Oliver Sacks’s Speed
Being allergic to stuff you don’t understand, you may appreciate my conundrum
This essay comes from Sack’s last essay collection, The River of Consciousness, published posthumously in 2017. The book’s blurb says Sachs is “the poet laureate of medicine.” Far out, man.
What I like about that book promo is the incongruity. I thought doctors were trained to be medical dweebs in white gowns with an anal thermometer at the ready — oh, forgive me, those are vets.
Oliver Sacks’s Speed is a story that runs a fair piece from where it starts. You can hardly call it ‘short form.’ Goodreads has it listed under biography, and the Amazon ad says it’s a book of short stories — implying Oliver wrote fiction. These are essays, you dim wits, essays aiming for the heart of the matter — being alive in all its permutations.
Speed begins with Oliver’s boyhood fascination with an unusual preoccupation — how life is lived at different speeds. He does this while telling something of his younger days. Falling into the story, you’re given the impression Sacks is a bright and easily understood person. Misimpression, that second part.
As a kid, I wasn’t thinking past the next football game with my neighbor, Barry. I wasn’t thinking more than necessary about school work either. Ubiquitous commentators are now saying boys take a bit longer than girls to engage. Admittedly I didn’t like the nuns any more than they liked me. I had my suspicions their droning on about saints and angels was a stretch — with the moral always being how good Catholics needed to behave. You’d think they were training feral animals.
As I saw it, a god who would let a little boy lose his father when he needed him most wasn’t to be relied on. Let’s say I had my suspicions.
Ryan Holiday says the Stoics were on the practical side of life, versus dreaming up how an angel told Mary she got knocked up sleeping one night. “Bing! You got baby!” I knew zip about the process, but surely that couldn’t be it, and why was being a virgin so fantastic, anyway?
In grades school, the nuns taught us that Romans had nailed Jesus to a cross, so nothing good would come from any philosophy they’d think up — and we can skip over that grand European tradition of hating on the Jews. With a few more years under my belt, I’m thinking the Stoics might have had the more realistic argument.
Oliver Sachs had an early obsession with weight competitions. Blew his knee out doing squats with a ridiculous amount of weight and finally had to find something else to do with his time, so he became a neurologist. Not an uncomplicated man. And eventually a damn observant writer, which is what he’s remembered for. When you’ve reached the point in a career where Robin Williams is playing your character in a movie, you’ve made an impression. (see Awakenings)
“I wondered sometimes whether the speeds of animals and plants could be very different from what they were: how much they were constrained by internal limits — how much of external, the gravity of the earth, the amount of energy received from the sun, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere — and so on.” from The River of Consciousness, by Oliver Sacks
Sacks took up photography. And took to film so he could slow down bumblebees in flight to study how they did it. Huh. Normal daydreaming, right?
Sacks credits the 19th century philosopher, William James, with noting how time expands with some drugs — the essay morphs into a novella at this point. William was the older brother of Henry James, the novelist.
Huh. Did William ever share his hashish with his little brother, Henry? Was Henry James stoned while writing Washington Square, is that why it’s so pointless? Far out, man.
There’s the apocryphal story of Timothy Leary’s experiments with LSD — and the Moody Blues’ famous ballad line, “Timothy Leary is dead,” sung like a dirge to the drug. But Sachs mentions his own experiment with hashish only in passing to confirm what William James observed about time’s expansion on some drugs. I’ll attest to listening stoned in Miami to a Beethoven symphony and how it expanded time and my appreciation of ol’ Ludvig both.
With much skepticism, I read Carlos Castañeda’s trilogy on peyote teachings. I can’t speak from personal observation, but altered states of mind involving peyote probably won’t improve reality any more than nuns teaching about heaven and hell. The nuns mostly dwelled on hell, which is another kind of bad trip. From the way they would eye me, they weren’t betting I was going to rise up at no Second Coming.
Stories I’ve read of the opium dens of yore — how emaciated stoners lay dreaming on dirty cots — the worse was an inability to think coherently. That seemed nightmarish, despite Coleridge’s poem, Kubla Khan. Sacks arrives at a declarative statement about his being on hashish and time expanding. I can confirm that from the summer in Clemson when we had a steady supply of black hashish coming from a boat in Savannah.
