DRUNKEN
BOAT, ISSUE 7, 2005
“Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance
and of necessity”
-Democritus
Imagine a place, not quite a place because it is in your body,
because it in fact is your body, where the noise of applause
is taken for the roar of surf, where the syncopation of traffic
is taken for a clatter of crockery, where those analogies,
while more or less accurate are also categorically false,
because there's no word for surf or crockery, nothing retrievable,
though knowledge and perception are there, just under the
black ice of speech. Imagine imagination without words, a
silence that doesn't obviate thought, but where what was once
taken for granted, like the name of a pet or the thing you'd
like slathered with butter, is suddenly, unmistakably unutterable.
Imagine arriving at this place, not quite a place, in a society
where speaking is considered a transparent, de facto attribute
of humanity, where the primacy of speech is seen as the differentiating
characteristic between humans and other higher mammals, where
the very disease you suffered from was itself caught in a
net of discourse whose terms and unspoken presuppositions
you had no control over, that in fact you were said, without
irony or apology, to have been struck dumb.
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Aphasic symptoms include word-finding difficulty and full-blown
speech distortion, incomplete structural differentiation, blurred
figure-ground discrimination, and the absence of formative processing.
Taken as a medical condition, these aspects can be personally
devastating, but seen in another light, as the basis for making
art, these very aspects can be productive, and it's part of
our charge in this issue of Drunken Boat to illuminate both
the ways in which the loss of speech can be both traumatic and
generative. Cognition can be conceptualized as a process of
both differentiation and integration and in individuals suffering
from aphasia, one or both of these functions is severed and/or
altered, resulting in a gradation of different symptoms-aphasia
could refer to the loss of the ability to comprehend written
words (alexia) or the ability to recall the names of objects
(anomia); it could refer to the inability to articulate words
normally in speech (aphonia) or in writing (agraphia); it could
refer to the disassociation of objects from their utility or
function (agnosia) or the inability to conceive of the world
symbolically (asemia). In these cases, and in many other cases
not listed here, there's a fundamental alteration in the self's
relationship with and in the world; suddenly an aphasic individual
is cut off from things that might have been taken for granted,
the world of sensation and perception, and the words that are
used to represent those things to others.
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Take the case of 20th century composer, Maurice Ravel, a giant
in his field who Stravinksy once referred to as “the Swiss watchmaker,”
because of his meticulous attention to detail and his ability
to integrate discrete, well-honed blocks of music into larger
and more complex compositions. Ravel described his most famous
work, Bolero, as “seventeen minutes of orchestral fabric without
music,” and he seemed destined to ascend into the pantheon of
immortals until the onset of Wernicke's aphasia in 1933 gradually
eroded his ability to write music. Still, he retained the ability
to recognize notes and rhythmical patterns, choose his scores,
even perceive that his doctor's piano had gone out of tune due
to the damp winter weather. As he was to report near the end
of his life, the music was trapped in his head-he could hear
it but was unable to produce the lexical effort necessary to
transmute it into symbols and as a result, was condemned by
his greatest gift. Ravel died in December, 1937, after a failed
craniotomy.
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In our own time, there's the distinguished poet William Meredith,
who spent time as a Naval aviator during the Second World War
and the Korean War before settling along the banks of the Thames
River in Uncasville, Connecticut. Meredith's output has been
prodigious as he has written over ten books of poetry, translated
French and Bulgarian poets, written elegantly on poetry and
prose, and maintained correspondences with many of the 20th
century's leading literary figures, including Robert Frost,
John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Elizabeth Hardwick, James Baldwin and James Merrill, among many
others. Meredith served as the Poetry Consultant to the Library
of Congress, the position now called Poet Laureate of the United
States, and has won most of the prestigious literary prizes
available to him, including a Pulitzer Prize and National Book
Award. Tragically, he suffered a severe stroke in 1983, which
left him unable to speak or move for over a year. Since that
time, Meredith has gone through intense therapy, slowly beginning
the process of rehabilitation and gradually relearning the words
he loves so much (though by his own admission, he'll have them
all back if he has 150 years left). There's nothing quite so
calamitous as a poet, whose very existence is limned in and
defined by language, losing his speech, but accompanied by his
companion, Richard Harteis, William Meredith has continued to
give readings and it's a profound testament to his courage and
his ardor for his métier, that he still shares
his work with audiences.
Aesthetically, much of contemporary art is characterized by
the interrogation of inherited forms-narrative, metrical, representational,
tonal and otherwise-and aphasia provides a trope for how those
structures might be further critiqued. Some of the work we've
included in the special folio on aphasia and the arts responds
to the ways in which language impairment might be reappropriated
as a compositional strategy. When the ligatures between morphemes
and phonemes, grammar and syntax are ruptured, something startlingly
new can sometimes emerge. The trope of speechlessness is a powerful
one in our moment where true dissent is silenced, where those
of us with a voice too often go unheard. The other side of that
coin, of course, is that most of us don't have enough silence,
in the contemplative sense, in our lives. As Pico Iyer has written,
“We have to earn silence, then, to work for it: to make it not
an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence
is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place
where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself
expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think;
but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves
not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper
than mere thought
allows.”
That's not to diminish the heartache that someone goes through
when a loved one suffers from aphasia, and other of the works
we've included deal with the earth-shattering revelation and
subsequent fortitude necessary to cope with this tragedy.
We've also included works from artists and writers who have
suffered from aphasia, such as Joseph Chaiken, William Meredith
and Jan Curtis, and continue to create art as well as works
from linguists and scientists. It's our wish, finally, that
this commingling of the arts and sciences can augur a new
moment of compassionate appraisal, changing the terms of discourse
to be more inclusive. As Michel Foucault has written, “the
examination that place individuals in a field of surveillance
also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them
in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them.” We're
not interested in capturing and fixing but liberating and
opening; the human brain is one of the wonders and mysteries
of our existence on this planet, perhaps the preeminent wonder
and mystery, and we hope that this special issue on Aphasia
and the Arts and William Meredith, combined with the other
works of arts that constitute the seventh issue of Drunken
Boat, goes a long way towards illuminating the diversity and
brilliance of contemporary art and literature.
We'd also like to announce the first annual Drunken
Boat Panliterary Awards. Judges Annie Finch, Sabina Murray,
Alexandra Tolstoy, Talan Memmott, David Hall and DJ Spooky will
help select the winners who will be announced at the Boston
Cyberarts Festival in May 2005. We'll publish the winners as
well as other notable entries in our next issue (which will
feature works from the Oulipo movement, guest-curated by Jean-Jacques
Poucel) and we encourage you to send us your best work. As a
501 (c)(3) non-profit organization, we also ask that you help
support our journal by making a contribution
to helping keep the arts alive online. Thanks for your continued
support and we hope you enjoy the new issue.
-Editors, Drunken Boat
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