Personal Melodies in Dissonance

How was everyone's break? I hope you all had a good rest and got some work done and traveled safely and all that. My break went a little awry right at the top--I was greatly enjoying the Echo Maker. I started reading it before break, and in the first week took it on my plane ride back home--and promptly left it in the seat pouch after I'd landed in Austin. Over the next couple of days, as I waited for my dad to pick up another copy at the bookstore, I found myself thinking a lot about recognition and homecomings, some of the themes in the book, if only because I no longer spend a lot of time in my hometown (which, being somewhat sheltered from the recession, is still vibrantly and rapidly changing all the time). I was struck by niggling feelings that something was wrong as I drove down the street where I lived after high school--and then realized the new owner of my old studio apartment had the door open, and she'd painted, and the color was different. Or I'd I find myself searching for an old friend in one of the enormous crowds sweeping the city for South by Southwest, and recognizing her from afar by the way she flicked her cigarette. As Karin does in the novel, I was instantly "at home" again both physically and psychologically, in an emotional and geographical place I'd left long ago--and it reminded me that mapping is still ever-present in my mind.

I'm not sure I ever wrote about this, but I was captivated a few weeks ago when we read a Sacks article online and someone referred to a patient's "motor melody" being disturbed. I think that is one of the most comprehensible metaphors I've come across to explain these altered states of being, altered relationships of mind to body. In the novel, the entire melody of Mark's life had been disrupted by the accident, and yet he didn't see himself as different, but the whole world, and most specifically, his sister, or her impersonator.

Because there's simply no way to comprehend inhabiting a Capgras mind, I kept reaching for strange metaphors to explain it to myself. For instance, when Richard Powers was talking to Terri Gross about the artificiality of typing and composing at once, I turned that into a way to understand the artificiality--or mechanicalness, I suppose is more correct--of how we recognize and represent the outer world to ourselves. I tried to imagine what it would be like to not simply know my sister, but to have most of the elements there and then have others ask me to convince myself that she was really the one. This problem that Capgras patients simply don't "feel" like the person is their loved one is awful. Few people, in other circumstances, have to consciously construct their most intimate relationships, they simply are.

Powers eloquently describes the effects of this emotional brain-damage on the bystanders. It seems that Mark makes everyone doubt themselves (except perhaps Barbara, who is in her own way shaping a double identity)--or perhaps not doubt, but re-examine the way they are positioned against other people. As Dr. Weber's mid-life crisis (for lack of a better term) creeps over him, he has the added uncertainty of this young man who for all intensive purposes seems functional--and yet is very, very damaged. Karin slowly becomes convinced, and begins to voice her belief, that Mark is right, that she can't be his real sister. Her pain in dealing with this disconnect is haunting. We've seen other spouses, siblings, and parents dealing with a loved one who is taken from them by a malady or condition--but never before someone who loses *themselves* because of another's illness.

Reading this novel just after Lying Awake brings us again to the issue of a patient's role and involvement in their treatment. Sister John, though she went through turmoil in the process, was actively involved in planning the course of action and had a great deal of input into how her illness was going to be viewed. Mark, on the other hand, because of the very nature of his deficit, was unable to productively participate in treatment and actually effectively blocked people from helping him. So would it have been right or wrong of Karin to have left him to his own devices, to wash her hands of the matter because this new, strange brother before her believed he was fine and the rest of the world was crazy? It's hard to say, especially because she needed him to "recover" to regain her own sense of self, so in a way her actions were almost as selfish as those Dr. Weber was punishing himself for. How do you treat someone who thinks they don't need treatment? And who is to say that a nonlife-threatening condition must be corrected?