Someone said, “Your stroke was your water shed moment.” Perhaps she assumed I understood it, but anyway, at the time I was too embarrassed to let acquaintances see my confusion. I followed my routine – I wrote it down, went home, and opened Google. I searched water shed. I did learn that it is one word, watershed, but it would have been simpler if I knew that was as a metaphor. Google explained that watershed is something about rivers. Google is better with literal than non-literal queries, such as figures of speech.
Nowadays when this happens, I first look at the chart below, which always is in front of me on my desk when I write:
As I have previously written, with my teacher (mediator) in the Feuerstein Method, we checked that list to see what we had learnt in that session. I became good at using it. I learnt I had to be precise to focus on a problem, more so as I distrusted most of my judgments after my stroke. I had to be more logical; have a usable system to investigate problems; and importantly, value abstraction as a thinking tool.
Because of my experience with the Feuerstein Method, traditional therapeutic rehab now seems odd in that (at least for me) mostly focus on logical/concrete solutions for tasks. For example, in the first year in rehab, I learnt again how to recognise a drawing of a house, but not what it also represents. Using the Feuerstein Method, I learnt that abstract and logical are different concepts but work together to find solutions. In some tasks, I learnt that many words and actions have an implied meaning, that is, it is abstract but grounded in everyday experience. For example, A home is your castle is not the building but all that it is represents – financial security, control, inheritance, aspiration etcetera. That is why a house becomes your home when we are comfortable.
Feuerstein Method tackles this difficult concept. It creates a bridge between abstract and concrete thinking after a traumatic brain injury. If you want to cross that bridge, you must accept it will be a long process. Once you get used to it, as a solving tool, you will be able to continue to learn by yourself.
I resisted the value of the Feuerstein Method for a long time, largely as I hated the whole traditional rehab approach, so of course, I looked for quick fixes. In the first few years after my stroke, you could have sold me a miracle elixir at a travelling medicine show. Feuerstein Method is not a quick fix.
My memory slowly returned hand in hand with memories of fragments of books I had read before my stroke. I don’t know why, maybe it is just the way my brain worked, and at the time I had given up trying to read except for newspapers. I think learning the Feuerstein Method gave me hope that my ability to read and understand would return. Now I can read, with some difficulty, though it is nowhere near the enjoyment it gave me previously. I cannot understand why people, who are able to read books, are not taking what it offers. It is a mystery to me.
My late brother, my only sibling, gave me Moby Dick to read when I was thirteen. As with other older brothers, he wrote his name on the front page, I am sure to warn me not to destroy it. I clearly remember when he gave it to me because he died soon thereafter. It was the last thing he gave me. It was published by The Children’s Press: they used to publish a series of simpler abridged versions of classic books, like Gulliver’s Travels or Oliver Twist. On the cover it had a picture of the actor Gregory Peck from the film of the book. I loved the book. A tale of daring, devils, dangers, and a great adventure. The plot is straightforward. Captain Ahab wanted to kill Moby Dick because it bit off his leg. From a child’s point of view, Ahab was justified. Because of that book, I have a lithograph of whaling on my wall.
For me, Moby Dick has the most crucial opening line in American literature: “Call me Ishmael.” Why? Ishmael introduces himself right off the bat. We know who is telling this yarn, and it is from his perspective. In Moby Dick, it tells the reader who you will be dealing with for the rest of the book. By the way, when I first meet someone and we start a conversation, I find a way to mention my disability near the start of the conversation, so they know who they are talking to. It is that Moby Dick opening line that gave me the idea.
Much later, when I read the full book, I found it was a different story – from a seafaring adventure into a great life adventure. Ishmael was hunting for meanings for his existence while Captain Ahab is consumed by his demented hunt for a white whale.
Nowadays I struggle to follow the plot of a B-movie, and I have had no thoughts about Moby Dick since my stroke. So how can I talk about the complexities of the plot? Because I read a report in a newspaper about a written acceptance speech by Bob Dylan for his Nobel Literature Prize. He cited Moby Dick as one of the three books that most influenced his creativity: “That theme, and all that it implies, would work its way into my songs.”
I did not really grasp the speech, but I certainly became excited when he had written, at length, about a book I too had read. It was his description of the book that made me excited. I read Dylan’s speech, with some effort – it was only three years after my stroke – and he gave a good analysis of that book. Because I was learning the Feuerstein Method, I immediately asked myself: If Dylan believes the book is important to him and his creativity – and I remember that the book was important to me both as a child and adult before my stroke – then why did it stir something in my brain now, and in a good way. It must be important for a reason. Through the Feuerstein Method, I had learned how to use hypothetical thinking. Without that training, I would not have looked for that connection. It was that cliched lightbulb moment – my watershed moment.
My brain injury is impossible to categorise, for exactly the reason some readers cannot relate to Moby Dick – they get disappointed that it is not an adventure, or as described on the cover of my brother’s book, The World’s Greatest Sea Story. If Moby Dick was just a novel, then it would be a very poor novel – far too long, a rambling plot and pretentious prose. This is also the way I think since my injury: My thoughts meander: it takes me a long time to learn things; I have wacky thoughts that lead to nowhere.
After my stroke, my thought processes have become a mystery. But I do know that, like Captain Ahab, deep down I want to conquer what is happening in my brain – as Ahab said, “the nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing.”
Moby Dick is as good of a metaphor you will find for what happens after a traumatic brain injury – a search for meaning in a hostile and inexplicable situation. And why the Feuerstein Method is, for me, all about making connections when you are surrounded by an experience you cannot understand.