Your sister has never once glanced at you.
Your sister has no idea who you are, what you are.
That you are, that you exist your sister has no idea.
No idea that anyone else exists, as she can have no idea that she herself exists.
If there is a riddle, your sister is the riddle.
Here is the tough nut to crack. The koan.
Disconcerting how with her dark brown eyes, wavy dark brown hair and pale skin, your younger sister so resembles you.
Anyone who sees her, and sees you—looks from one to the other—feels this frisson of recognition: how your sister who is eighteen years younger than you and who has never uttered a word in her entire lifetime so strikingly resembles you.
She will not meet your eye no matter how patiently, or impatiently, you wait. For she is not like you.
She is an individual without language. It is not possible for you to imagine what this must be, to be without language.
For nearly sixty years she has lived in silence. She does not hear the voices of others as we hear voices; but she has learned to hear in her therapeutic classes at the facility. Her own speech is grunts, groans, moans, whimpers and cries of frustration and dismay. She does not laugh, she has not ever learned to laugh.
In the presence of the brain-damaged we find ourselves in the Uncanny Valley. It is we who are made to feel unease, even terror. I am made to feel guilt—for I have had access to language, to spoken and to written speech, and she has not. And this, by an accident of birth.
Not what we deserve, but what is given us.
Not what we are, but what we are made to be.
I HAVE NOT SEEN my afflicted sister since 1971, when she was fifteen years old. Tall for her age, wiry-thin, gangling, with pale skin, an expression in her face of anger, anguish—or as easily vacancy and obstinacy. A mirror-self, just subtly distorted. Sister-twin, separated by eighteen years. Though I have thought of Lynn often in the intervening years, I have not seen her; initially, because my parents would not have wished this, and eventually, because such a visit would be upsetting to her, as to me. And futile. She would not know me, nor even glance at me. What I would know of her, I could not bear.
It is difficult to imagine a mouth that has never uttered a single word, and has never smiled.
Eyes that have never lifted to any face, still less “locked” with another’s gaze.
All literature—all art—springs from the hope of communicating with others. And yet, there are others for whom the effort of communication is not possible, or desirable.
Seems like she doesn’t know we’re here.
What do you think she is thinking?
PERHAPS THIS IS THE unanswerable question: does the brain think?
If the brain is sufficiently injured, or undeveloped: can the brain think?
In itself, perhaps the brain does not think; it is the human agent within the brain, which some have called the soul, that thinks. And yet—can a soul, or a mind, be differentiated from its brain? We speak of “our” brain as if we owned it, in a way; as we might speak of “our” ankle, “our” eyes. But such common usage is misguided, perhaps. We are nothing apart from our brains, thus it is our brains that think. Or fail to think.
Obviously, our brains generate consciousness—but this is an unconscious process. We are habituated to believe, at least in our Western tradition, that “we” are located somewhere inside our brains, behind our eyes; for it is our eyes “we” see through. When we look into the eyes of others, as we speak to them, we are looking “into” the brain, that is the core of personality—or so we think. (It is unnerving to think that just as our personalities reside in an organic, perishable brain, in some infinitely vast network of neurons beyond all efforts of tracking, the personalities of others reside in a similar place.) Except, of course, in some individuals, there is no “eye contact”—the brain refuses to function in accord with our expectations.
In April 2014, fourteen years after our father’s death, in response to a query, my brother brings me up-to-date on our sister’s condition, which seems unchanged:
Lynn is totally non-verbal and does not talk at all. She has frequent seizures and wears a helmet at all times to protect her when she falls . . . She does not recognize me nor do I think she recognizes anyone at all. She is shy, and does not like it when her routine is changed.
“HELP US NAME YOUR baby sister, Joyce.”
It was a festive time. It was in fact my birthday: my eighteenth birthday. I had not been forgotten after all.
My parents smiled with happiness. It was their hope that if I helped to name my sister that I would love her, too.
