1989 - Seeing Voices (2 page)

Finally I must acknowledge the deepest debt of all to four people—two colleagues and two editors—who have played a central part in making possible my work and writing. First to Bob Silvers, editor of the
New York Review of Books
, who sent me Harlan Lane’s book in the first place, saying, ‘You’ve never really thought about language; this book will force you to’—as indeed it did. Bob Silvers has a clairvoyant sense of what people have not yet thought about, but should; and, with his special obstetric gift, helps to deliver them of their as-yet unborn thoughts.

Second, to Isabelle Rapin, who has been my closest friend and colleague at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine for twenty years, and who herself has worked with the deaf, and thought deeply about them, for a quarter of a century. Isabelle introduced me to deaf patients, took me to schools for the deaf, shared with me her experience of deaf children, and helped me understand the problems of the deaf as I could never have done unaided. (She herself wrote an extensive essay review [Rapin, 1986] based chiefly on
When the Mind Hears
.)

I first met Bob Johnson, chairman of the linguistics department at Gallaudet, on my first visit there in 1986, and was introduced by him both to Sign, and to the world of the deaf—a language, a culture, that outsiders can scarcely enter or imagine. If Isabelle Rapin, with Bob Silvers, launched me on this journey, Bob Johnson then took over as my traveling companion and guide.

Kate Edgar, finally, has filled a unique role as collaborator, friend, editor, and organizer, inciting me at all times to think and write, to see the full aspectuality of the subject, but always to hold on to its focus and center.

To these four people, then, I dedicate this book.

O.W.S.

New York, March 1989

W
e are remarkably ignorant about deafness, which Dr. Johnson called ‘one of the most desperate of human calamities’—much more ignorant than an educated man would have been in 1886, or 1786. Ignorant and indifferent. During the last few months I have raised the subject with countless people and nearly always met with responses like: ‘Deafness? Don’t know any deaf people. Never thought much about it. There’s nothing
interesting
about deafness, is there?’ This would have been my own response a few months ago. Things changed for me when I was sent a fat book by Harlan Lane called
When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf
, which I opened with indifference, soon to be changed to astonishment, and then to something approaching incredulity. I discussed the subject with my friend and colleague Dr. Isabelle Rapin, who has worked closely with the deaf for twenty-five years. I got to know better a congenitally deaf colleague, a remarkable and highly gifted woman, whom I had previously taken for granted.
4

4. This colleague, Lucy K., is so expert a speaker and lip-reader that I did not realize at first that she was deaf. It was only when I chanced one day to turn my head to one side as we were talking, inadvertently cutting off communication instantly, that I realized she was not hearing me but lip-reading me (‘lip-reading’ is an extremely inadequate word for the complex art of observation, inference, and inspired guesswork which goes on). When the diagnosis of deafness was made, at about twelve months, Lucy’s parents had immediately expressed their passionate desire that their daughter should speak and be a part of the hearing world, and her mother devoted hours every day to an intensive one-to-one tuition of speech—a grueling business that lasted twelve years. It was only after this (at the age of fourteen) that Lucy learned Sign; it has always been a second language, and one that does not come ‘naturally’ to her. She continued (with her excellent lip-reading and powerful hearing aids) in ‘normal’ (hearing) classes in high school and college, and now works, with hearing patients, at our hospital. She herself has mixed feelings about her status: ‘I sometimes feel,’ she once said, ‘that I am between two worlds, that I don’t quite fit into either.’

I started seeing, or exploring for the first time, a number of deaf patients under my care.
5

5. Prior to reading Lane’s book, I had seen the few deaf patients under my care in purely medical terms—as ‘diseased ears’ or ‘otologically impaired.’ After reading it, I started to see them in a different light, especially when I would catch sight of three or four of them signing, full of an intensity, an animation, I had failed to see before. Only then did I start thinking of them not as deaf but as Deaf, as members of a different linguistic community.

My reading rapidly spread from Harlan Lane’s history to
The Deaf Experience
, a collection of memoirs by and about the first literate deaf, edited by Lane, and then to Nora Ellen Groce’s
Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language
, and to a great many other books. Now I have an entire bookshelf on a subject that I had not thought of even as existing six months ago, and have seen some of the remarkable films that have been produced on the subject.
6

6. There have been at least a half dozen major programs in England since ‘Voices from Silent Hands’ (Horizon, 1980). There have been many programs in the United States (in particular, some excellent ones from Gallaudet University, such as ‘Hands Full of Words’)—the most recent and important of these is Frederick Wiseman’s huge, four-part documentary ‘Deaf and Blind,’ shown on public television in 1988. There have also been an increasing number of fictional representations of deafness on television. Thus a January 1989 episode of the new ‘Star Trek,’ entitled ‘Louder than a Whisper,’ featured the deaf actor Howie Seago as a deaf, signing ambassador from another planet.

