Can Cuttlefish Get ALS?

1.
Did you hear about the cuttlefish with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease? No, this is not a joke. This is what the late, great neurologist, Oliver Sacks, heard a colleague say. It set him thinking. The class of cephalopods, (phylum mollusca), is a very intelligent group of animals. 

Maybe it’s possible for an organism as complex as a cuttlefish to be ravaged by ALS, who knows?, Sacks thought to himself. But he had his doubts, so he asked his colleague to repeat what he had said. The latter laughed. He had mentioned a publicist who had recently been stricken with this terrible disease. Sacks was approaching the end of his life when this incident occurred; his ability to hear was no longer acute. (He mentioned this anecdote in his excellent book, The River of Consciousness, which unfortunately was also his last).

Does entropy always win? It does indeed; things fall apart, the center eventually no longer holds.

I read in a recent edition of The New Yorker about a researcher who devised an apparatus which, when worn, would give a young person some idea of what it means to be old. The weight of this unshining armor hinders  movement; the apparatus thus allows a thirty-something to experience what a seventy-something goes through every day, such as having difficulty rising from a seated position, or, among the more fit septuagenarians,  maintaining the downward dog position in yoga for a long time. (Trust me on that one.)

I thought, however, that this old-age suit was incomplete. One would need to stuff cotton in the subject’s ears to give her a good idea of how well—that is, how poorly—old ears hear. In addition, for an average thirty-something to imagine how the average seventy-plus-something sees, the former would need to wear a beaten-up pair of dark glasses. (In my case, alas! I feel sometimes that the dark glasses in question would need to have been dipped in a vat of maple syrup,  then be liberally sprinkled with sugar, and left to dry in an attic for at least a month.)

I’m not asking for sympathy. Visual problems caused by bilateral cataracts and bilateral macular degeneration, however, will not be ameliorated by chomping on carrots. I’m in the process of figuring out what to do, while the vision of my youth approaches the upside-down world of a disoriented bat.

2.

As a man d'un certain age, I reluctantly admit that my hearing isn’t what it used to be, either. A recent example: a few days ago, a neighbor called out to me from across the street. “Semiramide!” he exclaimed. Semiramide? I didn’t know he was an opera fan. Besides, is that the way opera buffs great each other these days? I doubted it. “What?” I replied. “Semiramide! Semiramide!” Rossini’s overture to that piece began to play in my head. I doubted whether I had heard him correctly, however, and expressed my confusion with a shout, WHAT? My neighbor kindly crossed the street and said once more what he had apparently been saying all along: “Happy Father’s Day!”

Mishearing, though, is not, at least as yet, as significant a problem for me as “misseeing.” The latter isn’t even a word! (The word "misreading" indeed exists, but it usually refers to a faulty interpretation of a text, not to an error in decoding the letters of a word). Oliver Sacks gave a good deal of attention to mishearings in his last book, but not a mention of “misseeings.”  My aging brain, typical of many, felt left out.

A great humorist and cartoonist of the past century, James Thurber,  can help set the record straight. (An example of his humor: a rather dismissive critic told him that his cartoon women were unattractive. “Not to my cartoon men!” Thurber replied.)

Decades before the advent of the digital age, Thurber would write his articles on a large, yellow notepad. Unfortunately, his vision was so poor that he was unable to read what he had written. Thurber, thank goodness! frequently managed to find humor in his impediment. (What would an old man be if he couldn’t laugh? Sad).

I remember having read an article of his about the benefits of poor vision. One’s imagination is free to see, at last, whatever it wants to see. Walking down a street while observing the world with the visual acuity of a mole has, according to Thurber, undeniable advantages.

Who are walking down the street? The walrus and the carpenter, trailed by gaggle of jejune oysters! At last, the nearly blind man tells his inner child, you’ll be able to ask a walrus how it feels to have left the confines of a humorous poem for the prose of a (mostly) humorless world! True, as one gets up close, the oysters turn out to be scotomas, as the walrus and the carpenter become the Mutt of a lamppost and the Jeff of a mailbox; no matter: one now sees Bonnie Annie Laurie waving seductively from the distance. One happily moves on.

3.

I now approach a favorite book armed with a strong pair of glasses and a magnifying glass. Misreadings continue, which have taught me something about the brain: it does its best to make sense out of what it reads, and, regarding a word it has difficulty in decoding, it fills in the gaps between letters, and "sees" a familiar word. 

When I read now, I gloss over common words, a method which usually works. But if a more difficult word appears, this system breaks down. For instance, while recently rereading David Copperfiled, I came across the not-too-common word, defalcation. I knew what it meant—that is, if I had been able to decode the letters. My brain probably saw something like de—blur, blur-f--blur blur, followed by ation. How did Dickens know about deforestation, I thought to myself, which was hardly a concern in 1840s London? After much squinting, I finally figured out what Dickens had written.

A final example. Our book club is now reading The Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende.  It is the story of Zarité, a slave who somehow manages to triumph over adversity. In one of the beginning chapters, I came across the following sentence, spoken by a beautiful, sexually experienced mulatto slave to her master, who has decided to marry a Spanish woman and bring her back to his plantation located in what would become Haiti:

“Is it true that Spanish women live in a men’s nightmares with a hole cut in front for making love?”

Weird, I thought, and read on. After a page or two, however, I had to come back to that sentence; I was sure I had misread it, and so I did. With mush squinting I was able to determine what the slave, perhaps somewhat jealous, had actually said:

“Is it true that Spanish women sleep in nuns' nightdresses with a hole cut in front for making love?”

No comment.

Old age, with its inevitable approach to absolute zero, is, however, not all bad. Behind those cloudy glasses beams, as it were, a self-illuminating lens which transports a bright message: perspective. It is hard to imagine oneself as a king of his castle, when much of the castle is already  beyond repair. One learns, hopefully sooner rather than later, the life lesson behind the cogent words of Mr. Rogers: “It’s all about love—or the lack of it.” Once one loves and accepts not only oneself and others as they are, but life as it is as well, serenity follows.

Still, as Bette Davis once said, old age is not for sissies. Increasing aches and pains; decreasing acuities of hearing and vision; the sorrow of leaving behind so many acquaintances and friends whom one will never see again; decreased energy and increased forgetting, etc. etc., are certainly not my idea of a divertissement.

No, this is no country for old men. Or as my brain might misread this sad sentence: this is no chutney for nolled wrens, either. Ha ha.