Famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, has always been a scientific hero of mine, beginning more than 40 years ago when I read his wonderful 1973 book, Awakenings. He brought human understanding and fine writing to neurological case studies, always leading with empathy and a humane awareness.
My favorites among his many books include The Island of the Colorblind, Musicophilia, Gratitude and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Since I suffer from migraines, I first read his earliest book, Migraine (1970), and went on to Awakenings.
Sacks was a literary scientist who never allowed research or dull statistics to overwhelm his innate empathy with the humans he described, or to devalue open nature when he roamed. Sacks loved landscape photography, for example. He wrote an entire book about his badly mangled right leg, severely injured while running from a mountain bull during a long day-hike in Norway (A Leg to Stand On, 1984).
In his posthumous book of short essays, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, we find strong echoes of faith from this atheist raconteur who reveled in his love of people and nature (see 4.1.1. Books). And since human beings are part of the nature (yes), their eccentricities simply presented more examples for Dr. Sacks to study.
A quick Google search of his many book titles alone revealed the enormous breadth of his interests.
In this last book, we readily see how young Sacks was at one with the natural world around him in England. He grew up in a family of swimmers, and with his father and others he swam constantly as a boy in nearby tarns and lakes — and actually for the rest of his life (read his “Water Babies” story from Everything in Its Place).
The acute sense of wonder and awe that Sacks felt when around nature and nature’s mysteries — like the human brain or tungsten or an island of colorblind natives — animated his entire life in science. Denying all religion and ritual cant, he adored the visible world and loved studying the full panorama. His analytical mind kept humming and failed to age as Mother Nature constantly fed him visions and spectacles and odd case histories to recount.
In his essay about the aging brain, Sacks writes:
If we are lucky enough to reach a healthy old age,
this sense of wonder can keep us passionate and
productive to the end of our lives. — Everything in Its Place
Ten years ago, I cajoled several of my Crane Country Day School faculty colleagues to an evening address by Sacks at UCSB in Campbell Hall (April 22, 2009). However, it flopped because instead of speaking about the featured topic — “Creativity and the Brain” — he spoke brilliantly, indeed, but hallucinations dominated his talk. It was a great topic and clearly what he had been obsessing about since his book Hallucinations was published in 2012.
Since I study California rock art, Sacks’ ideas about organic visual hallucinations, phosphenes, entoptic phenomena and migraine (and epilepsy) have great interest. “Hallucinations” showing coronas, zig zags, chevrons, whorls and lozenges appear in the earliest rock art from all over the Earth as well as here locally. When I have a migraine, I see many of these designs inside my head. He summarizes them:
Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not
of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range
of human consciousness and experience … They provide
evidence only of the brain’s power to create them. — “Seeing God in the Third Millennium” essay
Wild stuff, but we still can easily see how early stone age shamans themselves would think their recollected pulsating “dream symbols” originated from another world, or via invisible beings or forces, or from an other-where parallel universe — animism is the pre-religion of all religion. (More on this topic and the origins of art in Eternal Backcountry Return.)
Dr. Sacks somehow kept his sense of awe about nature’s complexity as revealed in human aging and illness. He saw beauty right to the end of his life. Click here to read his final essay accepting death.
He had been a self-described weird kid, a fascinating character and relentless talker who later motorcycled around America and experimented with many drugs. He wrote about his constant sense of “otherness” and how he never seemed to fit in easily. A clumsy, gay British neurologist with eccentric interests and endless energy had to go to America to find his way (working at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City beginning in 1966).
He wrote movingly about the narrow isthmus of “normality” allowed in organized human life, and often struck his reader with startling neurological truths about humans. He wrote some words that might apply to his own assertions:
Perhaps … it will remind us of what a narrow ridge
of normality we all inhabit, with the abysses of
mania and depression yawning to either side. — “Hurry Down Sunshine” essay
In a time of opioid crisis, climate-change problems, government gridlock and terrified humans dominated by dystopian dreams, it makes a sort of sense when Sacks wrote in 2015: “What we are seeing — and bringing on ourselves — resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale (from his essay “Life Continues in Everything,” p. 258).
The only consistent antidote is the “eternal return” to immersion in full nature, where it is possible to recover that awe and mental rejuvenation that postmodern digital society drains out of us. Take your kids with you today to Rattlesnake Canyon and march beneath the Stanwood Bridge’s stone arch up into the wilderness!
4-1-1
» Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales (Knopf, 2019); Sacks, Gratitude (2015); Dan McCaslin, Eternal Backcountry Return (2018).
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Eternal Backcountry Return, has been published by Sisquoc River Press and is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
