Lets Faith It

Discoveries
In his book 'Musichophilia' Oliver Sacks demonstrates the personal meaning that comes from living in the present. He discovers the capabilities of different kinds of memory in his work with Clive. An amnesiac. Clive was an accomplished musician before his brain impairment. His ability to remember was restricted to 3 seconds at a time. He would repeatedly think he was alive for the first time but not be able to remember in context to the past or the future. He could not remember that he was repeating the comment that he was alive. With the help of his wife, who had to show him written music pieces or sing to him, he was able to play sing and conduct music the same way he had before his injury. But he could not think to look for the music or think to sing it for himself. Oliver Sacks states. 'It may be possible that Clive, incapable or remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is entirely in the present.

The hearing of a melody is a hearing with the melody.....it is even a condition of hearing melody that the tone present at the moment should fill consciousness entirely, that nothing should be remembered, nothing except it or beside it be present in consciousness.......hearing a melody is hearing, having heard and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.

His wife Deborah wrote "Clive's at homeness in his music and in his love for me are where he transcends amnesia and finds continuum--not the linear fusion of moment after moment, nor based on any framework of authobiographical information, but where Clive, and any of us, are finally, where we are who we are.