There was a time not that many years ago (I’m writing in 2019) when the spectacle of a seemingly ordinary person in the middle of his or her day suddenly yelping or cursing or expostulating in some public place in an extravagant and seemingly uncontrollable manner was thought quite unprecedented, uncanny, unsettling, and frankly scandalous. It’s hard to exaggerate how unfamiliar, even unknown, the condition characterized as Tourette’s syndrome was in those days, and how misunderstood even when recognized. If that particular social scotoma has in the meantime lifted, as it were—if individuals behaving in such a manner nowadays are understood to be displaying neither willful obscenity nor some demonic curse but rather the effects of a specific neurological condition and accounted for as such—this is in no small measure due to Oliver Sacks’s crusading writings and other interventions around the topic. Strange, in that context, how his pioneering work with such individuals presently got all tangled up in one of the most disastrous interactions of his career. But there you go, and there he went.
Over those years, in conversations with Oliver, an impinging presence almost as fraught as that of his blighted sexuality was the shadow cast by the still-smarting wreckage of a round of therapy with one patient in particular, the super-Touretter who I will call John. Splintered shards of the story would come up now and then (usually accompanied by a darkening glower and a veritable physical shudder), allusions proliferated, but I’d never gotten the full story. One day, as we sat on his back deck in City Island, I asked Oliver about it point-blank.
He was silent for a few moments, tapping his pen against the top of the red wooden picnic table. “Ah yes, the disastrous paranoic affair between John the Touretter and myself.” Tap, tap, tap, after which he stuffed the pen in his shirt pocket and sighed. “I never had another relationship quite like it,” he said at length. “It occupied my every Saturday for eighteen months.”
Had it been his first intensive interaction with a Touretter?
“Actually not. So-called Ray, by which I mean the man I’d subsequently write about as ‘Witty Ticcy Ray,’ was my first Touretter back in 1971, though my piece about him only ran in the London Review ten years after that, in 1981. As you’ll recall, 1971 was still in the middle of the busiest period of Awakenings for me. I suppose some of the wild reactions we were seeing among the postencephalitics there at Beth Abraham during the Tribulation period may have sensitized me into beginning to notice correlative sorts of behavior in the everyday wider world and wondering about those, such that by April 1974, I’d begun attending meetings of the Tourette Syndrome Association (the TSA), which were all wonderfully strange, what with their roomfuls of Touretters.” A blue jay went swooshing through Oliver’s backyard. “A blue jay would fly by there and his chirp would instantly get repeated, involuntarily, by thirty people all over the room.
“I met John at one such TSA meeting in October 1975.” (This would have been a year after the Ward 23 blowup and the ensuing trip to Norway with its leg accident.) “He just came up to me, presented himself temptingly, grandiosely, masochistically, seductively, declaring ‘I am the greatest Touretter in the world’—and indeed he was ticcing and contorting and gesticulating and stuttering all the while in the most outlandish ways—‘I can teach you more about Tourette’s than any book. You will never meet another Touretter like me. I am the last thing in Tourette’s!’ Perhaps he’d read Awakenings or been impressed by my contributions at the meetings. Perhaps he’d picked me out as imaginative, unorthodox, hospitable to the very strange.
“At any rate, he wooed me, though I was prepared to be wooed. I in turn brought an intellectual range and an empathic connection which delighted him, gratified him, and perhaps finally terrified him.” Now Oliver was tapping absentmindedly with his fingers, gazing out into the distance. “These strange infatuations—or squabbles—these folies à deux where two people become the world for each other. What can one say?”
What did John do for a living?
“He worked in an office job at one of the South Jersey school boards. He used to teach, loved teaching, but was transferred: It was said the children were frightened of his behavior; more likely the parents were.”
And his family background?
