In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent
English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties,
was struck by a brain infection—a herpes encephalitis—affecting
especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory.
He was left with a memory span of only seconds—the
most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events
and experiences were effaced almost instantly. As his
wife, Deborah, wrote in her 2005 memoir, “Forever
Today”:
His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was
unimpaired. But he did not seem to retain any impression
of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink,
his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before
the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance
away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried
to imagine how it was for him. . . . Something akin to
a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then
full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s
hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life,
a room changing in ways that were physically impossible.
In addition to this inability to preserve new memories,
Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually
his entire past.
When he was filmed in 1986 for Jonathan Miller’s
extraordinary documentary “Prisoner of Consciousness,”
Clive showed a desperate aloneness, fear, and bewilderment.
He was acutely, continually, agonizingly conscious that
something bizarre, something awful, was the matter. His
constantly repeated complaint, however, was not of a faulty
memory but of being deprived, in some uncanny and terrible
way, of all experience, deprived of consciousness and
life itself. As Deborah wrote:
It was as if every waking moment was the first waking
moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he
had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no
evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before. .
. . “I haven’t heard anything, seen anything,
touched anything, smelled anything,” he would say.
“It’s like being dead."
Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase,
Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper,
then in a notebook. But his journal entries consisted,
essentially, of the statements “I am awake”
or “I am conscious,” entered again and again
every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This
time properly awake. . . . 2:14 P.M: this time finally
awake. . . . 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,”
along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40
P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.”
This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was
fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first
time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled
out by the next entry.
This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content
but these passionate assertions and denials, intending
to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting
them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds
of almost identical pages. It was a terrifying and poignant
testament to Clive’s mental state, his lostness,
in the years that followed his amnesia—a state that
Deborah, in Miller’s film, called “a never-ending
agony.”
Another profoundly amnesic patient I knew some years ago
dealt with his abysses of amnesia by fluent confabulations.
He was wholly immersed in his quick-fire inventions and
had no insight into what was happening; so far as he was
concerned, there was nothing the matter. He would confidently
identify or misidentify me as a friend of his, a customer
in his delicatessen, a kosher butcher, another doctor—as
a dozen different people in the course of a few minutes.
This sort of confabulation was not one of conscious fabrication.
It was, rather, a strategy, a desperate attempt—unconscious
and almost automatic—to provide a sort of continuity,
a narrative continuity, when memory, and thus experience,
was being snatched away every instant.
Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s
own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions
on people’s faces when one has repeated something
half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s
coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks
at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own
handwriting. Lacking memory, lacking direct experiential
knowledge, amnesiacs have to make hypotheses and inferences,
and they usually make plausible ones. They can infer that
they have been doing something, been somewhere, even though
they cannot recollect what or where. Yet Clive, rather
than making plausible guesses, always came to the conclusion
that he had just been “awakened,” that he
had been “dead.” This seemed to me a reflection
of the almost instantaneous effacement of perception for
Clive—thought itself was almost impossible within
this tiny window of time. Indeed, Clive once said to Deborah,
“I am completely incapable of thinking.”
At the beginning of his illness, Clive would sometimes
be confounded at the bizarre things he experienced. Deborah
wrote of how, coming in one day, she saw him holding something
in the palm of one hand, and repeatedly covering and uncovering
it with the other hand as if he were a magician practising
a disappearing trick. He was holding a chocolate. He could
feel the chocolate unmoving in his left palm, and yet
every time he lifted his hand he told me it revealed a
brand new chocolate.
“Look!” he said. “It’s new!”
He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“It’s the same chocolate,” I said gently.
“No . . . look! It’s changed. It wasn’t
like that before . . .” He covered and uncovered
the chocolate every couple of seconds, lifting and looking.
“Look! It’s different again! How do they do
it?”
MORE
INFORMATION
This article first appeared
in the American Chronicle. Their website can be found
at www.americanchronicle.com
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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