The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, published 2017
The Creative Self
My favorite essay so far,
p141 Early in 1982, I received an unexpected packet from London containing a letter from Harold Pinter and the manuscript of a new play, A Kind of Alaska, which, he said, had been inspired by a case history of mine in Awakenings. In his letter, Pinter said that he had read my book when it originally came out in 1973 and had immediately wondered about the problems presented by a dramatic adaptation of this. But, seeing no ready solution to these problems, he had then forgotten about it. One morning eight years later, Pinter wrote, he had awoken with the first image and first words ("Something is happening") clear and pressing in his mind. The play had then "written itself" in the days and weeks that followed...
He contrasts this with yet another play about the same case history, written more quickly four years earlier by another playwright,
p142 ...was the problem essentially one of incubation, that... [the other playwright] had not allowed himself enough time for the experience of reading Awakenings to sink in? Nor had he allowed himself, as Pinter did, time to forget it, [there were many direct quotes from the book] to let it fall into his unconscious, where it might link with other experiences and thoughts...
He goes on to describe how Henri Poincare would struggle with, give up on a problem, only for a solution to pop into his head while he was doing something else entirely and not even thinking about the problem.
p144 ...It seemed clear, as Poincare wrote, that there must be an active and intense unconscious (or subconscious, or preconscious) activity even during the period when a problem is lost to conscious thought, and the mind is empty or distracted with other things. This is... the incubation of hugely complex problems performed by an entire hidden, creative self. Poincare pays tribute to this unconscious self: it "is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; . . . it knows how to choose, to divine. . . . It knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed."
...
p147 Creativity -- that state when ideas seem to organize themselves into a swift, tightly woven flow, when a feeling of gorgeous clarity and meaning emerges -- seems to me physiologically distinctive, and I think that if we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring.
At such times, when I am writing, thoughts seem to organize themselves instantly in appropriate words. I feel I can bypass or transcend much of my own personality, my neuroses. It is at once not me and the innermost part of me, certainly the best part of me.
I suspect anyone who has done much writing has experienced what Sacks is describing here. (I skipped the part about music and Wagner which sounded a little too much like Adrian in Doctor Faustus composing with the assistance of his Mephisto.) I can't help seeing in this either the work of the OS that runs under the App of our consciousness, or else our contact (he did use the term transcendence) with the Dreamer of our dream.
He has written about the subjective nature of our perception of reality but hasn't been explicit about how this perception is presented to our conscious self by something else that takes in whatever our senses receive and edits that into the Reader's Digest version of reality we are aware of. Is there any reason to doubt that it is this same "something" that is digesting these problems and then, after their incubation, presenting us with the surviving chicks?
To push this metaphor over the edge, it goes without saying that only fertile eggs will hatch into viable ideas, plays, or compositions. Also, in this interpretation, we are all both Mozart and Salieri. Salieri on our own, but Mozart when we are in touch with that inner, better, self.
Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science
p203 ...Gunter Stent, considering "prematurity" in scientific discovery in 1972, wrote, "A discovery is premature if its implications cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, knowledge."...
...
p205 Scotoma, surprisingly common in all fields of science, involves more than prematurity; it involves a loss of knowledge, a forgetting of insights that once seemed clearly established, and sometimes a regression to less perceptive explanations. [Ptolemy's geocentric theory is sited.] What makes an observation or a new idea acceptable, discussable, memorable? What may prevent it from being so, despite its clear importance and value?
Freud would answer this question by emphasizing resistance: the new idea is deeply threatening or repugnant and hence is denied full access to the mind...
It is not enough to apprehend something, to "get" something, in a flash. The mind must be able to accommodate it, to retain it. The first barrier lies in allowing oneself to encounter new ideas, to create a mental space, a category with potential connections -- and then to bring these ideas into full and stable consciousness, to give them conceptual form, holding them in mind even if they contradict one's existing concepts, beliefs, or categories. [Military history is all about this difficulty.] This process of accommodation, of spaciousness of mind. is crucial in determining whether an idea or discovery will take hold and bear fruit or whether it will be forgotten, fade, and die without issue.
There is so much more to say about this. There's that notion that Native Americans were unable to see the first European sailing ships off their shores because they had never seen anything visually similar. A visual equivalent of, "connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, knowledge" above. Then there's Proust's notion that the artist must train the audience to be able to comprehend the new form of art on display.
And military history is simply variations on the theme of someone (or some State or army) making an advance and everyone else struggling to comprehend what has changed. The poor Austrian generals facing Napoleon, and the European armies facing the Germans at the beginning of WW2, are obvious examples of this. Though my favorite would be the generals on both sides in the American Civil War struggling to understand why the battlefield maneuvers of Napoleon's time suddenly stopped working in the age of the mini-ball.
And then there's my not retaining much from my first reading of Pirenne. (Which book I will be getting back to soon.) What's curious here is that I had all the connections from before. The historical road leading to the Middle Ages was well paved for me. What I lacked was what came later. The history and political science that came later, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Knowing more of that is what has made Pirenne so much more valuable this time.
And that's it for Oliver Sacks. His last book. (Though there are still some earlier books that I haven't read.) This was as good as I had hoped. And the view of the creation of the book provided by Hayes certainly helped. Another great mind gone.
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