rather striking similitudes, would come naturally to her, though unpredictably, as sudden poetic e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns or allusions. Her grandmother was devout, in a quiet way, and this also was true of Rebecca: she loved the lighting of the Sabbath candles, the benisons and orisons which thread the Jewish day; she loved going to the synagogue, where she too was loved (and seen as a child of G.o.d, a sort of innocent, a holy fool); and she fully understood the liturgy, the chants, the prayers, rites and symbols of which the Orthodox service consists. All this was possible for her, accessible to her, loved by her, despite gross perceptual and spatio-temporal problems, and gross impairments in every schematic capacity-she could not count change, the simplest calculations defeated her, she could never learn to read or write, and she would average 60 or less in IQ tests (though doing notably better on the verbal than the performance parts of the test). Thus she was a "moron", a "fool", a "b.o.o.by", or had so appeared, and so been called, throughout her whole life, but one with an unexpected, strangely moving, poetic power. Superficially she was a ma.s.s of handicaps and incapacities, with the intense frustrations and anxieties attendant on these; at this level she was, and felt herself to be, a mental cripple-beneath the effortless skills, the happy capacities, of others; but at some deeper level there was no sense of handicap or incapacity, but a feeling of calm and com- pleteness, of being fully alive, of being a soul, deep and high, and equal to all others. Intellectually, then, Rebecca felt a cripple; spiritually she felt herself a full and complete being.
When I first saw her-clumsy, uncouth, all-of-a-fumble-I saw her merely, or wholly, as a casualty, a broken creature, whose neurological impairments I could pick out and dissect with precision: a mult.i.tude of apraxias and agnosias, a ma.s.s of sensorimotor impairments and breakdowns, limitations of intellectual schemata and concepts similar (by Piaget"s criteria) to those of a child of eight. A poor thing, I said to myself, with perhaps a "splinter skill", a freak gift, of speech; a mere mosaic of higher cortical functions, Piagetian schemata-most impaired.
The next time I saw her, it was all very different. I didn"t have her in a test situation, "evaluating" her in a clinic. I wandered outside-it was a lovely spring day-with a few minutes in hand before the clinic started, and there I saw Rebecca sitting on a bench, gazing at the April foliage quietly, with obvious delight. Her posture had none of the clumsiness which had so impressed me before. Sitting there, in a light dress, her face calm and slightly smiling, she suddenly brought to mind one of Chekov"s young women-Irene, Anya, Sonya, Nina-seen against the backdrop of a Chekovian cherry orchard. She could have been any young woman enjoying a beautiful spring day. This was my human, as opposed to my neurological, vision.
As I approached, she heard my footsteps and turned, gave me a broad smile, and wordlessly gestured. "Look at the world," she seemed to say. "How beautiful it is." And then there came out, in Jacksonian spurts, odd, sudden, poetic e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns: "spring", "birth", "growing", "stirring", "coming to life", "seasons", "everything in its time". I found myself thinking of Ecclesiastes: "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time . . . " This was what Rebecca, in her disjointed fashion, was ejaculating-a vision of seasons, of times, like that of the Preacher. "She is an idiot Ecclesiastes," I said to myself. And in this phrase, my two visions of her-as idiot and as symbolist-met, collided and fused. She had done appallingly in the testing-which, in a sense, was designed, like all neurological and psychological testing, not merely to uncover, to bring out deficits, but to decompose her into functions and deficits. She had come apart, horribly, in formal testing, but now she was mysteriously "together" and composed.
Why was she so decomposed before, how could she be so re-composed now? I had the strongest feeling of two wholly different modes of thought, or of organisation, or of being. The first schematic-pattern-seeing, problem-solving-this is what had been tested, and where she had been found so defective, so disastrously wanting. But the tests had given no inkling of anything but the deficits, of anything, so to speak, beyond her deficits.
They had given me no hint of her positive powers, her ability to perceive the real world-the world of nature, and perhaps of the imagination-as a coherent, intelligible, poetic whole: her ability to see this, think this, and (when she could) live this; they had given me no intimation of her inner world, which clearly was composed and coherent, and approached as something other than a set of problems or tasks.
