–noun Pathology.
the loss of a previously held ability to speak or understand spoken or written language, due to disease or injury of the brain.
Origin: 1865–70; < Gk: speechlessness, equiv. to a- a- 6 + phat(ós) spoken (deriv. of dcitphánai to speak) + -ia -ia
On Aphasia and Translation:
Aphasia is a condition of words, and the absence of words. Because of that, one can’t exactly talk or write about it, only write around it. Aphasia is, down to its very essence, unspeakable.
A Stitch of Time follows a year of recovery in language (August 2007- August 2008) after a ruptured brain aneurysm, and uses a large portion of documents from the journals recorded over that year. The journal entries were often written in the midst of the acute stages of the condition, which begs the question how does one include and/or decode entries written in times of severe impediment? Though many of the entries are included in the book without editing, the wealth of inscrutable pages cannot doesn’t account for a narrative. The entries sometimes need to be translated. The book is a story, and since the story happened to me, I like to think I have some special knowledge as the narrator/translator. At least, I know my subject well.
In most of the journal entries, I remember what I was writing about, and almost remember what I was thinking as I wrote them. But that almost is such a potential space. Anything that is transcribed, rephrased, explained, or expanded is all essentially translation. In the book, I often translate myself, the Recovered Writer translating the Journal Writer, sharing the unique dynamic of occupying the same body, the same brain, but slightly different minds.
(September 2007, a month after the aneurysm)
Here is the transcription, the journal entry in more legible print:
a picture
daily news. at a party. family
I Igirls. 2. 17 and maybe
13. a dad. that did in dad’s doctor.
ged a second gin. glasses
in the insent. to mug shots. to men in orange. one took
to melike boyfriend material
tosoon.
the father lived. not othere. siuspicious to me. (not to arny
else any
their in fine. daily news on
also say they were raped
first.
how. more than that. fafe? manka.
soul. one to be a murder
and murdersee. were they bent
why me with a neourosugen or the
raped
have the man in the driveway
there are orange men with pretrol.*
This might be called an expansion, but there is a translation in there too:
(Excerpt from A Stitch of Time, Chapter 2)
The halls of memory are a kind of library. Instead of books, it holds transparent glass jars with glass lids and inside each jars is a recollection. The memory is a fleshy thing, colorless and amorphous, which suspends in a sticky embalming fluid. The jars sit on shelves, and each shelf is incredibly deep and incredibly high. The length of the library is incredibly long, farther than any eye could see. A few of the memories are close and easily accessible; they show the attention of much use. But most of these memories are farther down on the shelves, musty, hardly pulled from their spots. The memories themselves have forgotten why and when they were filed there.
The aneurysm was a tremor in the library. The quake rattled and shook the jars, moving them from one location to another. Some of the memories without titles and dates dislodged from their storage, leapt from the shelves, shattering to the floor. Through the broken glass—the viscous liquid seeps into the grooves of the concrete. Why was I remembering these memories? Why suddenly could I now remember the name of everyone in my first grade class, but couldn’t remember the topic of my research paper last year? Why was Tommy Kochinas playing kickball again, and why was David Taylor writing on my shoes?
The memories had sounds, but more than that, they were an onslaught of images. Images of the playground at my pre-school, of award ceremonies, of Dial-a-Ride vans, plains of Montana wheat, the dense spot of ferns and shrubs on 1408 N. Mar Vista. The memories would flip through my mind with merciless speed often and with no apparent order. Sometimes I had a memory I could hardly account for that would arrive and linger for a while.
A memory:
I am looking at a newspaper, the NY Daily News, at the receptionist desk at an office I work for in NY. I am reading an article, looking at a picture of a family. It is a full-page color picture. The family is blonde, a mother and her two daughters, except for the graying husband and father, all-smiling, dressed in gowns and Dad in a tie. Next to them, is a small insert of two men in orange jumpsuits. One of them is young and handsome, Boyfriend material (I thought before I read the story). I discover the pictures were portraits of murderers and murderees, side-by-side. The paper said the men in orange had burst into the family home in the early night, at dinnertime. It explained that two girls 13, 17, and their mother had all been raped and killed and the intruders torched the house with the women inside of it. The men didn’t take anything of consequence and they were caught easily, confessed readily. The father, the smiling doctor from the picture, was saved only by coming home late from work. Maybe saved by having a second gin at a local bar.
It is a memory mainly of someone else's life I kept in a jar, a memory of a newspaper article about a family I did not know. But the memory saturated me, so I paused to wonder about the Long Island family. What happened? Was that fate? What is fate? Why, on a summer night, was it my fate to deserve to be saved by a neuroradiologist with a surgical catheter, when that smiling family’s fate was to be raped and killed by orange men with petrol?
*
A Stitch of Time is story that deals with language, and for the story to function, there must be a lot of translation. In the book, The Journal Writer and The Recovered Writer work together with different strengths and weaknesses. The Recovered Writer is an organizing force, the translator, a meaning-making machine working on all cylinders. The Journal Writer is vulnerable and unable to know her own deficits as she writes, but she is also necessarily intuitive. Both of the writers are enriched by their conversation. The aphasiac voice is especially effective in her poetry. And in addition to its translations and translators, the aphasiac voice occasionally deserves to speak for herself.