I spent the entire afternoon that day at Clemson creating line drawings in a style I’d never tried before. These were spontaneous doodles possibly borrowed from The New Yorker’s Saul Steinberg, or Rolling Stone’s Ralph Steadman.
Steadman was a hero for the way his pen-and-ink drawings were able to translate Hunter Thompson’s gonzoid journalism, with ink splatters for emphasis. Hunter Thomspon’s persona had him threatening to rip the eyeballs out of anyone he came on, particularly if they were Establishment types. You had to wonder about the boy, but Steadman was beyond the Pale as they say.
The humor in the sketches I drew in quick succession was mine. Certainly aided by then-suspended left brain strictures I may have had left over from the Catholic school.
Around that same time I recall writing several scenes in a fantasy about the hero being stupefied for weeks in an open-air latticed room hung high over a river after losing his one true love and the hero’s sidekick has to haul him out of there to get sober. But writing a 200-line poem about a bloodthirsty invader? Coleridge never finished his opus either, but it’s taught in high school — though probably not in Texas.
In the middle of reading Speed, I noticed my copy had a sticker on the back cover saying it was purchased at the Frankfurt Airport. Which is curious, seeing D and I have never passed through the Frankfurt Airport. Passed through Stuttgart once on the way back to the States, but never Frankfurt. And I never travel stoned — that would make the nightmare worse — so the best I can surmise is I bought it online and was shipped a secondhand copy. Jeff Bezos’s booksellers aren’t the most scrupulous lot. Whatever’s left in the garage will do.
I also have an advance copy of Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, How Creativity Works, the book pulled from publication in a plagiarism scandal. Impressed by his earlier book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, I wasn’t going to let a little scandal stay me.
Lehrer had a gift for paring up disparate things, correlating where few have gone before (borrowed from Gene Rodenberry). When I read about the scandal involving Imagine, I called Jeff to order it — thus receiving my very own advance copy. What else are you going to do with a recalled book?
There’s not much humor about a Rhodes Scholar going off the rails. Seems I read about a Wharton School of Business rogue who went on to help his father run a racist development company in Queens before going on the fuck up the entire country.
Class, please tell me which is the mortal sin and who’s not going to heaven? Yes, William, that’s correct. You must have been paying attention for once.
I’m fascinated by how many different cultures are spread across the world. Each with its language and curiosities — though without exception, all suspect the Other. So I asked myself, did multiple humanoids evolve independently — arising many times from the proverbial mud fish? Doesn’t it seem improbable we all could have come from a common ancestor? And if not, the internal workings of our brains can’t possibly run on the same schematic.
For example, Irish boys just aren’t the same as Irish nuns, though I know for a fact Irish priests enjoy a regular-like tipple — having been an altar boy when the priest would whisper, “More wine!” while getting ready to raise the host, “Blood of Christ!” Transposing blood to wine is a good enough magic trick, if a touch ghoolish.
The nuns called it ‘transubstantiation.’ When you think on it, that’s far out, and you can pass that joint, brother. Lot’s of folks in my immediate circle were reading Carlos Castañeda — oh, you figured that out, did you?
Oliver Sachs’s essay, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, followed his work with a patient afflicted with the inability to correlate what his eyes were reporting with the correct notion — technically termed visual agnosia. This was published in another book of his essays (not short stories, Jeff).
Reading Sachs, I never got the impression he was looking down on the people with mental afflictions he was researching — much the opposite — he could see himself in all of them. While Jonah Lehrer’s writing comes across as brilliant, my impression is he’s riding a higher plane looking down.
Following after the literary praise for Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Lehrer’s close focus on the famous madeleine stunned me, how a single memory can stand for what we don’t know about the human mind. It’s sad hearing the outcome of Lehrer’s own story.
I expect Oliver Sachs is annoying the hell out of the angels with all his queries — and the nuns won’t have anything to do with him, given that he bats for the opposite side, and you know how those virgins get about even frontal sex.
Getting back to visual agnosia — when scientists want to term something, they always return to Latin to make it official — so are scientists secret Stoics at heart?
I got time; I can wait for an answer.
