Summary
The introduction to “Excesses” opens with a discussion on where neurological disorders of excess stand in the field of neuroscience. As mentioned in the introduction to “Losses,” neurology loves to study deficits, especially in the left hemisphere of the brain. Hence, disorders that cause over-excitement or excessive ebullience in the brain have not received the attention they deserve. Instead, these conditions are received by psychiatry, anatomy, and pathology.
Sacks’ book Awakenings in part depicts patients who become dangerously over-animated due to the drug they received to cure their parkinsonian symptoms. Although at first the awakening of their bodies is fantastic, as their excitement escalates they begin to lose control, ticcing repetitively and furiously. The feeling of over-abundance proves for those patients to be just as concerning as a lack thereof. Sacks calls disorders of excess a kind of seductive trap, where the identity of the afflicted can become dangerously aligned, even consumed, by the disorder itself.
Ray, the subject of “Witty Ticcy Ray,” is one of the few Tourette’s patients Sacks agrees to see after a sudden upsurge of interest in Tourette’s and “ticcing” brought on by a Washington Post article from early 1971. Ray is twenty-four when he meets Sacks, “almost incapacitated by multiple tics of extreme violence coming in volleys every few seconds” (97). Although he had been subject to these attacks since the age of four, Ray managed thus far to get by with his wit, intelligence, and character–successfully completing college, making a few friends, and even getting married. His condition had, in fact, helped him to become a “virtuosic” jazz drummer and an excellent ping-pong player. After having been fired from over a dozen jobs for incidents caused by his tics, Ray decides to seek treatment.
Sacks prescribes Ray a drug called Haldol, which proves within a matter of hours to completely cease his tics. However, after a week passes, Ray returns to the hospital with a black eye and a broken nose. The drug had slowed his reflexes, resulting in an incident with a revolving door. Ray laments that without his tics, he is nobody; his tics were the defining quality of his personality. Sacks convinces him to continue taking the drug, and eventually, he adjusts to its effects. After nine years of being tic-free, Ray returns to the clinic. He says that he’s tired of being “sober,” and that without his Tourette’s he no longer experiences the wild, creative surges that he used to. He’d lost his interest in drumming and ping-pong and reports feeling far less competitive or playful. Finally, Ray decides to compromise: on weekdays he will dutifully take his Haldol, and on the weekends he will let fly, becoming Witty Ticcy Ray once again. “[H]e has been taught by his sickness,” Sacks concludes, “and, in a way, he has transcended it” (101).
Analysis
This section’s introduction endows disorders of excess with archetypically villainous qualities. Like the Sirens in The Odyssey, these conditions seduce patients with enormous energy and exuberance, then transform them into delirious, unrestrained bundles of energy without an operating sense of self. These figures are common in literature, from the serpent in the story of Adam and Eve to Pennywise in Stephen King’s It. Sacks writes that while excess can come from disorders and natural conditions, it can also come in the form of stimulants like cocaine, amphetamine, and PCP. The author tempers this characterization by reminding us that “nobody, absolutely nobody, is exempt from such bizarrenesses, such indignities” (91). The notion of what is and isn’t bizarre, after all, is culturally constructed. When Sacks writes about disorders of excess, he is also writing about a larger question of what society deems to be “too much,” and how individual patients struggle to fit inside of that boundary.
These questions and themes are immediately central in “Witty Ticcy Ray.” Unlike previous patients, Ray does not come to the clinic because his condition is physically or cognitively crippling. If anything, Sacks highlights that Ray is a faster, more creative, more spirited person because of his Tourette’s. Ray seeks treatment purely because his condition is economically crippling; his tics have made it impossible to hold onto a job. Here, Sacks is put in a different position than we’ve seen up to this point: he is not really acting as a doctor, but as an arbitrator between Ray’s Tourette’s and the expectations of conventional society. It is a fitting resolution, then, that Ray and Sacks decide to compromise in the end, allowing “normal” Ray to operate during the work week and Witty Ticcy Ray to come out on the weekends.
