by Henry Kisor
But I’m not complaining. No longer do I have to wait until the next day to read the text of a presidential address in The New York Times. I do, however, turn off the captioner during Monday Night Football. Who needs the inane, cliched chatter of pro football commentators? Silence can sometimes be a blessing.
Closed captions are also being recorded on films released in videocassette. Many recent movies are captioned at the same time they are released as videos, and more and more classic old films have been re-released with captions. These enable the deaf to participate in an important segment of popular culture that in the past largely had been lost to them. One Saturday not long ago I rented Gone With the Wind. I’d known about Rhett Butler’s famous “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” but it was the first I’d heard of Scarlett’s “Fiddle-de-dee!”
A little-known side benefit of captioned videos is as a “language lab” for lipreaders. Watching the lips of the speakers at the instant the captions appear on-screen will sharpen the skills of any speechreader. It’s not long before one begins to understand all the words the captions leave out. And it’s excellent practice in accustoming oneself to non-American accents. After years of watching Masterpiece Theatre as well as scores of captioned British films, I’ve discovered that on trips to the United Kingdom I have much less trouble lipreading most Britons. Even Cockneys aren’t the puzzle they used to be.
One final electronic device should be mentioned: the cochlear implant. A surgeon embeds a small round “receiver-stimulator” and a tiny array of electrodes in the mastoid bone and cochlea. A tiny microphone that looks like a behind-the-ear hearing aid picks up sound and passes it to a pocketsized computer worn on the body. The computer processes this sound, then transmits it to the electrodes, which stimulate the auditory nerve. This produces sensations that are interpreted by the brain as sounds.
How well? In some cases, enough so that the patient can use the telephone unaided. For most patients, however, the implant is of greatest benefit in giving them enough “hearing” to markedly improve their speech and lipreading, as well as enabling them to “hear” environmental sounds such as doorbells and automobile horns. There is great variation in the benefits of an implant, and much depends on how long the patient has been deaf as well as the age of onset of the deafness.
Not all deaf people are suitable candidates for implants. Among the requirements, as of the summer of 1990, were a profound loss of hearing in both ears; an inability to recognize speech with hearing aids; cochlea in suitable condition to accept the implanted electrodes; at least one functioning auditory nerve; and a willingness to work hard at the task of learning to “hear” all over again.
Cochlear implants in children are controversial in some parts of the deaf community. They are challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of one company’s implant for children. They contend that any improvement in speech comes from the education program that follows the implant, rather than the implant alone. They also believe that implanted children eventually will tire of the external apparatus, put it away in a drawer, and join the deaf culture.
The dispute apparently is rooted in the old battle between sign and oralism. Those who believe some deaf children can grow up to be competent speaking and lipreading participants in the hearing world view the cochlear implant as another excellent tool for helping them do so. Others consider such an idea an outright rejection of the sign-language-based culture, which they believe superior.
In the mid-1980s, I investigated the possibility of undergoing an implant. But I was turned down without even an interview, because I had lost my hearing at what the surgeons considered too early an age for the then-existing equipment, which sent signals to a single electrode. By 1990, however, the state of the art had advanced so that the implant consisted of as many as twenty-two electrodes, helping patients distinguish among a wider range of sounds. Middle-aged people like me, even elderly ones, who had lost their hearing as toddlers, were being successfully implanted. In the late fall of 1990 I again began to consider becoming a candidate for a twenty-two-channel implant.
Why? As a deaf person, I’ve always eagerly grasped whatever opportunity has come along to ease the tasks of living and working in a hearing world. If it turns out that I am physiologically not a good candidate for an implant, I’ll just recall the counsel a wise audiology professor at Northwestern University offered me after I was turned down for a singlechannel implant. He pointed out that I was already light years ahead of dealing with my deafness compared with those who at the time were considered the best prospects for the implant—those who had lost their hearing later in life, when adjustment to the loss was at its most difficult. “Why interfere with what already works?” he said sensibly.
Indeed, Dean Garstecki is a veritable model of sensibility. I met him several years ago, when I realized that my speech was again beginning to deteriorate and that I needed some brush-up therapy if I was to maintain it at a reasonable level of intelligibility. I wrote a note to a friend at the Chicago Hearing Society, on whose board of directors I had briefly served a few years before. Could she put me in touch with someone who could help?
To my surprise she suggested my old battleground, the Institute of Language Disorders at Northwestern—now called the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. The prospect did not fill me with joy, but I reasoned that I had nothing to lose, and perhaps a different philosophy had displaced the irritating old paternalism, even arrogance, that I had experienced two and three decades before. Besides, private speech therapists cost a good deal of money.
Instantly Garstecki, head of the department’s program in audiology and hearing impairment, lifted my concern. He wasn’t interested in what went on in my head, he said. That was irrelevant. Clearly I’d made a good adjustment to life as a deaf person. Let’s treat what obviously ails me—my speech. And so, for nearly a decade, I have spent a quarter or two of every other academic year as a client at the institute, brushing up on my “s”s and “e”s and learning to put the brakes on so that I don’t runmywordsalltogetherlikethis.
