Summary
In “On The Level,” a good-humored, elderly man named Mr. MacGregor sees Dr. Sacks because others have been telling him that he leans to one side. Although Mr. MacGregor is convinced that his posture is normal, indeed when he walks, his body tilts at a twenty-degree angle. Sacks tells Mr. MacGregor that he has lost part of his proprioception, the automatic and unconscious “sixth sense” that keeps the body balanced and upright. Mr. MacGregor, a former carpenter, rationalizes this diagnosis by way of making an analogy to a faulty spirit level, the device used to measure the levelness of a surface. Inspired, Mr. MacGregor works with Sacks to rig up a pair of glasses with a horizontal spirit level set about five inches out from the bridge of the nose. This way, he can use the leveler to monitor his balance visually instead of proprioceptively. Though it is initially exhausting to use, Sacks reports that, after a couple of weeks, Mr. MacGregor is able to walk upright while keeping an eye on the leveler unconsciously, as one automatically monitors the speedometer on a car.
Mrs. S, the subject of “Eyes Right!”, is a humorous and intelligent woman in her sixties who, after suffering a stroke in the deeper portions of her right cerebral hemisphere, completely loses touch with the left field of her vision. She is not simply blind in her left eye; she cannot conceptualize the notion of a “leftward” reality. When brought a tray of food, for example, Mrs. S. complains that there is nothing on the left half of the tray, and doesn’t comprehend or respond when told to turn her head to the left to see the rest of her meal. When she puts on makeup, she only applies it to the right side of her face, seemingly incapable of drawing her attention to the other half. Eventually, Mrs. S. finds a solution to this problem: instead of turning to the left, she swivels around to the right in a circle until what she’s looking for comes into view. To address the makeup issue, Sacks arranges for a camera and video monitor to be assembled so that Mrs. S. can see the left half of her face in her right field of vision. This proves to be terribly confusing and distressing, however, and Mrs. S. demands that the monitor be taken away.
In “The President’s Speech,” an entire ward of patients are found laughing at a televised speech from the president. These patients all suffer from severe global aphasia, meaning that they have lost the ability to understand the meaning of words. However, with no damage to their right hemispheres, most aphasiacs still receive and understand all of the minute visual and tonal cues of speech, and hence they are often able to piece together what is said to them. Due to this unique impairment, “one cannot lie to an aphasiac,” Sacks writes: “He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them” (82). This is ostensibly why the ward finds the president’s speech so amusing.
A patient named Emily D. is also present during the president’s televised speech. However, she has a glioma in her right temporal lobe, which has diminished her ability to interpret tonal cues in speech (this is called tonal agnosia). Due to malignant glaucoma, she has also rapidly lost her vision. A former English teacher, Emily D. demands that others speak to her in proper prose so that she can ascertain their meaning. “Evocative” speech, which relies heavily on tone and cadence to express meaning, had become utterly incomprehensible to her. She finds the president’s speech to be confusing and uninterpretable, as it is full of evocative speech patterns.
Analysis
Mr. MacGregor’s and Mrs. S.’s stories highlight the levity that is required to make the best of a neurological disorder. Mr. MacGregor’s strange pair of glasses certainly don’t help him look “normal,” but they are a creative workaround for a problem that had once crippled him and stripped him of his dignity. Mrs. S.’s twirling solution is also quite the quirk, but it reflects her humor and her energy, and it removes the confusion from her daily life. Most importantly, by inventing these self-corrections, both Mr. MacGregor and Mrs. S are able to retain agency in their situations, and aspects of their prior identities continue to shine through in their new habits. This is largely due to the freedom they are granted to devise their own correction strategies. Although Sacks is largely on the sidelines for these two stories, his inactivity is influential in their success.
The author makes a pointed statement at the end of “The President’s Speech” that in many ways sums up the first part of this book: “Here then was the paradox of the President’s speech. We normals -- aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (‘Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived” (84). It would be easy to assume that because the patients of the aphasia ward have lost their left-hemisphere powers of processing, they would be at a loss for reality. But Sacks impresses that the left brain, often considered the more rational and “refined” hemisphere, does not hold total power over consciousness. The ward’s laughter is a thwarting of the president’s attempt to control reality with his words, as so many politicians are wont to do. As they watch him on screen, the aphasiacs are communing with the president’s right hemisphere, which is communicating something that words, by definition, can’t describe.
