Stroke Odysseys

At the end of a busy, varied life, my mother was hit by a series of strokes, at first so minor as to be almost unnoticeable, then becoming more serious. Gradually, very gradually, her speech deteriorated. At first it was as if a poltergeist was moving her words around, in a very subtle way. ‘Butcher’ would become ‘baker’, ‘garden’ would become ‘pavement’. Or ‘butcher’ might become ‘pig’, ‘garden’ become ‘flower’. The sentences were often surreal (and sometimes hilarious) but listening to her speak you could not only find the meaning but see clearly the way in which the thought process had been scrambled. Later on, the substitutions were much more extreme, almost random. ‘Butcher’ would become ‘wine glass’, ‘garden’ become ‘doctor’. And her speech became halting, uncertain, fragile. It was impossible to tell if the problem was that she couldn’t form the thought, or whether, having formed the thought, she couldn’t articulate it, couldn’t bring it into the world. The process was clearly extremely disturbing for her, and extremely disturbing to witness. And of course there would be the agonizing guesswork, which was occasionally successful, but more often led to nothing except frustration. It was not all misery. She evolved … Read more

Improvisation and contact improvisation in particular is a useful technique. Its emphasis on flow and fluidity focus on processes that are becoming and emergent . No position is held long enough at any point to become fixed as a represented image of an able or disabled body. This enables the disabled body to challenge any fixed representation.