Dementia & Avant-Garde Empathies

In his memoir, Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio writes about losing his ability to write: "The disease produces a literary trash pile of butchered words, once recognizable but now arranged in combinations neither I nor the spell-checker has ever seen," he writes (125).  My edition begins with a typo, "Many friends have helped with ths project," and the editions of my students and co-instructor begin with flurries of missing letters. (I'm trying to find out to what extent these omissions are "accidents," or intentions by the editors, and why different printings have different errors.) The passage that sent me back to poetry, however, is this one by DaBaggio:

As I type, my fingers hit unexpected keys and make words with similar sounds or rearrange letters. It began with small words. Recently I discovered the word "will" when I thought I had written "still." Another time the word "ride turned into "rice. . . Sometimes this "dyslectic" alphabet goes unnotced by me for several readings. Eye, hand, mind, the connections are weakening. Typos tell the story of the march of Alzheimer's. (134)

I was reminded of a passage in John Shoptaw's essay on John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein in The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. In that essay, he quotes Ashbery on the deliberate cultivation of "typos": "I just wrote ap oem this morning in which I used the word 'borders' but changed it to 'boarders.' The original word literally had a marginal existence and isn't spoken, is perhaps what you might call a crypt word" (214). Like Garrett Stewart, Ashbery finds meanings between words, though not between material words, as Stewart does, but between homonyms. Shoptaw catalogues many of these crypt words and phrases, which include the shift from "screwed into place" to "screwed onto palace" and "Time stepped," rather than "stopped," both from The Tennis Court Oath. Charles Bernstein takes cliches and transmogrifies them by sonic shift, too:

half a loaf
would be not
so good as

no loaf (half
a boast not
so good as

no boast). (Tribe, 215)

My co-teacher, Lori Yancura, had just found an article by Aagje Swinnen on "Dementia in Documentary Film: Mum by Adelheid Roosen." At the end of this article, Swinnen uses Riffaterre (ah, blast from the critical past!) to read words written by the woman with dementia chronicled in the film, Mum. Mum was not yet mum, still had words and wrote them on a clear plastic "window." Taking what appears to be evidence of illness, confusion, and reading it through the lens of poetry, Swinnen finds important words, and parts of idioms.  She takes the following phrase: "No I don't have to be on the leg, on the dove . . . or on the breaking, but I do want to be free..." reads "breaking" as part of "breaking free" and then speculates that the word "leg" might also be related to "breaking," as in "break a leg."

I created a writing exercise out of these links, connections, breakings of words into other words. The resulting chaotic proliferation of meaning does not net communication or information, but fields of suggestive sounds.  We did a 10-minute automatic writing bout during which any word that could be flipped into another word would be flipped/flopped. My co-instructor, Lori, started writing and laughing.  When she finished and read her piece, which was suitably chaotic, she said she realized that every word she'd written, while it did not "make sense to anyone else," was important to her. Her words, like those of others in the class, came to her out of her recent experiences with cars, with her dog, and so forth.  Some of the material came out of the conversation we'd been having before class began, about Kapena's car, which was lost on the Honda lot, after he took it in for repair. My free write took the word "Cambodia" apart as "come boding in an rise paddy," where Cambodia came to mind based on a verbal/visual memory of the teeshirt I'd seen there that read "iPood," which came from earlier in-class conversation about measuring your health according to the color of your poo (our class is inspiring us to eat healthier food . . . ).

We had written "demented texts," but we were not dementia-sufferers.  We had laughed at our writing, whereas DeBaggio suffered deeply trying to write his. For him, the typo was horrible symptom of his disease; for us, the typo was mental liberation into zaniness.  So what was the point of the exercise?  We had not come to understand the anguish of trying to communicate, but instead writing word salad. When I asked if the exercise helped us to better understand dementia, Lori noted that she wants to use the exercise with caregivers, because this exercise made her more understanding (if not better able to understand exactly what dementia-sufferers say). Knowing that her own words meant so much to her, but couldn't be tracked by us without explanation, meant that efforts at communication by Alzheimer's sufferers likely include words that likely mean a lot to them.  I remember Florence, in my mother's Alzheimer's home, who talked so much about church.  Or Sylvia about her store. A woman who kept saying "baby" over and over again. Their sentences didn't make sense, but their words were meaningful.

