and has quite a good vocabulary for his age, but he always refers to himself declaratively in the third person, present tense. When you say it’s time for bed, he says, ‘Daniel isn’t tired.’ When you say, ‘Give Grandad a kiss,’ he says, ‘Daniel doesn’t kiss granddads.’ Pronouns are tricky for kids, of course, because they’re shifters, as we say in the trade, their meaning depends entirely on who is using them: ‘you’ means you when I say it, but me when you say it. So mastery of pronouns always comes fairly late in the child’s acquisition of language, but Daniel’s exclusive use of the third person at his age is rather unusual. Marcia is anxious about it and asked me if I thought it was possibly a symptom of something, autism for instance. I asked her if she referred to herself in the third person when speaking to Daniel, like ‘Mummy is tired’, or ‘Mummy has got to make the dinner’, and she admitted that she did occasionally. ‘You mean, it’s my fault?’ she said, a little resentfully. ‘I mean he’s imitating you,’ I said. ‘It’s quite common. But he’ll soon grow out of it.’ I told her that Daniel’s sentences were remarkably well-formed for his age, and that I was sure he would soon learn to use pronouns. I actually find it charming, the way he says, ‘Daniel is thirsty,’ ‘Daniel doesn’t tidy up,’ ‘Daniel is shy today,’ with a perceptible pause for thought before he speaks. It has an almost regal gravity and formality, as if he were a little prince or dauphin. Dauphin Daniel I call him. But young parents, educated middle-class ones anyway, are very jumpy these days, they get so much information from the media about all the things that could be wrong with their child - autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, obesity and so on - they’re in a constant state of panic, watching their offspring like hawks for warning signs. And it’s catching: I’m far more anxious about the baby Anne is expecting than I was about any of Maisie’s pregnancies. Thirty-seven is late to give birth for the first time.
2
1st November, 2006. I rather enjoyed writing that piece last night, and re-reading it this morning. As aural-oral communication becomes more and more difficult, the total control one has over written discourse becomes more and more appealing, especially when the subject is deafness. So I’ll go on for a bit.
I first discovered I was going deaf about twenty years ago. For some time before that I’d been aware that I was finding it increasingly difficult to hear what my students were saying, especially in seminars, with anything from twelve to twenty of them sitting round a long table. I thought it was because they mumbled - which indeed many of them do, being shy, or nervous, or unwilling to seem assertive in front of their peers - but it hadn’t been a problem when I was younger. I wondered if perhaps my ears were blocked with wax, so went to my GP. He peered into my ears with a chilly steel optical instrument and said there was no build-up of wax, so I’d better have my hearing checked at the Ear, Nose and Throat department of the University Hospital.
They did an audiogram: you wear a pair of headphones and hold a press-button thingy which you squeeze when you hear a sound. The audiologist is using his apparatus out of your sight, so you can’t cheat, not that there would be any point in cheating. The sounds are not words, or even phonemes, just little beeps, which get fainter and fainter, or higher and higher, until you can’t hear them, like the cries of a bird spiralling up into the sky. Philip Larkin first discovered he was going deaf when he was walking in the Shetlands with Monica Jones and she remarked how beautiful the larks sounded singing overhead, and he stopped and listened but he couldn’t hear them. Rather poignant, a poet finding out he’s deaf in that way, especially when you think of Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’, ‘Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!’ one of the poems everybody learns by heart at school, or did before educational theory turned against memorising verse. A poet called Larkin, too - it’s almost funny in a black way, deafness and comedy going hand in hand, as always.
Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic.Take Oedipus, for instance: suppose, instead of putting out his eyes,