A book which I find rather difficult, a book which might be what one calls post-modern or deconstructional and which certainly includes both Derrida and Foucault in the index, although Freud figures larger than either of them. According to the puff on the back: ‘Ira Livingston’s reading of Romantic and postmodern texts – from poetic and scientific works to films and dreams – reveals surprising code shiftings within and among them. The resilience of Romanticism, Livingston argues, lies in not enforcing a single “master narrative” but in orchestrating these fluxes’. A puff which I find as impenetrable as the book so puffed, which seems entirely appropriate.
Chapter 5 is entitled ‘Fractal Logics of Romanticism: Rhythming’, with the fourth and last section therein being entitled ‘Parkinsonism, Romanticism, Postmodernism: Neurology as Ideology’, which turns out to be a reading of the Sacks book, which is presumably why Bing turned it up in the first place.
I did not get much from a first reading of this last section last night, beyond a sense that the present writer (Livingston) found both Sacks and his book rather irritating, but I did rather better this morning, getting glimpses of real content among the clouds of words.
We start with Mr. Parkinson himself, a London apothecary and doctor at the turn of the 17th century, an Enlightenment type taking an interest in all kinds of things, for examples Jacobins and fossils. He even has some fossil beans named for him, as well as the more famous disease. I quote from reference 6, turned up by Bing: ‘… But the name of Parkinson in the world of geology and his skill and ingenuity in dissecting the weird fossilized creatures of bygone days was still remembered. The curious fossil beans found in the clay of the Isle of Sheppey, which had so fascinated him and which he thought were those of the cocoa plant, had been named Pandanocarpus parkinsonis by Brongmart and Nipadites parkinsonis by Mantell, and there were others too…’. See references 4 and 7.
More famously he was able to abstract from the symptoms of various people wandering the streets of London the disease which we now know as Parkinson’s; an impressive feat of observation. While Livingston tells us all about how diseases are as much a mirror of their times and of their inventors as something real with an independent existence, and talks in a rather disparaging way of poking around in bodies to find an anatomical analogue for a disease so identified. He neglects to mention that we have in this particular case found an anatomical analogue (the substantia nigra, at the bottom of the brain proper) and, to my mind, he fails to acknowledge that science mostly works; Derrida, Foucault and company notwithstanding. It does deliver the goods; it does get us to the dark side of the moon.
But he has a point in that some medical diagnoses are very much a product of their time and place. I recall reading once that French doctors saw all disease through the prism of the liver, while German doctors saw all disease through the prism of the heart. And then there are the passing fads of diagnosis of mental illness – which brings hysteria, multiple personality and satanic abuse to mind – and perhaps autism and the autism syndrome will be consigned to the same bin in due course. Medicine is littered with the corpses of problems which were once thought important.
We then get an anecdote drawn from another of Sacks’ books, about coming across a lady with Tourette’s syndrome in a New York Street, a rather florid and extreme case to judge by the article at reference 5. With Livingston being interested in the way in which the ladies’ bizarre echoing of the appearance of the people around her interacted with those people in a bizarre two way process. I associate to receding mirrors.
Livingston then has a pop at Sacks’ account of a president’s speech, then at his magpie-like gathering up of fashionable bits and pieces from 1970’s science in ‘Awakenings’ – stuff like relativity, chaos, attractors and limit cycles. After which we move onto the film of the book, and Livingston has some sport with Sacks’ fascination with his visit to the world of luvvies which resulted. Perhaps Livingston was jealous that nobody had ever accorded him that sort of attention. He observes that ‘… By the same token, one might say that professional intellectuals are most often those who must continually immunize themselves to ideas, those whose training is designed to protect them from the danger that living ideas poses…’. Which smells of class envy to me, the envy of someone who went to a university from tier three rather than one from tier one – although all I can find out on that score is that he got his PhD from Stanford, which I had thought of as a tier one place.
He accuses of Sacks of building his picture of Parkinson’s and then putting words into his patients’ mouths which conform to that picture. He complains about the way that the film simplifies the story, such as it was.
I have learned that Robin Williams, the actor who plays the Sacks figure in the film, is, as it happens, famous for his Tourtettic performances.
Some of Livingston’s sport arises from Sacks’ comments in later editions of his book about Williams’ portrayal of this Sacks figure. Which is, I suppose, fair enough, but I would think that one is going to be interested, more interested than anyone else and one is all too apt to get a bit carried away pondering about such a portrayal. Perhaps the trick is not to commit such ponderings to print, where they become fair game for critics.
Livingston moves on to calling the genome project a con game and wondering about whether well intentioned professionals have done more harm than good in their work with Parkinson’s patients. Perhaps if he ever had the misfortune to get the complaint he would get to know the answer fast enough.
In the meantime he closes with Rolando P.’s last words, a plea to be left alone to die in peace. Where here, Livingston does have a point, that sometimes the professionals go too far, that they lack the sensitivity to know when to stop. But his point would have been more telling had it been made in terms which were both easier to understand and more moderate in tone.
It remains to be seen whether I shall try to tackle any of the other parts of this book. I did try starting at the beginning, but that really was impenetrable to this amateur.
PS 1: for some reason, I had thought Ira was an earnest young lady. Whereas actually he is a professor of poetics at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. And clearly well read. See reference 3.
PS 2: I do not pursue the line of deconstructional exploration concerning exactly how an Internet search engine came to connect me with this book. Who was manipulating who?
PS 3: Leonard L. and Rolando P. are two of the twenty patients, clinical sketches of whom make up the core of Sacks' book.
References
Reference 1: Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity - Ira Livingston – 1997.
Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/awakenings.html.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_(name).
Reference 4: Ethnobotany, phytochemistry and pharmacology of Podocarpus sensu latissimo (s.l.) - H.S. Abdillahi, G.I. Stafford, J.F. Finnie, J. Van Staden – 2010. Neither Bing nor Google had heard of Pandanocarpus parkinsonism, other than in the context of the present book, but Google did turn up something for Nipadites parkinsonism. Google also asked whether I actually meant Podocarpus, a tree found in various places in the southern hemisphere and which contains Parkinson’s disease relevant chemicals. The subject of this paper.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette_syndrome.
Reference 6: James Parkinson (1755-1824): A Bicentenary Volume of papers dealing with
Parkinson's Disease, incorporating the original ‘Essay On The Shaking Palsy' - Macdonald Critchley with W H McMenemey, Francis Walshe, Sir J Godwin Greenfield - 1966.
Reference 7: https://ukfossils.co.uk/2012/01/24/warden-point/. A fine place for fossil hunting, looking not unlike the blue lias cliffs at Lyme Regis, another fine place for fossil hunting. The source of the snap above.
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