June 22, 2023 : Issue #45

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

Nodal panoramic/panachronic vantages from three farflung street corners (Amsterdam, Chicago and Krakow), followed by a surprising thread on what we do or don't "see" with our eyes closed.

* * *

The Main Event

A few weeks back, when I was “out fishing” in Amsterdam, my friend Ben proceeded to splay out virtually all of Rembrandt’s history in the city from the vistas available from just one street corner near the town’s center (actually atop the arch of one particular canal bridge, the staalmeestersbrug, the staalmeesters or sample-masters bridge). I told him how he ought to bottle the talk and publish it, or at least turn it into some sort of podcast audio guide, and further suggested that as model for the enterprise he might consult one of the finest examples of this sort of thing, Sarah

Vowell’s unforgettable early contribution to a relatively early incarnation of This American Life (back in 1999), in which she performed a similar feat, though that time unfurling the entire history of the United States drawing on the 720 degree panorama (360 degrees of space compounded by 360 degrees of time) available from just one street corner in Chicago. To wit, this one here: Michigan Avenue as it courses over the Chicago River and intersects with Wacker Drive.

If you’ve already heard that piece, as many of you will have, you should need no reminding: you won’t likely have forgotten it. If not, though, do yourselves a favor and pause right here right now to listen to it right here. (I’m not kidding, just twenty minutes and it may well change how you think about everything from now on—and besides, it’s just so much fun.)

Incidentally, Vowell adapted the piece in text form for a chapter in her book Take the Cannoli, which also includes similar adaptations of such equally iconic TAL pieces as the one in which she retraced the Trail of Tears in a rented car with her Oklahoma-born twin sister, as well as the title piece which recalls Sarah’s headlong college besottedness with the Godfather films. That piece, and the book whose title it bears, in turn came to mind just the other day when the Wall Street Journal featured this delicious cover story, above the fold:

Though, as it happens, were he to do so, my Amsterdam friend would hardly be the first to redeploy Sarah’s inspired Olympian vantage as a model for their own efforts. Indeed, I myself shamelessly piggybacked on Sarah’s example, when, just a few years later, in the summer of 2002, I was invited to contribute a travel piece on Krakow, “The Jewel of Poland,” by the Atlantic magazine, and launched into it as follows:

On a brisk, sunny morning this past spring I was back in Kraków, lounging at one of the hundreds of outdoor café tables scattered around the vast medieval Market Square—the largest of its kind in Poland and, reputedly, in all of Europe. Off to the side, from a window in the tower of the part Gothic, part Art Nouveau Saint Mary's Church, the hejnal kicked in: a haunting trumpet solo that is sounded live every hour on the hour by a trumpeter who abruptly cuts himself short in midstrain. This happens in commemoration, it is said, of a thirteenth-century trumpeter, a watchman felled in midclamor when a Tatar arrow pierced his throat. Next, the fellow closes the window and opens the next one over, repeating the ritual at the four cardinal points of the compass. A classic gesture from an earlier, romantic Polish era: martyrdom, not just once but four times an hour.

I found myself imagining the guy's view from up there, one of the highest vantages in the city. Kraków constitutes a focal node of history, a place where the great themes converge and knot up and radiate back outward. Over there, for example, about a half mile to the south, the fellow could doubtless see, atop its promontory overlooking the Vistula River, Wawel Castle, home to more than 500 years' worth of Polish kings (and their tombs). Among them was Kazimierz the Great, who in the 1360s founded the Jagiellonian University (one of the oldest in Europe, after those in Bologna and Prague). The university's spires and gabled roofs should in turn be visible to our trumpeter, just to the west of the square. It was also Kazimierz who offered Europe's Jews safe haven during a period of intense persecution, though a century later, following a huge influx of expelled Spanish Jews, his successors relegated Kraków's Jews to the Kazimierz district, farther south and a bit to the east, just beyond Wawel. Likewise visible from up there in the tower, though a bit closer in to the south, is the house where Copernicus lodged in the 1490s, soon after studying at the university. Recently the building was transformed into a hotel, bearing the astronomer's name, which happened to be where I was staying on this trip (ask for the truly splendid Room 301!). Relatively expensive, the place offers a fetching combination of Gothic and hypermodern, with a gleaming blue lap pool slotted into its arched stone cellar.

