Dyslexia and looking at pictures

Dyslexic rahzbreez.

I sketched this to show solidarity with those of us who find words a challenge. I use ‘dyslexia’ as a carpetbag word to refer to the whole raft of difficulties attached to the written word. For instance, I have little difficulty in reading. But writing is a different matter. I think of it as mild dysgraphia. The first draught of anything I write - as now - is hesitant, lacks rhythm, has many repeated words, misspellings, and all in all is a general lumpy mess out of which I hew and hammer what I really want to say.

“Write as you speak!” is a phrase I have heard often. “well, if you sayso. Erum, yeswell, it was while I was…’mm, writing about speech, - sorry I’ll start again.

I think that that those who offer the ‘write as you speak’ kind of advice' must talk differently to the way I do, that is, full of hesitations, blurring, all accompanied by lots of body and facial language - for which there is no written alternative except in the form of stage directions, or the use of punctuation marks. But these are hardly subtle.

I begin a blogpost, as I am doing now in ‘Word’ so that I can check the spelling. When I am reasonably satisfied with what I have written I shall transfer it first to ‘WordPad’ saving it as ‘Richtext’ before moving it on to the blog - where you now read it.

I once met a dyslexic psychologist whose interest was in helping children to read and write. In his experience he found that dyslexics divide into those who avoid the use of the written word at every opportunity and those who are fascinated by them, written or read. There’s a character in Bleak House by Charles Dickens who props up copies of single letters from the alphabet all round his shop. He does this because they puzzle him. I think this is the first example in literature of dyslexia.

My ear is, and always has been, the arbiter when it comes to spelling. The word ‘raspberry’ springs to mind from when I struggled with it in primary school. I had been brought up in Birmingham, in the midlands of England for the first 8 years of my life by a Yorkshire father and a Derbyshire mother. Since going to The Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the early 50s I have had in my head at least four different sound patterns for that particular word. I refer to it especially because it has the sound of my name embedded within it. Had I been taught phonetics, my spelling would have been perfect in all four dialects as, roughly: razbriz, rasbuuriz, rasbarries and the BBC raspberries i.e (approximately) raahspriz.

I once acted as a guinea pig for my partner, a psychologist, who wanted practice in giving various psychological tests. What surprised us both was that I failed every one of the questions put to me in picture form.

We came to the conclusion that the well-intentioned person who had designed the picture questions must have thought that pictures are constructed like formal sentences that can be ‘read’ in only one way. But I look at pictures quite differently. In fact, I sometimes catch myself out trying to read a page of a book in the way that I look at a picture, and cannot, for a split second, understand why I do not understand it! Sometimes I get as much pleasure from the patterns of spaces between words as I do the story itself.

To get a tick from me and not a cross in the test a picture had to have that extra something that cannot be described in words. Otherwise why bother to print a drawing in the first place? Thus it was that not one of the drawings got my tick - except one. That portrayed a table with three legs where four in a three dimensional world would have been required to keep it upright. To that I gladly gave a tick because it was witty and I liked the way the whole picture had been placed on the page. I wonder how many strokes of the cane I would have got in the old days for such silliness.

hard work this art stuff!

My partner, Philippa, and I take pleasure in art-based programmes.  If we are given a good balance between still and moving pictures that are presented by a well informed and enthusiastic commentator it makes for easy watching at the end of the day.  Friends in the business tell me that these programmes are comparatively cheap to produce.  So lets have more of them.

Hugh Skeene, an art master at Buxton College in Derbyshire, who taught me during the 1940s, talked wittily to his classes about the history of art, and through those tried to get us to dip our toes into the deeper waters of not making artwork but making art work -  to create the otherwise indefinable.

Amongst the books on my desk is a copy of the Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon. I refer to it when the history of a word catches my interest and spurs me to do a bit of time travelling.  Today, after having difficulty remembering the order of the Greek Alphabet, at last I found what I was looking for, Ποιεω - something along the lines of ‘Poieuu’, meaning,  “to make, produce, execute, especially works of art.”  I was glad to find that my memory hadn’t played me false of when I first came across the word.   If I say it out loud and soften the P with a puff of air it gets near to ‘Phiew’.  The dictionary goes on, “to bring, to pass, bring about, cause, effect. perform the rites of sacrifice,” whilst in a slightly different form and in conjunction with another word it also refer to building a house -  hard work that, phew!

It’s like a second cousin twice removed to the Scottish word, ‘mackar’, or ‘maker’ meaning a poet or storyteller.  Michael Innes used the word in his detective story, A Lament for a Maker, in which, I suspect, he had had his wonderfully humorous eye on that quintessential of Scottish books, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner  by James Hogg.

Here is the living room in sunlight - even in Manchester! An acrylic I painted last year, 2009.

I challenge those who devise TV programmes to make instead of an entertainment out of the history or sociology of art but one that seeks to find the Phew! in it.

