One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir (39 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Heartfelt thanks to friends who drew even closer after Paul’s stroke, especially Dava, Peggy, Jeanne, Dan, and Philip. Continued thanks to Alane Salierno Mason, my smart and savvy editor at Norton, for her encouragement and guidance. Jeanette Norden, director of the Brain and Behavior Module at Vanderbilt University, brought her expert eye and welcome insights. Dr. Ann’s medical knowhow and generosity of spirit were a godsend. And I’m indebted to Paul and Liz, who read and listened to the manuscript in its many revisions, sharing invaluable memories, corrections, and suggestions. In
Rashômon
fashion, we’ve all experienced the same events, though from different angles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diane Ackerman was born in Waukegan, Illinois. She received an MA, MFA, and PhD from Cornell University. Her works of nonfiction include
An Alchemy of Mind
, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience;
Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; Deep Play
, which considers play, creativity, and our need for transcendence;
A Slender Thread
, about her work as a crisis-line counselor;
The Rarest of the Rare
and
The Moon by Whale Light
, in which she explores the plight and fascination of endangered animals;
A Natural History of Lov
e, which celebrates humankind’s oldest and most defining mystery;
On Extended Wings
, her memoir of flying; the bestseller
A Natural History of the Senses
, a poetic and scientific tour through the kingdom of the senses; and, most recently,
The Zookeeper’s Wife
, a narrative nonfiction about one of the most successful hideouts of World War II, a tale of people, animals, and subversive acts of compassion.

Her poetry has been published in leading literary journals and in the books
Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, I Praise My Destroyer, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, Lady Faustus, Reverse Thunder: A Dramatic Poem, Wife of Light, and The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral
. She also writes nature books for children:
Animal Sense, Monk Seal Hideaway,
and
Bats: Shadows in the Night
.

Ms. Ackerman has received many prizes and awards, including a DLitt from Kenyon College, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Burroughs Nature Award, the Orion Book Award, and the Lavan Poetry Prize, as well as being honored as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. She also has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her—the dianeackerone. She has taught at a variety of universities, including Columbia and Cornell. Her essays about nature and human nature have appeared in the
New York Times, Smithsonian, Parade, The New Yorker, National Geographic
, and many other journals. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by
A Natural History of the Senses
. She divides her time between Florida and upstate New York.

ONE HUNDRED
NAMES FOR LOVE

Diane Ackerman

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. As Diane Ackerman so beautifully describes, life can change utterly in an instant, leaving us feeling like complete strangers in a world we thought we knew. Describe a moment when this happened to you. How did you get your bearings? How did Diane?

2. Diane writes that any marriage or relationship that has existed over a long period of time is actually several marriages (or relationships), as there are different stages and colors of love over a lifetime. Have you experienced this? How would you describe your “different” loves or stages of love?

3. Diane’s husband, as a poet, novelist, and professor, had a complex “professional” language learned in young adulthood. Does your profession in any way have its own language? If you were to speak only that, what would it sound like?

4. Most of us fall into the most common pet names for our lovers: honey, sweetie, babe, darling. Which ones speak to you and which ones make you cringe? Why do some feel right and others not? What do they evoke? Try inventing five (or one hundred!) new names for your love. Do they make you see your relationship any differently? Make it a party game—spin the bottle and make the one it points to reveal his or her silliest pet name!

5. Every religion teaches us about suffering and how to cope with it. What did your religious (or nonreligious) upbringing teach you about this? What struck you about Diane’s coping strategies and spiritual resources? How are they alike or different from your own? 

6. Despite the difficulties encountered in this book, there is considerable humor in it. What were your favorite funny moments? Do you remember funny moments that got you through a dark time? How is this kind of humor different from “making fun of” or “making light of” a tough situation? Looking back, do those moments still make you laugh?

7. What did you take away from this book about what is most precious in life for Diane? For you?

AN INTERVIEW WITH DIANE ACKERMAN

Your work before this book has ranged from the best-selling
A Natural History of the Senses
to the runaway success
The Zookeeper’s Wife
, a work of historical nonfiction about a zoo in Poland during the Second World War. Yet people like Antonio Damasio and Atul Gawande have called
One Hundred Names for Love
your best book yet. How did those other books prepare you to write
A Hundred Names for Love
, and how does it fit into your work as a whole?

Few of my readers know that I wrote
The Zookeeper’s Wife
, and then
Dawn Light
, while the events of
One Hundred Names for Love
were unfolding. In many ways, writing
Zookeeper
was my sanctuary and an important source of strength. The woman I write about in
Zookeeper
was a much more valiant caregiver than I could ever hope to be. She didn’t just want the people in her care to survive, she wanted them to survive with their humanity intact.