“John had been struck by how many of his co-Touretters had had overpowering fathers, and John’s father was indeed a piece of work. The entire family was Tourettic: A brother had multiple tics with convulsiveness, while the father had the opposite. John’s sister was the white sheep of the family and was almost discriminated against for her lack of afflictions. His whole life must have been a flight between the grotesque impression of Tourette’s and the ‘real person’ under the Tourette’s. But it was indeed just as he said: He did display extraordinary virtuosity. Indeed, he had been compelled into virtuosity.
“Later, when we began doing videotapes, looking at them afterwards, the ‘real’ John would remind me of a Rembrandt portrait, all his other iterations of an Al Capp cartoon cavalcade. He would come to the rented place where I was living in Mount Vernon at the time, where I’d mounted a bizarre labyrinth of cameras, mics, and monitors—”
Was he coming as a patient, or what?
“Well, he paid fifty dollars per session, of which his insurance covered eighty percent. Every Saturday, he was subject to, and a virtuoso at, inspired drivel. It fascinated me through many weeks, and for hundreds of hours, to hear, see, witness, and record his witty ticcy raving. And I felt intensely privileged.”
Had they been aiming at some sort of cure?
“Well, relatively early on we exhausted the possibilities of drugs. John had had negative experiences with Haldol, but at a certain point, we decided to try Haldol again … And I think I almost killed him …
“My sixth sense had told me he might be incredibly sensitive, so I gave him an incredibly small dose, at which point he went into a coma! I got him to come back to. But it was really scary. He was then tic-free for five hours, but dulled, and then suddenly the tics just came back. It had been intriguing to see him tic-free. So this was a real mixture of things: With Haldol, for instance, it proved impossible to find an intermediate dose between no effect and nearly killing him. And the same sort of thing played out with other possible drugs, and eventually it was clear to both of us that due to the severity of his condition, chemotherapy of any sort was out. So medicine had failed.
“After that, we’d start each session with current problems and ascend toward general themes. Our working hypothesis was that the tics formed a kind of hieroglyphics, a pantomimic language with kinship to dreams whose meaning was clear to no one, least of all to the ticcer. My bedside reading at the time were Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and indeed I sometimes wondered whether Freud had felt just like this as the secrets of dreaming were beginning to be vouchsafed to him. I still think Tourettic tics occupy a space between jokes and dreams. That they are reactions to both internal and external stimuli.
“Other aspects of things didn’t feel Freudian so much as Lurian. So I sent an audiotape to Luria as a Christmas present in 1975. I still wonder what the cryptanalysts at the KGB must have made of the tape as it crossed their desks—but somehow it got through. And Luria said he’d never encountered such unselectivity of action, that it reminded him of Brownian motion: an extraordinarily funny, grotesque performance that at the same time transpired at the roots of both psychodynamics and neurodynamics.
“Later on, after everything had collapsed, I will say this: In all his raging and ranting, to the very end John would grant that I had spoken about him with Luria, and that somehow still really mattered.”
The blue jay came arcing back into the yard, and Oliver smiled at its passage and erupted into a manic cacophony of chirps and tweets of his own, by way of greeting.
“For a long time,” he continued, “I thought John had in himself the sensibilities of a naturalist and a novelist, but I may have been projecting. He’d come upon a phrase in a Balzac novel—‘I can carry a whole society in my head’—and he insisted, ‘So can I! In pantomime. Does that mean,’ he’d go on to ask, ‘that I could be an artist?’ I told him the perception would first have to be disembedded from the mime.
“He had all sorts of fantasies as to what he wanted to be—lover, artist, warrior, explorer. As I say, initially he hadn’t presented himself as a patient but rather as a specimen, a teacher.
“As often happens with exotic diseases, perhaps there was a sort of ambivalence in both him and me. ‘You wouldn’t take any interest in me if I didn’t tic,’ he’d say. ‘I’d just be an average bright guy, whereas I’m the greatest teacher in the world!’ (My brother Michael, too, sometimes speaks of ‘rotten normality.’) And there may have been something to that, because from the very start ours was a flawed relationship, like a bad affair: We had different perceptions of what we were about, as in natural history versus an ambivalently desired cure. (I wonder how much this sort of thing arose with Freud in the early investigative days of psychoanalysts.) At first I imagined we would indulge and even encourage the pathology and physiology of Tourette’s until we had plumbed it—but then we would somehow move on.”
