The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred

West Tisbury

Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., USA

July 15, 1994

Dear Miss Vogel,

First I would like to thank you for your visit, which has left me many precious memories, and which has also, I hope, answered some of your questions. Genealogy is for me an uncharted area, but in your case, it would be hard not to draw the same conclusions as you have done: namely, that while you have kept the woman’s surname, mine is, as you so rightly guessed, the anglicised form of our ancestor’s German name.

I am old now, as the first Barefoot came to be in his day, and the price I’m paying for extreme old age is loneliness. If your guesses prove correct, then you are my closest living relative on my father’s side.

In Chilmark parish I am the only one left who remembers him. He died in 1914, from the after-effects of mumps, shortly before the outbreak of World War I.

By then he had reached the grand age of 101. That was the same summer as I turned eight, long before mass tourism transformed Martha’s Vineyard into the outdoor museum you encountered during your, alas, far too brief stay on the island. I called him Grandfather, though this was inaccurate: he had outlived all his children and was in fact my great-grandfather.

The attached memoranda are a record of what he told my relatives, in particular my older sisters and myself. The rest is the result of my own research more than half a century ago. Information derived from the archives in Germany is naturally at your disposal. You may find the material from Königsberg of particular interest, the original records, as you know, having disappeared during the chaos of the war years.

When he was still alive I was too young to understand the details of his story: mainly I remember him as a kind-hearted little man, his face concealed behind a cloth mask, an expert at the grammar of sign language who, one day when I was visiting, whispered clear as can be, but without moving his lips:
Better to hold your tongue and be taken for a jester, than to speak and dispense with all doubt of it!
The quote, I later learned, came from Lincoln, whom he had once met.

The first deaf people came to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1790s. Intermarriage caused the handicap to spread throughout the area. In my youth there were deaf people in every family. In Tisbury and Chilmark parishes they made up about a third of the population, in some of the villages all the inhabitants had hearing defects, so in the end the whole island learned sign language. Those of us who could hear grew up bilingual. Indeed I learned sign language even before English, since both my mother and my father had hearing disabilities. Put it this way: the handicap was so common that the idea of deafness didn’t even exist. We never regarded them as “deaf”. It was
we
who lived among
them
, not the other way round. They were the ones who set the cultural climate on the island; their world was our world.

The recessive gene had disappeared by the early fifties, but the old people among us still cling to sign language; not to tell dirty jokes (though that does sometimes happen) or in order to exclude visitors and tourists from our private conversations (which, as you probably noticed, also sometimes happens), but for the simple reason that it was the island’s lingua franca. It was used as often as English. Besides which, it is a more expressive idiom than spoken language. Only recently I read in
National Geographic
about Providence Island in the West Indies, where the population, in much the same way, use an old form of Maya sign language when speaking among themselves. I could send you a copy of the article, you might find it helpful.

For obvious reasons I am most familiar personally with the American episode of Barefoot’s story, though I chose to focus my research on the earlier years of his life, in Europe. According to family legend he mourned your great-great-grandmother so deeply he never again truly loved another woman. This notwithstanding, he had four children with two local women. My sisters and I were the first in our family to be born without handicaps.

Have you ever really asked yourself what
sound
is all about, Miss Vogel? This is a matter of interest for several different reasons, but above all because it indicates blind spots in our relationship to consciousness.

Sounds are vibrations which set the molecules in the air in motion. People who can hear apprehend sound on a scale of twenty to twenty thousand Hertz. Sound waves made up of fewer than twenty vibrations a second are called infrasonic; those made up of more than twenty thousand vibrations are called ultrasonic. Bats live exclusively in ultrasonic spheres; clinically speaking, they can’t hear sound, they sense it. It is in this infrasonic world that alligators, whales, the Pampas ostrich and the cassowary live. Here, too, the idea of hearing is meaningless, since none of these animals can “hear” in the ordinary sense of the word. The alligator, for example, lacks ears. It listens with its body, that is to say, it registers vibrations from the outside world with a sensory nerve under an abdominal layer of skin.

During your stay, you asked which of these worlds Barefoot lived in. I would like to pose the hypothesis that he lived outside of our known hearing index, and that he “heard” on another frequency, hitherto scientifically unknown.

Moreover, during the autopsies carried out immediately after his death, a number of puzzling physical paradoxes appeared. His heart, for instance, was over-dimensioned, twice the size of a normal human heart, despite his being a dwarf. When I came across this curious detail in his medical journal, I interpreted it symbolically: his life, just as that of your great-great-grandmother, is a love story. The doctor wrote that he “lived against all the odds”, with a heart that ought to have stopped in early childhood, only one kidney, only one functioning lung and an abdomen eaten away by tumours which, according to the expertise of the day, were at least half a century old by the time of his death. But the most fascinating of the post-mortem findings were the auditory organs: the vestibule of the inner ear, which in humans makes up the centre of equilibrium, was missing altogether. He ought not, in fact, have been able to walk or move about at all.

A month after his death a more extensive post-mortem was carried out on his corpse at a teratological clinic in Boston. The post-mortem dissector – a specialist on deformities – maintained that the right ear, apart from a slight petrification of the malleus, must have been as good as intact during the earliest years of his childhood, “up to the age of two” was his guess. This contradicted the evidence produced by the first autopsy. For it meant that he must have been able to hear, however slightly, during his infancy.

