The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks
"I had no room now for this dread, or for some other dread, since I was filled to the overflow with music."
I was a relative latecomer to the work of Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), that incredible sorcerer of narrating who spent his life spanning science and the human soul — somewhat in light of the fact that I was not yet conceived when he initially charmed the perusing open with his written work, and mostly on the grounds that those early books never made it past the Iron Curtain and into the Bulgaria of my youth. It was just in my twenties, having advanced toward America, that I became hopelessly enamored with Dr. Sacks' composition and the psyche from which it sprang — a brain completely glorious, floated by a full heart and a brilliant soul.
His scholarly style astounded me, and I felt an interesting family relationship with a considerable lot of his characteristics, from the energetic undertaking with iron — in spite of the fact that the 300-pound squats of my lifting weights days withered before his 600 pounds, which set a state record and earned him the moniker Dr. Squat — to our mutual love of Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
In reality, it was his extraordinary understanding into the part of music in the human experience that initially attracted me to Dr. Sacks' written work. I arrived into Musicophilia and soon ate up his more seasoned works. Both his science and his life were undergirded by a significant adoration for music — music appeared to be this scholarly goliath's most prominent type of deep sense of being. He realized that the life of the brain and the life of the body were one, and comprehended that music wedded the two — an understanding he conveyed in his neurotransmitters and his ligaments.
No place did this exemplified mindfulness, nor his iridescent soul, come more dynamically alive than in the amazing story of how he once spared his own particular life by tune and writing while at the same time running from a seething bull in a Norwegian fjord, told in his 1974 journal A Leg to Stand On (open library) — the story by which I might never forget him.
To remember this fundamental man, I requested that craftsman Debbie Millman make a bit of workmanship representing the section that catches the heart of that gladdening story, as well as the soul in which Dr. Sacks occupied and left our reality.
The work of art is accessible as a print and I am giving all returns to the Oliver Sacks Foundation.
As the broken instrument of his body is covered still and quiet into the earth, may the ensemble of his soul live on in his written work with an indistinguishable forever resonating life from what Dr. Sacks called "one of the world's extraordinary melodic fortunes" in his last correspondence with the world:
What a benefit for this world to have been graced with this phenomenal human creature and his completely exemplified mind. The main thing left to state is what Dr. Sacks himself kept in touch with his cherished auntie Lennie, who formed his life, as she lay biting the dust: "Thank you, at the end of the day, and for the last time, for living — for being you."
No comments