A long pause, the fingers tapping. “Early in 1976, a woman reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer somehow got wind of John’s situation and decided to do a feature on him, and she taped four hours with me. Gradually, however, I began to recognize a second gleam in her eye: There was the gleam of pure interest, yes, but also the gleam of the scoop. When I saw that, a bit late, I said, ‘Look, all of this is tentative, many of these thoughts are just ideas I’m playing with, some would be disquieting to publish—in particular one, two, three, and four…’ She assured me she’d only be using a couple of lines and that she’d show me a draft. She never did. Her two lines became two pages, with one, two, three, and four as the major points, and my words recrafted in such a way that I became an obscene voyeuristic doctor grafted onto and exploiting a patient who was trapped in an endless dirty joke. She lied, sensationalized, did great damage.”
Did John see the piece?
“John saw it, everybody saw it. You could not walk the streets of New York City in late February 1976 without tripping over it! At that point, though, John and I were still okay, things hadn’t yet soured, we agreed The Philadelphia Inquirer incident had been unfortunate, but we let it go.
“In response to my anxiety about its forthcoming publication, however, and then its actual publication, I wrote the first draft of a piece called ‘Humean and Human Being’ in which I referred to John as ‘Motley,’ hence ‘M,’ and keyed off of Hume’s notion that we are nothing but a bundle of sensations succeeding one another with inconceivable rapidity, that any coherent sense of personhood is hence a sort of overarching fiction, a state of affairs that may or may not be the case on average but was almost literally the case with someone like M who in that sense existed at a sort of philosophical extremity.1
“I concluded the piece with quotes from Luria’s Mind of a Mnemonist (‘Waiting, always waiting for something’) and Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (‘The Messianic leads to a life lived in deferment’). And indeed, I ended up wondering whether John would ever take the plunge.”
It was in here, as well, Oliver noted, that he began to conceive of his own “five seconds” book—a project he might still like to pursue, if necessarily now with someone else—the high-speed recording of a Touretter ticcing and expostulating in such a way that the tape could be slowed down to reveal a veritable universe of gestures, the one related to the next, and what was provoking each, all as revealed in five seconds of tape.
As with that van Eyck postcard, the sheer compression of experience, I hazarded. “Precisely,” Oliver concurred.
Oliver’s thoughts about the intelligibility and interpretability of tics, though, had in the almost a decade since become more nuanced than that, as was revealed to me a few days later when I received a long, typewritten letter he’d composed a few hours after I’d left. To wit (selected passages):
[As for your question] about the “meaning” of tics, John’s in particular, about which I have expressed myself contradictorily. I again thought about this—in conversation with Mark [Homonoff] (we took off to Lake Jeff.2 For a day)—but have forgotten what I thought. A tic is convulsive—this term is repeatedly used by Gilles de la Tourette—but it may be a convulsion (so to speak) of the Will or Passions or Imagination. This confers feeling and meaning of a sort, although it may be a sort which is essentially absurd.
Thus, although one might suppose that every tic, or most tics, had “meaning,” this was communicated cryptically if it was communicated at all (in this way like dreams—but less coherent: delirium, perhaps … or like the wayward, arbitrary associations of the Luria’s Mnemonist). […]
[With John,] there was a peculiar vocal tic, an ejaculation, a crushed sound, which with “tape-stretching” and repeated playing, finally revealed itself as an admonition (in the German his father used to use) … Verboten! Followed by a lightning quick slap of the hand. I included this, I think, in the tape-segment I sent Luria.
