Last Gasp or First Breath?

Last Gasp or First Breath?

    The passing of Dr. Oliver Sacks was the subject of a reflection in The New Yorker by fellow doctor, Atul Gawande.  Just weeks before, Oliver Sacks had written to the doctor (in longhand), excitedly telling him about an article he was working on covering the subject of eyes: “I’m writing a piece on EYES—all sorts, from those of jellyfish and scallops and jumping spiders and octopi to our (vertebrate) eyes,” he reported.  “I am also trying to write something about the (deadly) effects of ‘social-media’ when they absorb people, to the exclusion of everything else, throughout their waking hours.”  He told of his delight in coming upon a century-old E. M. Forster short story called “The Machine Stops.”  “Do you know it?” he asked.  Forster, he said, had foreseen such possibilities. “But I don’t know if I can complete the pieces,” he went on.  “I fear I am losing ground fast.”  He was having trouble breathing and was growing weaker.

    One of the last pieces the magazine published by the prolific author and neurosurgeon (Dr. Oliver Sacks famously wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat, a collection of observations and stories about actual patients and their unusual reactions --or lack thereof-- to what was going on in their heads) was his own reflection on growing up eating gefilte fish, or "filter fish" as he termed it.  As the article was subtitled, "At life's end, rediscovering the joys of a childhood favorite."  Says the author, furiously trying to get out yet another bit of writing before his life here ebbed away: But now, in what are (barring a miracle) my last weeks of life—so queasy that I am averse to almost every food, with difficulty swallowing anything except liquids or jellylike solids—I have rediscovered the joys of gefilte fish.  I cannot eat more than two or three ounces at a time, but an aliquot of gefilte fish every waking hour nourishes me with much needed protein. (Gefilte-fish jelly, like calf’s-foot jelly, was always valued as an invalid’s food.)...Deliveries now arrive daily from one shop or another: Murray’s on Broadway, Russ & Daughters, Sable’s, Zabar’s, Barney Greengrass, the 2nd Ave Deli—they all make their own gefilte fish, and I like it all (though none compares to my mother’s or Helen’s)...While I have conscious memories of gefilte fish from about the age of four, I suspect that I acquired my taste for it even earlier, for, with its abundant, nutritious jelly, it was often given to infants in Orthodox households as they moved from baby foods to solid food. Gefilte fish will usher me out of this life, as it ushered me into it, eighty-two years ago.

   Another prolific writer, John McPhee (his first professional piece as a budding new writer at The New Yorker was 40,000 words, about a third the length of an average small-type book -- I say that because many of today's authors or publishers somewhat "cheat," using a shortened manuscript but releasing it in much larger type to make the buyer feel that another rather large book has been written) wrote of his adventures (also in The New Yorker) on writing, only this piece was on editing, at least from the perspective of the writer.  Writing is selection.  Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language.  Now keep going.  What is your next word?  Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter?  Your next ball of fact.  You select what goes in and you decide what stays out.  At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out.  That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got.  Forget market research.  Never market-research your writing.  Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way...The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters.  The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space.  Let the reader have the experience.  Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder.  When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author.  If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost.  Give elbow room to the creative reader.  In other words, to the extent that this is all about you, leave that out.

    Some of the first words I received in college was on the divergent paths of choosing a writing major...journalism or "other writing."  And at the time, I was advised (by someone, although I cannot remember by whom or even what position they had, if any; it could have simply been a friend, but obviously it was someone who carried some influence in my book back then), "don't try and mix the two...once you start down one path, you can never go back."  The advice was simple to me, for journalism (such as newspapers and broadcasts and often weekly magazines) needed to be able to "green line," as author McPhee put it, to slice and dice sentences and words to fit the page or the time limit.  Cut, cut, cut, and because of such, your writing would have to take that staccato approach.  The facts, mam, just the facts.  Flowery and descriptive stuff...forget it, or so I was told.  But in my case, my college offered little choice for "other" writing, other than screenwriting (which I took) and poetry (which didn't interest me), and that was it.  Journalism courses, meanwhile, were plentiful.  But the college did allow a student to write one's own major...so I elected to make my major "creative writing."  Now, decades later, such a major is accepted throughout colleges around the world (in fact, author John McPhee teaches such a class, adding: Creative nonfiction is a term that is currently having its day.  When I was in college, anyone who put those two words together would have been looked on as a comedian or a fool.  Today, Creative Nonfiction is the name of the college course I teach.  Same college.  Required to give the course a title, I named it for a quarterly edited and published by Lee Gutkind, then at the University of Pittsburgh.  The title asks an obvious question: What is creative about nonfiction?  It takes a whole semester to try to answer that, but here are a few points: The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of your prose, the integrity of the composition, the anatomy of the piece (does it get up and walk around on its own?), the extent to which you see and tell the story that exists in your material, and so forth.  Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.

    Dr. Gawande wrote this about his friend and fellow doctor, Oliver Sacks: ...Sacks wanted us to know, simply to understand.  This was his deeper lesson.  His most important role, as a doctor and as a writer, was to bear witness to the wide experience of being human.  There was a tender passion beneath the dispassion...“Studies, yes,” he wrote in the preface, but “why stories, or cases?”  Because, he explained, the understanding of disease cannot be separated from the understanding of the person.  They are interwoven, and this has been forgotten in our era of scans, tests, genetics, and procedures.  He compared the modern clinical practitioner to the man who mistook his wife for a hat—able to register many details yet still miss the person entirely.  “To restore the human subject at the centre—the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale,” he wrote.

    So it was as my wife and I and our friends stared at the Milky Way from the cabin, of which I wrote earlier.  Under the grand sky above, an entirely different world than the one we were used to, it was easy to both forget and remember why we were here and what we were about.  Being humanity.  Being humane.  Then came sunrise, the moon filtering through with just enough light to highlight the planets Venus and Mars, all lining up perfectly for those awake early enough to witness.  It was a stunning sight, even as the light of day grew brighter and brighter.  Those awakening even minutes later would emerge with a puzzled look, a look of "what did I miss?"  In some ways, it was similar to Dr. Sacks, seeing the beauty in all things, even in the unseen.  As the time neared, and the light began to fade in one world, Dr. Sacks may have been seen something many have witnessed, but none by those that are still living.  And rather than a last gasp, perhaps Dr. Sacks walked into that new world with a breath of fresh air, a world waiting for his mind and his writing.