Welcome to My Country by Lauren Slater

Author:Lauren Slater [Slater, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Medical, Mental Illness, Personal Memoirs, Psychiatry, Psychology, Women
ISBN: 9780385487399
Google: d1YjeoPK8KEC
Amazon: 0385487398
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 1997-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

3

I thought about him a lot during those early-fall days. Sometimes it happens that a patient brings up your own pain, and you enter his story, swimming down deep into the mind’s green waters. I felt a clot in my throat, something that wouldn’t let language come. I remembered times when I had stared at a page such as this one and seen in my own clumsy attempts to write stories just a scramble of black, or the gap between sentences—a whiteness into which we fall. And there is also a dream I have over and over again, of opening up my mouth and finding my tongue studded with broken glass, so every word is a wound.

Six weeks after Joseph had returned to school, six weeks into his failing and his ever-growing grunginess—the loss of his last hope—I went to the Museum of Science on a Saturday evening with a friend. My friend wanted to see a movie there about sharks, but because the movie was sold out, we meandered around the museum instead, finding ourselves in an exhibit about the respiratory system. Half bored, I peered my way into replicas of white lungs and lungs blackened by tar. “Cilia,” a plaque read, “are small hairy outgrowths on cells. They line the lungs, the trachea, the intestinal tract. All throughout our body are cilia that act like filters, catching and then clearing away dust particles and poisons. Keeping us free from intrusive toxins, cilia are crucial to human survival.”

I thought about Joseph then, and a way both to conceptualize and to work with his language problem occurred to me. Everyone’s mind, I imagined, has the mental equivalent of cilia that allow for the screening out of static and the subsequent picking and choosing and shaping of ideas into sentences. Joseph, however, did not seem to have such cilia. His windpipe, lacking those little hairs, was a smooth swoop upward, spilling pennies and couches and terrors onto the page. Perhaps the problem was somehow as simple as that—not so much a damaged language capacity but a terribly untamed one that could not resist the intrusion of any subject. I recalled the sentences of his I had read, their broad beauty, their sprawling grammar that nevertheless sometimes seemed to hold seeds of meaning. And I thought of a particularly favorite passage of mine in, of all places, a neuropsychology textbook from school. This passage discussed the hypothesis that in early infancy our minds are open basins into which the whole world pours. Eventually, this theory goes, we acquire a capacity called negative learning, which means we become able to block out as well as let in. The specific neural ensembles responsible for negative learning have not yet been identified, but maybe, in the case of Joseph, the problem lay within those neural ensembles, those tiny microscopic screens hidden deep in gray matter.

In a way, then, Joseph was open wide and wonderful, and maybe my job was to close him, to act as some sort of screen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.