This was long ago. Yes, it was a happy time.
For so much lay ahead, unanticipated. No reason to anticipate the wholly unexpected of years to come.
After days of deliberation I presented my parents with the name that seemed to me the ideal name—Lynn Ann Oates.
A very nice name, they said. “Thank you, Joyce.”
NIGHTHAWK: RECOLLECTIONS OF A LOST TIME
WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES is often not where we’ve sent ourselves. One day it happens we are awakened to the thought Here. Here I am. Why?
Madison, Wisconsin. September 1960. For the first time in my (relatively) young life, I’d flown alone—I arrived at the small airport in Madison breathless with anticipation. No doubt, I had not slept the night before in anticipation of the flight into the unknown. For I was leaving home after a brief summer in Millersport, after graduating from Syracuse University; this time, enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin with the intention of earning a master’s degree in American literature and, if all went well, eventually a Ph.D.—it seemed clear to me, as to my parents, that I was leaving home permanently.
I was twenty-two years old. Though it seems preposterous to me now, at the time twenty-two did seem somewhat old.
At Syracuse, a special aura could be perceived about certain girls—(in the parlance of contemporary twenty-first-century usage, “young women”)—who, though possibly not distinguished academically, and with no plans to attend a prestigious graduate school to earn an advanced degree, nonetheless basked in their great good luck: engaged to be married.
This was a particular category of girl, the fiancée. The fiancée was one who’d been given an engagement ring, and this ring on the third finger of the left hand conferred a blessing of such value, it could hardly be described. As one who had no hope, though perhaps also no great wish, to be a fiancée, or to wear an engagement ring, I stood at a little distance from my companions in that social world, in a kind of penumbra. Any girl who graduated from college in 1960 who was not a fiancée, and did not have an engagement ring, was made to feel, however foolishly, old. You might joke about it, and if you were literary- or artistic-minded you would certainly feel superior to such conventional prejudices, and yet—you could no more escape that atmosphere than you could cease breathing toxic air. If you were there, you breathed it.
Vividly I recall one of my classmates lifting her ring hand so that we could admire the minuscule yet unmistakable diamond—“At least, I’m engaged before graduation.” An intelligent and mature girl, yet Diane spoke without irony.
Unknowingly, by enrolling in graduate school, I was escaping this atmosphere almost entirely. Never again would I live in any social environment in which being engaged was so crucial; never again, in any environment in which to be married was so high a priority. (Nor did I live in a social environment in which having children was a high priority.) Yet, I’d never anticipated this escape, for I had not really known what graduate school would or might be. Naively, I had imagined it as essentially an extension of undergraduate life and not, as it would turn out in Madison, an entirely different experience.
Though in years I was an adult, in experience I was still very much an adolescent. I did not look twenty-two—I scarcely looked twenty. In my classes and seminars at Syracuse I’d been one of the
shy girls—it would astonish and embarrass me, years later, to read recollections about my undergraduate self from a selection of professors and classmates, about how intensely shy I was. (Even now I want to protest—But I could not have been so shy! That is not possible—is it?)
It is humbling to discover that our former selves, recollected by contemporaries, were so imperfect. And imperfect in ways we hadn’t quite allowed ourselves to realize at the time. Though we may recall dramatic incidents clearly, we are not so likely to recall the daily, hourly texture of our lives with others.
Painfully shy. Would not speak in our fiction workshop so Professor Dike read her short stories to us.
