Rather suddenly, after her grandmother’s death, she became clear and decisive. ‘I want no more classes, no more workshops,’ she said. ‘They do nothing for me. They do nothing to bring me together.’ And then, with that power for the apt model or metaphor I so admired, and which was so well developed in her despite her low IQ, she looked down at the office carpet and said:
‘I’m like a sort of living carpet. I need a pattern, a design, like you have on that carpet. I come apart, I unravel, unless there’s a design.’ I looked down at the carpet, as Rebecca said this, and found myself thinking of Sherrington’s famous image, comparing the brain/mind to an ‘enchanted loom’, weaving patterns ever-dissolving, but always with meaning. I thought: can one have a raw carpet without a design? Could one have the design without the carpet (but this seemed like the smile without the Cheshire cat)? A ‘living’ carpet, as Rebecca was, had to have both—and she especially, with her lack of schematic structure (the warp and woof, the knit, of the carpet, so to speak), might indeed unravel without a design (the scenic or narrative structure of the carpet).
‘I must have meaning,’ she went on. ‘The classes, the odd jobs have no meaning . . . What I really love,’ she added wistfully, ‘is the theatre.’
We removed Rebecca from the workshop she hated, and managed to enroll her in a special theatre group. She loved this—it composed her; she did amazingly welclass="underline" she became a complete person, poised, fluent, with style, in each role. And now if one sees Rebecca on stage, for theatre and the theatre group soon became her life, one would never even guess that she was mentally defective.
The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing—suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music—the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music. The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia—an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways. This procedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the instructor. All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs.
What we see, fundamentally, is the power of music to organise—and to do this efficaciously (as well as joyfully!), when abstract or schematic forms of organisation fail. Indeed, it is especially dramatic, as one would expect, precisely when no other form of organisation will work. Thus music, or any other form of narrative, is essential when working with the retarded or apraxic—schooling or therapy for them must be centred on music or something equivalent. And in drama there is still more—there is the power of role to give organisation, to confer, while it lasts, an entire personality. The capacity to perform, to play, to be, seems to be a ‘given’ in human life, in a way which has nothing to do with intellectual differences. One sees this with infants, one sees it with the senile, and one sees it, most poignantly, with the Rebeccas of this world.
22. A Walking Grove
Martin A., aged 61, was admitted to our Home towards the end of 1983, having become Parkinsonian and unable to look after himself any longer. He had had a nearly fatal meningitis in infancy, which caused retardation, impulsiveness, seizures, and some spasticity on one side. He had very limited schooling, but a remarkable musical education—his father was a famous singer at the Met.
He lived with his parents until their death, and thereafter eked out a marginal living as a messenger, a porter, and a short-order cook—whatever he could do before he was fired, as he invariably was, because of his slowness, dreaminess or incompetence. It would have been a dull and disheartening life, had it not been for his remarkable musical gifts and sensibilities, and the joy this brought him—and others.
He had an amazing musical memory—‘I know more than 2,000 operas,’ he told me on one occasion—although he had never learned or been able to read music. Whether this would have been possible or not was not clear—he had always depended on his extraordinary ear, his power to retain an opera or an oratorio after a single hearing. Unfortunately his voice was not up to his ear—being tuneful, but gruff, with some spastic dysphonia. His innate, hereditary musical gift had clearly survived the ravages of meningitis and brain-damage—or had it? Would he have been a Caruso if undamaged? Or was his musical development, to some extent, a ‘compensation’ for brain-damage and intellectual limitations? We shall never know. What is certain is that his father transmitted not only his musical genes, but his own great love for music, in the intimacy of a father-son relationship, and perhaps the specially tender relation of a parent to a retarded child. Martin—slow, clumsy—was loved by his father, and passionately loved him in return; and their love was cemented by their shared love for music.
The great sorrow of Martin’s life was that he could not follow his father, and be a famous opera and oratorio singer like him— but this was not an obsession, and he found, and gave, much pleasure with what he could do. He was consulted, even by the famous, for his remarkable memory, which extended beyond the music itself to all the details of performance. He enjoyed a modest fame as a ‘walking encyclopedia’, who knew not only the music of two thousand operas, but all the singers who had taken the roles in countless performances, and all the details of scenery, staging, dress and decor. (He also prided himself on a street-by-street, house-by-house, knowledge of New York—and knowing the routes of all its buses and trains.) Thus, he was an opera-buff, and something of an ‘idiot savant’ too. He took a certain child-like pleasure in all this—the pleasure of such eidetics and freaks. But the real joy— and the only thing that made life supportable—was actual participation in musical events, singing in the choirs at local churches (he could not sing solo, to his grief, because of his dysphonia), especially in the grand events at Easter and Christmas, the John and Matthew Passions, the Christmas Oratorio, the Messiah, which he had done for fifty years, boy and man, in the great churches and cathedrals of the city. He had also sung at the Met, and, when it was pulled down, at Lincoln Center, discreetly concealed amid the vast choruses of Wagner and Verdi.
At such times—in the oratorios and passions most of all, but also in the humbler church choirs and chorales—as he soared up into the music Martin forgot that he was ‘retarded’, forgot all the sadness and badness of his life, sensed a great spaciousness enfold him, felt himself both a true man and a true child of God.
Martin’s world—his inner world—what sort of a world did he have? He had very little knowledge of the world at large, at least very little living knowledge, and no interest at all. If a page of an encyclopedia or newspaper was read to him, or a map of Asia’s rivers or New York’s subways shown to him, it was recorded, instantly, in his eidetic memory. But he had no relation to these eidetic recordings—they were ‘a-centric’, to use Richard Wollheim’s term, without him, without anyone, or anything, as a living centre. There seemed little or no emotion in such memories—no more emotion than there is in a street-map of New York—nor did they connect, or ramify, or get generalised, in any way. Thus his eidetic memory—the freak part of him—did not in itself form, or convey any sense of, a ‘world’. It was without unity, without feeling, without relation to himself. It was physiological, one felt, like a memory-core or memory-bank, but not part of a real and personal living self.