Art Update

"Everything is all right."

I am currently reading the book "Hallucinations" by Oliver Sacks. I came upon a passage that I thought was emotional and it moved me. I would like to share it.

Ray P. wrote to me after his father died at the age of eighty five, following a heart operation. Although Ray had rushed to the hospital, his father had already lapsed into a coma. An hour before his father died, Ray whispered to him: 'Dad, it's Ray. I'll take care of mom. Don't worry, everything is going to be alright.' A few nights later, Ray wrote, he was awakened by an apparition:

'I awoke in the night. I did not feel groggy or disoriented and my thoughts and vision were clear. I saw someone sitting on the corner of my bed. It was my Dad, wearing his khaki slacks and tan polo shirt. I was lucid enough to wonder initially if this could be a dream but I was certainly awake. He was opaque, not ethereal in any way, the nighttime Baltimore light pollution in the window behind him did not show through.He sat there for a moment and then said "Everything is all right."'

The Case of Mr. Thompson

This is the most brutal and depressing description of someone's mental condition I have ever read. This sounds like a nightmare. The worst part is the patient not even having the cognitive ability to realize the state that he is in.

The author is describing the patient "Mr. Thompson." The patient is unable to form new memories and his working memory is essentially a few seconds long. He forgets everything after that brief duration and has to start from the beginning over, and over, and over, and over again.

The following quotes are from the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.

He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world. Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant--there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr. Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him--an Arabian Nights world, a phantasmagoria, a dream, of ever-changing people, figures, situations--continual, kaleidoscopic mutations and transformations.

[He was] continually creating a world and a self, to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost. Such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment... Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy--hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives, in a pseduo-continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms...

Here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing--and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him...

He can never stop running, for the breach in memory, in existence, in meaning, is never healed but has to be bridged, to be 'patched', every second. And the bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance, fail to work--because they are confabulations, fictions, which cannot do service for reality, while also failing to correspond with reality...

Our efforts to cure Mr. Thompson will all fail--even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out in the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in its quietness, he recovers his own quiet. The presence of others, other people, excite and rattle him, force him into an endless, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and seeking; the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity-delirium to relax, to subside, and by their quiet, non-human self sufficiency and completeness allow him a rare quietness and self-sufficiency of his own, by offering (beneath, or beyond, all merely human identities and relations) a deep wordless communion with Nature itself, and with this the restored sense of being in the world, being real.

Tribute to Oliver Sacks

It's painful to accept the fact that this amazing human being is terminally ill and is going to pass away soon. Dr. Oliver Sacks has lived a rich, fulfilling, and relentlessly unapologetic life. This drawing is my tribute to him and my way of saying goodbye to someone who I greatly admire. I rarely call any specific individual an inspiration but Dr. Sacks is an exception. His infinite curiosity and love of learning is a constant reminder for me to strive to be the same way and I will forever remember him.

For anyone who hasn't read his recent autobiography, I HIGHLY recommend it:

On the Move: A Life


I also recommend reading his two most recent articles in the New York Times. He discusses the beauty of life and how little of it he has left. His writing is very emotional, thoughtful, and philosophical:

My Own Life

My Periodic Table