The man was describing the time he spent in South Africa as a young man. He spoke in English, although his native language was Swiss German. According to one of the carers, that often happens with Alzheimer’s; patients often speak in a foreign language which they learned as young adults.
The man was conscious of the fact that he was describing something that happened long ago. He could remember the places where he lived very vividly. But suddenly he stopped in the middle of a sentence. His description broke off; he was missing a word. He looked annoyed. He explained that it led from the house to the sea. I thought he meant a particular region and answered awkwardly that I unfortunately didn’t know South Africa at all. He looked at me, frustrated and angry. It was some time before he was able to find the word he could no longer remember. It was ‘road’.
The word had gone. Between his vivid memories, the concrete images which appeared in his mind’s eye, and language, the sounds which enable a description, a gap had opened up. This incident has remained with me and is one of those experiences during the observation days at the dementia homes and day centers that still occupy my mind. The loss of language raised questions for me which go beyond the specific processes of dementia as a disease and make the boundaries of language visible. Because calling the road ‘road’ may allow communication to flow, but between the image in his memory and my imagination, there is still a difference [E is for Emoticons, for Evaluation]. How much space do these different imaginary worlds take up in our thinking, and what are their effects? How much does it matter whether I am conscious or not that what I imagine when I hear the word ‘road’ must be different from what he imagines? And would I have thought about these questions at all if he hadn’t forgotten that word?
While the word eluded him, we searched together. We each lacked knowledge in different ways, but we both relied on points of reference from the other in order to proceed with our communication. For a short moment, our condiciones overlapped in the experience of speechlessness. The search for the word formed a kind of node at which our ways crossed, before diverging [B is for Between]. Such moments of intersubjective experiences became particularly relevant to the investigation of asynchronous (temporal) perceptions, because they create a situation of concrete participation in interactions, which fosters respect within inequality, and makes us conscious of our reliance on each other.