I’m sure it isn’t a coincidence that I was writing a book about a secret caregiver, in the land my ancestors came from, at precisely the time I was learning to be a caregiver myself.

Antonina had an almost mystical relationship with animals and nature, and I do, too. One way in which I would nourish myself as a caregiver was to go out in nature and learn what everyday miracles had taken place overnight and look at them with curiosity and wonder. That might just mean a walk through the woods or garden. It might just be a few minutes, but I always found it replenishing.
Dawn Light
is a tribute to the wonders of nature and the everyday magic of being alive.

All of these things (and more) came into play while I was dealing with the very intense and, in many ways, traumatic events of Paul’s stroke, the difficulty of having Paul at home and looking after him when I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and my determination to rebuild our world.

We think of writers as being temperamental, hyper-sensitive, high-strung, self-absorbed—in short, very hard to live with! But you and your husband have been together for more than forty years! How did you do it?

It wasn’t always fun and games—we also fought at times, using words as edged weapons. Trust a writer to come up with unusual slurs! Sometimes they were so funny that we’d crack up laughing and the quarrel would be over; once humor enters the argument it’s hard to keep fighting. Paul was an alcoholic for many years, and domineering, though also thin-skinned; he used to tease that he was “a sensitive tyrant.” Like all artists we could be “hyper-sensitive, high-strung, and self-absorbed.”

But living with
anyone
for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to each other, hopefully in positive ways. Laughter and humor helped to put things in perspective. Play relieved the tension in the relationship, eased the inevitable setbacks and disappointments, and renewed intimacy and acceptance. In any relationship, there’s always the other, the welcome and desired other, and the fine art of negotiating your time and space together. Much as you may love someone, alone moments when you don’t have to agree on anything can feel like a gift from heaven. After all these years, I found Paul’s new habit of waking when I did confusing and even a little irritating, because it meant I lost a special realm. At the moment, we go to bed at 11:00 p.m., but he wakes up instinctively at 3 a.m., to work until 6 a.m., when I wake up, and then he goes back to sleep for a few hours. So we once again have private time zones in which to work.

It is a truism that lovers have their own language. You take it even further when you write, “In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos.” Is this something that gets intensified when both of the lovers are writers?

Very much so. Words completely enchanted us. We read lots of books, and wrote many ourselves. We adored making colorful phrases, and finding new ways to describe the world. But we were also immensely playful and childlike, so in our off-duty hours, when we weren’t writing or teaching—and not using language in the countless grown-up ways that people normally do—we played with words. Words became exciting, flexible toys that we could share, gluing them together in all sorts of crazy ways, sometimes romantically but mainly just for fun. Kids sometimes build tree houses, off-limits to adults, in which they meet in a tiny secret society. Words were our tree house.

We created our own elaborate dialect (which I describe in the book), and improvised word games. One example: Paul would serenade me with ad-lib operettas and little ditties, in which he would sing about my physical attributes or habits. We enjoyed punning, renaming the household objects, redefining words based on what they sounded like they should mean, concocting riddles, mispronouncing names of things on purpose, and tossing lots of rhyming words into a single sentence (ex: “In the Middle Ages, the sage pages rampaged in stages”).

We created a private mythology of imaginary creatures. I don’t reveal them in the book, but here’s one example. When I complained of suddenly having a small tummy bulge, Paul wanted to reassure me, so he lovingly stroked my tummy and said it was nothing to worry about because it was simply full of baby kangaroos. Kangaroos live in pouches, women have wombs that are pouches, therefore humans are really marsupials. From then on the imaginary kangaroos in my tummy became part of our affectionate menagerie. They were all girls with a fetish for having their hair brushed. He would put his ear down and listen to them, ask them funny questions and report what they were saying. We also had imaginary hopping spiders (which dispensed “spider cuddles”), and we pretended to be prairie voles, harvest mice, kissel panthers (which stalked and pounced, scaring the other person, but only to bestow kisses), and all sorts of other hybrid animals, just to show our affection in creative ways. I assume other couples play equally smoochy games. And Paul loved inventing
piropos
for me, the Latin American flirtation of paying women cleverly expressed compliments, such as “You are a park for my eyes.”

Words obviously mean a lot to both of you. How did it feel for you when Paul suddenly was unable to speak or write?

