For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

Or there’s nowadays, by which time she lives in the
void, of course, glancing occasionally at her hands as if in an
attempt to catch them off guard. Her hands were lucid where
her mind was not. A dreadful thought, that: lucid hands! That
we understand anatomists as describing most of the cortex –
which is a slice of the brain, of course – the part they call the
ISOCORTEX in most, and something else entirely in HER – as
having six layers, but not all layers are apparent in all areas, and
even when a layer is present, its thickness and cellular organization
may vary. Several anatomists – though very few I’ve ever
met – have constructed maps of cortical areas on the basis of
variations in the appearance of the layers as seen with a cheap
plastic microscope. One of the most widely used schemes came
from Brodmann, who split the cortex into fifty-one different
areas and assigned each a number (some anatomists have
since subdivided many of the Brodmann areas). For example,
Brodmann area one is the primary somatosensory cortex,
Brodmann area seventeen is the primary visual cortex, and
Brodmann area twenty-five is the anterior cingulate cortex.
Something like that. Brodmann area twenty-three is, I think,
entirely missing in our example. Which might go some way to
explaining the lucidity of hands – in her case. As discrete from
the lucidity of the mind. The absence of area twenty-three being
connected to certain cases of Cotard’s syndrome, also – the
syndrome being a rare neuropsychiatric disorder (or genuinely
neurological, in the case of a lady from Tarzana) in which
people hold a delusional belief that they are dead (either figuratively
or literally), do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost
their blood or internal organs. In rare instances, it can include
delusions of immortality.
Or the recollection of that Peter Lorre vehicle – ‘The
Hands of Orlac’, I think it was. Or perhaps it was simply called,
‘MAD LOVE’! In which he plays an insane surgeon who transplants
the hands of an executed murderer – a notorious stran-