On the one hand tics are jerks, convulsive movements; but in a ticcer like John, they can become a sort of (hieroglyphic) “language” as well … though a language which defeats the purpose of language by failing to communicate. […]
Thus there is, and is not “meaning” in tics …
I am tired, I can’t think, I am blathering … I fear I have confused you, or myself, more than ever. I had best stop.SB
“As you could see from that letter,” Oliver admitted a few days later when I returned to City Island and we resumed our conversation about what happened with John, “nowadays I’m somewhat more mixed in my own mind between thinking of tics as superficial and as unfathomably deep.
“Back then, though, I was filming everything, using up all my savings” (just as earlier he had with the postencephalitics, it occurred to me). “And at a certain point, after so many Saturdays in the office, I began to feel that maybe I’m indulging this man and myself too much. Furthermore, I began to get bored with his repertoire of tics, just as one gets bored with any repertoire. In a way it was like, ‘Okay, we’ve had fun, but enough now, let’s try to shape up.’ But every word I said along these lines he turned into tics.
“In part as a way of transcending this impasse, we decided to leave the confines of the office. He would get so ticcy describing interactions in the world, and particularly how he was received in the world, that it occurred to me it might be better just to go out with him to observe and record things in person. Perhaps we made a mistake when we abandoned the doctor’s office for the outside world, for this anthropological fieldwork, as it were. But had we not, I might not have come to appreciate, for example, his deep love of animals: He was a ticcy Saint Francis who found all animals his brothers and sisters.
“Indeed, much more so than actual people.” Oliver sighed, pausing. “One of the sinister things was that so personable a man had neither friends nor girlfriends,” Oliver continued, before correcting himself. “Actually, that’s not entirely true: He did have one girlfriend for a while with whom he had a terrifically complex relationship.”
At any rate, the videotaping project was becoming too expensive. “Of the $10,000 I’d started with, I only had $2,000 left,” Oliver related. “I’d actually spoken with a few anthropological filmmakers to see if they might like to come on board, but they all wanted too much money. So I wrote to my old friend Duncan Dallas at Yorkshire Television, describing the situation in detail, initially asking about the possibility of a grant. Whereupon, Duncan came over to see for himself, agreed that it was incredible, and though I can’t remember whether the impulse came from John, Duncan, or me, at a certain point we all agreed: ‘Let’s do it, let’s make a film together!’
“I should clarify, because from the start, Duncan, like me, also had his ambivalences. But it was almost as if we were fated from the beginning to bring John into the public realm—and in so doing to destroy everything. For now—filming took place in February 1977—things really began to intrude into John’s life. The film crew were very much in his face, continuously, deploying telephoto lenses and the like—this was now indeed becoming the very stuff of paranoia.
“And no sooner had filming been completed with the crew heading back to England, than the very next day, John came into my office and showed me his 2,002nd face: acutely paranoid, in a blind fury—accusing me of having betrayed him, and so forth.
“We suspended our meetings for a while, indeed through the summer, though Duncan and John stayed in touch. At various points Duncan and I thought about shelving the entire project, but somehow it continued to stumble along. At one point Duncan wondered whether the act of being involved in the editing might not in itself have been an affirming, integrating experience for John, and he urged him to come over to England to take part, but John refused. In the end, it took over ten months for Duncan and his team to edit the program, but it was finally shown on English TV in February of 1978.”
Unlike the Awakenings documentary of a few seasons earlier, which had aired to near-universal praise, this one received mixed reviews, and even some quite unfavorable ones which spoke of a doctor exploiting his patient—reviews which, by a terrible error in judgment, were all sent to John. (“He also received a barrage of mail, including proposals of friendship and even marriage.”) But the net effect of this sudden upsurge in attention, Oliver explained, “is that John began leaving messages on my machine (by this point, there’d already been a year’s break in our in-person meetings) reminding me ominously of Gilles de la Tourette’s own fate—as you may know, Tourette, the first to have described the condition, back in the late nineteenth century, ended up murdered by one of his own patients.
“Presently we were brought together on neutral ground, as it were, in a psychiatrist colleague’s office, alongside Sheldon Novick, the medical director of the TSA, and though we all agreed the film should and would never be shown over American television, John seemed to show himself agreeable to the film’s exhibition before limited audiences. And I thought this signaled a kind of peace.