As the years passed, Wawel remained a sort of shrine to Polish nationhood, especially after 1795, when the country disappeared from the map of Europe altogether, divvied up among three adjacent empires. The Austrians refitted the castle as a provincial garrison. Austria-Hungary's was the mildest of the three occupations, which may have something to do with why the Polish independence fighter Jozef Pilsudski and the exiled Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin both made the town their base in the years leading up to World War I. (Our trumpeter could easily spy their various lodgings scattered about the Old Town.) After the war the two went on to lead their respective regenerated countries, and even briefly went to war with each other, in 1920. Less than two decades after that, Poland was being divvied up again, this time by Stalin and Hitler, and Hans Frank, the dread Nazi "Butcher of Poland," made Wawel his headquarters; he herded the town's Jews over the river into the Podgorze district, the site of Oskar Schindler's factory and, a bit farther on (though possibly still visible to our trumpeter), the Plaszow concentration camp, in whose factory so many of them were worked to death. And, of course, about forty miles to the west are Auschwitz and Birkenau.

For all the horror of Frank's occupation of Wawel Castle, it was perhaps thanks to his tenure there that Kraków, almost alone among major Polish cities, was spared the wholesale destruction wrought by the retreating Nazis. (Reluctant to smash up his private jewel-box fiefdom, the disbelieving Frank dallied till it was too late.) And so houses here are still occupied by families who have held them for generations, which may explain why after the war Kraków proved to be one of the most difficult areas for Stalin's new Polish Communist overlords to subdue. These leaders decided to punish the recalcitrant bourgeois enclave by erecting, just to its east, an otherwise senselessly sited mammoth industrial town, Nowa Huta, with tens of thousands of New Workers carted in to man its hideously belching Lenin Steelworks.

The ensuing years would see an ongoing struggle between the Communist authorities and the dynamic new archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyla, for the souls of those workers, a struggle incarnated in the battle to erect a modernist, arclike Church of Our Lady Queen of Poland amid the workers' tenements. It was Wojtyla who at last prevailed, in 1977 (the crucifix spire of the church pierces the horizon to the east), a year before his ascension to the papacy, as John Paul II. A few years after that, and much to the exasperation of the Communists, those model workers from Nowa Huta would prove among the fiercest partisans of the Solidarity movement, even after the imposition of martial law in December of 1981. Indeed, in August of 1988 it was from the Lenin Steelworks that the climactic set of strikes began, under the slogan "What one Lenin started, let another finish off!" And so another did, signaling the death throes of communism in Poland and, within a few months, throughout Eastern Europe and all the way back in Russia itself.

Quite the little panorama.

Squinted at just so, I suppose, the entire world comprises one vast monadology, an infinitely compounding latticework of such discrete panoramas.

* * *

FROM THE MAILBAG:
An aphantasia thread with Jay

Some of you will remember Jay Jurisich from Issue #20, where he featured as a regular in my brother Ray’s Sunday softball game in Berkeley.

The community veteran (whose actual real-life day job consists in helming an agency called Zinzin, for the etymology of which see here, that comes up with names for start-ups and other such corporate entities, an expertise for which he gets paid real actual money) weighed in in that issue with a truly impressive inventory of things that might keep him up at night if he “weren’t so busy sleeping after yet another hard day making lists like this.” (Go back and see it for yourself.)

Anyway, it turns out that something else now seems to be keeping him up at night, or so he revealed the other day in an email which came hurtling out of the blue into our box:

Hi Ren,

I was telling Ray yesterday at lunch about my aphantasia, the inability to see ANYTHING when my eyes are closed. Basically, my mind's eye is blind.

Malevich anticipates Jurisch.

We were wondering if Oliver Sacks ever wrote about this phenomenon. Ray confidently said that he's read pretty much everything OS wrote, and he didn't think he ever wrote about aphantasia. Well, perhaps not by NAME (it wasn't officially named until 2015), but he literally published a book in 2010 called The Mind's Eye, as I'm sure you're aware (I haven't read it, but I will soon). And there is this 4:32 minute video with him talking about “The Mind’s Eye & Internal Imagery,” where he admits that “I do very badly myself on Galton’s tests…I can’t visualize anyone.” Apparently, Oliver Sacks himself had aphantasia!

And by the way, there’s now (of course) an “Aphantasia Network” for people like me. (With terrible web design, so perhaps these people are eye-blind as well as mind-blind): https://aphantasia.com/

I’m wondering if you have any perspective on this from your perch atop the Oliver Sacks Mountain?

(Jay was referring to my 35-year friendship with Oliver Sacks which culminated, several years ago, in the publication of my biographical memoir, And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?)

This is the 2015 New York Times article that kicked off awareness of having aphantasia for many people, though I didn't figure it out for myself until just a couple years ago. Time wrote about it in 2022 in a piece titled “What It’s Like to be ‘Mind Blind.’”

Some famous personalities having this disorder are: Ed Catmull (co-founder of Pixar and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios), James Harkin (British podcaster and television writer), Richard Herring (British comedian and podcaster), Glen Keane (animator, author and illustrator), Mark Lawrence (fantasy author), Yoon Ha Lee (science fiction author), Derek Parfit (British philosopher), Blake Ross (co-creator of the web browser Mozilla Firefox), Michelle Sagara (fantasy author) and Zelda Williams (American actress, director, producer and writer).

