by Oliver Sacks
This nonstop verbosity, this reminiscence of concrete episodes, seemed to be in a quite different mode from his painting. When he was alone, he said, the yammer and clatter of memories would die down, and he would get a calm impression of Pontito: a Pontito without people, without incidents, without temporality; a Pontito at peace, suspended in a timeless “once”, the “once” of allegory, fantasy, myth, and fairy tale.
By midmorning, I had been enthralled again by Franco’s paintings but had had enough of his reminiscences. He had one subject only—could talk of nothing else. What could be more sterile, more boring? Yet out of this obsession he could create a lovely, real, and tranquil art. What was it that served to transform his memories—to remove them from the sphere of the personal, the trivial, the temporal, and bring them into the realm of the universal, the sacred? One encounters boring talkers, reminiscers, by the score, and not one of them will be a true artist, like Franco. Thus it was not just his vast memory or his obsession that was crucial in making him an artist but, rather, something much deeper.
Franco was born in Pontito in 1934. A village of some five hundred souls, it was nestled in the hills of Castelvecchio, in the province of Pistoia, about forty miles west of Florence. Like all Tuscan hill villages, it had an ancient lineage and still had an abundance of Etruscan tombs, as well as traditional patterns of farming, terracing, and olive and vine growing, going back more than two thousand years. Its stone buildings, its steep, winding streets, traversable only by trim mountain donkeys or human feet, had not changed in centuries, nor had the simple, orderly life of its residents. The village was dominated, at its highest point, by the spire of its ancient church, and Franco’s house was next to the church—indeed, as a child, he could nearly touch its roof if he leaned far enough out of his bedroom window. Somewhat isolated and inbred, the villagers formed almost a single large family: the Magnanis, the Papis, the Vanuccis, the Tamburis, the Sarpis, were all related. The village’s greatest eminence was Lazzaro Papi, an eighteenth-century commentator on the French Revolution; a monument to him still stands in the central square.
Isolated, unchanging, traditional, Pontito was a citadel against the flux of change and time. The earth was fertile, the inhabitants industrious; their farms and orchards sustained them without luxury or want. Life was good, and secure, for Franco, for all the villagers, until the outbreak of the war.
But then came horrors and troubles of every kind. Franco’s father died in an accident in 1942, and the following year saw the entry of the Nazis, who took over the village and evicted the townspeople. When the villagers came back, many of their houses had been defaced. Life was never the same after this. The town had been despoiled, the fields and the orchards had been ruined, and, perhaps most important, the old patterns and mores disturbed. Pontito gathered itself together and tried gallantly to recoup after the war, but it failed to recover fully.
It has been in a slow decline ever since. Its orchards and fields, its agrarian economy, were never fully restored; it ceased to be self-sufficient economically, and its young men and women had to leave and go elsewhere. The once-thriving village, which had five hundred people before the war, has only seventy people now, all elderly or retired. There are no longer any children, and there are few working adults. The once vital town is depopulated and dying.
All of Franco’s paintings represent Pontito, and his life there, prior to 1943; they are all recollections of his childhood, of the place where he lived and played and grew up, before his father was killed, before the Germans came, before the occupation of the village and the ruination of its fields.
Franco lived in Pontito until he was twelve, in 1946, when he went to school in Lucca. In 1949, he went on to Montepulciano, as an apprentice furniture maker. He was remarkable for his “photographic” memory even before this (as were his mother and one of his sisters, to a lesser degree): he could remember a page after a single reading or the lesson in church after a single hearing; he could remember all the inscriptions on the gravestones in the cemetery; he could remember (and add up) long lists of figures at a glance. But it was only in Lucca, away from home for the first time, and markedly homesick, that he started to experience another sort of memory: images that darted suddenly into his mind-images of great personal resonance and intensity, sharp with pleasure or pain. These images were quite different from the “rote” memory that had distinguished him thus far; they were involuntary and sudden, flashlike and imperative—hallucinatory, almost, in their sound, their texture, their smell, and their feel. This new kind of memory was, above all, experiential or autobiographical, for every image came with its proper personal context and affect. Each image was a scene, a flashback, from his life. “He painfully missed Pontito”, his sister told me. “It was the church, the street, the fields, that he would ‘see’—but as yet he had no impulse to draw.”