TAKING OFF: THE STORY OF THE MULL LITTLE THEATRE

To order a copy of Taking Off telling the story of the Mull Little Theatre please contact:-

Mairi McArthur, The New Iona Press, The Bungalow, Ardival, Strathpeffer, Scotland IV14 DS; or, mairimacarthur@yahoo.co.uk; or telephone 07881 92103. Special price including UK p&p: £5. Payment by cheque or Paypal. If you are ordering from abroad please add the appropriate amount for p&p;- the book weighs approximately 315 grms

'Please bring your dining chair with you!'
The setting was a guest house on the Hebridian island of Mull, one summer evening in 1966. The line was addressed to the after-dinner guests. The scene then moved across to a tiny, converted byre. And a unique adventure took off - the Mull Little Theatre.  This is the story of Barrie and Marianne Hesketh's life together - from their early acting careers and the steps that led them to Scotland - to the leap of faith that created the country's smallest professional theatre - through drama on and off stage, at home and on tour - and finally to Marianne's courageous struggle with terminal illness. A story of survival, told with spirit and humour.

'...a story of aristry and perseverance and love' (From the foreword by the late Paul Scofield)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage

15th June 2010
My partner, Philippa, and I, took a trip on the Metro into Manchester last night to hear the poet, Simon Armitage, read from his works.  The event was held in Chetham's Library, the oldest library in the English speaking world. I wanted to hear the poet because I much enjoy his translation of the Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a tale of decapitation and honour served.

Armitage’s West Yorkshire dialect gives just something extra to the words.  Poets are to be heard.

And thinking about the Yorkshire dialect – The theatre group, Northern Broadside has wonderful torsion and tension in its productions because of the use of it.

My dad was from a part of Yorkshire once known as the East Riding.  He told me the Yorkshire man’s toast:

Eat all, drink all and pay nowt.
Hear all, see all and say nowt.
And if tha dust owt for nowt
Do it for thi sen*
So here’s to me and my wife’s husband –
Not forgetting misen*

*(and if you do anything for nothing do it for yourself)

*(myself)

My dad had a Selby dialect and swore that anyone with the full Yorkshire ‘U’ sound, as in ‘electric buulb’ would have a good Latin tongue, His rendering of ‘Sic Luceat Lux Vestra!’  - would have had ‘em cheering in the Capital in Rome.  So let your light shine.

I get a nasty surprise that badly dints my view of the world.  No time to think before I grab at the first thing that ensures me a good view of myself.  What ever it might be, a scornful memory, a word from a friend, it adds up to the phrase, it isn’t my fault! 

My adolescent self makes an entrance to back me up. Get out from under, he says, get away, show them the cold shoulder – freeze them out. Hate them.   But the person who has landed me this nasty surprise is someone I have loved for many years, and damn it, still love. Electra, a play, written by Euripides well over two thousand years ago, stirs up this little drama at the back of my mind.  I am reading it in translation by Philip Vellacott.  The raw emotions on display bring their own disinfectant but at the same time they raise up spectres from my own past. 

Recollections of parental rows threatening my security jostle with those on show in the theatre in my head. Electra and her brother, Orestes must kill their mother whom they loved.  They are to mete out punishment for her brutal slaughter of their father who, in turn had sacrificed their sister.  In the Guildhall in London is a startling painting by the artist John Collier of the mother, Clytemnestra, in a blood bespattered chiton holding an axe, dripping yet more blood.

I cannot think of a greater contrast to the firm but delicate pictures by Philip Vellacott’s sister, Miss Elisabeth Vellacott – she was never known as anything else (she died in 2002). I had the great pleasure and privilege of knowing Miss Elisabeth Vellacott.  She led an art group that I joined when, for a short while, I lived in Cambridge as a Fellow Commoner at Churchill College.  Her work is as delicate as was the advice she dispensed.  I have very happy memories of her.

Toxoplasma gondii and Schizophrenia

As to the monologue, The Judge, it is not yet on the blog because I am tinkering with the scansion.  I want it to echo the way I said it in performance, but memory is playing tricks and I keep altering the rhythms. Its first title was The New Prometheus.  Things change.  On top of which, there is an alternative reason to the one I used that may explain why the judge went crazy.  Did his parents keep a cat, I wonder.

Browsing science web pages this morning, I  came across mention of 'Toxoplasma gondii and Schizophrenia'. From what I read, it seems that cat poo sometimes contains a bug that can infect the human brain and cause schizophrenia. Think o'that!   Instead of his father being the cause of his son's 'nervous illness', it was a cat picked up by the boy after it had done its business.

And what about those unfortunate men and women put to the fire paying the price not for witchcraft, but of a fondness for a familiar pet cat... I hasten to add that it appears from what I read this particular toxicity is  uncommon.