But what was the composing principle which could allow her composure (clearly it was something other than schematic)? I found myself thinking of her fondness for tales, for narrative composition and coherence. Is it possible, I wondered, that this being before me-at once a charming girl, and a moron, a cognitive mishap- can use a narrative (or dramatic) mode to compose and integrate a coherent world, in place of the schematic mode, which, in her, is so defective that it simply doesn"t work? And as I thought, I remembered her dancing, and how this could organise her otherwise ill-knit and clumsy movements.
Our tests, our approaches, I thought, as I watched her on the bench-enjoying not just a simple but a sacred view of nature- our approach, our "evaluations", are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.
Rebecca, I felt, was complete and intact as "narrative" being, in conditions which allowed her to organise herself in a narrative way; and this was something very important to know, for it allowed one to see her, and her potential, in a quite different fashion from that imposed by the schematic mode.
It was perhaps fortunate that I chanced to see Rebecca in her so-different modes-so damaged and incorrigible in the one, so full of promise and potential in the other-and that she was one of the first patients I saw in our clinic. For what I saw in her, what she showed me, I now saw in them all.
As I continued to see her, she seemed to deepen. Or perhaps she revealed, or I came to respect, her depths more and more. They were not wholly happy depths-no depths ever are-but they were predominantly happy for the greater part of the year.
Then, in November, her grandmother died, and the light, the joy, she had expressed in April now turned into the deepest grief and darkness. She was devastated, but conducted herself with great dignity. Dignity, ethical depth, was added at this time, to form a grave and lasting counterpoint to the light, lyrical self I had especially seen before.
I called on her as soon as I heard the news, and she received me, with great dignity, but frozen with grief, in her small room in the now empty house. Her speech was again e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "Jack-sonian", in brief utterances of grief and lamentation. "Why did she have to go?" she cried; and added, "I"m crying for me, not for her." Then, after an interval, "Grannie"s all right. She"s gone to her Long Home." Long Home! Was this her own symbol, or an unconscious memory of, or allusion to, Ecclesiastes? "I"m so cold," she cried, huddling into herself. "It"s not outside, it"s winter inside. Cold as death," she added. "She was a part of me. Part of me died with her."
She was complete in her mourning-tragic and complete- there was absolutely no sense of her being then a "mental defective". After half an hour, she unfroze, regained some of her warmth and animation, said: "It is winter. I feel dead. But I know the spring will come again."
The work of grief was slow, but successful, as Rebecca, even when most stricken, antic.i.p.ated. It was greatly helped by a sym- pathetic and supportive great aunt, a sister of her Grannie, who now moved into the house. It was greatly helped by the synagogue, and the religious community, above all by the rites of "sitting shiva", and the special status accorded her as the bereaved one, the chief mourner. It was helped too perhaps by her speaking freely to me. And it was helped also, interestingly, by dreams, which she related with animation, and which clearly marked stages in the grief-work (see Peters, 1983).
As I remember her, like Nina, in the April sun, so I remember her, etched with tragic clearness, in the dark November of that year, standing in a bleak cemetery in Queens, saying the Kaddish over her grandmother"s grave. Prayers and Bible stories had always appealed to her, going with the happy, the lyrical, the "blessing" side of her life. Now, in the funeral prayers, in the 103rd Psalm, and above all in the Kaddish, she found the right and only words for her comfort and lamentation.
During the intervening months (between my first seeing her, in April, and her grandmother"s death that November) Rebecca- like all our "clients" (an odious word then becoming fashionable, supposedly less degrading than "patients"), was pressed into a variety of workshops and cla.s.ses, as part of our Developmental and Cognitive Drive (these too were "in" terms at the time).
It didn"t work with Rebecca, it didn"t work with most of them. It was not, I came to think, the right thing to do, because what we did was to drive them full-tilt upon their limitations, as had already been done, futilely, and often to the point of cruelty, throughout their lives.
We paid far too much attention to the defects of our patients, as Rebecca was the first to tell me, and far too little to what was intact or preserved. To use another piece of jargon, we were far too concerned with "defectology", and far too little with "narratol-ogy", the neglected and needed science of the concrete.
