Diurnal

If you recall there was
a dazzling dreamlike light in those regions--

those lush and splendid places you had never been
yet remembered with tropical summer ache
as you lay bleeding in a verdant garden paradise

those fabled florid lands you knew did not exist
but for which you made grand and hopeful plans
and elaborate travel arrangements

those magical daylit moments you remembered so wistfully
yet which never came to pass--
all the glowing would-be memories stored in your vast
uncatalogued archive of wishes unfulfilled

--these too are part of your great and sparkling
experience on this earth.

Do you in fact recall
the strangely splendorous light in those regions?
--it shone with the radiance, it seemed
of glorious and disappearing suns

burning, laying us waste
in the interior deserts of our hearts
bursting forth bright and purple
a floral effulgence of dreams
of ardent solar longings

--there were also in those regions
blossoms bitter, brilliant, useless
there were blazing blinding lights that cascaded
from an unreachable ecstatic sky

--there were also in those regions
many instances of water.

*

Steven Holland
July 20, 2013

The Girls Who Spoke For Themselves : Part 3 : Was It A Real Language?

Did the Kennedy girls in fact invent a new language, as the media proclaimed, or was it simply a case of imperfect speech due to their socially deprived circumstances in early childhood?

As I alluded to before, Grace and Virginia Kennedy did not of course create their private language out of whole cloth. Feral children, those rare "wild children" who spend their earliest years separated from all human contact, do not use language. They behave pretty much as nonhuman animals. Their sad example underscores the fact that human beings are, as Aristotle said, social animals. This does not mean merely that we like to hang out together and chat; to be a social animal is something far more profound than that.

To be a social animal is to be a creature whose very nature depends on its sociality. In other words, a human being in complete and utter isolation is hardly even a human being. Perhaps more accurately, he is a human being who is greatly crippled, whose potential as a human being is not made actual, whose horizons and powers are severely limited and blocked. A human being living in complete isolation is not truly free, because he is not able to use his full human powers nor realize his full potential as a human being. Those accomplishments require society and culture, which by definition entail relationship with other human beings.

The Kennedy girls, despite their relative social isolation, were not of course feral children. They existed on the margins of human society, but still had some contact with it. In this way they were exposed to the phenomenon of language itself, and to at least snatches of the specific languages of English and German.

Language is one of the defining features of society. Even when people are physically proximate, if they do not communicate with each other they are hardly being social. It is interesting, and not coincidental, that the word "commune" is at the heart of the word "communication", as it is in the words "community" and "communion". Communication, or language in its broadest sense, is the glue that binds us together and that makes a society out of individual human beings; and the ideas and information expressed by that language constitute that society's culture, its ability to think and act above the level of mere natural instinct and mindless bodily impulse. It is what makes us civilized; it is, to a large degree, what makes us human.

We will never know the exact process by which Grace and Virginia created their peculiar form of speech. It would of course be entirely out of the question morally to subject children to such an "experiment" so that we might observe how such a process of language acquisition under those conditions unfolds, so we must go on inference and speculation. No doubt the girls heard their parents and grandmother speak; perhaps they heard the radio or watched television; in any case, we can only assume that they combined imitation of what they heard with their own imagination.

Imitation and imagination are both entirely natural and wondrously powerful capabilities of children, and both are essential to learning. One thing that seems clear to me is that, for the Kennedy girls, imagination played a far more prominent role in their language acquisition process, relative to imitation, than it does for most children. To me, this is the truly fascinating aspect of their feat: whereas for most children, the acquisition of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar is by way of imitation and an intuitive understanding of that which is imitated, Virginia and Grace had to rely to a very large extent on their own native imagination and creativity.

The girls were forced to rely upon the resources of their own minds, those minds having been shaped only vaguely by the larger human world. Yet the fact that they produced a complex language containing unique vocabulary and grammatical features illustrates the marvelous capacity for language that is inherent in the human mind. Like imitation, imagination too must rely upon experience, but it transforms that experience into something new by way of a mysterious and deeply intuitive process of creation. Whereas most children rely primarily on imitation to learn language, which ensures that the mother tongue is faithfully reproduced in the next generation, the Kennedy girls, having relatively little linguistic experience to imitate, had to fill in the gaps with their own fancy.

