I first met Franco Magnani in the summer of 1988, when the Exploratorium in San Francisco held a symposium and an exhibit on memory. The exhibit included fifty paintings and drawings by him—all of Pontito, the little Tuscan hill town where he was born but had not seen for more than thirty years. Next to them, in astounding apposition, were photographs of Pontito taken by the Exploratorium’s photographer, Susan Schwartzenberg, from exactly the same viewpoints as Magnani’s, wherever possible. (This was not always possible, because Magnani sometimes visualized and painted Pontito from an imaginary aerial viewpoint fifty or five hundred feet above the ground; Schwartzenberg sometimes had to hoist her camera aloft on a pole and at one point thought of hiring a helicopter or a balloon.) Magnani was billed as “A Memory Artist,” and one had only to glance at the exhibit to see that he indeed possessed a prodigious memory—a memory that could seemingly reproduce with almost photographic accuracy every building, every street, every stone of Pontito, far away, close up, from any possible angle. It was as if Magnani held in his head an infinitely detailed three-dimensional model of his village, which he could turn around and examine, or explore mentally, and then reproduce on canvas with total fidelity.
My first thought when I saw the resemblance between the paintings and the photographs was that here was that rare phenomenon, an eidetic artist: an artist able to hold in memory, for hours or days (perhaps for years), an entire scene that has been glimpsed in a flash; the commander (or slave) of a prodigious native power of imagery and memory. But an eidetic artist would scarcely confine himself to a single theme or subject; on the contrary, he would exploit his memory, or display it, in a huge range of subjects, to show that nothing lay beyond its grasp—whereas Magnani seemingly wanted to concentrate it exclusively upon Pontito. This, then, was an exhibit not of “pure” memory but of memory harnessed to a single, overwhelming motive: the recollection of his childhood village. And, I now realized, it was not just an exercise in memory; it was, equally, an exercise in nostalgia—and not just an exercise but a compulsion, and an art. (...)
By midmorning, I had been enthralled again by Franco’s paintings but had had enough of his reminiscences. He had one subject only—could talk of nothing else. What could be more sterile, more boring? Yet out of this obsession he could create a lovely, real, and tranquil art. What was it that served to transform his memories—to remove them from the sphere of the personal, the trivial, the temporal, and bring them into the realm of the universal, the sacred? One encounters boring talkers, reminiscers, by the score, and not one of them will be a true artist, like Franco. Thus it was not just his vast memory or his obsession that was crucial in making him an artist but, rather, something much deeper.
(...)
...a strange illness occurred, which finally brought him to a sanatorium. It is far from clear what the illness was. There was a crisis of decision, and hope and fear, but there was also a high fever, weight loss, delirium, perhaps seizures; there was a suggestion of tuberculosis, of a psychosis, or of some neurological condition. It was never really resolved what was going on, and the nature of the illness remains a mystery. What is clear is that at the height of the illness, his brain perhaps stimulated by excitement and fever, Franco started to have, nightly and all night, overwhelmingly vivid dreams. Every night, he dreamed of Pontito, not of his family, not of activities or events, but of the streets, the houses, the masonry, the stones—dreams with the most microscopic, veridical detail, a detail beyond anything he could consciously remember. An intense, strange excitement possessed him in these dreams: a sense that something had just happened, or was about to; a sense of immense, portentous, yet enigmatic significance, accompanied by an insatiable, yearning, bittersweet nostalgia. And when he awoke it seemed to him he was not fully awake, for the dreams were still present, still before his inward eye, painting themselves on the bedclothes and the ceiling and the walls all around him, or standing on the floor, like models, solid with exquisite detail.
In the hospital, with these dreamlike images forcing themselves upon his consciousness and his will, a new feeling took hold of him—a sense that he was now being “called.” Though his powers of imagery had always been great, he had never seen images of such intensity before—images that suspended themselves like apparitions in the air and promised him a “repossession” of Pontito. Now they seemed to say to him, “Paint us. Make us real.”
What happened, one wonders (and Franco has never ceased to ask himself), in those days and nights in the hospital, that time of crisis, delirium, fever, seizures? Did he crack under the stress of his decision, undergo a “Freudian” splitting of the ego, and become from then on a sort of hypermnesic hysteric? (“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” Freud wrote.) Did a split-off part of him seek to provide in memory or fantasy what he had cut himself off from, could no longer return to in reality? Were these dreams, these memory images, called up by him in response to a deep emotional need? Or were they forced on him by some strange, physiological bombardment of the brain, a process that he (as a person) had nothing to do with, but could not help reacting to? Franco considered, but rejected, these “medical” possibilities (and never allowed them to be properly explored) and moved instead to a more spiritual one.1 A gift, a destiny, had been vouchsafed to him, he felt, and it was his task to obey, not to question. It was in this religious spirit, then, that Franco, after a brief struggle, accepted his visions and now dedicated himself to making them a palpable reality.