“Not long afterwards, though, he retracted the agreement, complaining that it had been achieved, as he put it, ‘under medical duress.’ No, he insisted, he was not happy. ‘If you ever do try to show it,’ he insisted, ‘I want to be there to monitor what you say!’ As a result of which, I have been more secretive than he’d have ever wished: I’ve shown it to at most half a dozen friends. He meanwhile became more and more obsessed with his own videotape copy, compulsively showing it to himself over and over again.
“The thing is, he was extremely ambivalent. I think he’d have liked it if I’d shown the film before the entire AMA, after which he could have emerged from backstage, proclaiming, ‘The film is as nothing compared with the real thing!’
“Meanwhile, between the filming and the British TV showing of our film, another film was being gotten up by another director who’d wanted to include John and me, along with others. ‘No,’ John had huffed. ‘What need have I of you? I am the star of my own film!’ In the event, that film, The Sudden Intruder, featuring a fellow named Orrin, was eventually adopted as the official TSA film. At which point John really got angry, insisting that ‘our film’ was much better and more human than the other. That one was competent, but ours was remarkable!
“At our very last meeting, as we were still trying to sort this whole thing out, John shouted that all along I’d only been obsessed with his private life. ‘I’m a naturalist,’ I’d shouted back, ‘not a voyeur. I don’t give a damn about your private life!’
“But the next day Shengold observed, with his typically cutting intelligence, ‘Don’t you see? You were his private life.’”
Going home that evening, I decided to dig back into my notes from my conversation with Duncan Dallas in London—as it happens that conversation had not been taped, but I reproduce these observations from my notes at the time. After we’d spoken at some length about Dallas’s Awakenings collaboration with Oliver, in closing I’d asked him about the Tourette’s film.
“Around 1975, Oliver told me, ‘I have a new and very interesting patient I’m not going to tell you any more about.’ Six months later, though, he told me of this new patient, John, who was in his own words ‘a super-Touretter.’ And Oliver intimated that he might indeed make for an interesting film.
“So I went back over to the States to meet John, and once again, it was the same thing. Here was this chap who, if you and I met him, we’d probably just say that the guy has a lot of problems, maybe averting our gaze and doubtless moving on as quickly as possible with the rest of our day. But Oliver had imagined himself into this fellow’s situation—perhaps even a bit too much for John’s comfort, as things developed. A question does arise as to the degree to which one owns one’s own disease.
“Beyond that, you know how if you happen upon an epileptic in the midst of his fit, you grow frightened for yourself. Well, John had been having to deal with that sort of reaction to his condition all of his life, and it must have been very distressing, such that the prospect of being filmed was perhaps too much to expect John to come to terms with.
“But he insisted that he’d be happy and indeed more than happy to be filmed, so we decided to proceed with the project. Still, for various extraneous reasons, we had to put off the actual shoot for another six months, and by the time we came back, things had grown distinctly more difficult: John had in a way fallen in love with Oliver, or was it vice versa? And yet at the same time John had come to understand that Oliver was never going to be able to ‘cure’ him and that he was going to have to face the same old challenges for the rest of his life. In his disappointment, he began to see Oliver as just another doctor experimenting on him. And a strange dynamic seemed to have developed within him of rampant suspiciousness laced with equally rampant exhibitionism.
“Filming was difficult, and two or three times we thought of giving the whole project up. For one thing, John was entirely different depending on whether the camera was on or off, overacting as it were in either direction: At lunch he’d be completely wild and wonderful and very very funny, but the minute we turned the camera back on he became reserved, restrained, and seemed able to enforce a kind of momentary calm upon himself. Meanwhile, the good stuff we were getting was of Oliver, though even there, it seemed much more difficult than it had been with the Awakenings film, since he hadn’t yet really sorted things out in his own mind and here we were right on top of him as he was endeavoring to do so. It was all so raw, which was enthralling for us, if difficult for him.
