Uncle Tungsten lights up the way

This week, I conducted a reading session for a group of enthusiasts taking an art criticism course at Jnanapravaha, a para-academic platform that has emerged as one of Mumbai's most vibrant hubs for intellectual exchange. An experiment in communication between the specialist domain and the general audience, Jnanapravaha has developed around itself a community of writers, artists, architects, historians, filmmakers and (those lost tribes) readers and listeners. For mytext, I quite deliberately chose one that came from outside the domain of art: aluminous chapter titled 'Images' from Oliver Sacks' memoir of a London childhoodin the 1930s and 1940s, Uncle Tungsten. I wanted my colleagues - literally, fromthe Latin, 'fellow readers' - to see that, sometimes , you have to make a detourthrough neurology or anthropology, the cookbook or the fashion manual, tounderstand how to bear witness to the arts. And any serious text, which employsstrategies that invite us into an enchantment and an engagement, is a literarytext and worthy of attention. I've always loved Oliver Sacks'writing, and have learned a great deal from the writing of neurologists likeSacks, Luria, Edelman and V S Ramachandran. They understand how cruciallyselfhood is based on memory, dream, affect, the layering of experience by thebodied mind. As healers, they have had to place themselves in unimaginable,neurally unimaginable situations, to understand a damaged Other. How to reassurea woman who no longer has a conception of 'left' and whose world is entirelyright-handed ? How to console a painter robbed of colour by an accident, whomust re-draft his world in a palette or muddy greys? How to pacify a man whotalks incessantly to cover up his complete lack of short-term memory?While these are extreme situations, they have something in common with what goes on in the dialogue between artists and their audiences. The artist works from idiosyncrasy, a special insight into reality, and demands of us that we do our share of grasping this. Which calls for us to step outside our cherished notions of normality , to inhabit another's skin, see through another's eyes. Perhaps because the Sacks chapter seemed soaccessible, the group responded warmly to it, gradually seeing its hiddendepths. The rich descriptions of chemical experiments and historical events,they realised, were not information but activations of a disappeared epoch. Theyidentified the shifts of perspective, the appeal to various senses, and thestimulation of various inner times within the reader - devices that drew us,without our conscious assent, into a full-bodied encounter with the text.And crucially, they saw the memoir as an allegory of apprenticeshipand initiation. The wonderment of the child's private discovery makes sense onlywithin a larger system of discoveries and disclosures about the world, ahistory. This caveat might be useful to young Indian writers on art: thedepartures they imagine to be novel and unprecedented are as old as Dada orFluxus, and the trends they identify today were often trends two decades ago.