Rebecca made clear, by concrete ill.u.s.trations, by her own self, the two wholly different, wholly separate, forms of thought and mind, "paradigmatic" and "narrative" (in Bruner"s terminology). And though equally natural and native to the expanding human mind, the narrative comes first, has spiritual priority. Very young chil- dren love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost non-existent. It is this narrative or symbolic power which gives a sense of the world-a concrete reality in the imaginative form of symbol and story- when abstract thought can provide nothing at all. A child follows the Bible before he follows Euclid. Not because the Bible is simpler (the reverse might be said), but because it is cast in a symbolic and narrative mode.
And in this way Rebecca, at nineteen, was still, as her grandmother said, "just like a child". Like a child, but not a child, because she was adult. (The term "r.e.t.a.r.ded" suggests a persisting child, the term "mentally defective" a defective adult; both terms, both concepts, combine deep truth and falsity.) With Rebecca-and with other defectives allowed, or encouraged in, a personal development-the emotional and narrative and symbolic powers can develop strongly and exuberantly, and may produce (as in Rebecca) a sort of natural poet-or (as in Jose) a sort of natural artist-while the paradigmatic or conceptual powers, manifestly feeble from the start, grind very slowly and painfully along, and are only capable of a very limited and stunted development.
Rebecca realised this fully-as she had shown it to me so clearly, right from the very first day I saw her, when she spoke of her clumsiness, and of how her ill-composed and ill-organised movements became well-organised, composed and fluent, with music; and when she showed me how she herself was composed by a natural scene, a scene with an organic, aesthetic and dramatic unity and sense.
Rather suddenly, after her grandmother"s death, she became clear and decisive. "I want no more cla.s.ses, no more workshops," she said. "They do nothing for me. They do nothing to bring me together." And then, with that power for the apt model or metaphor I so admired, and which was so well developed in her despite her low IQ, she looked down at the office carpet and said: "I"m like a sort of living carpet. I need a pattern, a design, like you have on that carpet. I come apart, I unravel, unless there"s a design." I looked down at the carpet, as Rebecca said this, and found myself thinking of Sherrington"s famous image, comparing the brain/mind to an "enchanted loom", weaving patterns ever-dissolving, but always with meaning. I thought: can one have a raw carpet without a design? Could one have the design without the carpet (but this seemed like the smile without the Cheshire cat)? A "living" carpet, as Rebecca was, had to have both-and she especially, with her lack of schematic structure (the warp and woof, the knit, of the carpet, so to speak), might indeed unravel without a design (the scenic or narrative structure of the carpet).
"I must have meaning," she went on. "The cla.s.ses, the odd jobs have no meaning . . . What I really love," she added wistfully, "is the theatre."
We removed Rebecca from the workshop she hated, and managed to enroll her in a special theatre group. She loved this-it composed her; she did amazingly well: she became a complete person, poised, fluent, with style, in each role. And now if one sees Rebecca on stage, for theatre and the theatre group soon became her life, one would never even guess that she was mentally defective.
Postscript The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing-suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the r.e.t.a.r.ded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music-the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music. The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia-an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways. This pro- cedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the instructor. All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs.
What we see, fundamentally, is the power of music to organise-and to do this efficaciously (as well as joyfully!), when abstract or schematic forms of organisation fail. Indeed, it is especially dramatic, as one would expect, precisely when no other form of organisation will work. Thus music, or any other form of narrative, is essential when working with the r.e.t.a.r.ded or apraxic-schooling or therapy for them must be centred on music or something equivalent. And in drama there is still more-there is the power of role to give organisation, to confer, while it lasts, an entire personality. The capacity to perform, to play, to be, seems to be a "given" in human life, in a way which has nothing to do with intellectual differences. One sees this with infants, one sees it with the senile, and one sees it, most poignantly, with the Rebeccas of this world.
22.
A Walking Grove Martin A., aged 61, was admitted to our Home towards the end of 1983, having become Parkinsonian and unable to look after himself any longer. He had had a nearly fatal meningitis in infancy, which caused r.e.t.a.r.dation, impulsiveness, seizures, and some spasticity on one side. He had very limited schooling, but a remarkable musical education-his father was a famous singer at the Met.