Franco returned to Pontito in 1953, after his four years of apprenticeship, but found that the village, already declining, could not support a woodworker. Unable to make a living in Pontito, or follow his trade, he went to Rapallo, where he worked as a cook—though he remained dissatisfied and dreamed of a different life and faraway places. At the start of 1960—he was now twenty-five—he decided, half impulsively, half deliberately, to quit his job, to see the world, to work as a cook on a cruise ship. And as he was preparing to do this (knowing, perhaps, that he would never return) he composed an autobiography—but he flung it into the water as he was boarding the ship. The need to recollect, to make a picture of his childhood, was clearly very strong in him at this point; but he had not yet found his medium. So he set sail. He plied to and fro between the Caribbean and Europe and got to know Haiti, the Antilles, and the Bahamas well—indeed, in 1963 and 1964 he spent fourteen months in Nassau. During this time, he says he “forgot” Pontito—thoughts of it almost never came to his mind.
In 1965, when he was thirty-one, he made a momentous decision: he would not go back to Italy, not go back to Pontito; he would settle in America, in San Francisco. The decision was a difficult and troubling one. It threatened a separation, perhaps irrevocable, from all that he held most valuable and dear: his country, his language, his village, his family, the habits and traditions that had bound his people together for hundreds of years. But it promised, or seemed to promise, freedom and perhaps wealth, a new life in a new country, a freedom to be himself, to be independent, such as he had tasted on board ship. (His father, as a young man, had also gone to America and was in business for a few years, but then languished, and returned to Pontito.)
But with the troubling decision a strange illness occurred, which finally brought him to a sanatorium. It is far from clear what the illness was. There was a crisis of decision, and hope and fear, but there was also a high fever, weight loss, delirium, perhaps seizures; there was a suggestion of tuberculosis, of a psychosis, or of some neurological condition. It was never really resolved what was going on, and the nature of the illness remains a mystery. What is clear is that at the height of the illness, his brain perhaps stimulated by excitement and fever, Franco started to have, nightly and all night, overwhelmingly vivid dreams. Every night, he dreamed of Pontito, not of his family, not of activities or events, but of the streets, the houses, the masonry, the stones—dreams with the most microscopic, veridical detail, a detail beyond anything he could consciously remember. An intense, strange excitement possessed him in these dreams: a sense that something had just happened, or was about to,—a sense of immense, portentous, yet enigmatic significance, accompanied by an insatiable, yearning, bittersweet nostalgia. And when he awoke it seemed to him he was not fully awake, for the dreams were still present, still before his inward eye, painting themselves on the bedclothes and the ceiling and the walls all around him, or standing on the floor, like models, solid with exquisite detail.
In the hospital, with these dreamlike images forcing themselves upon his consciousness and his will, a new feeling took hold of him—a sense that he was now being “
called.” Though his powers of imagery had always been great, he had never seen images of such intensity before—images that suspended themselves like apparitions in the air and promised him a “repossession” of Pontito. Now they seemed to say to him, “Paint us. Make us real.”