One more acknowledgment by way of preamble. In 1969 W.H. Auden gave me a copy, his own copy, of
Deafness
, a remarkable autobiographical memoir by the South African poet and novelist David Wright, who became deaf at the age of seven. ‘You’ll find it fascinating,’ he said. ‘It’s a wonderful book.’ It was dotted with his own annotations (though I do not know whether he ever reviewed it). I skimmed it, without paying more attention, in 1969. But now I was to rediscover it for myself. David Wright is a writer who writes from the depths of his own experience—and not as a historian or scholar writes about a subject. Moreover, he is not alien to us. We can easily imagine, more or less, what it would be like to be him (whereas we cannot without difficulty imagine what it would be like to be someone born deaf, like the famous deaf teacher Laurent Clerc). Thus he can serve as a bridge for us, conveying us through his own experiences into the realm of the unimaginable. Since Wright is easier to read than the great mutes of the eighteenth century, he should if possible be read first—for he prepares us for them. Toward the close of the book he writes:
7

7. Wright, 1969, pp. 200-20t.

Not much has been written about deafness by the deaf.
8
Even so, considering that I did not become deaf till
after
I had learned the language, I am no better placed than a hearing person to imagine what it is like to be born into silence and reach the age of reason without acquiring a vehicle for thought and communication. Merely to try gives weight to the tremendous opening of St. John’s Gospel: In the beginning was the Word. How does one formulate concepts in such a condition?

8. This was indeed the case when Wright’s book was published in 1969. Since then there has been an explosion of writings about deafness by the deaf, of which the most remarkable is
Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture
, by the deaf linguists Carol Padden and Tom Humphries. There have also been novels about the deaf by the deaf, for example,
Islay
by Douglas Bullard, which attempt to catch the distinctive perceptions, the stream of consciousness, the inner speech of those who sign. For other books by deaf writers, see the fascinating bibliography provided by Wright in
Deafness
.

It is this—the relation of language to thought—that forms the deepest, the ultimate issue when we consider what faces or may face those who are born, or very early become, deaf.

The term ‘deaf’ is vague, or rather, is so general that it impedes consideration of the vastly differing degrees of deafness, degrees that are of qualitative, and even of ‘existential,’ significance. There are the ‘hard of hearing,’ fifteen million or so in the U.S. population, who can manage to hear some speech using hearing aids and a certain amount of care and patience on the part of those who speak to them. Many of us have parents or grandparents in this category—a century ago they would have used ear trumpets; now they use hearing aids.

There are also the ‘severely deaf,’ many as a result of ear disease or injury in early life; but with them, as with the hard of hearing, the hearing of speech is still possible, especially with the new, highly sophisticated, computerized, and ‘personalized’ hearing aids now becoming available. Then there are the ‘profoundly deaf’—sometimes called ‘stone deaf’ who have no hope at all of hearing any speech, whatever imaginable technological advances are made. Profoundly deaf people cannot converse in the usual way—they must either lip-read (as David Wright did), or use sign language, or both.

It is not merely the degree of deafness that matters but—crucially—the age, or stage, at which it occurs. David Wright, in the passage already quoted, observes that he lost his hearing only after he had acquired language, and (this being the case) he cannot even imagine what it must be like for those who lack or have lost hearing before the acquisition of language. He brings this out in other passages.
9

9. Wright, 1969, p. 25.

My becoming deaf when I did—if deafness had to be my destiny—was remarkably lucky. By the age of seven a child will have grasped the essentials of language, as I had. Having learned naturally how to speak was another advantage—pronunciation, syntax, inflexion, idiom, all had come by ear. I had the basis of a vocabulary which could easily be extended by reading.
All of these would have been denied me had I been born deaf or lost my hearing earlier than I did
.

[Italics added.]

Wright speaks of the ‘phantasmal voices’ that he hears when anyone speaks to him provided he can
see
the movement of their lips and faces, and of how he would ‘hear’ the soughing of the wind whenever he saw trees or branches being stirred by the wind.
10

10. Wright uses Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘eye-music,’ for such experiences, even when there is no accompanying auditory phantasm, and this is used by several deaf writers as a metaphor for their sense of visual patterns and beauty. It is especially used of the recurrent motifs (the ‘rhymes,’ the ‘consonances,’ etc.) of Sign poetry.

