An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (9 page)

Although Greg’s parents did not have any direct communication from him, they did get occasional reports from the temple—reports filled, increasingly, with accounts of his “spiritual progress”, his “enlightenment”, accounts at once so vague and so out of character with the Greg they knew that, by degrees, they became alarmed. Once they wrote directly to the swami and received a soothing, reassuring reply.

Three more years passed before Greg’s parents decided they had to see for themselves. His father was by then in poor health and feared that if he waited longer he might never see his “lost” son again. On hearing this, the temple finally permitted a visit from Greg’s parents. In 1975, then, not having seen him for four years, they visited their son in the temple in New Orleans.

When they did so, they were filled with horror: their lean, hairy son had become fat and hairless; he wore a continual “stupid” smile on his face (this at least was his father’s word for it); he kept bursting into bits of song and verse and making “idiotic” comments, while showing little deep emotion of any kind (“like he was scooped out, hollow inside”, his father said); he had lost interest in everything current; he was disoriented—and he was totally blind. The temple, surprisingly, acceded to his leaving—perhaps even they felt now that his ascension had gone too far and had started to feel some disquiet about his state.

Greg was admitted to the hospital, examined, and transferred to neurosurgery. Brain imaging had shown an enormous midline tumor, destroying the pituitary gland and the adjacent optic chiasm and tracts and extending on both sides into the frontal lobes. It also reached backward to the temporal lobes, and downward to the diencephalon, or forebrain. At surgery, the tumor was found to be benign, a meningioma—but it had swollen to the size of a small grapefruit or orange, and though the surgeons were able to remove it almost entirely, they could not undo the damage it had already done.

Greg was now not only blind, but gravely disabled neurologically and mentally—a disaster that could have been prevented entirely had his first complaints of dimming vision been heeded, and had medical sense, and even common sense, been allowed to judge his state. Since, tragically, no recovery could be expected, or very little, Greg was admitted to Williamsbridge, a hospital for the chronically sick, a twenty-five-year-old boy for whom active life had come to an end, and for whom the prognosis was considered hopeless.

I first met Greg in April 1977, when he arrived at Williamsbridge Hospital. Lacking facial hair, and childlike in manner, he seemed younger than his twenty-five years. He was fat, Buddha-like, with a vacant, bland face, his blind eyes roving at random in their orbits, while he sat motionless in his wheelchair. If he lacked spontaneity and initiated no exchanges, he responded promptly and appropriately when I spoke to him, though odd words would sometimes catch his fancy and give rise to associative tangents or snatches of song and rhyme. Between questions, if the time was not filled, there tended to be a deepening silence; though if this lasted for more than a minute, he might fall into Hare Krishna chants or a soft muttering of mantras. He was still, he said, “a total believer”, devoted to the group’s doctrines and aims.

I could not get any consecutive history from him—he was not sure, for a start, why he was in the hospital and gave different reasons when I asked him about this; first he said, “Because I’m not intelligent”, later, “Because I took drugs in the past.” He knew he had been at the main Hare Krishna temple (“a big red house, 439 Henry Street, in Brooklyn”), but not that he had subsequently been at their temple in New Orleans. Nor did he remember that he started to have symptoms there—first and foremost a progressive loss of vision. Indeed he seemed unaware that he had any problems: that he was blind, that he was unable to walk steadily, that he was in any way ill.

Unaware—and indifferent. He seemed bland, placid, emptied of all feeling—it was this unnatural serenity that his Krishna brethren had perceived, apparently, as “bliss, ” and indeed, at one point, Greg used the term himself. “How do you feel?” I returned to this again and again. “I feel blissful”, he replied at one point, “I am afraid of falling back into the material world.” At this point, when he was first in the hospital, many of his Hare Krishna friends would come to visit him; I often saw their saffron robes in the corridors. They would come to visit poor, blind, blank Greg and flock around him; they saw him as having achieved “detachment”, as an Enlightened One.

Questioning him about current events and people, I found the depths of his disorientation and confusion. When I asked him who was the president, he said “Lyndon”, then, “the one who got shot.” I prompted, “Jimmy—”, and he said, “Jimi Hendrix”, and when I roared with laughter, he said maybe a musical White House would be a good idea. A few more questions convinced me that Greg had virtually no memory of events much past 1970, certainly no coherent, chronological memory of them. He seemed to have been left, marooned, in the sixties—his memory, his development, his inner life since then had come to a stop.

