Inside McLuhan’s head

Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd/ Getty Images

Most anyone who attended or audited his classes or went to any of his speeches will agree that Marshall became random quickly. He was tangential and self-contradictory, and could really piss people off. With his protective oblivious coating, it all bounced off him. He was out to stimulate people into making up their own minds and stimulating their own ideas, using his thinking as a catalyst. If they became wrapped up in a specific, it meant they’d lost sight of the big picture. He almost felt sorry for people who took him the wrong way.

There were underlying biological reasons for the acceleration of Marshall’s tics and eccentricities. Throughout the early 1960s he began to, for lack of a better word, freeze when in public, either teaching or in social situations. He’d be talking and then he would stop. His eyes would go blank, and then after a minute or two he’d continue where he had left off. It was disconcerting, and worried those close to him. Medically, there were three potential causes for these freezings: perhaps they were mini-strokes, or they may have been petit mal seizures (minor epileptic seizures), or they could have been related to a benign brain tumour the size of a lemon found in his brain later on in the 1960s. With each event, Marshall became a bit more of a prisoner of the wiring and plumbing of his head.

His blackouts became alarmingly frequent, but Marshall never wanted to give any indication of weakness, however slight. Finally, in the fall of 1967, his family broke through Marshall’s fortress of denial and begged him to get help. He went in for brain surgery on the morning of Nov. 25, 1967. The doctor exercised supreme caution, and Marshall’s surgery became, at that point, the longest recorded neurological surgery in medical history.

His family had braced themselves for all possible worst-case scenarios (paralysis, profound memory loss, retardation—a terrifyingly long list of possibilities). When Marshall woke up an hour after surgery, the surgeon asked him how he felt, and he replied that it would depend on one’s definition of “feeling.” He was back again—phew!—but he was back in reduced form. He had, in fact, lost swaths of memory; curiously, he had trouble remembering books he’d read many times over. He lived with staggering pain for months afterwards, and he lost some of his ability to be civil to colleagues and students. In addition, his hypersensitivity to noises, always high, became extreme.

Marshall had another health scare in 1971. An angiogram revealed that his carotid artery was blocked, but it was during the discovery of this that surgeons discovered his feline blood circulation: his external carotid artery (the artery that supplies blood to the face, scalp, and jaw) had formed huge connecting channels through the left base of his skull and inside his skull. Had it not been for his one-in-a-billion vascularization, Marshall’s brain would have been toast long ago. He considered this vascularization to be a miracle. Who’s to say it wasn’t?

On Sept. 26, 1979, he suffered a catastrophic stroke in his office. Marshall’s stroke left him unable to read, write, or speak. He could understand conversations but couldn’t participate verbally. The arteries that had blessed him had also cursed him. And, as happens with stroke victims, some verbal function remained: he could still sing hymns, and he was left with one signature phrase he could use when trying to speak. In his case, it was “Oh boy!”

Oh, the irony for Marshall. Words—the sound of them, the shape of their letter forms, their intricate relationship to each other, a relationship rendered industrial and homogenized by the printing press—were suddenly nothing but sounds with meaning, prehistoric noises with no means of being recorded or passed forward.

Well-meaning friends and family tried to retrain Marshall to read, but the neural damage was structural and too great. Devices like flash cards and Speak & Spell toys were tried, but to no avail. What seemed to make him happiest was to have visitors and friends come to read to him.