Of Boy, Brain, and Stars

     Human speech is like a cracked kettle on
     which we tap crude rhythms for bears to
     dance to, while we long to make music that
     will melt the stars.
                                             --Gustave Flaubert
                                                   Madame Bovary

I'm not as good a writer as Flaubert, and not nearly as prescient, so I'll have to use more words:

It's midday, and you look up into a cloudless blue sky.  All the stars you could ever hope for are there, right above you, but the sun is so bright you can't make them out.  Later, the sun sleeps and you prove to yourself once again that the stars really are there, and have been all along, brilliant points of steely light that leave you wondering how you could possibly have missed them, brightness be damned, only hours before.

Your brain is a little like this.  The left brain, the hemisphere of language, analytical thinking, the realm of the objective, is ascendant over the right brain, the hemisphere of feeling, synthesis, the realm of the subjective.  This is so because the capacity for language is a recent gift from the gods of evolution.  The playing field is not yet level.  Language is the sun, blotting out the stars of intuition, overshadowing creativity, subsuming all too infrequent flashes of creativity.  But, if you're lucky, or simply good at it, the sun that is language eventually sets, and things happen at a different pace, and in a different way.

I encountered this metaphor in Carl Sagan's The Dragon's of Eden some time ago.  Yes, I understand that the left-brain/right-brain model has fallen on hard times, and no longer enjoys its own ascendancy in the constellation of ideas that collectively make up brain science, but it is a useful way to look at things.  Personally, I think my analytical abilities reside in my eyelids, and my intuitive in my elbows, but then that's another story.

John, a student at the school where I work as a therapeutic instructor, and the same John I wrote of in Prometheus, requires more attention and therapeutic intervention than any other boy I've worked with.  He is a handful.  It's not that he's physically or emotionally aggressive, as some of the boys can be, but that he lives in a world of his own making and rarely admits visitors.  The treatment team, consisting of instructors, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists, is often at wits end trying to devise something that will reach him.  There is open discussion, only partly tongue in cheek, as to whether John recognizes that he is one of us; a human, and if he ever feels empathy or compassion.

I've been thinking of John quite a bit, trying different tactics to reach him, but with no real success.  But then that's been the problem.  I was thinking, and like most of us would, in words, analyzing, constructing a linear approximation of who John is.  Bad, no, fruitless idea.

Then something happened on Thursday.  John left a Milan group session, upset that he had not earned a specific privilege he sought, and gone on a walkabout.  To those of us who work at this school a walkabout is when a student walks away from his group without staff approval and simply wanders around.  When this happens a staff member must follow him and make sure he remains safe.  A student cannot be restrained from a walkabout unless he presents a clear danger to himself or to others.  I was closest to John when he decided to depart, and had the duty to follow him, trying to talk him back into the group.  This scenario has presented itself many times.  John has gone on more walkabouts that the rest of my group combined.  His modus operandi is to hike in a broad circle around campus, stopping only to correctly identify the various tree species, and eventually head to the small lake on the eastern end of the property, all the while acting as though he were completely alone, that no staff trailed in his wake.  If it's at all possible I always try to dissuade John from going there because it's at the lake, surrounded by steep and slippery banks, that he could quickly get into trouble.  On this day it was apparent John had the lake as his ultimate destination.

I was thinking, hard, "How do I get to him, how do I help him hear me?"

And then something happened.

As we walked up a short slope of bare red clay, wet and slippery from an overnight rain, my feet slid out from under me.  I didn't fall, but I had no choice but to slide backward on my feet to the bottom of the slope, a distance of maybe five feet.  I had been thinking when the slide started, but when I stopped a second later I was no longer thinking, and knew exactly what to do, and what the possible outcomes were.  It wasn't that I thought of what to do, or even that it dawned on me, but rather it hit me.  Instantaneously.  No words.  No thoughts.  No time.  Only stars of intuitive certainty.  The sun of language had momentarily set. 

"Ow, ow, ow, shit" I said, putting my hands on my lower back.  I wasn't hurt at all, and saying cuss or swear words is only allowed if attached to injury, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

John spun about to face me.  "Are you all right Mr Krupp?" he asked.  "Are you okay?"

"Ahhh, I think I pulled a back muscle" I faked.

"Can you walk?"

"I think so, but hey man, we gotta head back to campsite.  There's no way I can make it down to the lake."

"Okay Mr Krupp.  Can I help you?  Carry your pack?"

It took us fifteen minutes to reach campsite.  I deliberately walked slowly, hunched over a bit, occasionally throwing in a grunt or wince for good measure.  John talked.  He talked like he never had before.  I learned a lot.

When I come back in to work after time away most of the boys greet me joyously, running up to me in a pack and converting me from an instructor into the object of a boisterous group hug.  John has never done this, preferring to remain apart, looking on as though he were testing the focusing ability of his eyes.  Yesterday morning I worked some extra time.  Just as I got out of the shuttle bus John came running up calling my name and giving me a greeting hug.  He almost knocked me over before he remembered and asked me how my back was.

I think there's a little progress here.  And all because of the stars.