He lived with his parents until their death, and thereafter eked out a marginal living as a messenger, a porter, and a short-order cook-whatever he could do before he was fired, as he invariably was, because of his slowness, dreaminess or incompetence. It would have been a dull and disheartening life, had it not been for his remarkable musical gifts and sensibilities, and the joy this brought him-and others.
He had an amazing musical memory-"I know more than 2,000 operas," he told me on one occasion-although he had never learned or been able to read music. Whether this would have been possible or not was not clear-he had always depended on his extraordinary ear, his power to retain an opera or an oratorio after a single hearing. Unfortunately his voice was not up to his ear-being tuneful, but gruff, with some spastic dysphonia. His innate, hereditary musical gift had clearly survived the ravages of meningitis and brain-damage-or had it? Would he have been a Caruso if undamaged? Or was his musical development, to some extent, a "compensation" for brain-damage and intellectual limitations? We shall never know. What is certain is that his father transmitted not only his musical genes, but his own great love for music, in the intimacy of a father-son relationship, and perhaps the specially tender relation of a parent to a r.e.t.a.r.ded child. Martin-slow, clumsy-was loved by his father, and pa.s.sionately loved him in return; and their love was cemented by their shared love for music.
The great sorrow of Martin"s life was that he could not follow his father, and be a famous opera and oratorio singer like him- but this was not an obsession, and he found, and gave, much pleasure with what he could do. He was consulted, even by the famous, for his remarkable memory, which extended beyond the music itself to all the details of performance. He enjoyed a modest fame as a "walking encyclopedia", who knew not only the music of two thousand operas, but all the singers who had taken the roles in countless performances, and all the details of scenery, staging, dress and decor. (He also prided himself on a street-by-street, house-by-house, knowledge of New York-and knowing the routes of all its buses and trains.) Thus, he was an opera-buff, and something of an "idiot savant" too. He took a certain child-like pleasure in all this-the pleasure of such eidetics and freaks. But the real joy- and the only thing that made life supportable-was actual partic.i.p.ation in musical events, singing in the choirs at local churches (he could not sing solo, to his grief, because of his dysphonia), especially in the grand events at Easter and Christmas, the John and Matthew Pa.s.sions, the Christmas Oratorio, the Messiah, which he had done for fifty years, boy and man, in the great churches and cathedrals of the city. He had also sung at the Met, and, when it was pulled down, at Lincoln Center, discreetly concealed amid the vast choruses of Wagner and Verdi.
At such times-in the oratorios and pa.s.sions most of all, but also in the humbler church choirs and chorales-as he soared up into the music Martin forgot that he was "r.e.t.a.r.ded", forgot all the sadness and badness of his life, sensed a great s.p.a.ciousness enfold him, felt himself both a true man and a true child of G.o.d.
Martin"s world-his inner world-what sort of a world did he have? He had very little knowledge of the world at large, at least very little living knowledge, and no interest at all. If a page of an encyclopedia or newspaper was read to him, or a map of Asia"s rivers or New York"s subways shown to him, it was recorded, instantly, in his eidetic memory. But he had no relation to these eidetic recordings-they were "a-centric", to use Richard Woll-heim"s term, without him, without anyone, or anything, as a living centre. There seemed little or no emotion in such memories-no more emotion than there is in a street-map of New York-nor did they connect, or ramify, or get generalised, in any way. Thus his eidetic memory-the freak part of him-did not in itself form, or convey any sense of, a "world". It was without unity, without feeling, without relation to himself. It was physiological, one felt, like a memory-core or memory-bank, but not part of a real and personal living self.
And yet, even here, there was a single and striking exception, at once his most prodigious, most personal, and most pious deed of memory. He knew by heart Grove"s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the immense nine-volume edition published in 1954- indeed he was a "walking Grove". His father was ageing and somewhat ailing by then, could no longer sing actively, but spent most of his time at home, playing his great collection of vocal records on the phonograph, going through and singing all his scores- which he did with his now thirty-year-old son (in the closest and most affectionate communion of their lives), and reading aloud Grove"s dictionary-all six thousand pages of it-which, as he read, was indelibly printed upon his son"s limitlessly retentive, if illiterate, cortex. Grove, thereafter, was "heard" in his father"s voice- and could never be recollected by him without emotion.
