1989 - Seeing Voices (7 page)

44. Besides its exemplary school for the deaf, the town of Fremont, California, offers unrivaled work opportunities for deaf people, as well as a rare degree of public and civic awareness and respect. The existence of thousands of deaf people in one area of Fremont has given rise to a fascinating bilingual and bicultural situation, whereby speech and Sign are used equally. In certain parts of town, one may see cafes where half the customers speak and half sign, Y’s where deaf and hearing work out together, and athletic matches where deaf and hearing play together. There is here not only an interface—and a friendly one, between deaf and hearing—but a considerable fusion or diffusion of the two cultures, so that numbers of the hearing (especially children) have started to acquire Sign, usually quite unconsciously, by picking it up rather than deliberately learning it. Thus even here, in a bustling industrial Silicon Valley town in the 1980’s (and there is a somewhat similar situation in Rochester, New York, where several thousand deaf students, some with deaf families, attend the NTID), we see that the benign Martha’s Vineyard situation can re-emerge.

Intriguingly, even after the last deaf Islander had died in 1952, the hearing tended to preserve Sign among themselves, not merely for special occasions (telling dirty jokes, talking in church, communicating between boats, etc.) but generally. They would slip into it, involuntarily, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, because Sign is ‘natural’ to all who learn it (as a primary language), and has an intrinsic beauty and excellence sometimes superior to speech.
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45. I recently met a young woman, Deborah H., the hearing child of deaf parents, and a native signer herself, who tells me that she often falls back into Sign, and ‘thinks in Sign,’ whenever she has to puzzle out a complex intellectual problem. Language has an intellectual no less than a social function, and for Deborah, who hears, and lives now in a hearing world, the social function, very naturally, goes with speech, but the intellectual function, apparently, is still vested for her in Sign.

Addendum (1990
): An interesting dissociation or doubleness of verbal and motor expression is reported by Arlow (1976) in a psychoanalytic study of a hearing child of deaf parents:

Communication by motor behaviour became a very important part of the transference…[W]ithout knowing it, I was receiving two sets of communication simultaneously: one in words, a form in which the patient ordinarily communicated with me; the other in gestures [signs], as the patient used to communicate with his father. At other times in the transference, the motor symbols represented a gloss upon the verbal text the patient was communicating. These motor symbols contained additional material which either augmented or more likely contradicted what was being communicated verbally. In a sense, ‘unconscious material’ was making its appearance in consciousness by way of motor rather than by way of verbal communication
.

I was so moved by Groce’s book that the moment I finished it I jumped in the car, with only a toothbrush, a tape recorder, and a camera—I had to see this enchanted island for myself. I saw how some of the oldest inhabitants still preserved Sign, delighted in it, among themselves. My first sight of this, indeed, was quite unforgettable. I drove up to the old general store in West Tisbury on a Sunday morning and saw half a dozen old people gossiping together on the porch. They could have been any old folks, old neighbors, talking together—until suddenly, very startlingly, they all dropped into Sign. They signed for a minute, laughed, then dropped back into speech. At this moment I knew I had come to the right place.

And, speaking to one of the very oldest there, I found one other thing, of very great interest. This old lady, in her nineties, but sharp as a pin, would sometimes fall into a peaceful reverie. As she did so, she might have seemed to be knitting, her hands in constant complex motion. But her daughter, also a signer, told me she was not knitting but thinking to herself, thinking in Sign. And even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane—she was dreaming in Sign. Such phenomena cannot be accounted as merely social. It is evident that if a person has learned Sign as a primary language, his brain⁄mind will retain this, and use it, for the rest of that person’s life, even though hearing and speech be freely available and unimpaired. Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.

I
first became interested in the deaf—their history, their predicament, their language, their culture—when I was sent Harlan Lane’s books to review. In particular, I was haunted by descriptions of isolated deaf people who had failed to acquire any language whatever: their evident intellectual disabilities and, equally seriously, the mishaps in emotional and social development to which they might fall prey in the absence of any authentic language or communication. What is necessary, I wondered, for us to become complete human beings? Is our humanity, so-called, partly dependent on language? What happens to us if we fail to acquire any language? Does language develop spontaneously and naturally, or does it require contact with other human beings? One way—a dramatic way—of exploring these topics is to look at human beings deprived of language; and deprivation of language, in the form of aphasia, has been a central preoccupation of neurologists since the 1860’s: Hughlings-Jackson, Head, Goldstein, Luria all wrote extensively on it—and Freud too wrote a monograph in the 1890’s. But aphasia is the deprivation of language (through a stroke or other cerebral accident) in an already formed mind, a completed individual. One might say that language has already done its work here (if it has work to do) in the formation of mind and character. If one is to explore the fundamental role of language, one needs to study not its loss after being developed, but its failure to develop.

