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Tales from the Other Side of Language 125 my body, the array of sensations that give me information, orientation. Like listening to the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, I learn to listen to the sensory landscape in my body. Pleasure is essential in my healing life again, so that disappointment doesn’t follow all the dogged practice. The activities need to be fun to sustain me, to keep me going. Satsima is fine company and takes care of me in the ways I hoped Sahaya would do, and more. I named him before I met him: Maha Satsima, meaning “a very great good fortune” in Sanskrit. I call him Satsi, but in public he is Handsome Dude. Satsima isn’t doggy enough for people to remember. One night he throws pillows off the couch in the living room, pushing with his head to get my attention because he thinks I’m on the computer too long in the studio. I continue anyway, so he scrapes his front paws on the couch, noisily making a mess of the slipcover. Irritated, I scream at him, but still don’t stop. He throws more pillows until, finally, I do stop what I am doing. He is right; I’ve way overstretched my stamina, as my irritation and screaming show me all too well. Tonight he makes me pay attention to where my limits are. In a morning Nia class, Satsima is fast asleep on the risers as we are well into the routine. Suddenly he bolts awake, crosses the floor to where I’m dancing, and rubs his head against my leg. He is telling me I should slow down. I see what he has done, and I realize he is right. Another day in a yoga class he lies beside me, he on his mat and I on mine. It is coming to the end of class and I’m thinking of a doing a full bridge. He moves over to my mat and sits on my chest, preventing me from even trying. Acutely sensitive to me, he notices before I do when I overextend my abilities, a great advantage to me in learning how to be more aware moment by moment. Satsi, beauty on all levels, stands as my front man against my disability and my invisibility. His intelligence is essential to my recovery.
126 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: A dream wakes me up suddenly in the middle of the night. In it I am doing a computer search in the university library, and it gives me a title, “Rocks, Fossils, and Flying.” Still half-dreaming, I pull the white comforter over my shoulders, dog still lightly snoring at my feet. I muse for a few minutes, intending sleep, but the words nag my consciousness and don’t let me. So I get up. Satsima gets up with me and follows me into the studio and lies down on his blue fleece mat beside me. I sit at my computer, thinking and writing. Rocks and fossils are evidences of a living past. Visions come to me of layers of silt and stone season upon season in ancient streambeds lying far under the surface of today. In my dreamy awake mind I see ancient glaciers scouring the land to bedrock in crushing movements, pushing boulders at their forward edges to distant places. I see the crashing as continental plates collide, their shelves lifting to form mountain chains. So it is with my life, I think. The scouring of the stroke sheered my edges, polished them brightly, and cleaned out the graveled layers of speech. Sensory materials, their very physicality, form the geologic layering of my life. Layers of my experience are all there under the surface. The geology of me sits here with me this dark morning. Fossils are like little novellas, telling stories of the immense varieties of plant, animal, and fish that have lived on this planet before this time. There are striking correspondences in body structure and behavior in vastly different species across eons of time. In older human oral cultures, people located themselves deeply in the sensory experience of the intimate relationships of the world around them—trees, mountains, animals, birds, their community. With the loss of speech, I lost the narrative of verbal planning. Life was much harder in the beginning because the planning, orienting part of language I depended on was a further loss. These two losses eclipsed the primacy of my verbal mind and moved me into a larger narrative. I listen to stories and
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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