In April 2016, Ross published an essay, “How it Feels Be to Blind in your Mind,” describing his own aphantasia and his realization that not everyone experiences it. The essay gained wide circulation on social media and in a variety of news sources.

Anyway: Cheers,

Jay

Cheers indeed. All of which was news to me, although I must say I found the label for the condition “aphantasia” to be singularly misleading (I would have thought that Jay with his naming specialty would have thought so as well). I mean, it’s not that people can’t fantasize, they simply cannot visualize their fantasies as such, nor for that matter anything else, with their eyes closed. But anyway, I replied:

Hey Jay!

All very interesting, and I would think especially hard to inventory in any objective manner, for it is not entirely clear to me what people mean by having or not having an exclusively internal visual perception (as opposed to a wider sensorium generally, a mishmash of the visual, aural, tactile, etc.) and whether reporting on the phenomenon means the same thing from one person to the next.

I don't particularly recall talking about this specific problem (the visual imagination of the closed-eye seeing) with Oliver, though we often discussed the visual world of the blind, and specifically as regards that Mind's Eye book, I was very much on call as a consulting associate whenever Oliver wandered into questions of neurological artistry since he himself was completely, but completely, avisual (as opposed to preternaturally aural and musical). On the other hand he was extremely interested in the character of the internal voice that people deaf since birth might develop (this is indeed one of the main themes of his great book on the deaf, Seeing Voices.)

Do you have visual imagery when you dream? As you walk down a hall in your dreams, do you stumble along like a blind person or do you perhaps rather "sense" the regression and expansion and compression of space in some other register?

I myself, when you ask me point blank whether I have vivid visual imagery when my eyes are closed, would say not terribly much, though I am extremely visual (and visually free associative) with my eyes open—I tend to "see" "more" than what is right there in front of me. I am fairly prosopagnosic—it's not that I don't see faces, I just can't readily remember them—how are you in that regard, and might the two be related?

Of course, everything is on a spectrum, and as my friend Blaise says, when it comes to whether or not any given person is "on the spectrum,” we are ALL on the spectrum, that's what a spectrum IS.

I'm glad we've cleared that up.

Do party on there in the dark...

Ren

To which Jay responded:

When I close my eyes I see nothing. Total blackness. The void. And it's always been this way as long as I can remember. And like most with aphantasia, I just always assumed this was normal, and that whenever people asked you to "visualize" something, they just meant, "Tell yourself a bunch of words about it," since that's what I did.

I feel like I dream in images, but I can't prove it, because when I wake up I can't "picture" what I think I just "saw" in a dream. I don't stumble blind in dreams, so at least in dream logic I'm “seeing” perfectly well. And I'll remember having seen things when I wake up, and vivid colors, but alas I can't picture what I saw, only "describe" it conceptually in words.

This one is kind of maddening. It's like the film Memento (stolen from the better Winter Sleepers), taking polaroids to remember what one had seen/experienced. I would LOVE to see films of my dreams (AKA Wenders' Until the End of the World). Sadly, that advanced technology probably won't arrive until mid-2024.

I don't remember a person's face or name (ironic) very well, but I can recognize faces. In fact, I have a very odd superpower: I can see a face and say with great certainty, "This person looks like a cross between Larry David and Oliver Sacks," or whoever. And I'm usually very right in my assessment. Again, I don't "see" that blended face, but somehow I just "know," almost instantly, who a face is a blend of.

Thanks for playing along at home, and for your input. How is the development of your SacksGPT coming along? I want to discuss my SYNDROME with it.

Cheers,

Jay

Just to be clear, that last “SacksGPT” comment is a joke. At least I think it is. At any rate, I have nothing to do myself with developing such a thing, though who knows what the bots get up to late at night, frottaging away amongst themselves. Aye.

Still, this feels like the beginning of a wider conversation, and Cabineteers, I now want to throw the forum over to you. Please use the Comments section to offer your own vantages (or lack thereof) on this question of closed eye visualization (and while you are at it, maybe suggest names other than “aphantasia” for the condition, or syndrome, or spectrum, or whatever the hell it is).

Onward!

* * *

ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

* * *

NEXT ISSUE

Poolside with David Hockney, Richard Feynman, a pair of twins, and some bugs. And who knows (that’s not enough!?), maybe more…

*

Thank you for giving Wondercabinet some of your reading time! We welcome not only your public comments (button above), but also any feedback you may care to send us directly: weschlerswondercabinet@gmail.com.

Here’s a shortcut to the COMPLETE WONDERCABINET ARCHIVE.