by Arika Okrent
What if your mind was sound but your body gave you no way to let anyone else know that it was? What if you had wishes, desires, complaints, and opinions but no control of your voice to speak them, no control of your hands to write or gesture about them? What if you could understand what everyone around you was saying—that you were a vegetable, that you were retarded, that it didn’t matter what they did to you because you couldn’t tell the difference anyway—and you could not let them know that they were wrong?
In 2007, I met with Ann Running, a woman in her thirties with severe cerebral palsy, at a group home for the disabled in Toronto. This is how we communicated: I moved my hand over a laminated chart of about eight hundred words that was attached to a tray on her wheelchair. The words were arranged both thematically (food words, sports words, color words, and so on) and by grammatical function (pronouns in one section, prepositions in another). At each section I stopped and checked to see whether she rolled her eyes upward. If she didn’t, I moved to the next section. If she did, I pointed to the top of the first column of words in that section and checked for the eye signal, pointing to each column in turn until she indicated I had reached the correct one. When I had the right column, I started down the column, pointing to each word in turn until she signaled. Then we started the process again, until Ann had said all the words she wanted to say.
It was an incredibly slow and frustrating way to have a conversation. Often, I missed her eye signal—a random jerk of her body could make me think she had signaled when she hadn’t—and I had to back up and check that I had the right section or column. Also, she refused to let me finish a sentence for her, even when it was completely clear where she was headed. And Ann didn’t take any shortcuts. Her sentences were complete and grammatically correct—when she wanted to say “told,” she didn’t just lead me to “tell,” but to “tell” and to an entry indicating past tense. When she wanted a name or a word that wasn’t on her chart, she directed me to a section that had the alphabet arranged on a grid, and she spelled the whole thing out, letter by letter, even when I guessed the word correctly. She made no concessions to convenience.
To my convenience, that is. Her whole life was inconvenience, and she was accustomed to it. She depended on others to feed her, to dress her, to put her to bed at night and get her out of bed in the morning. She had no control over anything having to do with her body. But she did have control over her mind, and in her use of language she could prove it. She was not going to leave it up to me, and my convenience, to guess at a good enough approximation of her intentions. She had the ability, as difficult and time-consuming as it was, to say what she wanted to say, in exactly the way she wanted to say it, an ability that most of us take for granted. Ann had known what it was like not to have that ability, and she was never going to take it for granted.
I had come to Toronto to find out more about Blissymbolics, a pictorial symbol language invented by Charles Bliss in the 1940s. I had found a copy of his 1949 book about his system in a used bookstore in Washington, D.C. It was full of rambling Utopian philosophy and naive scientific theories (complete with references to Reader’s articles). I was delighted to add it to my collection of nutty universal language schemes that I considered myself to be single-handedly rescuing from obscurity. Upon further investigation, however, I found out that Blissymbolics was not as obscure as I thought it was. There was a school in Canada for children with cerebral palsy that was actually using it for communication. But what, exactly, were they doing with it? How could a language as crazy as this one be useful for anything?
Ann was a graduate of the program at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre (now called Bloorview Kids Rehab) that had started using Blissymbolics in the 1970s. But like all the other program graduates I visited on that trip, she now interacted through English text. All of the students I met with talked about the way Blissymbols had changed their lives. Ann said Bliss had “opened a door to my mind.” But none of them used the language anymore. Why, I wondered, hadn’t they just started with English, a language they could hear and understand, rather than spend their time learning this bizarre symbol language? I thought about Stephen Hawking, who communicates in a manner similar to Ann’s (his computer pages through the word choices for him, and he clicks a device with his hand when it arrives at the word he wants). He never had anything to do with Blissymbols and gets along just fine.
I mentioned this, delicately, to Shirley McNaughton, the teacher who had started the Blissymbol program. “Oh,” she said, “but Stephen Hawking was an adult when he lost the ability to speak.” He has ALS, a degenerative neurological disorder. “He already knew how to use English to express himself. He already knew how to read. Ann was five or six when we started with her. What good is English text to a child who can’t read yet? And if a child can’t speak and can’t move, how do you teach them to read? How do you know what they know, what they understand?”
McNaughton didn’t know anything about children with dis-abilities when she began teaching at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre (OCCC) in 1968. On her first day, as she was touring the center, she saw a little girl drop one of her crutches, and, she says, “I was about to run over and help her, but they held me back. ‘She has to learn how to get up,’ they told me.” After that McNaughton relied on the kids to tell her what to do—how to open leg braces, how to adjust a wheelchair—and she learned to focus on their capabilities and strengths.
But she wasn’t sure what to do with the children who couldn’t speak. “They had little boards with pictures on them—a picture of a toilet, a picture of some food, all needs-based pictures—I went through a year just asking them yes-or-no questions: ‘Would you like to do this? Would you like to do that?’ But they couldn’t initiate anything themselves.” They seemed to understand what was said to them, and, more important, they seemed to have something to say. “You could just tell with the twinkle in their eye or something.”