This could explain his musical talent – the eternal enigma in his biography: how can someone who has been deaf from birth understand and play music? Maybe, as the dissection suggested, during his earliest childhood – before the handicap took over completely – he had been able to discern notes and sounds?

It is extremely difficult for a hearing person to imagine the world of the deaf. You would have to imagine a world in which no sounds exist, no sough of the wind, no voices, no sound of a loved one’s laughter, perhaps no comprehension of what sound is. Someone who is born deaf never speaks of silence, or lack of sound; nor do they complain about being deaf, any more than someone born blind complains about a lack of visual information, since they can’t even imagine what seeing is like. Just as you, Miss Vogel, cannot miss a phenomenon you have never experienced, or a person of whose existence you are unaware, or a place to which you have never been. All this – deafness, blindness – is at best a metaphor.

Lew Wygotski, the renowned defectologist wrote: “Words die giving birth to thoughts, implying thereby that thought and speech transcend one another.” This is along much the same lines as Schopenhauer’s assertion that thoughts die the minute they are dressed in words. Words are but reference points for our experiences, the idea of conversation being to evoke common ground through associations between people. But maybe there are other ways of arriving at the same result. It is sometimes said that a picture says more than a thousand words. So does music, it is a method of conveying emotional states of mind from the creator to the listener.

One thing we can be sure of: a deaf person who has never learned any language at all lives in limbo. People and objects lack names, existence becomes chaotic, a mass of non sequiturs. The idea of questions and answers loses all meaning, abstractions do not exist, such people’s intelligence remains on the level of a two-year-old. For it is through language that the child is introduced into the symbolic sphere of history and the future, it is through language that the small child learns to abstract and classify.

My parents used a language richer by far than English: sign language. Contrary to spoken language, sign language is four dimensional, occurring simultaneously in time and three-dimensional space, thereby conveying an enormous amount of information in a very short time. At only three months a child can learn signs, long before it is mature enough to attempt expressing its emotions in gurgles and words. The first sign I learned was the one for milk. According to my parents I was four months old at the time, that is to say at an age when normal children in normal families are capable only of expressing their hunger and need for breast milk by screaming. My first dreams were of hands communicating by signing, words without sounds, words as visual information, the mute movement of lips, mobile symbols. I still sometimes dream in sign language.

My uncle, Henry Russell-Price, was one of the foremost poets in America, but completely unknown outside a small circle of initiates. He was a sign-language poet. I remember meeting him when I was young, and how his body would start twitching and spontaneously producing signs when a moment of inspiration fell on him. He was a divinely gifted poet, the old people on the island talk about him to this day; I’ve met people from various sign-language groups all over America who can “recite” his verses for hours on end without tiring.

There is so much that hearing people don’t know about deaf people’s culture. About the humour and irony in sign language, about choirs who “sing” using signs, about how it feels to enter a restaurant where all the diners are deaf, the fantastic atmosphere at the tables where hands are signing at lightning speed, strange silences broken only by loud outbursts of laughter when someone has “said” something funny. Or what a breach of etiquette it is to put yourself between two people engaged in sign language, or how rude it is to listen to others’ conversation, that is to say, by staring at their hands.

As I grew up in this culture, it doesn’t feel a bit odd, but when I try to explain it to outsiders I am forced to use similes. It’s the same thing with Barefoot; any attempt to talk about his extraordinary gift and life has always to be in a figurative sense.

Some neurologists maintain that our conscious minds are not in sync with the world around us, and that we experience reality with a slight retardation, with the time it takes for the brain to screen off irrelevant impressions. And maybe it is in the light of this that we should see our forefather’s gift? That he, contrary to people he met, was in tune with the sense impressions, that he lost no time screening off facts, so that, not only did he have access to a greater amount of information, but he was also so quick on the uptake that he seemed to be able to predict what people were thinking?

Again, this is all speculation, impossible to verify. The ego is but a map of a larger consciousness, just as language is a map of the terrain and must not be confused with the terrain itself.

As you may have noticed, Miss Vogel, it is only with a great effort that I am able to define the object of your interest, and only through these paraphrases, similes and related examples. But one thing is for sure, and that is that Barefoot’s extraordinary gift functioned as a substitute for sensory shortcomings.

Every person has his own unique understanding of the world. A missing sense is compensated by another. The deaf hear with their eyes and speak through signing. Through the Tadoma method, Helen Keller developed a way for those who are both deaf and blind to understand the world through touch. By laying fingertips against another person’s lips and larynx, the person who is deaf and blind can “feel” a fellow human speaking; by tracing letters or signs in the hand he can also make himself understood.

Our ancestors were born into a Europe that still looked on the deaf as idiots, and where sign language had not as yet spread, long before Alexander Graham Bell and Helen Keller succeeded in altering our attitude to this handicap. Nature herself compensated Barefoot for his lack of hearing, but in so radical a manner that it does not lend itself to science’s landmarks. That is why my notes have assumed a metaphorical form, in order to try and get to the root of
our
enigma.