The Space City is getting a visitor.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks is coming to Seattle on Oct. 19 to talk about “the future of health.”
Sacks wrote a lot of short stories about the imaginary worlds of his mental patients, which like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Rain Man give us some serious insight into the worlds of people who roam this earth with different mental abilities.
One story in particular has remained with me since it was required reading for a color theory class I took at Pratt Institute. Before we even went around the room to say Hi My Name Is, Professor Jenny Lynn McNutt told us to 1) go see the Jasper Johns show at the Museum of Modern Art and 2) read Oliver Sacks’ The Case of the Colorblind Painter.
I loved it.
In fact most all of the stories on both sides of this one in Sacks’ collection An Anthropologist on Mars remind me of the lush imaginary landscapes of sci fi writers like Asimov and Sagan: people who inspired and influenced when I was young.
Reading Sacks made me see that quite fascinating “other worlds” like the ones from my paperback sci fi novels actually thrive right here on earth. They exist in people’s heads.
Sense, perception, and our understandings of reality… all of it is in flux all the time, and the ways in which we consider what’s “true” around us rest largely with the chemicals swimming about in our minds.
Right?
Here’s a passage from Colorblind Painter:
As soon as he entered, he found his entire studio, which was hung with brilliantly colored paintings, now utterly grey and void of color. His canvases, the abstract color paintings he was known for, were now greyish or black and white.
His paintings–once rich with associations, feelings, meanings–now looked unfamiliar and meaningless to him. At this point the magnitude of his loss overwhelmed him…
He had spent his entire life as a painter; now even his art was without meaning, and he could no longer imagine how to go on. –Oliver Sacks, The Case of the Colorblind Painter, in An Anthropologist On Mars.
Future of Health: Oliver Sacks
Friday, October 19 :: 7 pm
Seattle Public Library
FreeReferences:
OliverSacks.com
*** The title of the talk has been changed to “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” as of Tuesday this week, as far as we know. Sounds a LOT more interesting, IMO –AM
one of the best examples of writing in the genre (of doctors trying to be writers) is kay jamison’s ‘an unquiet mind’. a poetry professor proofread it and, i think as a result, its very lyrical.
for what its worth, i’d still turn to artists for the best examples, in first person, of mental illness (example - townes van zandt).
Thanks for these examples, Robin.
I once took a psychiatrist along to see this Picasso show at the Guggenheim in New York. It was during the same era I was checking out SoHo galleries and getting introduced to Oliver Sacks.
While the bulk of visitors oohed and ahhed (”This is Picasso, I’m supposed to be amazed, right?”), my companion stared at them with visible discomfort. Then spoke:
“These paintings look like stuff my patients make.”
Mental patients!
Is being crazy a pre-requisite for being an artist?
Maybe. But there’s also this annoying tendency in this culture (and others) where you feel this pressure to “act the part” and be crazy if you want people to take you seriously as an artist.
While it is just annoying to amusing when amateurs “pretend” to be artists by acting crazy, I think that same pressure contributes to many real artists’ hurting themselves and others (van zandt being a good example, i think?).
What do the doctors think?
I don’t think just because one is an artist, it necessarily follows that she is insane.
I wrote a post recently about Elizabeth Gilbert’s comments on becoming a writer, which touches on this point, after reading her book Eat Pray Love.
Could you please provide the correct time, and date for the Oliver Sacks Lecture, thanks (October 19th is a Sunday, not a Friday, and I’m making flight reservations to attend this, thanks, darci
Darci,
This happened in 2007…