Man Who MIstook His Wife for a Hat (7 page)

   of a faulty and fallible mechanism-that of meaningless sequences and memory traces-but was absorbed in an act, an act of his whole being, which carried feeling and meaning in an organic continuity and unity, a continuity and unity so seamless it could not permit any break.

   Clearly Jimmie found himself, found continuity and reality, in the absoluteness of spiritual attention and act. The Sisters were right-he did find his soul here. And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: 'A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being … It is here . . . you may touch him, and see a profound change.' Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.

   But perhaps 'moral' was too narrow a word-for the aesthetic and dramatic were equally involved. Seeing Jim in the chapel opened my eyes to other realms where the soul is called on, and held, and stilled, in attention and communion. The same depth of absorption and attention was to be seen in relation to music and art: he had no difficulty, I noticed, 'following' music or simple dramas, for every moment in music and art refers to, contains, other moments. He liked gardening, and had taken over some of the work in our garden. At first he greeted the garden each day as new, but for some reason this had become more familiar to him than the inside of the Home. He almost never got lost or disoriented in the garden now; he patterned it, I think, on loved and remembered gardens from his youth in Connecticut.

   Jimmie, who was so lost in extensional 'spatial' time, was perfectly organised in Bergsonian 'intentional' time; what was fugitive, unsustainable, as formal structure, was perfectly stable, perfectly held, as art or will. Moreover, there was something that endured and survived. If Jimmie was briefly 'held' by a task or puzzle or game or calculation, held in the purely mental challenge of these, he would fall apart as soon as they were done, into the abyss of his nothingness, his amnesia. But if he was held in emotional and spiritual attention-in the contemplation of nature or art, in listening to music, in taking part in the Mass in chapel-the attention, its 'mood', its quietude, would persist for a while, and there

   would be in him a pensiveness and peace we rarely, if ever, saw during the rest of his life at the Home.

   I have known Jimmie now for nine years-and neuropsychologically, he has not changed in the least. He still has the severest, most devastating Korsakov's, cannot remember isolated items for more than a few seconds, and has a dense amnesia going back to 1945. But humanly, spiritually, he is at times a different man altogether-no longer fluttering, restless, bored, and lost, but deeply attentive to the beauty and soul of the world, rich in all the Kier-kegaardian categories-and aesthetic, the moral, the religious, the dramatic. I had wondered, when I first met him, if he was not condemned to a sort of 'Humean' froth, a meaningless fluttering on the surface of life, and whether there was any way of transcending the incoherence of his Humean disease. Empirical science told me there was not-but empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being. Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov's, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.

   
Postscript

   I know now that retrograde amnesia, to some degree, is very common, if not universal, in cases of Korsakov's. The classical Korsakov's syndrome-a profound and permanent, but 'pure', devastation of memory caused by alcoholic destruction of the mammillary bodies- is rare, even among very heavy drinkers. One may, of course, see Korsakov's syndrome with other pathologies, as in Luria's patients with tumours. A particularly fascinating case of an acute (and mercifully transient) Korsakov's syndrome has been well described only very recently in the so-called Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) which may occur with migraines, head injuries or impaired blood supply to the brain. Here, for a few minutes or hours, a severe and

   singular amnesia may occur, even though the patient may continue to drive a car, or, perhaps, to carry on medical or editorial duties, in a mechanical way. But under this fluency lies a profound amnesia- every sentence uttered being forgotten as soon as it is said, everything forgotten within a few minutes of being seen, though long-established memories and routines may be perfectly preserved. (Some remarkable videotapes of patients
during TGAs
have recently [1986] been made by Dr John Hodges, of Oxford.)

   Further, there may be a profound retrograde amnesia in such cases. My colleague Dr. Leon Protass tells me of a case seen by him recently, in which a highly intelligent man was unable for some hours to remember his wife or children, to remember that he had a wife or children. In effect, he lost thirty years of his life- though, fortunately, for only a few hours. Recovery from such attacks is prompt and complete-yet they are, in a sense, the most horrifying of 'little strokes' in their power absolutely to annul or obliterate decades of richly lived, richly achieving, richly memo-ried life. The horror, typically, is only felt by others-the patient, unaware, amnesiac for his amnesia, may continue what he is doing, quite unconcerned, and only discover later that he lost not only a day (as is common with ordinary alcoholic 'blackouts'), but half a lifetime, and never knew it. The fact that one can lose the greater part of a lifetime has peculiar, uncanny horror.

   In adulthood, life, higher life, may be brought to a premature end by strokes, senility, brain injuries, etc., but there usually remains the consciousness of life lived, of one's past. This is usually felt as a sort of compensation: 'At least I lived fully, tasting life to the full, before I was brain-injured, stricken, etc.' This sense of 'the life lived before', which may be either a consolation or a torment, is precisely what is taken away in retrograde amnesia. The 'final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life' that Bunuel speaks of may occur, perhaps, in a terminal dementia, but not, in my experience, suddenly, in consequence of a stroke. But there is a different, yet comparable, sort of amnesia, which can occur suddenly-different in that it is not 'global' but 'modality-specific'.

   Thus, in one patient under my care, a sudden thrombosis in

   the posterior circulation of the brain caused the immediate death of the visual parts of the brain. Forthwith this patient became completely blind-but did not know it. He looked blind-but he made no complaints. Questioning and testing showed, beyond doubt, that not only was he centrally or 'cortically' blind, but he had lost all visual images and memories, lost them totally-yet had no sense of any loss. Indeed, he had lost the very idea of seeing-and was not only unable to describe anything visually, but bewildered when I used words such as 'seeing' and 'light.' He had become, in essence, a non-visual being. His entire lifetime of seeing, of visuality, had, in effect, been stolen. His whole visual life had, indeed, been erased-and erased permanently in the instant of his stroke. Such a visual amnesia, and (so to speak) blindness to the blindness, amnesia for the amnesia, is in effect a 'total' Korsakov's, confined to visuality.

