On Humming

 

Oliver Sacks’ The man who mistook his wife for a hat is, I think, one of the best short story collections of the 1980s – a decade that dove into short stories. These stories are diagnostically true, as far as that goes, but they are mostly true as  stories. The ancestors of these stories of neurological and other disorders are to be found not only in, say, the case histories of Charcot, but as well in the short stories of Chekhov.

The first story has haunted me since I read it way back when the book came out. It is about a musician who has a curious impairment of vision in which big gaps in his responses to visual stimuli open up, while at the same time he is able to get about his daily life.

“When the examination was over, Mrs. P. called us to the table, where there was coffee and a delicious spread of little cakes. Hungrily, hummingly, Dr. P. started ont eh cakes. Swiftly, fluently, unthinkingly, melodiously, he pulled the plates towards him and took this and that, in a great gurgling stream, an edible song of food, until, suddenly, there cam an interruption: a loud, peremptory rat-tat-tat at the door.”

It is this moment that gives us the diagnostic clue of Dr. P’s curious behavior. Sacks asks the musician’s wife about this, and she tells him that Dr. P. “does everything singing to himself.” He moves, it seems, in an aural or musical landscape that closely maps the visual world in which he finds himself – but the world must be organized so that the music can guide him to where things are and what to do with them.

I have been thinking of Dr. P. this week for a simple reason. Lately, for no reason I can think of, I find myself humming.

Now, I am a man who sings to himself. I’ve been doing that forever. When I ride a bike, I will sing long Dylan or Leonard Cohen songs to myself. When I cook in the kitchen, I sing along, often wandering off the lyrics, to the Black Angels or Nick Cave. I have a pretty good songbook in my head.

But I am not a man who hums to himself. I associate that man with my grandfather, my father’s father, who seemed to hum bits of some grand symphony of hum, one that spanned decades. His humming was part of his resting, his watching of tv, his trying to do home repairs when he was 88 or so, etc. There was a humming aura around Granddaddy, and though I loved the guy, I received the strong impression, when I was a kid, that I did not want to grow into being Granddaddy – that I wanted anything but.

So, the idea that I am suddenly humming alarms me. And it alarms me even more that I am humming hums – there’s no tune, no song nor etude, in this humming. It feeds on its own buzz.

In the story of Dr. P., there’s a wonderful moment. Dr. P. had been a painter in his youth, and on the walls of his house there were hung paintings he’d done from that period onto his late maturity. They began as realistic depictions. “Finally, in the last paintings, the canvasses became nonsense, or nonsense to me – mere chaotic lines and blotches of paint.”  For Sacks, the paintings “was a tragic pathological exhibit, which belonged to neurology, not art.”

Sacks, of course, knows that art belongs to neurology – it is our home, it is the earth we will never escape from, disregarding the longtermist, transhumanist dream that our plutocrat overlords will become digital androids, half man, half silicon chip. My humming and my non-humming both belong to neurology. But I hope not pathological neurology.

It is too early for me to become a hummer, Lord!