My whole world collapsed, and I felt abandoned in a flat silent desert. I hurt all over my body but in no place I could point to. I felt agonizingly alone. Paul was the only person I had ever felt normal with. Suddenly I was all alone with my creative flights of fancy, synesthesia, wordplay, and passion for both poetry and science. Who would understand me?

Did you find other ways to communicate?

Almost at once I began exploring new ways to communicate, through affection, gestures, pantomime, facial expressions, animal sounds, play. But especially affection, which communicates wordlessly and so well. Our nonverbal behaviors—the way we look at, listen, and react to someone—can send strong messages. They can convey a sense of interest, trust, love, and especially the desire to stay connected. This isn’t something that takes learning, because we’re always giving and receiving wordless signals without realizing it, from the way we stand or sit to how much eye contact we make or how loud or fast we speak. It’s just a matter of being aware of it and doing it on purpose.

When Paul started to talk again, words that most of us would consider difficult—words that most of us don’t even know, like “tesseract”—came to him more easily than simple words like “telephone.” How could that be?

My hunch is that words we learn as children are processed by the key language areas of the brain—which were killed in Paul’s stroke—but that the words we learn as adults, professionally, in hobbies, as a foreign language, are processed elsewhere. Once he had access to those words—many of which I understood—we had a way to communicate a little. Very metaphorically at first, almost in runes. He’d say things in weird roundabout ways, some of which were very poetic or funny, and I had to decipher what he really meant.

We ordinary people and even a lot of doctors and therapists tend to treat an adult who can’t speak as if he or she were a child. Does it seem that the medical establishment in general tends to treat sick people like children? Do you think that has an effect on the healing process?

Yes, I do. Remember the old adage: “You can’t tell a book by its cover”? When someone has a speaking disorder, they may sound a bit like a child trying to talk, and people often assume they don’t have a smart, grown-up mind chattering away inside. But they do. The inner monologue is still there, and they know what they want to say. The brain’s wiring has been snipped and they can no longer retrieve the right words or move the mouth to utter them. It also means we need to help them explore novel ways to communicate, ones tailor-made to their own interests and strengths. Everyone has a different history, different hobbies, and passions. Alas, we often underestimate them, and don’t believe they’re capable of improving.

You write of wordplay and language games having a huge role in Paul’s recovery. From your point of view as a science writer, is there real evidence that play can actually be healing?

Yes, as many studies have shown, hope, acceptance by others, and belief in one’s ability to heal correlate highly with positive outcomes. Play helps children learn about the world and feel at home in it; it literally shapes the brain. The same is true for adults—play helps the brain to grow new connections and find unused pathways. Play is essential for creative problem-solving, for trying new things and making discoveries. Play connects us to others in richly rewarding ways. It triggers the release of endorphins, which lifts the mood, and helps to focus the brain, making hard work pleasurable, and it boosts creativity. Paradoxically, play is relaxing and calming at the same time that it’s stimulating. Laughter provides the brain with more oxygen, lowers blood pressure, and strengthens the immune system. So it recharges us, excites and energizes us.

As a writer, would you go even further to say that wordplay, in particular, might have a role in mental, emotional, even physical health?

Emotionally, few things are as comforting as finding the right words for what we experience and how we feel. We don’t really know how we feel about something until we put it in words. Without the paperweight of words, ideas float away and vanish into an inconsequential distance. Language helps to clarify and shape thought. We remember hues better if we know their names.

Should doctors prescribe a daily dose of poetry?

Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Among other things, poems are vats of mindfulness. In a high-speed, easily distracted world, poets take the time to pay attention to things, all the subtle human dramas, predicaments, and feelings, including the countless feelings for which we have no name. Words are human-made, but feelings aren’t. As a result, much of our experience from birth to death remains inexpressible because we can’t find the right words for it. By combining words in subtly charged ways, poets bridge some of those spaces and give a voice to our deepest sense of humanity.

You have written many books about nature, and your study of the natural world is obviously more than just an intellectual pursuit. It seems that you find a great deal of solace and a kind of spiritual sustenance in nature. Yet nature did this horrible thing to your husband. How does that square with your worldview?

If only nature were a personage who could be flattered, bribed, appealed to in some way, and blamed for bad luck, bad design, or bad choices, a green-robed titan wielding lightning and pestilence. Or delivering golden eggs. But nature is a seamless web of infinite ingredients and life forms. So there’s no one to blame. The great adventure of being alive on our crazy blue planet in space includes all the accidents, gifts, and mindless (but nonetheless clever) strategems of evolution, including some that plague and destroy us.