They surely did all of this in a largely unselfconscious way, almost as a form of play. "What is that?" my two-year-old daughter often asks me, wanting to know the word for something. With no adults around to tell them, Grace and Virginia had to make something up. Perhaps it was a misremembered word that they had heard a grown-up say, or that they had heard on TV. Or perhaps it was purely made up, a gibberish sound that became a meaningful word, because they assigned that sound a particular meaning.

In this way, the Kennedy girls' language became a real language. It was a mode of communication shared between two human beings, only "private" in a relative sense, but still a social and collaborative construction and tool for sharing ideas, thoughts, and feelings. Virginia and Grace understood each other. No one else did, but a language is made no less valid just because you cannot understand it or speak it. These words and sentences were meaningful and perfectly intelligible to Grace and Virginia Kennedy--or, as they chose to name and identify themselves, Poto and Cabengo.

 

Part 4

The Girls Who Spoke For Themselves : Part 2 : Ginny and Gracie Go to School

At some point, the Kennedys moved to San Diego and, while there, a caseworker at the unemployment office (the family was described as living on "food stamps and welfare") advised the girls' father to put his daughters in speech therapy. And so these two girls who had been named by their parents Virginia and Grace, but who were known to themselves as Cabengo and Poto, soon found themselves at the Children's Hospital of San Diego, working with two speech therapists so that they might learn how to speak "correctly".

What the therapists soon realized was that the girls possessed at least normal intelligence, thereby disproving the belief that they suffered from mental retardation. Furthermore, the twins' odd speech, far from being mere gibberish, was discovered to be in fact its own complex language, an example of idioglossia--that is, an idiosyncratic language spoken by only one or a few people, often by twins (in which case it is also known as "twin speech").

The girls were taught to speak standard English (they apparently already understood it to a large degree, as well as some German, though they only spoke in their own made-up language) and eventually they were enrolled in elementary school (in separate classes). Thus their social, linguistic, and educational "mainstreaming" began.

*

Grace and Virginia Kennedy became famous for a time in the late 1970s, being written up in newspaper and magazine articles and earning a spot in that popular book of miscellanea, The People's Almanac. They even became the subject of a 1980 documentary film, titled Poto and Cabengo, made by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin.

In a 1988 interview, Gorin offered a glimpse into his thought process as he approached his unusual subject:

The film is about an unstructured discourse—the language of the twins—surrounded by structured discourses—the discourse of the family, the discourse of the media, the discourse of therapy, the discourse of documentary filmmaking. There are as well other structured discourses at work in the film: the discourses of science, capitalism, and education. They are each a method of using words that presumes a type of authority. Clearly the twins’ unstructured discourse challenges discursive authority: it erupts as a subversive act which has not been authorized by any social or ideological establishment. In a sense its special threat is that its “unauthorized” nature relativizes the arbitrary nature of those institutionalized discourses. The singsong of the twins reveals the shaky grounds of institutional power. It relativizes discursive authority from the family to the scientific community in their competitive and ineffectual attempts to “define” the twins who spontaneously flit about the screen exceeding any definition. In a fashion, I wanted the viewers to feel the twins made more “sense” than anybody around them. Or at least to perceive that the twins’ way to handle language offered a marker for the way people around them used language and were used by it, and were spoken through it.

In this somewhat academic-sounding yet meaningful and fertile statement, Gorin outlines some of the complex philosophical issues that lie at the heart of any serious and thoughtful consideration of the Kennedy twins' linguistic accomplishment. There are other philosophical issues involved as well, but here Gorin gives us more than enough to start with.

Before we get into some of those heady discussions, however (which I will try to keep as simple as possible, while also balancing them with thoughts and reflections of a more personal and poetic nature), I will show you a clip from Gorin's film that is an example of the girls "spontaneously [flitting] about the screen", perhaps in a way that serves to illustrate their "wildness"--that is, as Gorin suggests above, their existence outside of normative civilization and its concepts.

There is an interesting exchange in the interview about this scene:

Interviewer: There is the scene, for instance, where you take the twins to the library. They are running around, grabbing books off the shelves at random and you are trying to follow them. There is something very sad and very funny simultaneously, something difficult to express in words.

Gorin: It’s a key scene in the film for me. They are grabbing these books as if they were these talismans. There is an urgency, something both manic and poignantly relevant to their situation in the way they pile these books up in the hope of taking them home with them, as if these things were bound to secure their liberation, their passage into another world beyond the confines of their family.