   A still more limited, but none the less total, amnesia may be displayed with regard to particular forms of perception, as in the last chapter, 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat'. There there was an absolute 'prosopagnosia', or agnosia for faces. This patient was not only unable to recognise faces, but unable to imagine or remember any faces-he had indeed lost the very idea of a 'face', as my more afflicted patient had lost the very ideas of'seeing' or 'light.' Such syndromes were described by Anton in the 1890s. But the implication of these syndromes-Korsakov's and Anton's-what they entail and must entail for the world, the lives, the identities of affected patients, has been scarcely touched on even to this day.

   In Jimmie's case, we had sometimes wondered how he might respond if taken back to his home town-in effect, to his pre-amnesia days- but the little town in Connecticut had become a booming city with the years. Later I did have occasion to find out what might happen in such circumstances, though this was with another patient with Korsakov's, Stephen R., who had become acutely ill in 1980 and whose retrograde amnesia went back only two years or so. With this patient, who also had severe seizures, spasticity and other problems necessitating in-patient care, rare weekend visits to his home revealed

   a poignant situation. In hospital he could recognise nobody and nothing, and was in an almost ceaseless frenzy of disorientation. But when his wife took him home, to his house which was in effect a 'time-capsule' of his pre-amnesia days, he felt instantly at home. He recognised everything, tapped the barometer, checked the thermostat, took his favourite armchair, as he used to do. He spoke of neighbours, shops, the local pub, a nearby cinema, as they had been in the mid-Seventies. He was distressed and puzzled if the smallest changes were made in the house. ('You changed the curtains today!' he once expostulated to his wife. 'How come? So suddenly? They were green this morning.' But they had not been green since 1978.) He recognised most of the neighbouring houses and shops-they had changed little between 1978 and 1983-but was bewildered by the 'replacement' of the cinema ('How could they tear it down and put up a supermarket
overnight?').
He recognised friends and neighbours-but found them oddly older than he expected ('Old so-and-so! He's really showing his age. Never noticed it before. How come everyone's showing their age today?'). But the real poignancy, the horror, would occur when his wife brought him back-brought him, in a fantastic and unaccountable manner (so he felt), to a strange home he had never seen, full of strangers, and then left him. 'What are you doing?' he would scream, terrified and confused. 'What in the hell
is
this place? What the hell's going on?' These scenes were almost unbearable to watch, and must have seemed like madness, or nightmare, to the patient. Mercifully perhaps he would forget them within a couple of minutes.

   Such patients, fossilised in the past, can only be at home, oriented, in the past. Time, for them, has come to a stop. I hear Stephen R. screaming with terror and confusion when he returns-screaming for a past which no longer exists. But what can we do? Can we create a time-capsule, a fiction? Never have I known a patient so confronted, so tormented, by anachronism, unless it was the 'Rose R.' of
Awakenings
(see 'Incontinent Nostalgia', Chapter Sixteen).

   Jimmie has reached a sort of calm; William (Chapter Twelve) continually confabulates; but Stephen has a gaping time-wound, an agony that will never heal.

   
3

   The Disembodied Lady

   The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.

   –Wittgenstein

   What Wittgenstein writes here, of epistemology, might apply to aspects of one's physiology and psychology-especially in regard to what Sherrington once called 'our secret sense, our sixth sense'- that continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of our body (muscles, tendons, joints), by which their position and tone and motion are continually monitored and adjusted, but in a way which is hidden from us because it is automatic and unconscious.

   Our other senses-the five senses-are open and obvious; but this-our hidden sense-had to be discovered, as it was, by Sherrington, in the 1890s. He named it 'proprioception', to distinguish it from 'exteroception' and 'interoception', and, additionally, because of its indispensability for our sense of
ourselves;
for it is only by courtesy of proprioception, so to speak, that we feel our bodies as proper to us, as our 'property', as our own. (Sherrington 1906, 1940.)

   What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.

   Jonathan Miller produced a beautiful television series,
The Body

   
in Question,
but the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question-they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, its certainty, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty. Thus, in his last book
(On Certainty),
he opens by saying: 'If you do know that
here is one hand,
we'll grant you all the rest.' But then, in the same breath, on the same opening page: 'What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it . . . '; and, a little later, 'Can I doubt it? Grounds for
doubt
are lacking!'

   Indeed, his book might be titled
On Doubt,
for it is marked by doubting, no less than affirming. Specifically, he wonders-and one in turn may wonder whether these thoughts were perhaps incited by his working with patients, in a hospital, in the war- he wonders whether there might be situations or conditions which take away the certainty of the body, which do give one grounds to doubt's one body, perhaps indeed to lose one's entire body in total doubt. This thought seems to haunt his last book like a nightmare.

   Christina was a strapping young woman of twenty-seven, given to hockey and riding, self-assured, robust, in body and mind. She had two young children, and worked as a computer programmer at home. She was intelligent and cultivated, fond of the ballet, and of the Lakeland poets (but not, I would think, of Wittgenstein). She had an active, full life-had scarcely known a day's illness. Somewhat to her surprise, after an attack of abdominal pain, she was found to have gallstones, and removal of the gallbladder was advised.