“Still, the final film was very interesting. We showed it over the television here in England, but if the Awakenings film had been very well received, this one was not so much: Critics attacked its snooping quality. And yet it did have an impact, and people do remember it.
“Then we went over to show it to Oliver and John, and initially things went okay. John seemed happy with it. But with the passing days, John grew increasingly angry and presently very, very nasty—to Oliver more so than to us. He accused him of using earlier videotapes that they had made together that were supposed to have remained private, even though he’d known of our intention to use them all along, but he now insisted he’d never agreed to that and as a result he was going to report Oliver to the relevant psychological associations and so forth. The kind of overreaction that if you are in television, you learn to shrug off and move on, but Oliver couldn’t.
“I think John couldn’t handle the fact that the camera in the end didn’t pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, and that it made evident the way treatment as such wasn’t going to lead to a cure. And he lashed out. Oliver, in turn, turned completely neurotic, obsessing over the way Tourette himself had ended up being shot by one of his own patients. Oliver insisted that we not now and not ever allow the film to be shown in America ‘or I’ll be killed,’ he said—which was fine with us. We agreed, of course, not to distribute it to the States, though eventually, apparently, relatively recently, it did show up once late at night on some cable outlet as part of some package deal, and though John didn’t bother us, he did apparently vent at Oliver, and the whole thing boiled up all over again. We took pains to make sure it wouldn’t happen again, but still …
“Which of course is all quite dismaying. Not only on its face but also because for Oliver to write, conditions have to be just right, he has to be at peace.”
Pausing for a moment, Dallas concluded: “Often as you spend the postproduction hours editing a big project, you become disillusioned with its subject, you come to see through them, but that never, ever happens with Oliver. He stops your life—just as he’s quite prepared at any moment to stop his own.”
The next time I went to City Island, I asked Oliver if I could watch the video of the documentary, and he set me up in a little alcove in his basement storage area while he returned to his own work upstairs.
Frankly, I was shocked. Far from being in any way insensitive or exploitative or even discomfiting, the documentary (a part of the wider A Change in Mind series entitled “What Makes You Tic?”) was heartfelt, charming, and intensely sympathetic to both John and Oliver. It was hard to see how anyone could have been offended or disconcerted, least of all its principals, the mutual respect and high regard and indeed pleasure they and the filmmakers were so clearly taking in each other being evident in every frame.
At one point, for example, they were all watching an earlier video from Oliver’s private stash on a TV monitor, in which John can’t stop tapping and poking and prodding the table mic, even though he knows he’s not supposed to and has repeatedly been asked not to. He just can’t help himself, he declares impishly, with Oliver guffawing in the background, behind the camera. How much of that behavior, one hears Oliver ask John, does he think is just meaningless it, and how much of it is you, such that it may stand for something? To which the John on the monitor answers, “I was going to ask you that!” At which point the John outside the monitor, watching the previously videotaped exchange, averred how it had been as incredible for him to watch as it would have been for anyone without Tourette’s.
“There’s a who and there’s a what,” Oliver speculates, “and in some ways they are separate and yet they are inseparable, they’ve grown up together.”
“May I interrupt here,” John interrupts, at which point he goes on to note how when he sleeps, he never dreams of himself as ticcing. Everything he does—playing tennis, skiing, being with a girl—he does well. And when he then wakes up, for a few moments that dream reality persists; he is calm, becalmed, content, still. “And sometimes I actually laugh to myself, thinking of myself and how I will be just a few minutes later on, making noises, making screeches, having tics and mannerisms, being looked at by people. And I laugh to myself in a genuine fashion of laughing, out loud, because I think … That’s not me.”
