The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [147]
18 See note 15, first sentence.
19 In an article entitled “Oedipus Anorex” (Scottish Journal of Art and Cognitive Neuropsychology, April 1991), I compare Lord Byron’s incessant dieting and his equation of starvation with self-mastery with the practices of today’s young anorexics. His revulsion at the sight of women eating was obviously related to both his compulsive dieting and his mother’s obesity. As for Noel Burun’s being occasionally “fat and mad,” Noel’s weight consistently fell within the norms for his age and height, and he is no madder than I.
By now the reader will have noted my interest in the arts. My publishing house, although specialising in scientific texts, also publishes poetry, novels and short stories dealing with scientific themes. For one of the chief purposes of art lies in its cognitive function: as a means to acquiring truth. NB’s father, Henry Burun, went farther: he considered art the avenue to the highest knowledge available to man, to a kind of knowledge impossible to attain by any other means.
20 The jest may call for a gloss: it is a reference to Prince Philip’s (in)famous remark, which contains—let’s be honest—a kernel of truth. In 1996, I hired a Paki who designed a laboratory electrical system not unlike JJY’s.
21 Émile Nelligan (1879–1941) is generally regarded as Quebec’s national poet (despite the fact that his father was from Dublin). After “burning out” creatively at the age of nineteen, Nelligan spent the rest of his life in insane asylums. See my “La schizophrénie et la poésie” in Art et neuropathologie (Memento Vivere, 1988).
I should point out to the reader that I am not only an art theorist, but a practitioner as well: as my readers well know, it is my custom to “set the tone” for my research articles, or chapters of longer works, with an epigrammatic poem or “intermezzo” of my own composition. (In my canton, I was once the semi-official Mundartdichter, or local poet.) Indeed I am mistaken if a single one of these poems fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse’s lips let it fall. One of them, entitled Der Regenbogen (“The Rainbow”), elicited the following critical response: “Each phrase is so meticulously calibrated that we feel the concluding line as an emotional thunderclap” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 09/08/99).
22 JJY, far from being “crazed,” periodically or otherwise, is a generally well-adjusted individual with an above-average IQ (in the 120–125 range). Because of a history of minor behaviour disturbances as a child, including enuresis, soiling, somniloquy and bruxism, JJY’s family physician referred him to a psychiatrist, who in turn referred him to a neurologist in our department, Dr. Charles Ravenscroft. After several tests, Dr. Ravenscroft discovered a deficiency of large nerve cells called Purkinje cells and an excess of serotonin, and thereby concluded that JJY had a mild form of autism, of which there is a familial genetic component. Because I suspected careless procedure and analytical irregularities, I personally repeated all tests and scans and reached my own conclusion: that Dr. Ravenscroft had made yet another misdiagnosis.
JJY’s memory skills are also above average: on testing he had an excellent memory for pictures, recalling 10 out of 12 objects after a 40-minute delay, and perfectly reproducing the Weschler designs after a similar delay. His memory for verbal material was not as good, but still within the average range of the Weschler Logical Memory Scale. Psychiatric profile: displaying a number of paedomorphic traits, JJY is more or less delayed at the second stage of pyschosexual development. With the loss of his mother and father, and the loss of his girlfriend to another, JJY has sought refuge in an idealised, nostalgicised youth: in the rampant “Peterpandemonium” (a term I coined back in 1992) that characterises his generation. See my “Peterpandemonium” in Zeitschrift für die Gesamte