Though he had scarcely painted or drawn before, he felt he could take a pen or brush and trace the outlines that hovered so clearly in the air before him or projected themselves, as through a camera lucida, on the white walls of his room. Above all, in those first nights of crisis, there came to him images of the house where he was born, images impossibly beautiful but with a menacing aspect, too.
Franco’s first Pontito painting, indeed, was of his house, a painting that, despite his lack of training, had a striking confidence and clarity of outline, and a strange, dark emotional force. Franco himself was amazed by this painting, by the fact that he could paint, could express himself in this wonderful new way. Even now, a quarter of a century later, he remains amazed. “Fantastic,” he says. “Fantastic. How could I do it? And how could I have had the gift and not known it before?” He had occasionally, as a child, imagined himself as an artist, but that was a mere fancy, and he had never done more than play with a pen or a brush—sketch a ship on a postcard, perhaps, or a Caribbean scene. He was also frightened by the power he now felt—a power that had seized him and taken him over but that he could perhaps control and give voice to. And the voice of his paintings, his style, was there from the start, even—or especially—in the first paintings he did. “The first two paintings are quite different from the later ones,” his friend Bob Miller said to me. “There’s something ominous in them—you can see something deep and significant happening.”
That Franco did not start thinking obsessively of Pontito—did not dream day and night of Pontito—until this time is corroborated by his brother-in-law, who did not see him between 1961 and 1987. “Back in ’61, Franco would talk about anything,” he told me. “He wasn’t obsessed—he was normal. But when I saw him in ’87 he seemed possessed. He constantly had visions of Pontito, and he wouldn’t talk about anything else.”
Miller says, “His paintings started in this crisis period. He was in the hospital, pretty near a mental breakdown, and the paintings seemed to be a sort of solution, or cure. Sometimes he says, ‘I have these memories, I have these dreams, I can’t function,’ but he seems to function pretty well. It’s hard to have a normal conversation with him, though—it’s ‘Pontito, Pontito, Pontito,’ all the time. It’s as if he had this 3-D construct, this model of Pontito, he can erect—he moves his head, turns around, to ‘see’ different aspects. He seemed to think this sort of ‘seeing’ was normal, and it was only in the late seventies, when Gigi, a friend, came back with photos of Pontito, that he realized for the first time how extraordinary it was.… Everything is fresh, excited, as if just recalled. It is not a fixed thing, a repertorial thing, at all. He remembers scenes. He acts them out, relives the whole thing. So it is a very concrete, particular memory, which organizes itself in stories and scenes—a memory of who said what when.” One sometimes feels that there is something theatrical in the paintings, and, to some extent, Franco himself sees them that way.
The mood that had announced itself in dreams at night now deepened and intensified in Franco’s mind. He started to get “visions” of Pontito by day—visions emotionally overwhelming but with a minute and three-dimensional quality that he compares to holography. These visions may come at any time—when he is eating or drinking, taking a stroll, showering. There is no doubt of their reality for him. He is, perhaps, talking with you quietly, and suddenly he leans forward, his eyes fixed and staring, in a rapture: an apparition of Pontito is rising before him. “Many of Franco’s paintings,” writes Michael Pearce (in a fascinating analysis that appeared in the Exploratorium Quarterly to coincide with the exhibition), “begin with what he describes as a kind of memory flash, where a particular scene will suddenly come into his head. He often feels a great urgency to get the scene down on paper immediately, and has been known to leave a bar in mid-drink in order to begin a sketch.… Apparently the ‘flash’ Franco gets of a scene is not a static, photographic view.… He can scan the area and ‘see’ in several directions. To do this, he must physically reorient his body, turning to the right to envision what would be to the right in the Pontitan scene, to the left to ‘see’ to that side … his eyes looking into the distance as though he can see the stone buildings and archways and streets.”
Such apparitions are not only visual. Franco can hear the church bells (“like I was there”); he can feel the churchyard wall; and, above all, he can smell what he sees—the ivy on the church wall, the mingled smells of incense, must, and damp, and, admixed with these, the faint smell of the nut and olive groves that grew around the Pontito of his youth. Sight, sound, touch, smell, at such times are almost inseparable for Franco, and what comes to him is like the complex and coenesthetic experiences of early childhood—“the instantaneous records of total situations,” the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan once called them.
(...)
Such changes, Geschwind emphasized, could not be considered either negative or positive as such; what mattered was the role they came to play in a person’s life, and this could be creative or destructive, adaptive or maladaptive. He was, however, especially interested in the (relatively uncommon) situation of a highly creative use of the syndrome. “When this tragic disease is visited upon a man of genius,” he wrote of Dostoevsky, “he is able to extract from it a depth of understanding … a deepening of emotional response.”2 It was the conjunction of disease, or biological disposition, with individual creativity that excited Geschwind above all.3The rather dry term “interictal personality syndrome” was to become “Waxman-Geschwind syndrome,” or sometimes simply “Dostoevsky syndrome.” I had to wonder whether the illness that Franco had in 1965, with its intensely vivid dreams, its seizurelike hallucinations, its mystical illuminations and transports, was not indeed the inauguration of such a Dostoevsky syndrome.