What happened, one wonders (and Franco has never ceased to ask himself), in those days and nights in the hospital, that time of crisis, delirium, fever, seizures? Did he crack under the stress of his decision, undergo a “Freudian” splitting of the ego, and become from then on a sort of hypermnesic hysteric? (“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences”, Freud wrote.) Did a split-off part of him seek to provide in memory or fantasy what he had cut himself off from, could no longer return to in reality? Were these dreams, these memory images, called up by him in response to a deep emotional need? Or were they forced on him by some strange, physiological bombardment of the brain, a process that he (as a person) had nothing to do with, but could not help reacting to? Franco considered, but rejected, these “medical” possibilities (and never allowed them to be properly explored) and moved instead to a more spiritual one. 83
83. Giorgio De Chirico, the painter, was subject to classical migraines and migraine auras of great severity—he gave vivid circumstantial accounts of these—and sometimes incorporated their geometric patterns, their zigzags, their blinding lights and darknesses, into his pictures (this has been described in detail by G.N. Fuller and M.V. Gale in the British Medical Journal). But De Chirico was also reluctant to acknowledge a purely medical or physical cause for his visions, since, he felt, their spiritual quality was so strong. His final term for them was a compromise—“spiritual fevers.”
A gift, a destiny, had been vouchsafed to him, he felt, and it was his task to obey, not to question. It was in this religious spirit, then, that Franco, after a brief struggle, accepted his visions and now dedicated himself to making them a palpable reality.
Though he had scarcely painted or drawn before, he felt he could take a pen or brush and trace the outlines that hovered so clearly in the air before him or projected themselves, as through a camera lucida, on the white walls of his room. Above all, in those first nights of crisis, there came to him images of the house where he was born, images impossibly beautiful but with a menacing aspect, too.
Franco’s first Pontito painting, indeed, was of his house, a painting that, despite his lack of training, had a striking confidence and clarity of outline, and a strange, dark emotional force. Franco himself was amazed by this painting, by the fact that he could paint, could express himself in this wonderful new way. Even now, a quarter of a century later, he remains amazed. “Fantastic”, he says. “Fantastic. How could I do it? And how could I have had the gift and not known it before?” He had occasionally, as a child, imagined himself as an artist, but that was a mere fancy, and he had never done more than play with a pen or a brush—sketch a ship on a postcard, perhaps, or a Caribbean scene. He was also frightened by the power he now felt—a power that had seized him and taken him over but that he could perhaps control and give voice to.
And the voice of his paintings, his style, was there from the start, even—or especially—in the first paintings he did. “The first two paintings are quite different from the later ones”, his friend Bob Miller said to me. “There’s something ominous in them—you can see something deep and significant happening.”
That Franco did not start thinking obsessively of Pontito—did not dream day and night of Pontito—until this time is corroborated by his brother-in-law, who did not see him between 1961 and 1987. “Back in 1961, Franco would talk about anything”, he told me. “He wasn’t obsessed—he was normal. But when I saw him in ‘87 he seemed possessed. He constantly had visions of Pontito, and he wouldn’t talk about anything else.”
Miller says:
“His paintings started in this crisis period. He was in the hospital, pretty near a mental breakdown, and the paintings seemed to be a sort of solution, or cure. Sometimes he says, ‘I have these memories, I have these dreams, I can’t function,’ but he seems to function pretty well. It’s hard to have a normal conversation with him, though—it’s ‘Pontito, Pontito, Pontito,’ all the time. It’s as if he had this 3-D construct, this model of Pontito, he can erect—he moves his head, turns around, to ‘see’ different aspects. He seemed to think this sort of ‘seeing’ was normal, and it was only in the late seventies, when Gigi, a friend, came back with photos of Pontito, that he realized for the first time how extraordinary it was—Everything is fresh, excited, as if just recalled. It is not a fixed thing, a repertorial thing, at all. He remembers scenes. He acts them out, relives the whole thing. So it is a very concrete, particular memory, which organizes itself in stories and scenes—a memory of who said what when.”
One sometimes feels that there is something theatrical in the paintings, and, to some extent, Franco himself sees them that way.
