Within months, Clive’s confusion gave way to the agony, the desperation, that is so clear in Miller’s film. Deborah wrote of how, coming in one day, she saw him Indeed, Clive once said to Deborah, “I am completely incapable of thinking.” At the beginning of his illness, Clive would sometimes be confounded at the bizarre things he experienced. Yet Clive, rather than making plausible guesses, always came to the conclusion that he had just been “awakened,” that he had been “dead.” This seemed to me a reflection of the almost instantaneous effacement of perception for Clive-thought itself was almost impossible within this tiny window of time. They can infer that they have been doing something, been somewhere, even though they cannot recollect what or where. Lacking memory, lacking direct experiential knowledge, amnesiacs have to make hypotheses and inferences, and they usually make plausible ones. ![]() Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting. It was, rather, a strategy, a desperate attempt-unconscious and almost automatic-to provide a sort of continuity, a narrative continuity, when memory, and thus experience, was being snatched away every instant. This sort of confabulation was not one of conscious fabrication. He would confidently identify or misidentify me as a friend of his, a customer in his delicatessen, a kosher butcher, another doctor-as a dozen different people in the course of a few minutes. He was wholly immersed in his quick-fire inventions and had no insight into what was happening so far as he was concerned, there was nothing the matter. It was a terrifying and poignant testament to Clive’s mental state, his lostness, in the years that followed his amnesia-a state that Deborah, in Miller’s film, called “a never-ending agony.”Īnother profoundly amnesic patient I knew some years ago dealt with his abysses of amnesia by fluent confabulations. This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content but these passionate assertions and denials, intending to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds of almost identical pages. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry. 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . . But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. ![]() “It’s like being dead.”ĭesperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. “I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,” he would say. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before. . . . It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. His constantly repeated complaint, however, was not of a faulty memory but of being deprived, in some uncanny and terrible way, of all experience, deprived of consciousness and life itself. He was acutely, continually, agonizingly conscious that something bizarre, something awful, was the matter. When he was filmed in 1986 for Jonathan Miller’s extraordinary documentary “Prisoner of Consciousness,” Clive showed a desperate aloneness, fear, and bewilderment. In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible. ![]() Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. I tried to imagine how it was for him. . . . ![]() Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired.
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