Here is the scene:

Ginny and Gracie Go to the Library

What Gorin says above seems to me to capture a morally and intellectually complicated dilemma underlying the twins' mainstreaming: On the one hand, the process of integrating the girls into the mainstream of U.S. society and culture (or indeed, of any larger human society outside of themselves) seems inarguably desirable and necessary; on the other hand, while there can be no doubt that much is gained by this process, anyone who appreciates and admires the twins' achievement in creating their own language, while considering everything that language implies in terms of thinking, experiencing, and identity, cannot help but wonder what was lost in this process.

Part 3

The Girls Who Spoke For Themselves : Part 1 : Meet Poto and Cabengo

"Dug-on, haus you dinikin, du-ah."

"Snup-aduh ah-wee die-dipana, dihabana."

Can you understand the above sentences? Odds are you cannot, unless you happen to be one of the two girls pictured above, and who knows if even they can still remember what these cryptic utterances meant. They are the only two persons on Earth who ever spoke this mysterious language.

The two girls are named Poto and Cabengo. At least, those are the names they gave themselves. Their given English names are, respectively, Grace and Virginia Kennedy. When they were children in the 1970s, they became briefly famous for something wholly remarkable yet which came entirely naturally to them, given their circumstances: they invented their own language.

*

I first became intrigued by the Kennedy girls (identical twins) when I read about them in The People's Almanac in the late seventies. They were born in 1970, the same year as me, and in different circumstances, they could have been girls that I went to school with. For most of my life, they have lingered deep in my subconscious memory, a symbol of the mystery and wonder of childhood imagination and genius, and have given rise to at least one fictional story idea, yet to be written.

Now, with fuller knowledge of their remarkable history, I am fascinated and impressed more than ever by what these neglected little girls accomplished in creating a language for themselves. Their story is equal parts tragic and inspiring, and my purpose in this series is to give that story a new telling, and to meditate on the many philosophical questions and human meanings that the Kennedy girls' experience brings forth in my intellect, imagination, and heart.

*

Grace and Virginia Kennedy were born in Columbus, Georgia, and upon birth seemed quite normal. However, shortly after being born, they apparently suffered seizures of some sort. According to their father's account, a doctor informed him that the girls might possibly become mentally retarded (a medical term that was used at the time and in fact is still in official use today). Sadly, the parents interpreted this to mean that their daughters were in fact mentally retarded, and did not think it necessary to pay much attention to them other than ensuring that their physical needs were met.

Both parents worked and the girls were left in the care of their grandmother, who spoke only German. The grandmother, like the parents, did not pay much emotional attention to the girls, taking care of their physical well-being but not playing or interacting with them. The girls did not go outside much, and did not play with other children. In essence, they were socially and emotionally abandoned from an early age and left to grow up in a bubble of isolation, experiencing only minimal and peripheral contact with the larger human world.



These two lonely and neglected little girls were given deplorable circumstances in which to grow and develop as human beings, but they managed to do something incredible with those sorry circumstances. Without the full socialization of interactive and attentive adults or engagement with other children, the Kennedy girls figured out how to speak for themselves.

They didn't create their language out of thin air, although the above sample of their speech and others may sound, as some have put it, "like Martian". They used what little scraps of English and German to which they were exposed, and built upon that foundation with their own native intelligence and invention (for instance, they made up entirely new words and used some of their own unique grammatical and syntactical rules).

The process by which they accomplished this feat may always remain mysterious, but it at least demonstrates not only their own intelligence and marvelous linguistic capabilities, but also that which is natural to all children. Young children's acquisition of language is always a miraculous achievement, but the Kennedy twins' demonstration of this feat even in their socially isolated situation illustrates this miracle all the more clearly.

Some have tried to downplay the girls' achievement as a negative, a mere lack of proper mastery of English. But I think the truth is far more positive, and that is one concept I wish to explore in this series. Their experience brings up many questions about the nature of language and the way it makes us who and what we are, and how language determines the way we relate to other people and to the larger society. In a way, for human beings, to speak (whether with the mouth or the hands, or in writing or whatever other form of expression it may take) is to be, and more specifically is to be human. The wondrous and beautiful thing about Poto and Cabengo is that they rose above their social and emotional abandonment, their seemingly less-than-fully-human status, and taught themselves how to be, and how to be human.

