the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

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