Sunday, February 22, 2009
Nice Writing, Skloot
“I do not mistake my wife for a hat,” Skloot says on page 40 of his book In The Shadow of Memory. Indeed, this is clear in the frequently iterated descriptions of his disabilities caused by brain damage. His specific accounts of individual occurrences provide a much-appreciated insight into his world, in a way that is different from the other narratives we have read. While the connection between Skloot’s situation and Zasetsky is stated obviously in the text, (“ “I was lost in time and space, it seemed; I felt myself, my mind, to be incoherent and my world to be in fragments.”), it is the tone and grace of Skloot’s prose that sets him apart. His writing is amazingly eloquent; I found myself transcribing quote after quote into my personal journals for remembering. Ethereal observations such as, “I have been resouled,” as well as blunt explanations like, “I know that I knew what I no longer know” have equal power in relaying Skloot’s exact experience. The prose itself is a balancing act between literary eloquence, accessibility and neurological descriptions that reads perfectly in the form of a good story. This feat is more extraordinary when considering both the heightening in emotion and the lapse in memory that Skloot describes as primary afflictions. The decay of his short-term memory leads to difficulties again similar to Zasetsky’s as far as writing is concerned, though definitely less extreme. Paired with his proneness to emotional overreaction, Skloot’s essays could have very possibly read like a angry tirade, if he managed to write at all. Yet he is able to write about his “insult to the brain” more collectedly than any other author we have read thus far. There is not so much irritation as with Zasetsky, not the keen contemplation of Luria, and certainly not the manic involvement of Sacks. The difficulties he describes sound very frustrating, worthy of anger, defeat, sadness, annoyance, etc., yet he writes in a way that is almost anecdotal, that is, lightly, cleanly, and with a balanced sense of humor. There is no sign of frustration in his prose, though there are descriptions of times he did feel that way. In some cases he sounds almost nonchalant or nostalgic. In any case, Skloot has certainly found more peace with his illness than any other, which I applaud.
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One thing I found striking about Skloot's essays in the first section was his heavy reliance on his training and methods as a writer as a way of understanding and coping with his dementia. He is extremely mindful of the terms we use to discuss illness, and eloquently explains the import of metaphorical meaning on both the external and internal perception of disease. What better evidence of the enduring nature of the "self", than how Skloot's self-construction/understanding of himself as a writer has such an impact on the way he discusses his impairment. His previous experience comes to bear greatly on his current condition (and, of course, he continued to write, using past habits and skills as a means of rehabilitation, acceptance, exploration)....
ReplyDeleteSeveral examples of what I mean are Skloot's dissections of the the word "dementia" (p.19), the term "insult to the brain" (p.9), the colloquialisms for dementia (p19), and the language equating balance and health (p.51). I was also moved by Skloot's realization (or, perhaps, assertion!) that his malapropisms are "better" than the correct words, somehow, because of the weight and poetics of the semantic confusions.
We keep coming back to this in class, too. Elizabeth tends to notice when we use spatial metaphors, a product of her background and inclinations. Since I started reading Skloot's work, I realized in other readings (even just the newspaper) that I am keenly attuned to linguistic references/metaphors that concern my field, and I suspect others might not notice them as readily. Clearly, our greater selves affect what meaning and import we give to the language that we use ourselves, and the language that others use to communicate with us.