Lost Mariners

A “clinical tale” I read some time before I started drinking (not before I’d had a drink, not before I’d been drunk, either, but before I’d started drinking) described the case of a “charming, intelligent, memoryless” man who had lost almost everything to an alcohol-related condition. This was The Lost Mariner, Jimmie G., in Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and what he had lost, by 1975, was thirty years of memory.

Jimmie G. suffered from Korsakov’s syndrome. He remembered nothing after 1945, when he had been nineteen. His “integral experience of time” had given way to a “world of isolated impressions.” The amnesia was retroactive, but absolute. Sacks writes: “[N]one of us had ever encountered, even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.”

After nine years of observation, Jimmie G. remained as lost a mariner, neuropsychologically, as when Sacks first met him. Deprived of moorings in “extensional ‘spatial’ time,” however, Jimmie was “perfectly organized in Bergsonian ‘intentional’ time; what was fugitive, unsustainable, as formal structure, was perfectly stable, perfectly held, as art or will.” He found “continuity and reality” in the chapel, and took to the garden and gardening. But he could never remember isolated items for more than a few seconds, and Sacks wonders “if he was not condemned to a sort of ‘Humean’ froth, a meaningless fluttering on the surface of life.”

Recovering alcoholics speak of insanity and dying out there. There’s another state, perhaps, with a half-measure of each: the diminished self, giving up time to nothing - absolutely nothing, nothing at all. Classical Korsakov’s - “a profound and permanent, but ‘pure’ devastation of memory caused by alcoholic destruction of mammillary bodies” - is a rare beast, but alcoholic stasis, suspending your engagement with anything other than alcohol, turning over years, is common enough. There are blackouts, of course, but before that there is all that time abandoned to meaninglessness, to entirely negligible events and conversations you could guarantee would be forgotten - pre-forgotten, even; dead upon arrival.

I remember many things. But many more are gone with the Guinness and its perfect head, the bishop’s collar, the Humean froth.