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There are two themes of the human experience that influence greatly our feelings and our behaviours: the memory, and the pain.
Today we are going to talk about the first.
Clive Wearing was a conductor, a musician, that lost a part of his brain. A virus, herpes simplex, that causes fever, in his case trespassed the barrier between blood and brain and caused an inflammation that damaged permanently the hypothalamus, responsible for memory.
Immediately — after being cured of the infection by antiviral medicine —, he was a man with no memory. He couldn’t recognize his children — who, later, recognized they kind of abandoned the father, ceased the visits to him, because that condition was too sad for them.
In the first moments, Clive was too angry, “I can’t think” was a constant. “Prisoner of the consciousness”, is the title of the TV documentary produced on him soon after the event.
His wife — the second, not the mother of his two sons and one daughter — was his fullest “item” of memory — if we could picture memory as drawings in a piece of furniture, what of course is inexact, to say the minimum. He could still know, ever, that she, Deborah, was his wife; and, apart from his own’s, Deborah’s name was the only one he still knew.
His angriness was surplice by a calm and gentle and gistful personality. Like, apart from the loss of memory, he kept two thirds of this personality: he definitely was Clive. (That observation is from one of his sons, in the documentary made 20 years after the first, called “7 seconds memory”). That is why Deborah, after divorcing him, and couldn’t having find another love (she was searching for Clive in other experiences, which she couldn’t find), later renewed the wedding vows with her husband; even though they couldn’t live together because of his need of constant supervision.
The doctors — as the 2nd documentary, that is the line for this program, says — could not explain how he became more peaceful. I have a guess. Clive lost memory of events, he could not live in his mind any happenings. He knew her wife was his wife, but had no memory of the wedding; remembered having worked for BBC, but not one thing, not one activity, that he has done or participated. Maybe he have retained a little bit of what we could call (and I lack any technical precision here) descriptive memory. He could retain the old relations of a name with a characteristic, a face with the level of proximity he had with the person, as long as they (these relations) were verbalized in his understanding. Because he could not evoke any fact, he lost the (other term with precision) narrative memory — but words still made sense to him. So, in living the same day every day, with no time, no continuity, maybe some perception could have been engraved in his mind, unconsciously or not, even with the damaged memory, in the direction of going on
(letting go)
without despair. This is only a guess.
Thank you.
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