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Tales from the Other Side of Language 27 and then in the woods, always looking at the gestures and the patterns. George would go back to the city in the middle of the month, and I learned to be alone with myself … and to draw. I am eager now to walk with Jake and my daughter, eager for the remembered peacefulness of Cathedral Woods. Immensely tall and soaring pines make soft swishing sounds by light breezes in their tops. At their base the deep mulch of the seasons of needles spread a leathery brown covering, large and intimate at the same time. I am eager for the scrubby path and the scramble down to Pebble Beach where the “pebbles” are glacial boulders. Walking with Jake, these visions in my head, my body gives out. I haven’t the stamina. I want to go to the densely quiet woods in the center of the island and then out to the magnificent headlands on the other side. Too weak, I walk the little dirt road in the small village. I sit on the rocks near my room, watch the tide roll the kelp. Even this quiet island world is too dazzling. A walk to the country store, seeing people I know along the way, is more than I can take. My fragile body churns with unmanageable sensation. The inside and outside sensations boil into a physical commotion that cascades into flood, like a baby being tickled into screaming, physical overload. It used to be so simple to make words and have feelings at the same time. My halting words now are too gossamer to shelter the mass of sensation and emotion underneath the enduring calamities of my day. I haven’t enough words to smooth all the jumbled pieces together. I’m trying valiantly to be in the world, but I’m unmoored. Behind my presence, ragged as it is, I know I’m coherent, sentient, even with the lack of words. Still … I’m not quite sure. I have to retreat. I borrow an ancient manual typewriter from the inn where we are staying. The inn stands at the top of the cliff, with a magnificent view of the ocean and the little islands close by. My room back down the hill is small, has
28 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: no view, a little closed-in cocoon. I trudge down the hill with the typewriter and make a desk of a little table in the room. Since I don’t recognize sounds as letters, I cannot spell. I type fast to avoid thinking about spelling. I let my fingers use motor memory through another part of my brain. I am a terrible typist, and the result is pretty bad. I keep on anyway; it is good enough to see what I want to know. Can my mind still articulate concepts? It is ... essential ... to know this. The paper I have in mind is based on videos in my research nursery of an autistic baby and her mother, their immense difficulty to form a sensory relationship. I write bits ... parts of ideas ... search. I cut with scissors, rearrange words, paste with glue. My pages are full of pasted pieces. I’m up early in the morning, typing, pushing for thought. The neighbor upstairs complains. I have only two more days. I must get into the black box of words. Two close friends, physicians, on their way to a shoreline walk, stop to chat as I’m sitting in an old rocking chair on the porch of my little room. When I tell them, slowly, that I am writing a paper, they stare off into space, faces blank, as though I hadn’t spoken. What can they say? Is it crazy even to think of writing a paper? When I leave the island I’m triumphant. I have a few messy pasty pages. They are a start. Back in the city a colleague joins me in this endeavor, willing and very patient. Working in his office, I continue to stumble around, slowly writing, sorting words and ideas with him. We pass very rough drafts back and forth. I’m knocking on the door of my verbal world. I am passionate for this, fiercely grasping shards from the shambles of my career. Out in my neighborhood I struggle to speak in the halting, tattered grammar of a toddler. I have lost the ease of basic housekeeping speech: chit-chat, requests, questions. The world’s words rush past me. I hear, and there is no space for me to collect my thoughts or respond. The world outside is too fast for me to conjure
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house as sentient. Tales from the O
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is now. Tales from the Other Side o
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lives around him in deep and import
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“Without Utterance is a testimoni
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