The avant-garde poet is not usually looked to as a model of empathy. She's more a Brechtian alienist, setting herself apart from audience rather than creating a moving field of compassion. But this exercise reminded me that those poems that drive their audiences crazy are (linguistically) very like persons with Alzheimer's, and that those persons with the illness can perhaps be better cared for if we recognize in their words the feelings that individual and broken words carry.  Not words as sentences or words as stories, but words themselves, in their own frailty, losing letters here and there, shifting into other words, then wandering into other fields of meaning, getting lost, and only sometimes found.  I read a book called The Alphabet Keeper to my kids; I think I found it in a London bookshop. The alphabet keeper has a big net and keeps trying to capture words, set them down to be still, but they keep shifting into other words. It's a lovely book, and now I see how apt an analogy it is for the language of dementia and for our attempts to capture meaning in it.  The in-class exercise was at once a literary one (make an avant-garde poem) and also an empathetic one (make the poem and hear it as transcript of a possible dementia). Or, as the Riffaterre drenched Dr. Swinnen writes: "The semiotics of poetry is to be understood as the transformation of the signs from the mimetic level to the second, higher level of significance by the reader."

Notes:

Thomas DaBaggio, Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's. NY: The Free Press, 2002.

John Shoptaw, "The Music of Construction: Measure and Polyphony in Ashbery and Bernstein," in Susan M. Schultz, Ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995: 211-257.

Aagje Swinnen, "Dementia in Documentary Film: Mum by Adelheid Roosen," The Gerontologist (53:1): 113-122, 2012.

DeBaggio/Oppen: An Alzheimer's Writing Experiment

never the chess game the checker game in which the pieces
The words are under control but the letters that form the words squirm in their own directions.
Juggler, why need I invent so much
I have searched for the potent words that announce my coming departure, but I cannot find them.
in the back yard tongueless
Words come when I sit down to write, but they dance away seductively, and meaning and substance disappear quickly.
on the beach in the hissing surf I don't know don't know what to say
I have to be careful to spell correctly but sometimes . . .
poem said you may see the poem spells itself out
Thoughts squiggle and writhe into sentences that disappear before they can be acknowledged.
wordings o my elderly siblings the children running on the beach in the hissing surf I don't know don't know what to say
It is tough work all day to chase words flitting away before they anoint paper with their color. Tyger still burning in me burning in the night sky burning in us the light
I can spell the word "dying" but I do not know what it really means other than the opposite of living. I have experienced living and it has already cost me many words and I have yet to understand it fully.
to become old the innocence
When I am writing, I am someone else looking at me and the world.
The old man In the mirror Startles Me But the young man In the photograph Is stranger Still.
I bleed emotion every hour and play with a tricky shifting alphabet of stumbling words. I have just spent five minutes struggling to spell the word "hour."
And cannot bear to speak of it
I am losing my ability to write. I see the signs of verbal atrophy every day. Cut my legs off but don't take away my ability to think, dream, and write.
In the last month, an arm Stiff, a leg Dragging, his speech Impeded--'You cannot Imagine', he said, 'What has Been happening To me--'
More and more I am unconsciously mixing words that have similar sounds: our and out, would and wood, me and be, to name a few.
the saving ray of strangeness saving ray of exile ray of darkeness ray of light
Almost every minute of the day is destroyed by the struggle to reclaim lost words in my search to communicate. It is a losing battle, but I will sing until no word is left.
that force the words
out of that whirlwind his
and not his strange
words surround him
Night after night strange dreams inhabit my sleep, nights of lost wandering, terror, fear, and mysterious occurrences. These are dreams of confusion, deep, dreadful dreams I categorize as Alzheimer's experiences. In them the man I see is walking, wandering aimlessly, lost and fearful. I wake up screaming, fearing loss of control, hiccupping with fear, breathless with emotion.
I dreamed one night that I was in Northern France in one of the red-brick industrial towns the doors and the windows locked. I knocked on a door and entered and I said to the family I was here during the war, I was
in a house near here tho I cannot find it, it is near, you
can take me there they will know me. I stood in that room and they would not guide me. I was lost and they could not guide me.
After so many years coddling words, it is now I realize writing carries the blood of memory. boards and the voice of the poem a wandering foreigner more strange
Alzheimer's is like trying to describe air.
the finches at the feeder in Spring yell us us us us does their language contain them The struggle to find the words, to express myself, has become insurmountable. I must now be done with writing and lick words instead.
whereupon curious archangels begin to watch

________________________


Text in Arial comes from Thomas DeBaggio's Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's.

Text in Courier comes from George Oppen's New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Davidson. I took lines from the poems of the 1970s, whether originally published or not.

Blogger has, as is its wont, further deranged line breaks; I have let these errors be.