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Tales from the Other Side of Language 129 Deborah Zaslow, storyteller and memoirist, rips each chapter I write to shreds. In her tiny blue handwriting, she creates alternatives around my words. I think about them and write again. The more she rips, the more in love I am. I’ve willingly stretched myself out on this rack, yielding to the tearing away of my old language habits. I yearn for renewal. No language is sufficient to tell what it is like inside without words, certainly not the language I knew and lost. I sweat in effort to tauten and compress these vast acres of experience. For so long I was avid to mediate the loss, so eager to return to some piece of the verbal culture. I ached toward words. I’ve been torn apart and reconstructed, finding worlds without words, and like a baby, comparing and organizing what is there: perception, sensation. I’ve come out of the desert again, the black box of words gone. I wonder why I would want to return to the sweltering metropolis of language anyway. I don’t want to resume the same somnolent stew, the dispassionate accuracy, the din of barren verbosity. In the dreamy dark morning I stand at a continental divide, word mind on one side and sensory mind on the other. I think it must be an either/or choice; I haven’t lived how to do both at once. I get back on the rack to stretch and shred my language, to discover a way of expression that I can love. My mind treks in other territories: nerve, fiber, and marrow, searching for the understory of language, voice, song. I wonder how to paint my sensory mind into words so that I can see vividly the inner story I’m trying to tell.
130 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: In the original stroke twenty-five years ago, I lost both expressive language and the supporting syntax of daily life activity. The loss of life syntax was language-related: planning, communicating, and executing intent and goals were all affected. In the process, however, I gained art, a mystical mind, and vast non-word relationships in the journey. In this second event, the damage is to the sub-cortical cerebellum, where some of the most basic integration of sensory-perceptual planning, organization, and implementation of motor activity takes place. From the outside I look reasonably coordinated, but internally I feel off balance and very limited in multitasking across sensory-modalities. And I lost verbal facility again. I thought that the new damage was not related to the decline of my speech, that my attention went necessarily to the damage of new limitations and only secondarily to my expression. I learn from my neuropsychologist that is only part of the story. The cerebellum is part of the old, primitive brain, the first place where incoming information is organized. As such it provides the most basic direction for both thought and action. So damage in that area of my brain likely limited input into my higher cognitive/verbal brain, accounting for feeling the enormous complexity and the great effort of activities that formerly were simple. While everything ultimately connects to the brain, my functional disabilities this second time are in my body, motor and somatic, and less in my cognitive mind. The subtle sensorimotor syntax for dancing, for karate, for cleaning my bathroom, and for any other daily life task are now challenges in my body. The sensations of difficulty in sensory-perceptual-motor coordination and syntax in action feel quite different from the consciousness of struggle in cognitive word planning. The cerebellum, part of the animal mind, provides the basis of sensory thinking. I function best now when I don’t think cognitively, when I don’t try
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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Tales from the Other Side of Langua
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