In the beginning I had hoped to improve my speech to a silver-tongued point, one that would allow me to orate before large groups of hearing strangers. From time to time I am invited to lecture on literary topics, a task that can be lucrative. Perhaps after hours a day of intensive training over many months, the quality of my speech could be raised to a level close to that of the normal hearing person. Retaining that quality, however, might require just as much labor—a game that might not be worth the candle.
I cannot hear myself speak; my lips, tongue, mouth, and larynx may seem to me to be going through the correct motions to produce intelligible speech, but their synchronization may be off ever so much, my tongue and teeth not quite in the right position with the precise tension required to produce a certain sound properly. The difference between the right and the wrong placement of the structures of the mouth is very, very subtle, and I cannot always tell the difference.
The only way I can tell with any consistency if my speech is understandable is to watch the reaction of the strangers to whom I speak. If they knit their brows, or gaze at me vacantly, we’re not connecting. It’s when I have to repeat myself more and more to be understood that I know my speech is slipping, that it’s time to go back to Northwestern for a brush-up.
Our sessions do not seek dramatic breakthroughs. They are simply intended to maintain my intelligibility at a level somewhere above 90 percent—that is, a level at which a stranger talking to me for the first time would understand at least 90 percent of what I said. That might seem a modest goal, but it requires a lot of hard work and conscientious drilling at home. Once a week my therapist and I meet across a table in a small room for an hour. Our largest difficulty is finding some way for me to monitor the quality of my speech. We try, fail, try again, fail again, suddenly find the right placement, lose it, find it again, try to hang on to it, and sometimes succeed. Each session is a mixtur
e of frustration, satisfaction, and sometimes elation.
“Hold that thought,” say my therapists as I leave each session. At the bus stop on the way to work each morning, I peer around to see whether anyone’s in earshot, then run through my drills, warming up for the day. To sharpen my “e”s, the vowel with which I have the most trouble—it often comes out too lax, almost like an “uh”—I’ll concoct sentences full of “e”s. “Evil babies eat eels from the sea” is one of my favorites. Waiting for the bus one day, I reeled off a dozen shapely and orotund “evil babies” sentences, exaggerating that “e” so that the proper sound would stay with me all day even when I wasn’t thinking about it. Then I looked around and saw that another commuter had joined me. She stared warily and kept her distance.
My instructors are graduate students training to be speech therapists, not teachers of the deaf. Most of the therapists are women less than half my age. They are still learning their specialty, and over the years I’ve often been amused by their transparent efforts to present a brisk, businesslike, professional image to their clients. They are so very young, and they look like freshly minted nickels in the dress-for-success suits they don for our sessions instead of the sweats and jeans they wear to class.
And they are eager and determined. The truly talented among them quickly lose their stiffness and help develop a rapport, joining me in what amounts to an eager, even gleeful conspiracy against unintelligibility. The very best therapists are single-minded and hard-nosed. They won’t settle for a reasonable approximation of a sound; they demand perfection. I am capable of achieving it, they declare, and they won’t be satisfied with less. And once in a while I do manage to attain that exalted level. Hanging on to it, of course, is something else, so I must go back now and again for routine maintenance, like an aging automobile in need of periodic tune-ups.
I am eternally grateful to these young almost-professionals, for the results always are worth the time spent in the sessions. For more than a year, sometimes two, strangers will understand what I say the first time I say it at our first meeting, the benchmark by which I judge my speech. Though I’m still aware of its limitations—raising my voice at noisy gatherings still distorts my production and hurts intelligibility—my speech feels solid enough to get me through most situations. In short, when it’s running smoothly on all cylinders it gives me a confidence I haven’t always had.
11
“Are you happy?” I was asked not long ago by someone who works in the world of the deaf.
I? I who have a loving spouse, two bright and strapping sons, a decent income, respect in my profession, a house in a pleasant suburb, and a host of good friends?
“Of course I am!” I all but shouted, exasperatedly throwing my hands into the air. I’m as happy as any other person whom life has nourished from a mixed plate of blessings and curses. It’s difficult, however, to persuade some people that is true; they often assume that I am at heart forlorn and despondent, and concealing my pain. According to the ideology of many educators of the deaf—and many of the deaf themselves—I must live a melancholy life simply because I communicate wholly by speech and lipreading rather than with sign language. By insisting on doing so, they declare, I am a poor shadow of a hearing person, not a contented and fulfilled deaf person. I belong neither to the hearing world nor to the deaf community, they say; I am an outcast from both.
Is the goal of life to become well adjusted and carefree? Or is it rather to rise high in a competitive world? These notions are not mutually exclusive—and it’s a safe guess that most people, deaf or hearing, achieve a balance between the two. But it’s sometimes hard to persuade naysayers that the deaf who choose the road of speech and lipreading can manage to achieve emotional equilibrium within the hearing world.
