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Out of context: Reply #162
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"I still have my hair, and when I recovered I took my feeble lungs, and Seeing Red, to Philadelphia. I was going to meet a man who, more than any other I know, lives absorbed in the present moment. My film director friend Ian Knox and I drove from New York and, close on midnight, arrived at the home of Pat Martino, the subject of the film we were making. As a young jazz guitar virtuoso starting out alongside John Coltrane, Pat was one of the finest musicians of his generation. Insect-thin and fastidiously dressed in black with cropped white hair, he is cadaverously handsome and unsettlingly serene. We sent out for Chinese food and got talking. With a catalogue of successful albums to his name, and on the brink of a major new recording deal, Pat became seriously ill. He was diagnosed with manic depressive disorder, but then the seizures started. The brain scans revealed a large arteriovenous malformation in his left temporal lobe. The surgery that saved his life wiped his memory. He had no idea who he was and didn't recognise his parents. The amnesia ripped selfhood from his brain. Nothing mattered; life was meaningless; he was nobody. They tried to coax him back to being the "somebody" he once was. His father would play Pat's old records at full volume—an intolerable torment. Pat could stand it no longer and left. He drifted, for a time living in Japan and then Amsterdam. He was recalled to Philadelphia on the death of his mother. His father died soon afterwards, and it was too much. Pat's life fell apart, and he ended up once more on a psychiatric ward. But it was there that an astute psychiatrist gave him a primitive computer to play with. It contained a music program, and Pat began to play, like a child with a toy. There was nothing to achieve, nowhere to go, forward or backward, nothing to do except play. It was an epiphany. It was like being born again, he says, but "living entirely in the moment." The music mattered; life was meaningful; he was somebody. And with music as the golden thread, he began to weave a new version of himself. He took up the guitar again, studying technique, via tuition videos, from a great teacher—his former self. Pat's memory is now substantially recovered, but he still has a residual, Zen-like focus on the "now." He claims to have a heightened sense of aliveness, of selfhood, of the sheer privilege of being alive. In the Moment is what we're calling the film."
Paul Broks