Neurologist Oliver Sacks is the author of seven books, including “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” “Awakenings” and “A Leg to Stand On.” Two episodes from the BBC series “The Mind Traveler” featuring Sacks will be shown at 4:20 and 5:15 p.m. Sunday at the Field Museum as part of the Midwest premiere of The Margaret Mead Traveling Film and Video Festival. Sacks spoke recently with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor and reflected on his work.
Q.How does film complement your work?
A. There’s a part of me that wants to have a pen in one hand and a camera in the other. I’m very conscious about what Wittgenstein said: “What can be shown cannot be said.” I’m very conscious of the importance of visual image. On the other hand, I feel that the word is my medium.
Q. This film festival is named for Margaret Mead. Have you been influenced by her work?
A. I think influenced somewhat. Like her, I went to some remote Pacific communities (in writing “The Island of the Colorblind”) because I wanted to look at a whole community and traditions and cultures which were quite different, particularly in relation to neurological conditions. So I feel that might have been a sort of Meadish adventure.
Q. How do you find the subjects for your books?
A. They come to me in odd ways. Sometimes I read, sometimes I get a letter, sometimes I get a phone call. I don’t know if it’s too systematic. In a way, the most recent book started with a phone call from Guam. It was someone I had had correspondence with many years before–a Canadian physician. I couldn’t think why on Earth I would be getting a phone call from Guam. But I went to Micronesia twice and I found this little atoll with many colorblind people not so far from Guam.
On the other hand, on a current subject, I started to write a book about aging and Alzheimer’s, and I hanker to go back to that, but I got a strange little parcel about three months ago–a very heavy parcel, and a small dense bar of tungsten fell out of the parcel.
Q. What’s that?
A. It’s a metal. When I was young I had an uncle who used to manufacture electric light bulbs that contained tungsten filaments, and who used to find tungsten and give me little bars of it. This came back to me, and so I am now writing a sort of memoir of my first passion, which was chemistry, and of what it meant to be an 11-year-old in love with chemistry in the latter days of the war in England. I didn’t intend to write about this. It just happened because someone sent me a bar of tungsten–although this was a chemist and he had heard a little bit of my early days. I don’t think that he thought his little present was going to sort of elicit a book from me.
Q. Are there any subjects you feel you don’t want to write about?
A.I’ve been writing in more different directions lately. I wrote two pieces on swimming last year and am now writing the chemistry thing. I wouldn’t open my mouth on politics. In general, I feel one should not speak freely about sex, politics or religion because these are subjects which are so often charged with violence and irrational feeling, and you may be in trouble before you know it.
Subjects I avoid: I haven’t written anything about repressed memory, multiple-personality disorder. I think I wouldn’t like anything about the paranormal, so-called, partly because I’m violently and possibly dogmatically suspicious and critical, so I think I should keep that to myself.
Q. Your house was once described as “a machine for work.” Why?
A. My writing habits. I don’t possess much. I keep lots of notebooks that have hard covers so I can just fit them into a pocket. I tend to carry them with me at all times, along with felt pens of different colors.
I seem to do a lot of my writing on trains and planes. Above all, I like writing in the restaurant cars of trains with a yellow pad and having a cup of tea and writing another two or three pages, so that after a long journey I will have written 60 pages and had 20 cups of tea. That seems to be bliss.
I also type fast, but with two fingers on an old IBM on long yellow sheets, triple spacing with wide margins, and then I go over things.
If I’m in the mood, I write constantly–12 hours a day, and in all circumstances. If I’m not in the mood, I can hardly write at all. I’m afraid it’s considerably mood dependent.
