 Tony
Cicoria was forty-two, very fit and robust, a former
college football player who had become a well-regarded
orthopedic surgeon in a small city in upstate New York.
He was at a lakeside pavilion for a family gathering
one fall afternoon. It was pleasant and breezy, but
he noticed a few storm clouds in the distance; it looked
like rain.
He went
to a pay phone outside the pavilion to make a quick
call to his mother (this was in 1994, before the age
of cell phones). He still remembers every single second
of what happened next: "I was talking to my mother on
the phone. There was a little bit of rain, thunder in
the distance. My mother hung up. The phone was a foot
away from where I was standing when I got struck. I
remember a flash of light coming out of the phone. It
hit me in the face. Next thing I remember, I was flying
backwards."
Then—he
seemed to hesitate before telling me this—"I was
flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw
my own body on the ground. I said to myself, 'Oh shit,
I'm dead.' I saw people converging on the body. I saw
a woman—she had been standing waiting to use the
phone right behind me—position herself over my
body, give it CPR. . . . I floated up the stairs—my
consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization
that they would be okay. Then I was surrounded by a
bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of well-being
and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life
raced by me. No emotion associated with these . . .
pure thought, pure ecstasy. I had the perception of
accelerating, being drawn up . . . there was speed and
direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, 'This is
the most glorious feeling I have ever had'—SLAM!
I was back."
Dr Cicoria
knew he was back in his own body because he had pain—pain
from the burns on his face and his left foot, where
the electrical charge had entered and exited his body—and,
he realized, "only bodies have pain." He wanted to go
back, he wanted to tell the woman to stop giving him
CPR, to let him go; but it was too late—he was
firmly back among the living. After a minute or two,
when he could speak, he said, "It's okay—I'm a
doctor!" The woman (she turned out to be an intensive-care-unit
nurse) replied, "A few minutes ago, you weren't."
The police
came and wanted to call an ambulance, but Cicoria refused,
delirious. They took him home instead ("it seemed to
take hours"), where he called his own doctor, a cardiologist.
The cardiologist, when he saw him, thought Cicoria must
have had a brief cardiac arrest, but could find nothing
amiss with examination or EKG. "With these things, you're
alive or dead," the cardiologist remarked. He did not
feel that Dr Cicoria would suffer any further consequences
of this bizarre accident.
Cicoria
also consulted a neurologist—he was feeling sluggish
(most unusual for him) and having some difficulties
with his memory. He found himself forgetting the names
of people he knew well. He was examined neurologically,
had an EEG and an MRI. Again, nothing seemed amiss.
A couple
of weeks later, when his energy returned, Dr Cicoria
went back to work. There were still some lingering memory
problems—he occasionally forgot the names of rare
diseases or surgical procedures—but all his surgical
skills were unimpaired. In another two weeks, his memory
problems disappeared, and that, he thought, was the
end of the matter.
What then
happened still fills Cicoria with amazement, even now,
a dozen years later. Life had returned to normal, seemingly,
when "suddenly, over two or three days, there was this
insatiable desire to listen to piano music." This was
completely out of keeping with anything in his past.
He had had a few piano lessons as a boy, he said, "but
no real interest." He did not have a piano in his house.
What music he did listen to tended to be rock music.
With this
sudden onset of craving for piano music, he began to
buy recordings and became especially enamored of a Vladimir
Ashkenazy recording of Chopin favorites—the Military
Polonaise, the Winter Wind Étude, the Black Key
Étude, the A-flat Polonaise, the B-flat Minor
Scherzo. "I loved them all," Tony said. "I had the desire
to play them. I ordered all the sheet music. At this
point, one of our babysitters asked if she could store
her piano in our house—so now, just when I craved
one, a piano arrived, a nice little upright. It suited
me fine. I could hardly read the music, could barely
play, but I started to teach myself." It had been more
than thirty years since the few piano lessons of his
boyhood, and his fingers seemed stiff and awkward.
