The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [146]
NXB’s remark about my being “cuckolded” (see note 9 above) continues to rankle. With respect to my much-publicised divorce, the pump of scandal was primed by insinuations and fabrications of that sort—the stock-in-trade of newspapers specialising in lurid crimes and juicy sexual irregularities. For a more factual account of the divorce, see Le Devoir of April 2, 2001 (page-one feature beginning “In the world of brain sciences, Dr. Vorta is a star of high wattage …”).
11 NB may be referring to this passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a favourite poem of his father’s:
Prometheus saw, and waked the legion hopes
Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers,
Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms;
That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings
The shape of Death … (II, iv, 59–65)
12 “You wake up one morning and find you are old” (literally “the fleeting years glide by”). Alas, how I identify with Stella in this respect! I devoted my life to science, and it cost me the love of my wife and daughter. There was a moment, in the late eighties, when I realised what I was losing, and what I had to do to regain it. And still I chose another path: sixteen-hour days, drinking Maxwell House coffee to keep me awake, driving my career forward with no concessions to age or family. True scientists, like true artists, make bad husbands.
13 The provincial motto “I Remember”—as I was informed by a former Quebec Premier, who urged me to run in a by-election with a view to becoming Minister of Health—derives from an anonymous poem beginning “Je me souviens / que né sous le lys / Je croîs sous la rose” (“I remember / that born under the [French] lily / I grow under the [English] rose”). It is perhaps my sovereignist convictions that deterred me, subconsciously at least, from improving my spoken English. See note 7, second sentence, which continues to grate.
14 Quebec filmmaker Claude Jutras was a friend and collaborator of François Truffaut, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean Rouch, and admired by Cassavetes, Cocteau and Jean Renoir. (In April of 1972, on our first anniversary, my wife and I saw Jutras’ Mon Oncle Antoine in Geneva.) He studied medicine at the Université de Montréal and worked for a time as an intern, which is when I met him. I learned later he was the son of a prominent radiologist and descended from a line of physicians. Jutras was a Renaissance man, for he went on to work as an actor, writer, painter and, of course, film director. After being diagnosed with AD, Jutras left his home one day in November of 1986, never to return. Did he lose his way, forget who he was? The mystery was not solved until several months later, when his badly decomposed body was found floating amidst the ice of the Saint Lawrence River. He was identified by a scrawled note in his pocket: “I am Claude Jutras.”
15 Who said the Swiss have produced nothing besides the cuckoo clock? This towering sixteenth-century physician and alchemist—who was born in my native village of Einsideln—established the role of chemistry in medicine and sowed the seeds of homeopathy. He published Der grossen Wundartzney (“Great Surgery Book”) in 1536 and a clinical description of syphilis in 1530.
16 I have never “chemically whitened” my beard. As for the rest, read on.
17 NXB, as usual, is wildly overstating. Humans remember approximately two bits per second. Over a lifetime, this rate of memorisation would produce some 109 bits, or only a few hundred megabytes. The analogy, in any case, is flimsy: a computer is a serial processor, whereas our brain is parallel. See “Dracula, Let Me Count the Bytes