And yet I found it difficult to imagine such things: I had patients who had lost language, patients with aphasia, but could not imagine what it might be like not to have acquired language to begin with.

Two years ago, at the Braefield School for the Deaf, I met Joseph, a boy of eleven who had just entered school for the first time—an eleven-year-old with no language whatever. He had been born deaf, but this had not been realized until he was in his fourth year.
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46. It is all too common for deafness not to be noticed in infancy, even by intelligent and otherwise observant parents, and for it only to be diagnosed belatedly when the child fails to develop speech. The additional diagnosis of ‘dumb’ or ‘retarded’ is also too common and may remain throughout life. Many large ‘mental’ hospitals and institutions tend to house a number of congenitally deaf patients called ‘retarded’ or ‘withdrawn’ or ‘autistic’ who may not be any of these, but have been treated as such, and deprived of a normal development, from their earliest days.

His failure to talk, or understand speech, at the normal age was put down to ‘retardation,’ then to ‘autism,’ and these diagnoses had clung to him. When his deafness finally became apparent he was seen as ‘deaf and dumb,’ dumb not only literally, but metaphorically, and there was never any real attempt to teach him language.

Joseph longed to communicate, but could not. Neither speaking nor writing nor signing was available to him, only gesture and pantomime, and a marked ability to draw. What has happened to him? I kept asking myself. What is going on inside, how has he come to such a pass? He looked alive and animated, but profoundly baffled: his eyes were attracted to speaking mouths and signing hands—they darted to our mouths and hands, inquisitively, uncomprehendingly, and, it seemed to me, yearningly. He perceived that something was ‘going on’ between us, but he could not comprehend what it was—he had, as yet, almost no idea of symbolic communication, of what it was to have a symbolic currency, to exchange meaming.

Previously deprived of opportunity—for he had never been exposed to Sign—and undermined in motive and affect (above all, the joy that play and language should give), Joseph was now just beginning to pick up a little Sign, beginning to have some communication with others. This, manifestly, gave him great joy; he wanted to stay at school all day, all night, all weekend, all the time. His distress at leaving school was painful to see, for going home meant, for him, return to the silence, return to a hopeless communicational vacuum, where he could have no converse, no commerce, with his parents, neighbors, friends; it meant being overlooked, becoming a nonperson, again.

This was very poignant, extraordinary—without any exact parallel in my experience. I was partly reminded of a two-year-old infant trembling on the verge of language—but Joseph was eleven, was like an eleven-year-old in most other ways. I was partly reminded in a way of a nonverbal animal, but no animal ever gave the feeling of yearning for language as Joseph did. Hughlings-Jackson, it came to me, once compared aphasics to dogs—but dogs seem complete and contented in their languagelessness, whereas the aphasic has a tormenting sense of loss. And Joseph, too: he clearly had an anguished sense of something missing, a sense of his own crippledness and deficit. He made me think of wild children, feral children, though clearly he was not ‘wild’ but a creature of our civilization and habits—but one who was nonetheless radically cut off.

Joseph was unable, for example, to communicate how he had spent the weekend—one could not really ask him, even in Sign: he could not even grasp the
idea
of a question, much less formulate an answer. It was not only language that was missing: there was not, it was evident, a clear sense of the past, of ‘a day ago’ as distinct from ‘a year ago.’ There was a strange lack of historical sense, the feeling of a life that lacked auto-biographical and historical dimension, the feeling of a life that only existed in the moment, in the present.

His visual intelligence—his ability to solve visual puzzles and problems—was good, in radical contrast to his profound difficulties with verbally based problems. He could draw and liked drawing: he did good diagrams of the room, he enjoyed drawing people; he ‘got’ cartoons, he ‘got’ visual concepts. It was this that above all gave me the feeling of intelligence, but an intelligence largely confined to the visual. He ‘picked up’ tic-tac-toe and was soon very good at it; I had the sense that he might readily learn checkers or chess.

Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with
perceptual
categorization or generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal—unable to judge images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm. And yet, one still felt, he was of normal intelligence, despite these manifest limitations of intellectual functioning. It was not that he lacked a mind, but that he was not
using his mind fully
.

