He vibrated with emotion and creative energy. His personality filled the small screen, came out of it into the room. He communicated with his words, his art, and his whole body so vividly that, despite our differences, I found myself thinking that I knew what he meant, knew how he felt, knew what it might be like to be him. A dangerously presumptuous thought
I suppose we can never know another person. I tried to regain my scientific distance, without complete success. Tommy wrote me soon after the show, a sprawling letter full of exuberance and suffering. In Tommy, as in many artists, the elation and anguish are not quite opposite poles, but mixed—two sides of the same coin. His letter made me write a sprawling letter back, and it was in this way that we began a lovely and fruitful penmanship. We have given each other ideas, I think. I could tell him what I understood about the brain, about what might have happened to his when his aneurysm ruptured. He has told me many thought-provoking things. There are the rich stories of his life—he is a wonderful narrator. And there are his descriptions of how his life changed.
For people from upper-middle-class backgrounds who are constantly encouraged, if formulaically, to be interested in art, it is difficult to understand how terrifying it was for Tommy to find himself suddenly obsessed with making art, with philosophical ideas, with speculations about how the brain works and how we perceive our worlds. To find your body changed after an illness is shattering enough. What if your thoughts and even your temperament change too? How do you deal with that when “you” no longer exist?
Tommy had been a contractor and ex-con with a taste for fighting. He came out of his coma with thoughts and concerns no one else cared about. To some extent, everyone who is ill suffers from this—we all are more interested in our own pain than others are. But with Tommy it extended much further. His friends didn’t know what to make of this new person who spent hours dripping wax on a pile to make sculptures, who often spoke in rhyme, who loved kittens and wept if he accidentally squashed an insect, who wanted to know what life Means. And Tommy didn’t know where to find people who might care.
During her research fellowship, she wrote The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain an award-winning nonfiction book about the way the brain drives creativity. The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the best books of 2004.
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