Later on, as the camera follows the doctor and his patient on various drives and walks around town (John driving, biting the steering wheel and steering with his teeth, interacting extravagantly with passing pedestrians, whooping and pumping, putting on quite a show; the two of them traipsing through Times Square or Central Park), Oliver in a voice-over describes how, on the one hand, “John has the most incredible empathy and resonance and power to feel, indeed to be what other people are, and also what other nonhuman wild creatures are.” (We see John playing with a passing squirrel.) “But by being everybody and everything,” Oliver continues, “at the same time, he may be nothing, he may be taken out of himself and out of the possibility of being an individual because he is everybody else.”
On camera, John keeps darting about, at a bagel stand in the park (“Mistuh,” a kid comes up to him, “you got the fastest reflexes I ever seen—how come you got such fast reflexes?”), later at Katz’s Delicatessen, where he teases the countermen and attracts the drop-jawed attention of fellow diners with his nonstop carnivalesqueries (Oliver off camera, guffawing all the while with fondness and delight and almost palpable pride). In another voice-over, Oliver notes how just plain funny and witty John is, how “he can be outrageous without outraging, his use of exhibition being like ours of inhibition. His associations are instant, sudden, surprising, immediate, without the usual deliberation, and as such they can be very remarkable.”
There is a good deal of conversation about whether the triggers for such associations are external or internal. At one point, Oliver relates how on an earlier videotape, there’d come a moment when John tumbled through “a hiss, a hoot, and a twitter one after the other in quick succession” and how it was only subsequently, playing back the tape in slow motion, that Oliver was able to determine that “the hiss had been preceded by a blast of escaping radiator steam, the hoot by a car horn passing, and the twitter by a passing bird outside.” On the other hand, John himself relates a story about how back in college, cramming for a test, the image of black churchgoers raising their hands up to heaven and shouting “Help me, Lawd, Lawd, help me now!” came into his head and almost instantaneously transmogrified into repeated arm-flailing tics of his own, punctuated by compressed “Help me, Lawd” shouts, which went on for a good part of the rest of the evening.
At another point, as John grows ever more intent upon a fierce game of Ping-Pong, his tics just seem to melt away. “One sees that he is happiest and most free and most himself, most at ease and most at home in various forms of play,” Oliver observes. “This might be playing with a squirrel, playing ball, playing guitar, he is full of fun, and indeed, the various forms of play are what bring him together.”
At times Oliver’s observations seemed to turn wistfully self-referential—doctor and patient seeming to blur into each other. “One can only find one’s repose and one’s resolution in embracing arms,” he commented at one point, “whether it’s the arms of one’s woman or one’s muse, of Mother Earth or nature, or of the Source of Everything … Now in a sense this problem can become particularly intense [for individuals with especially pronounced cases of Tourette’s], and the way John has it is something that in a way excommunicates and exiles and alienates and estranges him, but at the same time gives him such a sense of the richness of life, as I think few people can have. Such that in one sense, paradoxically, he has so much life, and in another way he has so little.”
A bit further on, Oliver confesses: “And yet as his physician, I can’t give him a life. There are and will be no magic pills, and this has meant John has had to renounce certain messianic expectations. But by the same token, alongside the disappointment and the anger, together we are beginning to investigate all sorts of other ways of making life better and more interesting. And he is becoming more active in all of this, less passive, less of a patient and more of an agent.”
As the film coursed to its conclusion, Oliver offscreen against the backdrop of a medley of sequences of John alone, making his way in the world, pulled many of these themes together one last time. “This is a man who is faced with too many possibilities. He is not simply at a crossroads; there are thousands of roads. And there’s a question as to whether there’s any point at which these thousands of radii all meet. I think they do meet, at least temporarily, as we have seen, in play, but as for the greater question as to what role he should play in the world, what is the role which is him, he doesn’t know, such a thing cannot be prescribed, it can only be found … he has to find his own home—and I can only hope that he will.”
After which the filmmakers return to the car for the final sequence, with John driving. If we asked you for the last word on Tourette’s, they inquire, what would it be?
“You want it?” John shoots back.
Yeah, they say, we do, go ahead.
“That was it,” John says, breaking into a smile. “Do you want Tourette’s? Take mine! You want it, you can have it.”
