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• 1 2017-11-16T11:00:12-08:00 Did Mr. I Die Before His Body? 18 plain 2017-12-06T06:31:24-08:00

   

  
  
  
   

  Prior to his accident, Mr. I. had built a well-organized identity, complete with clearly defined parameters for what he thought to be included amongst his essential faculties, qualities, and ambitions. He had worked decades to sort out just what those parameters were in the context of his norms, his routines, and the judgement of his peers. Mr. I. knew himself first and foremost to be an artist, a painter above all, as well as a music lover, an olfactory extraordinaire, a husband, and a general aesthete, likely amongst a number of other things. Additionally, Mr. I.’s social world seemed to have supported and reinforced not just the veracity of these identifiers, but the value of them, too. With the onset of cerebral achromatopsia, Mr. I.’s identity as he understood it, as his social circles knew it, took a severe blow – and, to make matters infinitely worse, also seemed to gain nothing in the process.

  The case of the colorblind painter is especially interesting, I would argue, because Mr. I. had lost what he thought to be an integral part of himself in such a way that he was forced to acknowledge that it would never return. Mr. I.’s initially extreme emotional reactions (disturbingly detailed on pages 32 and 33 of An Anthropologist on Mars) are not unreasonable, but they are unfortunate. Unfortunate indeed for their distressing nature, but more so for what they say about Mr. I.’s culture, which, I presume, most everyone reading this shares (at least in large part). For Mr. I. to believe for any length of time that an essential part of him died and left him unrecognizable during his accident is analogous to him claiming to have no substantial virtue or meritable agency in his being. Of course, Mr. I. only realized this and reevaluated his position when his newfound “disability” became a new artistic lense, a useful tool that opened up “a whole new world” (Sacks, 37). Mr. I.'s core identity was indeed retained with his new sight, and made more obvious to him via trial. But Mr. I., as the artist is apt to do, also made his shiny new "otherness" a primary descriptor for himself; all the initial fear coming from all about and within him, proven unfounded.

  We almost have to ask ourselves, however, if the same argument could be made for a Mr. I. who lost his eyesight entirely. Would Mr. I. have been able to come to terms with a complete inability to see, given that all but one of his given primary points of identification (his sense of smell – Mr. I.’s love of music was apparently the result of a sound-color synesthesia) involve sight somehow? Of course I am inclined to give Mr. I. the vote of confidence and imagine him using his spiritual, mental, and emotional strengths to pull through, adapt, and thrive.