His tumor, a slow-growing one, was huge when it was finally removed in 1976, but only in the later stages of its growth, as it destroyed the memory system in the temporal lobe, would it actually have prevented the brain from registering new events. But Greg had difficulties—not absolute, but partial—even in remembering events from the late sixties, events that he must have registered perfectly at the time. So beyond the inability to register new experiences, there had been an erosion of existing memories (a retrograde amnesia) going back several years before his tumor had developed. There was not an absolutely sharp cutoff here, but rather a temporal gradient, so that figures and events from 1966 and 1967 were fully remembered, events from 1968 or 1969 partially or occasionally remembered, and events after 1970 almost never remembered.

It was easy to demonstrate the severity of his immediate amnesia. If I gave him lists of words, he was unable to recall any of them after a minute. When I told him a story and asked him to repeat it, he did so in a more and more confused way, with more and more “contaminations” and misassociations—some droll, some extremely bizarre—until within five minutes his story bore no resemblance to the one I had told him. Thus when I told him a tale about a lion and a mouse, he soon departed from the original story and had the mouse threatening to eat the lion—it had become a giant mouse and a mini-lion. Both were mutants, Greg explained when I quizzed him on his departures. Or possibly, he said, they were creatures from a dream, or “an alternative history” in which mice were indeed the lords of the jungle. Five minutes later, he had no memory of the story whatever.

I had heard, from the hospital social worker, that he had a passion for music, especially for rock-and-roll bands of the sixties; I saw piles of records as soon as I entered his room and a guitar lying against his bed. So now I asked him about this, and with this there came a complete transformation—he lost his disconnectedness, his indifference, and spoke with great animation about his favorite rock bands and pieces—above all, of the Grateful Dead. “I went to see them at the Fillmore East, and in Central Park”, he said. He remembered the entire program in detail, but “my favorite”, he added, “is ‘Tobacco Road.’ ” The title evoked the tune, and Greg sang the whole song with great feeling and conviction—a depth of feeling of which, hitherto, he had not shown the least sign. He seemed transformed, a different person, a whole person, as he sang.

“When did you hear them in Central Park?” I asked.

“It’s been a while, over a year maybe”, he answered—but in fact they had last played there eight years earlier, in 1969. And the Fillmore East, the famous rock-and-roll theater where Greg had also seen the group, did not survive the early 1970
s
. He went on to tell me he once heard Jimi Hendrix at Hunter College, and Cream, with Jack Bruce playing bass guitar; Eric Clapton, lead guitar; and Ginger Baker, a “fantastic drummer.” “Jimi Hendrix”, he added reflectively, “what’s he doing? Don’t hear much about him nowadays.” We spoke of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles—“Great groups”, Greg commented, “but they don’t space me out the way the Dead do. What a group”, he continued, “there’s no one like them. Jerry Garcia—he’s a saint, he’s a guru, he’s a genius. Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, the drummers are great. There’s Bob Weir, there’s Phil Lesh; but Pigpen—I love him.”

This narrowed down the extent of his amnesia. He remembered songs vividly from 1964 to 1968. He remembered all the founding members of the Grateful Dead, from 1967. But he was unaware that Pigpen, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin were all dead. His memory cut off by 1970, or before. He was caught in the sixties, unable to move on. He was a fossil, the last hippie.

At first I did not want to confront Greg with the enormity of his time loss, his amnesia, or even to let involuntary hints through (which he would certainly pick up, for he was very sensitive to anomaly and tone), so I changed the subject and said, “Let me examine you.”

He was, I noted, somewhat weak and spastic in all his limbs, more on the left, and more in the legs. He could not stand alone. His eyes showed complete optic atrophy—it was impossible for him to see anything. But strangely, he did not seem to be aware of being blind and would guess that I was showing him a blue ball, a red pen (when in fact it was a green comb and a fob watch that I showed him). Nor indeed did he seem to “look”; he made no special effort to turn in my direction, and when we were speaking, he often failed to face me, to look at me. When I asked him about seeing, he acknowledged that his eyes weren’t “all that good”, but added that he enjoyed “watching” the TV. Watching TV for him, I observed later, consisted of following with attention the soundtrack of a movie or show and inventing visual scenes to go with it (even though he might not even be looking toward the TV). He seemed to think, indeed, that this was what “seeing” meant, that this was what was meant by “watching TV”, and that this was what all of us did. Perhaps he had lost the very idea of seeing.

