“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.
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.
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.
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.
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