At twenty-two I had not yet quite dared to think of myself as a writer—though I’d published some short stories by September 1960, and one of my professors, Donald A. Dike, had particularly encouraged me. (Professor Dike whose literary heroes were Faulkner and Conrad had strongly urged me not to go to graduate school but just to “write”—living anywhere except near a university campus.) I was naïve, romantic-minded, and vulnerable to hurt as if the outermost layer of my skin had been peeled away; the most wonderful thing about having been valedictorian of my graduating class at Syracuse was the fact that, at commencement, which was outdoors, a ferocious rainstorm had ended the ceremony abruptly, and I hadn’t had to deliver my commencement speech to thousands of strangers spread out before me in a football stadium—a responsibility that had filled me with terror for weeks beforehand. (Yet I’ve never forgotten the excellent advice given to me by the faculty advisor for the valedictorian: “When you stand up to speak, they will be waiting for you to sit down.”) Though generously praised by my professors, and a recipient of a Knapp Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin (which meant that I could complete a master’s degree in a single year since unlike most graduate students in English I would not be required to teach), I was uncertain, insecure, as a newly licensed pilot on her first solo flight in a small plane—doubtful about the good judgment of my instructors who’d licensed me and encouraged me as about my own ability not to disintegrate mid-air and crash.
By romantic-minded I mean in terms of books, literature, a career of teaching. Since first grade at the one-room schoolhouse in Millersport, I had always wanted to be a teacher and indeed such a life seems magical to me even now after decades—teacher.
And what of my own writing? All summer I’d been working on a novel with the hopeful Joycean/Faulknerian title Proserpina—one of several novels I’d written as an undergraduate at Syracuse. These were “experimental” works of fiction undertaken for no clear purpose other than to lose myself in the discipline of novel-writing. It was my vague hope that, at Madison, I would continue with writing fiction in the interstices of graduate school work, though I understood that my graduate studies would be demanding. With the blithe disregard for the future of one who has not really thought through what the future might bring I seem to have assumed that my writing—my fiction writing—would always in some way assert itself, like tough, sinewy wildflowers bursting through cracks in concrete; I would not actually need to make time for it.
It had been an astonishing surprise, to learn that I’d received a Knapp Fellowship to Wisconsin; as great a surprise as learning that I’d been a co-winner of the Mademoiselle fiction contest in 1959. The sheer size of the university was daunting, for it was much larger than Syracuse, with twenty schools and somewhere beyond thirty thousand students; winters in Madison were reputed to be worse even than winters in Syracuse. Yet I felt vaguely encouraged to learn that the state of Wisconsin had a history of political “progressivism”; despite the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy, there had been socialist politicians elected to office in the state for decades. When I thought of politics it was invariably my grandfather John Bush who came to mind—whose convictions were somewhere left of socialism though (so far as I knew) “the Brush” had never evinced the slightest interest in joining the Communist Party, or any party; nor was it possible to imagine any organization that would have wished him to join. My father had particularly loathed the duplicitous “red-baiting” Senator Joseph McCarthy (R, Wisconsin) but conceded that, overall, Wisconsin was an “enlightened” state, and that the University of Wisconsin at Madison appeared to be one of the great land-grant universities in the country. (When my father spoke of college, it was with a wistful air. He had taken an interest in my courses at Syracuse and had done some of the reading for my American literature classes. How Daddy would have loved to have been educated beyond the eighth grade! But he and my mother would never visit me in Madison during my single year there for there wasn’t money for such non-urgent trips; nor could they have left my sister Lynn with any caretaker.)
Despite its excellence, the University of Wisconsin at Madison would not have been a first choice for me, for graduate school; it was too far away from Millersport, which meant that I might not be able to return home even over the long Christmas break. (In those days, at least for people like myself, air travel was enormously expensive, and seemed daunting; as one did not casually make long-distance telephone calls, unless after eleven o’clock at night, and then infrequently, so one did not fly casually.) It was at the urging of my Syracuse professors that I applied to the “outstanding” English department at the university, and obviously their letters of recommendation must have been strongly supportive. I had not considered that writing could be a self-sustaining life or any sort of career; writing sprang from my deepest, most private self and could have nothing to do with earning a living.
Later it would seem to me the most extraordinary sort of luck, the flimsiest sort of chance, that had brought me to this university at the age of twenty-two, and not to another university equally likely for a young student like myself intending to study English and American literature—Cornell, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota. For then, I would not have met my husband-to-be Raymond Smith: an alternative life, without Raymond, is not fathomable to me.
