What a Way to the World

It’s pretty hard to recollect the crucial info that connects us to the everyday world. I’m obsessed with making connections in conversations; so, I got to remember what I’ve read. This is posing a peculiar problem because there are so many thoughts battling to overpower each other and emerge triumphant to be uttered out. However, I was afraid that this was some kind of neurological disorder – until I read the wonderful neurologist, Oliver Sacks (b. 1933).

In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he talks about the “clinical tale” of a musician-singer-painter, who has a damaged cognitive faculty of recognition (in the neurological jargon, agnosia.)

For this musician, music helps him make out and live life. One of the prominent ways in which he identifies others is through a unique use of music. He knows who his student is by his voice or the way his body twirls like music. For him, everyone is faceless. This musician has become incapable of recognizing the reality except that he does it in abstract ways. Concreteness has bid farewell to his life; abstractness was there to stay.

The various ways in which Sacks arrives at this conclusion are amazing. Sacks points out to the musician’s chain of paintings that was painted over a time. Sacks calls these “wall of paintings…a pathological exhibit, which belonged to neurology, not art.”

Earlier, the paintings had a resounding realism that gradually got eclipsed by obscure abstract cubist illustrations. This turn in thoughts had actually teamed up with his everyday living so much so that life had become a mirror of his thoughts. The simplest couldn’t be easily grasped; he had to grope with it through his system of abstract thinking.

Generally speaking, the patient “recognized familiars only by their voices.” Music was the feature of the voice; various modulations in voice were the indices by which the guy recognized people.

In a sense, the guy had totally lost the world as representation and just was living in it through music and certain other unique features in life. For example, he identified Einstein – but not his family or anyone closely related! – because of his uncommon hairstyle and moustache.

I was wondering how one could be so away from the usual way of living with the world and yet live in this world with alternative ways of recognition. Neurologically, his visual cortex may be damaged but his extra-fascinating ways of recognition are awesome. Sacks regrets that he was unable to treat him. But by leaving the patient for himself and his way of seeing the world through music, Sacks indeed had allowed an alternative lifestyle to live and experiment. I’m not suggesting that these disorders must become commonplace or one has to strive to get affected by such disorders or “deficits.” But, I’m quite amazed at the marvelous and gifted disorder!