Partly because I have no measurable hearing—the deaf who succeed in the hearing world tend to have a good deal of residual hearing that can be amplified to usable levels—some experts on deafness insist on forcing me into the mold of the “deaf personality,” a set of traits they theorize are created by the environment of deafness. Because lack of ready communication at an early age has deprived them of the opportunity to develop emotionally in many ways, the deaf sometimes are psychologically typed as immature, rigid, egocentric, impulsive, and overly trusting. And that’s just for starters. If their emotional development has been severely thwarted, many suffer debilitating mental illness.
That deafness has affected my mental makeup I have no doubt. To deny it would be to declare that environment has no part in the development of the human psyche, and that would be absurd. Obviously there have been times in my life, in both my childhood and my adulthood, when a knowledgeable counselor could have helped me deal with a deep emotional crisis. But, as do most essentially healthy people faced with mental upheavals, I managed, with the help of Debby and my friends, to emerge from each crisis as a stronger and wiser human being.
There have been two crises in my adulthood, linked to one another, and one still must be contended with. That is shyness. It’s almost universal among the deaf to want to cause hearing people as little fuss as possible; though there are exceptions, we can be self-effacing and diffident to the point of invisibility. Sometimes this tendency can be crippling. I must fight it all the time, and on occasion it can get the better of me.
I hate crowds, and I dislike meeting strangers. I will find any excuse not to undergo that exceedingly complex ordeal. Let’s face it: it is natural and inevitable for hearing people to consider a new acquaintance’s deafness the salient part of his personality. “This is a deaf person I am meeting,” goes the unspoken question in the back of their minds, “and how is his deafness going to affect our relations?” Not the usual mildly expectant curiosity such as “This is Debby Kisor’s husband I am meeting and will I like him for the same reasons I like her?”
If I’m lucky, I think, the person I am meeting will have no preconceived notions about the deaf. But that almost never happens. People bring to a meeting a lifetime’s mental baggage. Some of it will be wise, some of it foolish, some of it astute, some of it ignorant. Sometimes their mental picture of the deaf will be a vague idea that they are extraordinarily difficult to communicate with, that because they cannot speak well they are not too bright but it is necessary to be kind. Fortunately this Neanderthal notion is rare and growing rarer.
In my experience most people are simply too ignorant about the deaf to consider them members of a somewhat slow subspecies of humanity. They will form their judgments upon our meeting, not before. Usually their judgments will be skewed, and it won’t be their fault. Their problem—and mine—is one of communication, beginning with my imperfect speech. It takes time for a stranger to get accustomed to it, to feel comfortable enough with it so that he listens to what I have to say rather than how I say it. Likewise, I must “learn” the stranger’s manner of speaking. If I’m lucky, he’ll be instantly understandable. More often than not it’ll take a few minutes before both of us stop saying “Would you please repeat that?”
Often, however, strangers won’t ask me to repeat myself if they can’t understand me. They’re afraid of hurting my feelings. They don’t realize that after forty-six years of deafness I’m no longer so embarrassed by my sometimes unintelligible speech. Irritated and frustrated, yes, but hardly devastated.
This social interaction, so simple between hearing people, becomes between the deaf and the hearing an intricate but curiously graceless ballet, like a Balanchine pas de deux choreographed on an off day. Realizing all this, I know that if an introduction is to be successful, it’s up to me to meet the other person more than halfway, to put him at his ease. And when it’s necessary, I will.
In his splendid 1972 autobiography, Deafness, the British poet David Wright opined that coping with another’s deafness is an excellent “litmus test” of a hearing person’s character. Those with inquiring, interested minds, he wrote, will want to learn the intricacies of a deaf person’s life. The dull and self-a
bsorbed, on the other hand, will be too fearful to risk the social awkwardness of meeting and talking with a deaf person. In many cases this is true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The brilliant can be shy, and the kindly fearful of giving offense. If I let my deafness do the sorting out, I can be cheating myself of the chance to know someone worth knowing. So, for the most part, I will grit my teeth and plunge ahead into the chore of attempting to put the other person at his ease. More often than not, the experiment will work.
Much of the success of the ordeal of introduction depends upon where it is made. A quiet office or living room enables the introductee to encounter my speech and voice at its very best. As I’ve explained, background noise affects my intelligibility, most often at cocktail parties. Often the other person will be unable to hear me at all, let alone understand me, and turning up the volume on my larynx distorts certain sounds so badly that I am not intelligible at all. And if I am tired, my speech—and my lipreading ability—will suffer. When this happens, I get cranky, mulish, and standoffish, proffering a perfunctory handshake and the shortest of polite noises. I know perfectly well I’m being silly, that I’m depriving myself of the potential to know someone interesting. “You’re being unreasonable,” Debby will hiss. “I know,” I want to hiss back, “but, dammit, I can’t help it.”
Fortunately these episodes are infrequent. When it’s necessary to meet someone, I’ll set the stage as carefully as I can. Whether meeting a new neighbor or interviewing an author, I’ll make sure the setting is quiet and undistracting. And if I can’t do that, I’ll try to wait until I can. Such are the little strategies of deafness.