McNaughton started talking with some of the staff about trying to introduce reading to these kids. She and Margrit Beesley, an occupational therapist, went to the administration to ask for a half day to work just with the nonspeaking kids. “The administration agreed, and we were given a laundry room in the basement to try our experiment.” First, they needed to figure out what the kids knew and what they understood. They decided to try making up symbols that the kids could point to in order to express themselves (most of the kids, unlike Ann, were able to point), but it took them a long time to figure out how to symbolize more abstract concepts, so they decided to see whether someone already had a system of symbols they could use.
Their search led them to Semantography, Charles Bliss’s eight-hundred-page book. He claimed that with the small number of basic symbols in his book, thousands of ideas could be expressed through combination. For example, this was how the words for emotions were expressed:
A noun could be made into a verb with the addition of an “action” symbol:
And adjectives could be made with the addition of an “evaluation” symbol:
Other words were derived from more complex types of combination:
This type of combinatorial system seemed promising. The children could only point to what they could reach from a seated position in their wheelchairs; they couldn’t have a separate symbol for every word they might want to say. But if they could put two symbols together to create a third word, they could get more out of what fit in front of them.
Once McNaughton had taught the kids the meaning of a few symbols and showed them examples of how the symbols could be put together, she witnessed an explosion of self-expression. Kids whose communicative worlds had been defined by the options of pointing to a picture of a toilet, or waiting for someone to ask the right question, started talking about a car trip with a father, a brother’s new bicycle, a pet cat’s habit of hiding under the bed. Kids who were assumed to be severely retarded showed remarkable ingenuity in getting their messages across. When one little boy was as
ked what he wanted to be for Halloween, he pointed to the symbols “creature,” “drink,” “blood,” “night”—he wanted to be Dracula. One particularly bright little girl named Kari took to this new means of expression with so much gusto that she could barely stand to be away from her symbols. When her father picked her up from school, she would cry through the whole car ride home, and could not be consoled until she was on the living room floor with her symbols, telling her family about the exciting events of the day.
McNaughton and the team of therapists she was working with took a picture of Kari, sitting in her wheelchair, surrounded by an array of symbols. Her eyes are sparkling, her smile is huge, and her dimples are adorable. When they finally tracked down Bliss in Australia, they sent him the picture. Before he received it, he later wrote, “I was resigned to my fate that I shall not see the fruits of my labours before I die. And then this picture, sent by Shirley, floated onto my desk. I can’t describe the tumult of my thoughts. The heavens opened up and the golden sun broke through the darkened sky. I was delirious with joy.”
He immediately mortgaged his house in order to make the long trip to Toronto. Everyone was excited. When he arrived, there were meetings and talks and parties. Bliss told jokes and played the mandolin and showered everyone he met with over-the-top compliments. The children loved him; he juggled and sang and shouted his love for them at the top of his voice. When he found out that the speech therapist had recently lost her husband to diabetes, he shed tears of deep sorrow, raged at the injustice of her misfortune, professed his undying love for her, and proposed marriage.
The staff didn’t quite know what to make of that. It seemed kind of sweet and funny at the time. He was seventy-five years old. He was exotic, Old World, an Austrian Jew who had survived the war. He was effusive and emotional and not very Canadian. They stood back, amused but a little stunned. They had been hit by a personality tornado.
Near the end of his visit, Bliss gave McNaughton a copy of a book he had recently published, The Invention and Discovery That Will Change Our Lives. “We started to read it,” she told me, “and we all had a private meeting and we said the administration should never see this book. It was really something—about how the nuclear bomb is all a myth, how the Soviets killed Kennedy, and how teachers are to blame for the problems of the world, and how they are all cowards and sex perverts—we thought that if the administration sees this, they’ll never let him come back.”
The staff’s concern was for the children. They wanted to continue to develop the Blissymbols program, and they needed Bliss’s help. He was a bit strange, but wasn’t that often a mark of genius? They didn’t need to subscribe to all his theories; they just needed his symbols. And he wanted to help. He was so glad to be there. He cared about the children so much. Surely he would do everything he could to make the program succeed. He was a wonderful man.
McNaughton had originally discovered Blissymbolics in a book called Signs and Symbols Around the World, where it was briefly mentioned. There was a reference to Semantography. Shirley and her team couldn’t find the book anywhere. Eventually, they had the national library in Ottawa do a search across Canada, and one copy was found, at a university in Sudbury. They kept renewing the book as they searched for a copy they could buy. They wrote to the publisher but got no response. So they wrote to the book’s distributor, who said, “We want nothing to do with that man. We dropped his stuff years ago.” Their search led them to other distributors, who all said the same thing. At the time, Shirley was too preoccupied with finding the book to wonder about those comments. And in the whirlwind of Bliss’s visit, she failed to make any connection between those comments and the man who inspired them.