And then,
on the heels of this sudden desire for piano music,
Cicoria started to hear music in his head. "The first
time," he said, "it was in a dream. I was in a tux,
onstage; I was playing something I had written. I woke
up, startled, and the music was still in my head. I
jumped out of bed, started trying to write down as much
of it as I could remember. But I hardly knew how to
notate what I heard." This was not too successful—he
had never tried to write or notate music before. But
whenever he sat down at the piano to work on the Chopin,
his own music "would come and take me over. It had a
very powerful presence."
I was not
quite sure what to make of this peremptory music, which
would intrude almost irresistibly and overwhelm him.
Was he having musical hallucinations? No, Dr Cicoria
said, they were not hallucinations—"inspiration"
was a more apt word. The music was there, deep inside
him—or somewhere—and all he had to do was
let it come to him. "It's like a frequency, a radio
band. If I open myself up, it comes. I want to say,
'It comes from heaven,' as Mozart said."
His music
is ceaseless. "It never runs dry," he continued. "If
anything, I have to turn it off."
Now he had
to wrestle not just with learning to play the Chopin,
but to give form to the music continually running in
his head, to try it out on the piano, to get it on manuscript
paper. "It was a terrible struggle," he said. "I would
get up at four in the morning and play till I went to
work, and when I got home from work I was at the piano
all evening. My wife was not really pleased. I was possessed."
In the third
month after being struck by lightning, then, Cicoria—once
an easygoing, genial family man, almost indifferent
to music—was inspired, even possessed, by music,
and scarcely had time for anything else. It began to
dawn on him that perhaps he had been "saved" for a special
reason. "I came to think," he said, "that the only reason
I had been allowed to survive was the music." I asked
him whether he had been a religious man before the lightning.
He had been raised Catholic, he said, but had never
been particularly observant; he had some "unorthodox"
beliefs, too, such as in reincarnation.
He himself,
he grew to think, had had a sort of reincarnation, had
been transformed and given a special gift, a mission,
to "tune in" to the music that he called, half metaphorically,
"the music from heaven." This came, often, in "an absolute
torrent" of notes with no breaks, no rests, between
them, and he would have to give it shape and form. (As
he said this, I thought of Caedmon, the seventh-century
Anglo-Saxon poet, an illiterate goatherd who, it was
said, had received the "art of song" in a dream one
night, and spent the rest of his life praising God and
creation in hymns and poems.)
Cicoria
continued to work on his piano playing and his compositions.
He got books on notation, and soon realized that he
needed a music teacher. He would travel to concerts
by his favorite performers but had nothing to do with
musical friends in his own town or musical activities
there. This was a solitary pursuit, between himself
and his muse.
I asked
whether he had experienced other changes since the lightning
strike—a new appreciation of art, perhaps, different
taste in reading, new beliefs? Cicoria said he had become
"very spiritual" since his near-death experience. He
had started to read every book he could find about near-death
experiences and about lightning strikes. And he had
got "a whole library on Tesla," as well as anything
on the terrible and beautiful power of high-voltage
electricity. He felt he could sometimes see "auras"
of light or energy around people's bodies—he had
never seen this before the lightning bolt.
Some years
passed, and Cicoria's new life, his inspiration, never
deserted him for a moment. He continued to work full-time
as a surgeon, but his heart and mind now centered on
music. He got divorced in 2004, and the same year had
a fearful motorcycle accident. He had no memory of this,
but his Harley was struck by another vehicle, and he
was found in a ditch, unconscious and badly injured,
with broken bones, a ruptured spleen, a perforated lung,
cardiac contusions, and, despite his helmet, head injuries.
In spite of all this, he made a complete recovery and
was back at work in two months. Neither the accident
nor his head injury nor his divorce seemed to have made
any difference to his passion for playing and composing
music.
Excerpted
from Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks Copyright ©
2007 by Oliver Sacks. Excerpted by permission of Knopf
Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited.
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