I found this aspect of Greg’s blindness, his singular blindness to his blindness, his no longer knowing what “seeing” or “looking” meant, deeply perplexing. It seemed to point to something stranger, and more complex, than a mere “deficit”, to point, rather, to some radical alteration within him in the very structure of knowledge, in consciousness, in identity itself.
35

35. Another patient, Ruby G., was in some ways similar to Greg. She too had a huge frontal tumor, which, though it was removed in 1973, left her with amnesia, a frontal lobe syndrome, and blindness. She too did not know that she was blind, and when I held up my hand before her and asked, “How many fingers?” would answer, “A hand has five fingers, of course.”

A more localized unawareness of blindness may arise if there is destruction of the visual cortex, as in Anton’s syndrome. Such patients may not know that they are blind, but are otherwise intact. But frontal lobe unawarenesses are far more global in nature—thus Greg and Ruby were not only unaware of being blind but unaware (for the most part) of being ill, of having devastating neurological and cognitive deficits, and of their tragic, diminished position in life.

I had already had some sense of this when testing his memory, finding his confinement, in effect, to a single moment—“the present”—uninformed by any sense of a past (or a future). Given this radical lack of connection and continuity in his inner life, I got the feeling, indeed, that he might not have an inner life to speak of, that he lacked the constant dialogue of past and present, of experience and meaning, which constitutes consciousness and inner life for the rest of us. He seemed to have no sense of “next” and to lack that eager and anxious tension of anticipation, of intention, that normally drives us through life.

Some sense of ongoing, of “next”, is always with us. But this sense of movement, of happening, Greg lacked; he seemed immured, without knowing it, in a motionless, timeless moment. And whereas for the rest of us the present is given its meaning and depth by the past (hence it becomes the “remembered present”, in Gerald Edelman’s term), as well as being given potential and tension by the future, for Greg it was flat and (in its meager way) complete. This living-in-the-moment, which was so manifestly pathological, had been perceived in the temple as an achievement of higher consciousness.

Greg seemed to adjust to Williamsbridge with remarkable ease, considering he was a young man being placed, probably forever, in a hospital for the chronically ill. There was no furious defiance, no railing at Fate, no sense, apparently, of indignity or despair. Compliantly, indifferently, Greg let himself be put away in the backwater of Williamsbridge. When I asked him about this, he said, “I have no choice.” And this, as he said it, seemed wise and true. Indeed, he seemed eminently philosophical about it. But it was a philosophicalness made possible by his indifference, his brain damage.

His parents, so estranged from him when he was rebellious and well, came daily, doted on him, now that he was helpless and ill; and they, for their part, could be sure, at any time, that he would be at the hospital, smiling and grateful for their visit. If he was not “waiting” for them, so much the better—they could miss a day, or a few days, if they were away; he would not notice, but would be cordial as ever the next time they came.

Greg soon settled in, with his rock records and his guitar, his Hare Krishna beads, his Talking Books, and a schedule of programs—physiotherapy, occupational therapy, music groups, drama. Soon after admission he was moved to a ward with younger patients, where with his open and sunny personality he became popular. He did not actually know any of the other patients or the staff, at least for several months, but was invariably (if indiscriminately) pleasant to them all. And there were at least two special friendships, not intense, but with a sort of complete acceptance and stability. His mother remembers “Eddie, who had MS—they both loved music, they had adjacent rooms, they used to sit together—and Judy, she had CP, she would sit for hours with him, too.” Eddie died, and Judy went to a hospital in Brooklyn; there has been no one so close for many years. Mrs. F. remembers them, but Greg does not, never asked for them, or about them, after they had gone—though perhaps, his mother thought, he was sadder, at least less lively, for they stimulated him, got him talking and listening to records and inventing limericks, joking and singing; they pulled him out of “that dead state” he would otherwise fall into.