Some were singing, some were talking, some were far, far away. We walked into a room in a nursing home with twenty 2nd and 3rd stage Alzheimer patients, all in their own worlds.
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I thought to myself: If only they understood poetry and the pleasure of free association - they wouldn’t be so afraid.Ībout a decade later I received a grant to bring poetry to a nontraditional audience, and decided to work with Gary Glazner and the Alzheimer Poetry Project. The musical or artistic powers that may be released in front temporal dementia or other forms of brain damage do not come out of the blue they are, one must presume, potentials or propensities that are already present but inhibited-and undevelopedīecause I am a poet and am therefore loose with language and free association, my grandmother and I had a couple of terrific conversations in the strange musical language she had developed - a language that scared and offended other members of my family and seemed to raise the ire of the nurses. She underwent a total personality change, became uninhibited, smiled all the time, and laughed with total abandon. My grandmother, who had shown no interest in music during her life, suddenly started singing. In old age she was transformed by dementia and like Oliver Sach’s patient Vera B who used language purely associatively and would suddenly break into song. When she laughed it was always with a glare in her eye. She was always well-dressed, with a tight upper lip, and a rather severe sense of humor. Not wanting to be associated with immigrants, she changed the pronunciation of his last name so it sounded less French.
Louis slum where she met an inspiring man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps into a life of wealth and prosperity. Into that overmind, thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.īrings to mind a unique underwater system.
It is like a closed sea- plant, jelly-fish or anemone. That overmind seems like a cap, like water, transparent,įluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space.
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