It is clear that thought and language have quite separate (biological) origins, that the world is examined and mapped and responded to long before the advent of language, that there is a huge range of thinking—in animals, or infants—long before the emergence of language. (No one has examined this more beautifully than Piaget, but it is obvious to every parent or pet lover.) A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world.
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47. Or is he? William James, always interested in the relation of thought to language, corresponded with Theophilus d’Estrella, a gifted deaf artist and photographer, and in 1893 published an autobiographical letter from d’Estrella to him, along with his own reflections on it (James, 1893). D’Estrella was born deaf, and did not start to acquire any formal sign language until he was nine (though he had devised a fluent ‘home-sign’ from earliest child hood). At first, he writes:

I thought in pictures and signs before I came to school. The pictures were not exact in detail, but were general. They were momentary and fleeting in my mind’s eyes. The [home] signs were not extensive but somewhat conventional [pictorial] after the Mexican style…not at all like the symbols of the deaf and dumb language
.

Languageless though he was, d’Estrella was clearly inquisitive, imaginative, and thoughtful, even speculative, as a child: he thinks the briny sea is the urine of a great Sea-God, and the moon a goddess in the sky. All this he was able to relate when, in his tenth year, he started at the California School for the Deaf, and learned to sign and write. D’Estrella considered that he
did
think, that he thought widely, albeit in images and pictures, before he acquired formal language; that language served to ‘elaborate’ his thoughts without being necessary for thought in the first place. This too was James’ conclusion:

His cosmological and ethical reflections were the outbirth of his solitary thought…He surely had no conventional gestures for the casual and logical relations involved in his inductions about the moon, for example. So far as it goes then
, his narrative tends to discountenance the notion that no abstract thought is possible without words
. Abstract thought of a decidedly subtle kind, both scientific and moral, went on here in advance of the means of expressing it to others. [Emphasis added.]

James felt that the study of such deaf people could be of major importance in casting light on the relation of thought to language. (It should be added that doubt was expressed by some of James’s critics and correspondents about the reliability of d’Estrella’s autobiographic account.)

But
is
thought, all thought, dependent upon language? It would certainly seem, if introspective accounts can be trusted, that mathematical thought (perhaps a very special form of thought) can proceed in its absence. Roger Penrose, the mathematician, discusses this at some length (Penrose, 1989) and gives examples from his own introspection, as well as from autobiographical accounts by Poincare, Einstein, Galton, and others. Einstein, when asked about his own thinking, wrote:

The words or the language as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements of thought are certain
signs
, and more or less clear
images
…of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage
.

And Jacques Hadamard, in
The Psychology of Mathematical Invention
, writes:

I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think. [and] even after reading or hearing a question, every word disappears the moment that I am beginning to think it over; and I fully agree with Schopenhauer when he writes ‘thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words
.’

Penrose, who is himself a geometer, concludes that words are almost useless for mathematical thinking, even though they might be well suited for other sorts of thinking. No doubt a chess player, or a computer programmer, or a musician, or an actor, or a visual artist, would come to somewhat similar conclusions. It is clear that language, as narrowly conceived, is not the only vehicle or tool for thought. Perhaps we need to enlarge the domain of ‘language,’ so that it embraces mathematics, music, acting, art…
every
form of representational system.

But does one actually
think
in these? Did Beethoven, late Beethoven, actually think in music? It seems unlikely, even though his thought was articulated, and issued, in music, and cannot be glimpsed or grasped except
through
it. (He was at all times a great formalist, and by this time had been deaf, and auditorily deafferented, for twenty years.) Did Newton think in differential equations when he was ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’? This too seems unlikely, but his thought can scarcely be grasped except
through
the equations. One does not think, at the deepest level, in music or equations, nor, perhaps even for verbal artists, in language either. Schopenhauer and Vygotsky are both great verbal artists, whose thought, it might seem, is inseparable from their words; but both insist it is beyond words: ‘Thoughts die,’ Schopenhauer writes, ‘the moment they are embodied by words.’ ‘Words die,’ Vygotsky writes, ‘as they bring forth thought.’

But if thought transcends language, and all representational forms, nonetheless it creates these, and needs these, for its advancement. It did so in human history, and does so in each of us. Thought is not language, or symbolism, or imagery, or music—but without these it may die, stillborn, in the head. It is this which threatens a Joseph, a d’Estrella, a Massieu, an Ildefonso; which threatens any deaf child, or any child whatever, not given full access to language and other cultural tools and forms.