For the past twelve years, through working with people with developmental challenges, I've spent much time with people who often don't communicate verbally. At first this was a disorienting and anxiety-provoking experience for me. I had always relied on words to keep me safe -- and I was good at verbal expression, at least in writing. Words brought me good grades and test scores and a sense of confidence. While I was very shy about speaking, reading and listening enabled me to grasp the world through thinking. When out of this comfort zone, I felt completely at sea, as if facing an abyss of nothingness.
Language is an attempt to bridge the gap that arises through our human essence being divided up between separate bodies, distanced from one another. How do we share experiences, make requests, ask questions, with another soul? That was the challenge that faced me when I was thrown into a situation where words didn't work. I had to find another way across the abyss.
One possibility, which we use in my workplace, is pictures -- books full of them, or cut up into cards and stored in a box. Flipping through the book or selecting cards from the box, one can attempt to put together ideas and make a connection with the other. It's a complex, cumbersome system, which points up the challenge of how to depict abstractions in concrete terms. What would you draw to represent "a part of" or "something else"? "Tuesday" or "tomorrow"? How would you distinguish between "bigger" and "more"?
Somehow, the most important things get expressed, but it takes a great deal of time, and frustrating gaps can remain. Even some pictures that appear straightforwardly concrete can give rise to different meanings. For one person I know, for example, the picture that's supposed to mean "window" means "curtains," because he's very preoccupied with making sure all curtains are hung properly. If one is not aware of these quirks, misunderstandings can arise, or communication become impossible.
It makes me appreciate the incredible flexibility and versatility of verbal language and of the letters we use to represent it in writing. With just a couple dozen symbols, we have a vast range of possibilities for expression, for grasping abstract concepts, for combining ideas and creating new ones. It's so much faster and easier than trying to say things with pictures or gestures. But is faster and easier always better? When taken to an extreme, it leads to superficiality and a frantic, unhealthy pace of living.
That is the trend of our times, but it is not our only choice. We can decide nothing is so urgent that we can't take the time to slow down, to embrace what can't be expressed in words or grasped with concepts, and connect with another person soul-to-soul. Such has been my own developmental challenge, and I keep working at it, with and without words, grateful for the patience of my teachers.
How do you relate to words, and to wordlessness? What other ways of communicating have you experienced?
Words in the world
Here’s what you can read from me this month:
On the blog:
A dose of beauty
I spend a lot of time in various Swiss train stations, and in some of them are marvelous old murals that pique my curiosity about who made them and what their inspiration was. "Les Loisirs" is one of a set of three murals in La Chaux de Fonds, a town in the Jura mountains that has been an important center of the watchmaking industry. In the art world it's most famous as the birthplace of Le Corbusier, but he is not the only Neuchatelois artist worthy of note.
No information was forthcoming about the murals in the station, but upon deciphering the signature, I did some research and found that the artist, Georges Dessouslavy, was the son of a gypsum merchant in La Chaux de Fonds, born in 1898. After studying in Geneva he became a painter of figures, still lifes, and landscapes as well as monumental décor, and taught in the art academy of his hometown. His early style was post-impressionist, reminiscent of Bonnard and Vuillard, but late in his career he made an abrupt and rather surprising change to a post-cubist style. This is exemplified in the train station murals, which were executed in 1950-1952, just before his death.
The three murals are "Work," "Day and Night," and "Leisure," shown above. Leisure for Dessouslavy seemed to mainly involve enjoying nature, including hanging out with goats and sheep -- a very Swiss touch, that.
It was lovely to learn a little bit more about this work of public art I'd thoughtlessly passed so many times. I'll try to feature more murals in the future.