The Memory Artists (50 page)

44
Rossetti’s “Without Her” (1881) begins:

What of her glass without her? The blank grey

There where the pool is blind of the moon’s face.

Her dress without her? The tossed empty space

Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away …

Her pillowed place without her?

Tears, ah me! for love’s good grace

And cold forgetfulness of night or day …

Ernest Dowson’s over-quoted 1891 poem “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” (“I am not what I was under the reign of good Cynara”) ends:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and stronger wine,

But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea hungry for the lips of my desire:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

45
See note 15.

46
I am pleased to see that my mock-romantic “lampoon,” a parody of the Greek poet Anacreon, hit its mark.

47
Can 5’ 8
¹
⁄2” be considered “dwarfish”?

48
There was only one other writer involved, who was dismissed not because he told the truth, but because his translations did not convey the tenor of my endnotes. The workmanship, in other words, fell short of the material. Regarding NXB’s other insinuations (product-placement, miserliness, quackery, etc.), see note 9.

As for the “chapter of Norval’s novel” alluded to earlier, it is reproduced in Chapter 18 below. Norval may have refused permission, but his publishing house did not. My industry connections and name had something to do with that. See note 52.

The reader may wonder at this point why I run my own house (which NXB described, through ignorance, as a “vanity press”). The answer is quite simple: people are often blind to new ideas. Especially scientists. I have not always managed to get my complex research understood or appreciated by some of the more “famous” scientific journals and publishers. And I am far from being the only genius, in the annals of science, to have had this problem! Although I attempted, repeatedly, to explain this to my wife, and to account for the many long evenings devoted to publishing matters, she remained unyieldingly sceptical, portraying me in one English newspaper as a “vain, condescending, name-dropping, spotlightseeking, philandering monomaniac.” Because her English is unfluent, I can only assume these epithets came from her feminist attorney.

49
See note 9.

50
See note 9. For the record, our department director, a supremely skilled administrator, is not “cross-eyed.” She has a glass eye.

51
Niobe has a special resonance in my own life. In Greek mythology she is the prototype of the bereaved mother, weeping for the loss of her children. She was turned into a rock on Mount Sipylus, which continues to weep when the snow melts above it. Her story conjures up memories of a holiday my wife and I took to Turkey in 1996. It was to be our last. We hiked to the top of the legendary mountain (Yamanlar Dag, northeast of Izmir), and saw Niobe in stone. “
Du hast mich betrogen
,” my wife said calmly in the failing light. I remember I was wearing Tyrollean lederhosen and an alpine hat with bersaglieri feathers. When we arrived back in Montreal, my wife and daughter moved out of our nineteenth-century (and now echoingly empty) mountainside home, never to return.

Yes, I was unfaithful—I will admit it here for the first time. I am a man of vigour, I won’t deny it. Women in the lab threw themselves at me, knelt before me. With a wife who deprived me of what are considered conjugal rights, and with my ongoing studies of Viagra (of the blue-green colour blindness associated with the drug), who can blame me for the odd indiscretion? Does this signify, to quote a Montreal tabloid, that I am “suffering from satyriasis”? Do I deserve to be bracketed with a swine like NXB? (See note 26.)

52
This chapter, except for the last two sections, is taken directly from Norval Blaquière’s autobiographical novel
Unmotivated Steps
(London: Faber, 1992), with one modification: real names have been substituted for the fictional.

53
Florence Crandall obviously suffers from mysophobia, a dread of dirt or contamination. More famous mysophobes include Jonathan Swift, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Scriabin and Charles Baudelaire. (The Goncourt brothers described Baudelaire’s hands as “washed, scoured, cared for like the hands of a woman”; Rimsky-Korsakov described Scriabin, who perpetually wore gloves, as “half out of his mind”; Kaufman washed his hands forty times a day.) For an exhaustive account of the condition as it relates to literature, see Chapter 7 of my
Art et Neuropathologie
(op. cit.).

54
From here the novel descends into bathetic implausibility and stock literary referentiality: the lovers find each other again, and eventually walk hand in hand into Byron’s lake at Newstead Abbey in an act of
liebestod
! A modern-day Hero and Leander! Or Tristan and Isolde or Rosmer and Rebecca! (Or, in real life, Heinrich Kleist and Henriette Vogel, Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte, Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia, et al.)

Here is what I suspect occurred, based on NXB’s second recurring dream, various drug-induced hallucinations, and medical records from Queen’s Hospital in Nottingham. When Miss Teresa Crandall was nineteen, doctors found a marble-sized lump in her breast, which a biopsy showed was cancerous. Subsequent tests revealed that the cancer had spread to her spine and liver, which meant that surgery could not fully remove it. She was referred to Dr. Evelyn Nichols at Queen’s for chemotherapy. Tests on the tumour showed that it was insensitive to hormones—which ruled out the blocker Tamoxifen. A scan showed that three tumorous deposits had spread from the breast to the bones in the neck, and four to the liver. With aggressive chemotherapy, it was possible to shrink these metastatic deposits, but no amount of radiation would destroy every cancer cell in her body. The prognosis was dire, in other words. The treatment would be palliative; at most, she had two years to live.