To be young is to be particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of luck; to tear open an envelope and discover that your life has been set upon a course you could not have predicted.
When you are young, each day can be the start of a great adventure. And the adventure one of growth, happiness, prosperity—or derailment, disintegration, despair.
For always at the back of my mind there hovered the spectral figure of my lost friend Cynthia. Rarely did I think of Cynthia by day, only by night. And in my dreams, Cynthia’s identity had dissolved, even her facial features were blurred. You are as much myself, as another. You are myself.
IT SEEMS A FACT rarely acknowledged, that fantasies of self-hurt flourish when we are alone, and lonely; when homesickness fastens like a leech to an exposed artery. Though I was not ever “suicidal”—the very word is a kind of posturing, wrongly used by those who have never actually felt this way—it did seem to me, it had seemed to me for years, that my friend Cynthia had somehow “shown the way” for the rest of us, her friends; her friends who had not quite loved her enough, perhaps; or had not known her fully, that we might have loved her, and saved her. The saddest fantasy, that we might save another from self-hurt. The wish, the yearning, to have been so meaningful in another’s life.
I had told no one, and I would tell no one, that my strongest motive for leaving New York State and journeying to Wisconsin—just far-enough away to make visits difficult—was an emotional quagmire which, naïvely, but as it turned out accurately, I hoped that sheer distance would resolve.
This great adventure! An intellectual adventure, as I was not equipped to deal with an emotional adventure. I’d fled the East because I had no wish to marry a young man, a chemistry major, with whom I’d become emotionally involved; and yet within five swift months in the Midwest I would fall in love, and marry; within ten months I would become profoundly and irremediably disillusioned with the Ph.D. academic-scholarly profession even as I was (grudgingly) granted a master’s degree qualifying me to teach literat
ure in a college or university (as it would happen I would do for decades, very happily).
The malaise of Madison, Wisconsin, was the more difficult to absorb because it was so enmeshed with happiness, as a tumorous growth is enmeshed with healthy veins and tissue and cannot be easily extricated. What was stunning to me, and could not have been predicted (by me), was that, in graduate school, I would be unable to write anything genuine, anything real, anything that “sprang from the heart,” but only critical/scholarly papers; a development that would have seemed to me until this perilous time equivalent to ceasing to dream, or to breathe.
At Syracuse, our professors were scholars and critics to a degree, but they were also very good, very encouraging and lively instructors; at Madison, our professors were predominantly scholars, secondarily critics, and hardly instructors at all, if by “instructor” is meant an individual who is intellectually and emotionally engaged with his or her material and students. The mode of instruction at Madison was lecturing: the scholar-professor lectured to, the classroom or seminar room of students listened. (In one unsettling instance, a renowned American literature scholar simply read from his own book, on the subject of the New England Pilgrims; we graduate students listened, we took notes, we despaired and sighed with boredom, but we prevailed. Or most of us prevailed.) Our professors, most of them Harvard-educated, were at least a generation older than my Syracuse professors had been, and resisted, or were oblivious to, even the analytical/text-oriented New Critical approach to literature, that had become influential in the 1950s; to these conservative elders, with the (notable, wonderful) exception of the medievalist Helen C. White, for whom I wrote an inspired long paper on the English and Scottish popular ballads, canonical texts were never to be questioned, still less deconstructed, but rather approached as sacred/historical documents to be laden with footnotes as a centipede is outfitted with legs. When, in my idealism, or naïveté, I dared to write a seminar paper on Edmund Spenser and Franz Kafka, on the ways in which (it seemed to me excitingly) the allegorical and the surreal are related, my professor, Merritt Hughes, who knew nothing of Kafka and had not the slightest interest in correcting his ignorance, returned the paper to me with an expression of gentlemanly repugnance and suggested that I attempt the Spenser assignment again, from a “traditional” perspective.
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