The mood that had announced itself in dreams at night now deepened and intensified in Franco’s mind. He started to get “visions” of Pontito by day—visions emotionally overwhelming but with a minute and three-dimensional quality that he compares to holography. These visions may come at any time—when he is eating or drinking, taking a stroll, showering. There is no doubt of their reality for him. He is, perhaps, talking with you quietly, and suddenly he leans forward, his eyes fixed and staring, in a rapture: an apparition of Pontito is rising before him. “Many of Franco’s paintings”, writes Michael Pearce (in a fascinating analysis that appeared in the Exploratorium Quarterly to coincide with the exhibition), “begin with what he describes as a kind of memory flash, where a particular scene will suddenly come into his head. He often feels a great urgency to get the scene down on paper immediately, and has been known to leave a bar in mid-drink in order to begin a sketch—Apparently the ‘flash’ Franco gets of a scene is not a static, photographic view—He can scan the area and ‘see’ in several directions. To do this, he must physically reorient his body, turning to the right to envision what would be to the right in the Pontitan scene, to the left to ‘see’ to that side—his eyes looking into the distance as though he can see the stone buildings and archways and streets.”
Such apparitions are not only visual. Franco can hear the church bells (“like I was there”),—he can feel the churchyard wall; and, above all, he can smell what he sees—the ivy on the church wall, the mingled smells of incense, must, and damp, and, admixed with these, the faint smell of the nut and olive groves that grew around the Pontito of his youth. Sight, sound, touch, smell, at such times are almost inseparable for Franco, and what comes to him is like the complex and coenesthetic experiences of early childhood—“the instantaneous records of total situations”, the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan once called them.
It seems likely that there is some sudden and profound change in Franco’s brain whenever he is “inspired” or “possessed.” Certainly when I first saw Franco seized by a vision, and noted his staring eyes, his dilated pupils, his raptus of attention, I could not help wondering whether he was having a sort of psychic seizure. Such psychic seizures were first recognized a century ago by the great neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, who stressed the commanding hallucinations, the flow of involuntary “reminiscence”, the sense of revelation, and the strange, half-mystical “dreamy state” that could be characteristic of these. Such seizures are associated with epileptic activity in the temporal lobes of the brain.
In the last century, Hughlings Jackson, among others, suspected that some patients with frequent psychical seizures might show strange alterations in thinking and personality with the onset of their disorder. But it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that such an “interictal personality syndrome”, as it came to be called, received closer attention. In 1956 the French neurologist Henri Gastaut wrote an important memoir on van Gogh, in which he presented the case for van Gogh having not only temporal lobe seizures but a characteristic personality change with the onset of these, gradually intensifying
for the rest of his life. In 1961 one of the most gifted of American neurologists, Norman Geschwind, spoke about the possible role of temporal lobe epilepsy in Dostoevsky’s life and writings, and by the early seventies had become convinced that a number of patients with TLE showed a peculiar intensification (but also narrowing) of emotional life, “an increased concern with philosophical, religious and cosmic matters.” Remarkable productiveness was seen in many patients: the writing of autobiographies, the filling of endless diaries, obsessive drawing (in those graphically inclined)—and a general sense of illumination, “mission”, and “fate”, this even in poorly educated, “unintellectual” people who had shown no dispositions in these directions before.
Geschwind’s first publications regarding the incidence and nature of the syndrome were published in 1974 and 1975, with his colleague Stephen Waxman, and galvanized the neurological world. Here, for the first time, a whole constellation of symptoms and behaviors traditionally suggestive of either mental illness or inspiration were attributed to a specific neurological cause, in particular (as David Bear, another colleague, was to stress) a “hyperconnectivity” between the sensory and emotional parts of the brain, resulting in greatly heightened and emotionally charged perceptions, memories, and images. “Personality change in temporal lobe epilepsy”, Geschwind observed, “may well be the most important single set of clues we possess to deciphering the neurological systems that underlie the emotional forces that guide behavior.”
Such changes, Geschwind emphasized, could not be considered either negative or positive as such; what mattered was the role they came to play in a person’s life, and this could be creative or destructive, adaptive or maladaptive. He was, however, especially interested in the (relatively uncommon) situation of a highly creative use of the syndrome. “When this tragic disease is visited upon a man of genius”, he wrote of Dostoevsky, “he is able to extract from it a depth of understanding—a deepening of emotional response.” 84