NXB’s second recurring dream, and several of his hallucinations, contain a powerful sequence of him running away from a building, sometimes a church, sometimes a town hall. During one hallucination, induced by phencyclidine, the once-lionised actor and author scrawled the following words on the laboratory floor:

Mr. and Mrs. Galahad Santlal

are obliged to recall their invitation

to the marriage of their daughter

Teresa Crandall

to

Norval Blaquière

as the latter is a vile, black-hearted bastard

According to my researchers, the Registrar of Camden Town Hall is certain that NXB did not show up for the wedding ceremony, and equally certain that Miss Crandall did. After her tests at the hospital, she boarded the train to London as promised. NXB was doubtless hiding in a bar, or brothel. He cravenly backed out of his own wedding, in other words. And when he reconsidered, and returned to Hucknall unannounced a year later, it was too late. A week before he arrived, Teresa Crandall took her own life.

NXB’s inability to commit is thus not related to his mother’s betrayal, as NB conjectures, or to a girlfriend’s, as SD believes. It relates to his own betrayal.

55
NXB was about to say “Claude Jutras” (see note 14). By a grim coincidence, Alois Alzheimer discovered the disease exactly one century ago, after performing an autopsy on the brain of the once-fair “Augusta D,” a woman in her fifty-sixth year from Frankfurt.

56
See note 9. As indicated in the Foreword, I am leaving this and other instances of calumny intact, as they enrich the psychological portrait of NXB. With regard to his earlier comments on Lord Byron, I should point out that NXB suffers from “created dramatic identity syndrome,” a form of schizophrenia, modelling his behaviour on, or assuming the identity of, certain historical or fictional figures. He has moved, for example, from Astérix, Baudelaire and Poe in his childhood to fin-de-siècle Decadents in his twenties, to Regency rakes in his thirties. See my
Le Double psychologique en art: de Cervantes à Cocteau
(Memento Vivere, 2000), in which, en passant, I compare NXB with Rameau’s nephew, whom Diderot describes as “… [
quelqu’un
]
composé de hauteur et de bassesse, de bon sens et de déraison.
”

This may be a good time to point out the extent to which NXB’s overrated novel
Unmotivated Steps
ransacks Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
. Compare, for instance, the following passages from Proust and Blaquière respectively:

(1)  
Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates:
Memory feeds the heart, and starves sorrow.

(2)  
Our memory is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand to a soothing drug, or dangerous poison:
Love is a drugstore, where hazard guides our hand to a painkiller or poison.

(3)  
Memories are enclosed, as it were, in a thousand sealed jars, each filled with things of an absolutely different colour, odour and temperature:
Memories are stored in a million vessels, each with a different scent, colour, texture, and each in a different state of decomposition.

This may also be a good time to mention an incident that occurred recently at a federal penitentiary in Donnacona, a maximum-security facility west of Quebec City. It appears that someone has been shooting drug-filled arrows into the prison’s recreational yard from a nearby forest. The drugs, including certain hallucinogens, were packed into straws and then squeezed into the hollow shafts of the arrows. Why do I mention this? Because I happen to know that NXB made at least two trips to Quebec City around that time. Coincidence? Perhaps.

57
NXB should know: he twice volunteered for double-blind, placebocontrolled studies involving nicotine, which indicated that smoking a cigarette immediately before presentation of a fifty-word list improves recall after intervals of ten and forty-five minutes. Highernicotine brands are more effective than low. There are many good reasons for not smoking, but memory loss is not one of them: under laboratory conditions, I have demonstrated that nicotine can enhance factual recall.

Regarding alcohol and memory, my studies have shown that alcoholics like NXB, when sober, have trouble finding things they have hidden while intoxicated; when they drink again, the memory tasks become much easier. See my “Understanding the Rise of Memory Loss: Two Factors that Explain It and Ten that Don’t” in
Scientific Canadian
, 83, pp. 104–17.

As for cigarettes and Alzheimer’s, NXB hasn’t the faintest idea of what he is talking about.

58
Byron,
Don Juan
, II, cciii.

59
NB recorded this quiz-show episode in his diary as a dream, or rather a hyperrealist “nightmare” (May 14, 2002), but it was neither, because he was not asleep. As is well known by now, it stems from an experiment I conducted with a modified transcranial magnetic stimulator (VTMS
^©
), in which I altered NB’s cortex by electromagnetic pulse, neuropharmaceuticals and verbal cues, generating this complex “memory” of an event that never occurred. I call it a “memory” as it was stored in NB’s hippocampus, amidst genuine memories. The implications of this experiment boggle the mind. On which more in a future article.

60
The above note was Dr. Vorta’s last. After being anaesthetized for routine eye surgery, he lapsed into a coma from which he never awoke. His wife Anna Sautter-Vorta requested that the story be published by another press, unaltered, save for three concluding chapters and this final endnote.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Helen and Laura for their encouragement and faith, and Seán for his advice, some of which was followed properly. For my research on synaesthesia, the following works were treasure troves: John Harrison’s
Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing
; A. R. Luria’s
The Mind of a Mnemonist
; Richard E. Cytowic’s
Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses
and
The Man Who Tasted Shapes
. The chemical magic was inspired by both Oliver Sacks and my father—a chemist, drug salesman and child at heart who helped me make nitrogen iodide and other dangerous things. Information on Alzheimer’s was gathered from various sources, including the Canadian Alzheimer’s Society, the New York Memory & Healthy Aging Services, The American Journal of Alzheimer’s Care & Related Disorders, and my parents Robert and Barbara Moore, both of whom were victims of the disease.