Such prodigious hypertrophies of eidetic memory, especially if employed or exploited "professionally", sometimes seem to oust the real self, or to compete with it, and impede its development. And if there is no depth, no feeling, there is also no pain in such memories-and so they can serve as an "escape" from reality. This clearly occurred, to a great extent, in Luria"s Mnemonist, and is poignantly described in the last chapter of his book. It obviously occurred, to some extent, in Martin A., Jose, and the Twins but was also, in each case, used for reality, even "super-reality"-an exceptional, intense, and mystical sense of the world . . .
Eidetics apart, what of his world generally? It was, in many respects, small, petty, nasty, and dark-the world of a r.e.t.a.r.date who had been teased and left out as a child, and then hired and fired, contemptuously, from menial jobs, as a man: the world of someone who had rarely felt himself, or felt regarded as, a proper child or man.
He was often childish, sometimes spiteful, and p.r.o.ne to sudden tantrums-and the language he then used was that of a child. "I"ll throw a mudpie in your face!" I once heard him scream, and, occasionally, he spat or struck out. He sniffed, he was dirty, he blew snot on his sleeve-he had the look (and doubtless the feelings) at such times of a small, snotty child. These childish characteristics, topped off by his irritating, eidetic showing off, endeared him to n.o.body. He soon became unpopular in the Home, and found himself shunned by many of the residents. A crisis was developing, with Martin regressing weekly and daily, and n.o.body was quite sure, at first, what to do. It was at first put down to "adjustment difficulties", such as all patients may experience on giving up independent living outside, and coming into a "Home". But Sister felt there was something more specific at work-"something gnawing him, a sort of hunger, a gnawing hunger we can"t a.s.suage. It"s destroying him," she continued. "We have to do something."
So, in January, for the second time, I went to see Martin-and found a very different man: no longer c.o.c.ky, showing off, as before, but obviously pining, in spiritual and a sort of physical pain.
"What is it?" I said. "What is the matter?"
"I"ve got to sing," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "I can"t live without it. And it"s not just music-I can"t pray without it." And then, suddenly, with a flash of his old memory: " "Music, to Bach, was the apparatus of worship", Grove article on Bach, page 304 . . . I"ve never spent a Sunday," he continued, more gently, reflectively, "without going to church, without singing in the choir. I first went there, with my father, when I was old enough to walk, and I continued going after his death in 1955. I"ve got to go," he said fiercely. "It"ll kill me if I don"t."
"And go you shall," I said. "We didn"t know what you were missing."
The church was not far from the Home, and Martin was welcomed back-not only as a faithful member of the congregation and the choir, but as the brains and adviser of the choir that his father had been before him.
With this, life suddenly and dramatically changed. Martin had resumed his proper place, as he felt it. He could sing, he could worship, in Bach"s music, every Sunday, and also enjoy the quiet authority that was accorded him.
"You see," he told me, on my next visit, without c.o.c.kiness, but as a simple matter of fact, "they know I know all Bach"s liturgical and choral music. I know all the church cantatas-all 202 that Grove lists-and which Sundays and Holy Days they should be sung on. We are the only church in the diocese with a real orchestra and choir, the only one where all of Bach"s vocal works are regularly sung. We do a cantata every Sunday-and we are going to do the Matthew Pa.s.sion this Easter!"
I thought it curious and moving that Martin, a r.e.t.a.r.date, should have this great pa.s.sion for Bach. Bach seemed so intellectual- and Martin was a simpleton. What I did not realise, until I started bringing in ca.s.settes of the cantatas, and once of the Magnificat, when I visited, was that for all his intellectual limitations Martin"s musical intelligence was fully up to appreciating much of the technical complexity of Bach; but, more than this-that it wasn"t a question of intelligence at all. Bach lived for him, and he lived in Bach.
Martin did, indeed, have "freak" musical abilities-but they were only freak-like if removed from their right and natural context.
What was central to Martin, as it had been central for his father, and what had been intimately shared between them, was always the spirit of music, especially religious music, and of the voice as the divine instrument made and ordained to sing, to raise itself in jubilation and praise.