Hughlings Jackson speaks of the “doubling of consciousness” that tends to occur in such seizures. And this is how it is with Franco: when he is seized by a vision, a waking dream, a reminiscence of Pontito, he is transported—he is, in a sense, there. His reminiscences come suddenly, unannounced, with the force of revelation. Though he has learned over the years to control them to some extent, to invoke them or conjure them up—as indeed all artists learn to do—they remain essentially involuntary. It is precisely this characteristic that Proust holds to be the most valuable: to his mind, voluntary recall is conceptual, conventional, and flat—only involuntary recall, erupting or conjured from the depths, can convey the full quality of childhood experience, in all its innocence, wonder, and terror.
The doubling of consciousness can be confusing for Franco: the vision of Pontito, of the past, competes with the here and now, and on occasion can overwhelm it completely, so that he is disoriented, no longer knows where he is. And the doubling of consciousness has led to an odd doubling of life. Franco functions, lives, works in present-day San Francisco, but a large part of him—perhaps the larger part—is living in the past, in Pontito. And with this heightening and intensification of living in the past there has come a certain impoverishment and depreciation of the here and now. Franco hardly goes out, hardly travels, goes to no films or theaters; he has few recreations or interests other than his art; he used to have many friends but has lost most of them by his endless talking of Pontito. He works long hours as a cook in San Francisco’s North Beach; he walks around all day, oblivious of the world, in a daze of Pontito; and all his relationships have become attenuated with his obsession—all except that with his wife, Ruth, and this was based largely on her sharing his obsession.
(...)
There is no doubt that Franco is at once the victim and the possessor of an imagery whose power is difficult for us to conceive. He is not at liberty to misremember, nor is he at liberty to stop remembering. There beats down on him, night and day, whether he likes it or not, a reminiscence of almost intolerable power and exactness. “No one … has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo,” Borges writes in a sketch entitled “Funes the Memorious.” Such an intolerably vivid reality converges upon Franco, too.
One may be born with the potential for a prodigious memory, but one is not born with a disposition to recollect; this comes only with changes and separations in life—separations from people, from places, from events and situations, especially if they have been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved. It is, thus, discontinuities, the great discontinuities in life, that we seek to bridge, or reconcile, or integrate, by recollection and, beyond this, by myth and art. Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we leave or lose the place where we were born and spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place, or the life, we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed. All of us, finally, are exiles from the past. But this is particularly true for Franco, who feels himself the sole survivor and rememberer of a world forever past.
(...)
In March of 1989, I went to Pontito, to see the village for myself and to talk to some of Franco’s relatives there. I found the village itself, compared with the paintings, at once extraordinarily similar and totally different. There is an almost photographic fidelity, an amazing microscopic power of reproduction, in the way Franco recollects, thirty years later, the details of Pontito. And yet, at the same time, I was struck by the differences: Pontito is much smaller than one would think from his paintings—the streets are narrower, the houses more irregular, the church tower shorter and more squat. There are many reasons for this, one of which is that Franco paints what he saw with a child’s eye, and to a child everything is taller and more spacious. The literalness of this child’s-eye vision made me wonder whether, through some legerdemain of the brain, Franco was able, or even forced, to reexperience Pontito exactly as he had experienced it as a child; whether he was given access, a convulsive access, to the child’s memories within him.
(...)
Franco’s Pontito is minutely accurate, in the tiniest details, and yet it is also serene and idyllic. There is a great stillness in it, a sense of peace, not least because his Pontito is depopulated, its buildings and streets are empty; the bustling, transitory people have been removed. There is something of a desolate, a postnuclear, quality. But there is also a deeper, more spiritual stillness. One cannot help feeling that something is strange here, that what is being recalled is not the actuality of childhood, as with Proust, but a denying and transfiguring vision of childhood, with the place, Pontito, taking the place of the people—the parents, the living people—who must have been so important to the child.8 Franco is not unaware of this and will in some moods talk of the reality of childhood as he knew it—its complexities, its conflicts, its griefs, and its pains. But all this is edited out in his art, where a paradisiacal simplicity prevails. One finds the belief in a happy childhood “even in people who have undergone cruel experiences as children,” Schachtel writes. “The myth of happy childhood takes the place of the lost memory of the actual … experience.”
(...)
Franco gets up early each morning and knows what he has to do. He has his task, his mission: to recollect—to consecrate the memory of Pontito. His visions, when they come, are full of emotion and excitement—no less so than they were when they first came to him, twenty-five years ago. And the activity of painting—of walking again in recollection through the so-loved paths and streets, and being able to articulate this, in so masterly a fashion, with such richness and detail—gives him a sense of identity and accomplishment by giving his visions a controlled and artistic form.
From An Anthropologist on Mars
by Oliver Sacks
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