Communicasick: Poetry Inside Aphasia

On the morning of Saturday July 21st 2019, while reading, I noticed a tiny empty space in the center of my vision. A few minutes later, my motor skills began to deteriorate and my speech started looping and fraying. After a detour to an urgent care clinic, I was rushed to the emergency room, where I rapidly unraveled in alarming ways. When asked what my name was, I answered “Twelve.” When asked to smile, I stuck out my tongue. When asked if I could move my leg, I said “Yes” without moving my leg.

I remember fading in and out of consciousness. I remember hearing my voice drop and deepen, like a record winding down. I remember being placed inside machines, machines being placed on me, and an endless tangle of wires extending to machines. I remember trying to figure out which parts of my mind were still functioning. I remember trying to remember the contents of Joe Brainard reading from I Remember that I play for my students at the beginning of every semester since 2001.

I was attempting to re-visit some of my most worn perceptual grooves. When I introduce Brainard’s recordings to my students, I often say something like: “Memory is weird. Perception is weird. Consciousness is weird. Brainard’s writing is one way of being honest about that weirdness.”  

I remember asking the ICU nurse, who, every few hours for two days would show me pictures of objects for me to name, if what was happening to me was “weird.” I would be able to say chair but not feather. I could say comb but not hammock. When I encountered an image that I couldn’t name, we would both sit in concentrated silence while I attempted to expel the word floating just below the surface. “Is this weird?” “It feels weird.” I would say over and over. Finally, after a long pause, he said, “Yes, I imagine that what is happening to you feels very weird.”

At one point, I fixated on the word “communication.” I would substitute it for any word that was missing from my inventory. It seemed to smear around in the air or oddly pulse around the different syllables. It appeared in many drafts, one of them being “communicasick”—a little burst of meaning coughed out of a cloud of sound. When friends would hug me, I thanked them for “communicating” with me. I would say, “It feels so good to communicate.” I would also create neologisms to try to speak around absent nouns. A favorite invention of my poet-visitors was when I asked for my “contact remote” which turned out to be a new name for my phone. The experience was often one of moving toward meaning obliquely, through multiple channels.

Everyone who interacted with me during that time commented that my speech sounded like my poetry: assembled from broken phonemes and glimpses of images, on the verge of making rational sense but always a little out of reach. My friends were joking but they were also being accurate. In the poetry that I write, read, and listen to, I am searching for a way to more fully inhabit the honest weirdness of the brain, less to map territory and more to find strategies to hover for longer in that uncertain space between language and meaning, to try out its acoustics, to synthesize unusual sensations, to touch a new object in the dark.

Whit Griffin, one of the close friends surrounding me in the ICU, later told me that he thought that I was on the cusp of a transformative experience, and that he had hoped the doctors would leave me alone long enough for it to unfold. (Whit is a poet who is particularly skilled at re-framing experience beyond existing templates and categories.) I think I responded that my time in the hospital felt much more banal and disembodied, like I was a broken robot, trying to reboot back into my body. However, now I’m more inclined to see things his way.    

Once, during an entire night or perhaps during one moment out of an endless day (time expanded and collapsed arbitrarily), I dreamed about a tall columnar cactus for what seemed like hours. No language, no movement, just a green spine, sitting in stillness in the sun—a living antenna staring back at me with its whole body. Its presence felt fragmentary yet whole. Rather than emitting a message, it radiated an emphasis on its own immanence. It helped me to attend to experiences of absence and distance. It was very “No ideas but in things.” It was very “No one drew back the curtains. There were no curtains.”

The people who surrounded me during that time were mainly the poets of Denver. Poets cared for my cat while my wife, Andrea Rexilius, another poet, waited with me in the weird timelessness of hospital consciousness. A poet ran into Andrea in Walgreens and gave her time and space to burst into tears. In the hospital, the poets of Denver spoke with me very patiently, giving me long periods of silence to think within, waiting for me to remember the words for feather, for hammock.  

Reading was difficult for a while. Since I first noticed the symptoms while reading, it made me feel nervous, as if processing language would be the trigger for a cognitive breakdown. I also became aware of the small moments before speaking aloud, and that space became both fraught and interesting, something to fear and to explore more.

I bring up these experiences to talk about how living a lot of one’s daily life inside of poetry can feel like being with another kind of mind, alive within the poet but also de-familiarized. As I move forward in my reading, listening, and writing, I am paying more attention to how poetry is often in jagged correspondence with the weird multiplicity of consciousness, rather than expressing a fully formed, coherent, interior meaning. I understood these things before, but I feel them more viscerally now.  

During my time in the hospital the word “communication” seemed to mean everything and nothing. It seemed simultaneously magical and wholly inadequate to describe the language events that were unfolding. I want to attend, even more intimately, to the way language and silence re-shape the contours of awareness. I want to spend more time with the silent signal, without content, that beamed from the cactus in my dream.