Those Queer and Mysterious Chinese Characters
Charles Bliss was born Karl Kasiel Blitz in 1897, in Czernowitz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of Ukraine. His family was poor. “If you have seen the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’” he wrote in one of his pamphlets, “you will know the story of my parents.” His father worked odd jobs as an optician, a mechanic, an electrician, and a wood turner, and as a boy Charles was fascinated by gadgets, circuits, and chemistry. In 1908 he attended a lecture about the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition, and he was enraptured by the tale of bravery in the face of extremes. He realized that “life has been given to me to conquer hardship in the quest for knowledge. I decided to become an engineer. I wanted to invent things for a better life.”
But he struggled in school. When he entered high school, “suddenly I became an outcast to a group of fellow students. They went around with big books and talked big, very big and I couldn’t understand what they said.” Philosophy, logic, and especially grammar gave him trouble, and he often despaired that he was not intelligent enough to become the great thinker he wanted to be.
He fought as a foot soldier in World War I and then attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he graduated as a chemical engineer in 1922. He tried to get a job at the university, arguing that he should be awarded a professorship based on his invention of an education “machine” (questions written on one side of a page, answers on the other, and a separate sheet to cover up the answers during study), but he ended up working as a patent inspector in an electronics factory.
In 1938 the Germans marched into Austria, and Charles was sent to Dachau and then Buchenwald. His wife, Claire, who was a German Catholic twenty years his senior, worked tirelessly to get him released. Somehow, she helped secure him a British visa, and he was released on condition that he leave the country immediately. Claire had to stay behind. When the war broke out in 1939, she went to Czernowitz to stay with Charles’s family, and when the war reached there, she fled through Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Siberia. Meanwhile, Charles traveled the other way around the world, through Canada, and on Christmas Eve 1940 they were finally reunited in Shanghai. Charles had worked at a factory in England, where co-workers told him he couldn’t very well go around with a name like Blitz. So his name was now Charles Bliss.
The Blisses set up a photography and moviemaking business in Shanghai’s bustling Jewish community. Over twenty thousand Jews who could not get visas for anywhere else had poured into Shanghai in the early years of the war, and they brought their European way of life with them—filling the streets with cafés, concert halls, and Yiddish newspapers. But Charles, as he puts it, “went ‘oriental’” He became fascinated with “those queer and mysterious Chinese characters” when he saw them “at night in thousands of multi-coloured neon tubes filling the sky and making it a beautiful sight out of a fairy tale.”
He hired a teacher and learned some characters, and he noticed, with astonishment, that when he recognized the characters on a shop sign or a newspaper headline, he read them off in his own language, not in Chinese. “Later on,” he says, “the familiar words of my language disappeared and I could visualize directly the real things depicted by the signs.” He thought he had discovered a potential universal language, a direct line to concepts. But the Chinese system was too complicated and arbitrary. Most of the symbols didn’t look anything like the things they were supposed to represent, so it was too hard to learn. After a year of study, he gave up trying, and he started working on a new invention—a better, simpler system of pictorial symbols, “a logical writing for an illogical world.”
Such a language, he thought, would not just enable people of different nations to communicate easily with each other, but it would also free their minds from the awful power of words. Bliss had seen how Hitler’s slogans made people believe that lies were true. Propaganda—mere words—had instigated terrible acts. Such misuse of language would be impossible, he thought, in a “logical” system of symbols that represented the natural truth. One could not get away with malicious manipulation of words in such a system, because inconsistencies and falsehoods would be instantly exposed. Here was an invention, Bliss thought, that would benefit humanity more than any invention before it.
At the en
d of the war Charles and Claire immigrated to Australia, where they settled in the suburbs of Sydney. They were full of excitement about their future. “We felt that the scholars of the Western world would receive me and my work with open arms. We were sure that the University of Sydney would offer me a place to work out the primers and textbooks for this wonderful idea.” But no one was interested.
Charles decided to work on his own, living off their savings, and write a book that would prove the value of his idea and convince the world to pay attention. For three years he worked feverishly, the words spilling out in such a torrent that he began typing directly onto wax stencils for printing—no editing. He finished the book in 1949, just as their money was running out. Claire sent six thousand letters to universities and government institutions all over the world announcing the publication of his fantastic new invention. They waited for the orders to start rolling in.
There was no response. Despite having lived through the horrors of the Nazis and the privations of refugee life in Shanghai, Charles would refer to the time after the publication of Semantography as their years of despair. He got a job as a spot welder in an automobile factory and worked on his symbols by night. His efforts to gain recognition became larger and more desperate. When he heard that a prominent American educator was coming to Sydney on a lecture tour, he went to the airport and managed to push his way into the man’s taxi, where he spent the whole ride to the hotel firing off a sales pitch.
And when the philosopher Bertrand Russell came to town, Bliss somehow managed to wangle an audience with him. These kinds of actions did not endear Bliss to the public officials who sponsored lecture tours, but sometimes they did get him results. Russell wrote him a polite letter of endorsement (which Bliss quoted, or reproduced in full, in everything he ever subsequently published), and Bliss got his name, and his system, into the local papers.