Martin became a different man, then, when he returned to song and church-recovered himself, recollected himself, became real again. The pseudo-persons-the stigmatised r.e.t.a.r.date, the snotty, spitting boy-disappeared; as did the irritating, emotionless, im- personal eidetic. The real person reappeared, a dignified, decent man, respected and valued now by the other residents.
But the marvel, the real marvel, was to see Martin when he was actually singing, or in communion with music-listening with an intentness which verged on rapture-"a man in his wholeness wholly attending". At such times-it was the same with Rebecca when she acted, or Jose when he drew, or the Twins in their strange numerical communion-Martin was, in a word, transformed. All that was defective or pathological fell away, and one saw only absorption and animation, wholeness and health.
Postscript When I wrote this piece, and the two succeeding ones, I wrote solely out of my own experience, with almost no knowledge of the literature on the subject, indeed with no knowledge that there was a large literature (see, for example, the fifty-two references in Lewis Hill, 1974). I only got an inkling of it, often baffling and intriguing, after "The Twins" was first published, when I found myself inundated with letters and offprints.
In particular, my attention was drawn to a beautiful and detailed case-study by David Viscott (1970). There are many similarities between Martin and his patient Harriet G. In both cases there were extraordinary powers-which were sometimes used in an "a-centric" or life-denying way, sometimes in a life-affirming and creative way: thus, after her father had read it to her, Harriet retained the first three pages of the Boston Telephone Directory ("and for several years could give any number on these pages on request"); but, in a wholly different, and strikingly creative, mode she could compose, and improvise, in the style of any composer.
It is clear that both-like the Twins (see the next chapter)- could be pushed, or drawn, into the sort of mechanical feats considered typical of "idiot savants"-feats at once prodigious and meaningless; but that both also (like the Twins), when not pushed or drawn in this fashion, showed a consistent seeking after beauty and order. Though Martin has an amazing memory for random, meaningless facts, his real pleasure comes from order and coher- ence, whether it be the musical and spiritual order of a cantata, or the encyclopedic order of Grove. Both Bach and Grove communicate a world. Martin, indeed, has no world but music-as is the case with Viscott"s patient-but this world is a real world), makes him real, can transform him. This is marvellous to see with Martin-and it was evidently no less so with Harriet G: This ungainly, awkward, inelegant lady, this overgrown five-year-old, became absolutely transformed when I asked her to perform for a seminar at Boston State Hospital. She sat down demurely, stared quietly at the keyboard until we all grew silent, and brought her hands slowly to the keyboard and let them rest a moment. Then she nodded her head and began to play with all the feeling and movement of a concert performer. From that moment she was another person.
One speaks of "idiot savants" as if they had an odd "knack" or talent of a mechanical sort, with no real intelligence or understanding. This, indeed, was what I first thought with Martin-and continued to think until I brought in the Magnificat. Only then did it finally become clear to me that Martin could grasp the full complexity of such a work, and that it was not just a knack, or a remarkable rote memory at work, but a genuine and powerful musical intelligence. I was particularly interested, therefore, after this book was first published, to receive a fascinating article by L. K. Miller of Chicago ent.i.tled "Sensitivity to Tonal Structure in a Developmentally Disabled Musical Savant" (presented at the Psychonomics Society, Boston, November 1985; currently in press). Meticulous study of this five-year-old prodigy, with severe mental and other handicaps due to maternal rubella, showed not rote memory of a mechanical sort, but ". . . impressive sensitivity to the rules governing composition, particularly the role of different notes in determining (diatonic) key-structure . . . (implying) implicit knowledge of structural rules in a generative sense: that is, rules not limited to the specific examples provided by one"s experience." This, I am convinced, is the case with Martin, too- and one must wonder whether it may not be true of all "idiot savants": that they may be truly and creatively intelligent, and not just have a mechanical "knack", in the specific realms-musical, numerical, visual, whatever-in which they excel. It is the intelligence of a Martin, a Jose, the Twins, albeit in a special and narrow area, that finally forces itself on one; and it is this intelligence that must be recognised and nurtured.