After finishing the video, I tramped upstairs to tell Oliver that far from seeming charged or guilt-ridden, the film was lovely and loving and grace-flecked, filled with fellow feeling and fine regard. What on earth had happened?
“The absence of distance both made the illumination possible and made the subsequent intimacy terrifying,” Oliver suggested, the blowup—half a decade past at that point—seemingly as vivid as if everything had just occurred yesterday. “You have to understand, the man is close to insane with ambivalence.”
Speaking of which, though, Oliver too seemed almost as hamstrung over the prospect of any future book on Tourette’s as he had been, for much of the past eight years, over the Leg book that he was only now verging on concluding. The John impasse still had him paralyzed: so much research material with no way to deploy it.
“For a while I thought I could just shift details—his name, the location of our conversations, his age, his gender. He positively loathed the word ‘freak’ and out of perversity I’d sometimes entertained the fantasy of calling the book Freak. More recently, I’ve been considering chopping him up into twelve distinct pieces, as if profiling twelve different individuals in the context of a cavalcade of several other such Tourettic portraits.
“Hmmm,” he grunted, and “hmmm.
“Look at this.” He suddenly reached for an old volume he’d recently been perusing: Tics and Their Treatment, the translation by Kinnier Wilson (his mother’s teacher) of a French text from 1905, Les tics et leur traitement by Henry Meige and E. Feindel, a volume which included “Confessions of a Ticcer,” a memoir by a patient identified as O.
Flipping through the pages, alighting on one passage and another, I couldn’t help but notice the richness of O’s and the authors’ Victorian/Edwardian language, so obviously an influence on Oliver’s own: “The absurdity of this vicious circle does not escape my observation, and I know I am its author, yet that cannot prevent my becoming its victim”; “I cannot withstand the allurement or banish the sentiment of unrest”; “abandoning himself in his moment of solitude to a veritable debauch of absurd gesticulations, a wild muscular carnival, from which he returns comforted, to resume sedately the thread of the interrupted dialog”; “he is capable of sympathies keenly felt though rarely sustained.” The vocabulary! The cadences!
And then this, an extended passage that, it occurs to me, could as well apply to Oliver at times as to John:
Alike in speaking and in writing O. betrays an advanced degree of mental instability. His conversation is a tissue of disconnected thoughts and uncompleted sentences; he interrupts himself to diverge at a tangent on a new train of ideas—a method of procedure not without its charms, as it frequently results in picturesque and amusing associations. No sooner has he expressed one idea in words than another rises in his mind, a third, a fourth, each of which must be suitably clothed; but as time fails for this purpose, the consequence is a series of obscure ellipses which are often captivating by their very unexpectedness.3
I now suggested how this might constitute a solution to Oliver’s own Tourette’s book problem—that is, revise this text with a foreword of his own on Victorian medicine and an afterword on Tourette’s, incorporating his John the Touretter material, the entire thing to be published exclusively in France!
Oliver laughed. “Aye,” he said, sighing, “the problem of the ongoing existence in the world of one’s subjects.” At which point I laughed. And he laughed at me, all the harder.4
We both subsided. I now wondered aloud as to what Oliver would think of my trying to contact John. He hesitated, asked me to give him a few days to think about it.
And a few days later, he telephoned to say he’d talked the matter over with his shrink, Shengold, and the two had agreed that if I wished to approach John as a neutral party reporting on how I was moved by the film, that would be okay; or if I wished to approach him in the form of a neutral inquiry in the context of a profile of Sacks, that, too, would be okay; but if I imagined myself to be arranging any sort of reconciliation, that would be out of the question.
“I don’t know how much you know about paranoids, how naïve you are,” Oliver continued, pausing, considering. “I suspect what you might get would be an odd mixture of wistfulness, outrage, sadness, and spite … or he might blame it all on the film.”5
There were a few more moments of silence on the line, then a long sigh. “Oomph,” he concluded. “It’s a pity such a wonderful disease was visited upon such a terrible person.”