 

Part 2

Ode to My Muse

My muse does not know her name
Her secret, blessèd name

My muse does not know her fame
Her eternal, glorious fame

Her fire is like the furious sun
Whose light weaves a bright tapestry
Her love is like the continual moon
Of night the fair faithful queen

If my love were like her star—

A jewel of wondrous light
Set against the deep black night
In a constellation beauteous
Noble and vast—

Our love then might
Burn ever bright—

Our love might ever last

I may not behold her brilliant face—

But only when I dream—

Yet still she on me lovingly glows

Still she on me tenderly bestows
Her mysterious radiant grace

She reigns ever over my heart
Its true and lovely queen
She is my bright and beauteous beloved
My glorious and kindly queen—

She is my glorious
She is my glorious
She is my kindly queen—

In her dwells all that’s blest
And all that’s fair
And all that’s fit to dream

If ever I could I would love my muse
And desire nothing dearer
If ever I should I would love my muse
And never hold any dream nearer

She is a sweet and gracious and elegant muse
Her poet’s heart she must ever softly break
That she might bless him with longing dreams
And the songs of pure love that he must ever make

My muse does not know her fame
Her eternal, glorious fame

My muse does not know her name
Her secret, blessèd name

***

Steven Holland

July 7, 2013

The Fire of Heaven

Dante and Beatrice

 



Awake, O poet--the Muse has called your name.

For you did not choose your vocation, but you were chosen for it.

Thus spoke the angel.

*

I can see now, in the vision of hindsight, that it was given to me in my earliest days, a glittering star dropped from heaven and landing on my wide and wondrous eyes.

I did not know then what it was, nor that it was. It was only a seed, a gift and a talent, that yet required the nurturing of life's joys and the watering of life's pains.

It was nourished by wonder, by books and films and the world of nature and the love of family, by science and by science fiction, by flowers and by stars, by play and by dreams.

It was not until I had grown to become a man that I began to recognize it for what it was, and to take the first crude steps in learning the poet's magic art. Mine were still the simple singsong verses of children, which are the beginning of all poetry.

I began to discover my own voice, and to become more adept at wielding the wand that conjured visions. I became more aware of my peculiar destiny and my strange mission.

For many years I allowed the comfort and complacency and conventions of adulthood to settle over me, dulling my vision and almost making me forget who and what I was.

Yet I sensed deep within a longing and a loss, together with a hope that I might recover my vision and remember my destiny.

Then one day the blanket was taken from me, and I found myself face to face with myself, and only myself. And in that solitary space, the Muse revealed herself to me once more, and graced my soul with fire.

And the Muse gave me a strange and wondrous gift, a marvel of a thousand delights and twice a thousand sorrows. And she said unto me, With this treasure of heavenly beauty, you shall make Poetry.

My heart burned with a new flame, one that illuminated my soul and the hidden wonders within, and I began to draw them out and craft them into works of art finer and nobler and rarer than any I had yet made, nor knew I was capable of making.

Like all fires, it must be carefully tended. When kept within its proper bounds, the fire produces light and energy and life; when uncontrolled it burns and damages and destroys. To remain productive, it must be kept subservient to faith and hope and love.

The fire of heaven, bestowed by the Muse, burns with a bright and otherworldly flame. It is a fearsome gift, yet one I must not refuse. I have been called away from the tribe like a sacrificial priest, repeatedly slain by the sublime and terrible visions that are the secret graces of the sweet and tender Muse.

I can no longer see the world as I did before; the light has forever altered my vision. The spark that fell from heaven has been lit ablaze by strange and sparkling dreams, and the burning desire for beauties not to be found in this world.

These luminous dreams, says the Muse, have been granted you that you might turn them into Poetry. The vision is not given you to keep for yourself, but that you might give it to others.

Though the fire of heaven sometimes flares with a painful heat, I must not scorn this rare and precious gift. If I ever allow these flames to be extinguished, that is the day I shall cease to be a poet.

There Is Beauty

There is beauty when the rain breaks the flowers

And casts their dreamlike petals down

Their glory scattered white and purple

Across the soft and lonely earth

There is beauty when maidens fair of sweet and tender youth

Take holy vows and secret away in fortresses

Of rosaries, chants, and stone, their gorgeousness

Forever veiled from the gaze of lustful urgent men

There is beauty when visions marvelous and bright

Are glimpsed and forgot in the echoing violet dawn

But leave their subtle traces on dim unsleeping thought

Wondrous beacons to the wander-weary soul

There is beauty when a star drops from space

From sparkling heights of splendor to the dark and dismal dust

Bursting with ephemeral brilliance, its fall forlorn but fated

To leave a vestige of heaven on the earth

June 2, 2013