He gives a fascinating description of this first happening—of its
immediate
occurrence with the onset of deafness:
11

11. Wright, 1969, p. 22.

[My deafness] was made more difficult to perceive because from the very first my eyes had unconsciously begun to translate motion into sound. My mother spent most of the day beside me and I understood everything she said. Why not? Without knowing it I had been reading her mouth all my life. When she spoke I seemed to hear her voice. It was an illusion which persisted even after I knew it was an illusion. My father, my cousin, everyone I had known, retained phantasmal voices. That they were imaginary, the projections of habit and memory, did not come home to me until I had left the hospital. One day I was talking with my cousin and he, in a moment of inspiration, covered his mouth with his hand as he spoke. Silence! Once and for all I understood that when I could not see I could not hear.
12

12. There is, of course, a ‘consensus’ of the senses—objects are heard, seen, felt, smelt, all at once, simultaneously; their sound, sight, smell, feel all go together. This correspondence is established by experience and association. This is not, normally, something we are conscious of, although we would be very startled if something didn’t sound like it looked—if one of our senses gave a discrepant impression. But we may be
made
conscious, very suddenly and startlingly, of the senses’ correspondence, if we are suddenly deprived of a sense, or gain one. Thus David Wright ‘heard’ speech, the moment he was deafened; an anosmic patient of mine ‘smelt’ flowers, whenever he saw them (Sacks, 1985); and a patient described by Richard Gregory (in ‘Recovery from early blindness: a case study,’ reprinted in Gregory, 1974) could at once read the time on a clock when he was given his sight (he had been blind from birth) by an eye operation: before that he had been used to feeling the hands of a watch with its watch-glass removed, but could make an instant ‘transmodal’ transfer of this knowledge from the tactile to the visual, as soon as he was able to see.

Though Wright knows the sounds he ‘hears’ to be ‘illusory’—’projections of habit and memory’—they remain intensely vivid for him throughout the decades of his deafness. For Wright, for those deafened after hearing is well established, the world may remain full of sounds even though they are ‘phantasmal.’
13

13. This hearing (that is, imagining) of ‘phantasmal voices,’ when lips are read, is quite characteristic of the
postlingually
deaf, for whom speech (and ‘inner speech’) has once been an auditory experience. This is not ‘imagining’ in the ordinary sense; but rather an instant and automatic ‘translation’ of the visual experience into an auditory correlate (based on experience and association)—a translation that probably has a neurological basis (of experientially established visual-auditory connections). This does not occur, of course, in the
prelingually
deaf, who have no auditory experience or imagery to call upon. For them lip-reading—as, indeed, ordinary reading—is an entirely visual experience; they see, but do not hear, the voice. It is as difficult for us, as speaker-hearers, even to conceive such a visual ‘voice,’ as it is for those who have never heard to conceive an auditory voice.

The congenitally deaf, it should be added, may have the richest appreciation of (say) written English, of Shakespeare, even though it does not ‘speak’ to them in an auditory way. It speaks to them, one must suppose, in an entirely visual way—they do not hear, they
see
, the ‘voice’ of the words.

When we read, or imagine someone speaking, we ‘hear’ a voice, upon the inward ear. What of those born deaf? How do they imagine voices? Clayton Valli, a deaf Sign poet, when a poem is coming to him, feels his body making little signs—he is, as it were, speaking to himself, in his own voice. But what if
other
voices are imagined, or dreamed, or hallucinated? The mad often suffer from ‘hearing voices’—other voices, often accusing voices, nagging and cajoling them; do deaf people, if they go mad, suffer from ‘seeing voices’ too? And, if so, how are these seen? As hands in mid-air making signs; or as whole-body visual apparitions making signs? I have found it oddly difficult to get a clear answer—as it may be difficult, sometimes, to get a dreamer to tell you how he dreams. He is given to understand something, in the course of his dream, but whether by sight or sound,
how
, he is unable to say. There are as yet too few studies on hallucinations, dreaming, and language imagery in the deaf.

The question of how much the postlingually deaf may continue to ‘hear’ has analogies to the ways in which those blinded late in life may continue to ‘see,’ and continue, one way and another, in waking and dreams, to live in a visual world. The most extraordinary autobiographical account of this has just been provided by John Hull (1990). ‘During the first couple of years of blindness,’ he writes, ‘when I thought about people I knew, they fell into two groups. There are those with faces, and those without faces…The people I knew before I lost my sight have faces but the people I have met since do not have faces…as time went by, the proportion of people with no faces increased.’ With those whom he knew, there would be vivid images of their faces as they spoke to him—though images fixed by his last impressions before he became blind, and therefore increasingly outdated. With others, of whom there were no actual visual memories, there were, at one point, incontinent visual ‘projections’ (perhaps analogous to Wright’s auditory ‘phantasms’ and the phantom limbs of amputees: such ‘sensory ghosts’ are created by the brain when it is suddenly cut off from normal sensory input).

In general, Hull found, as the years went by, he moved deeper and deeper into what he calls ‘deep blindness,’ with less and less memory of, imagination of, or need for, visual images, and more and more the sense of being a ‘whole body seer,’ living in an autonomous and complete world of body sensations, touch, smell, and taste, and, of course, hearing—all these senses now greatly enhanced. He continues to use visual images and metaphors in his speech, but these, increasingly, are only metaphors for him. It is probable that those who have been deafened late in life, similarly, may gradually lose more and more of their auditory memories and images, as they advance into the exclusively visual world of ‘deep’ deafness. When Wright was asked if he would like his hearing back, at this stage, he answered, no, he now found his world complete.