Last fall, my speech therapist suggested I sit down in front of a mirror and watch myself stutter. The idea was to see how, during more severe moments of stuttering, my face contorts in the effort to expel my words. In these instances, I’m at my ugliest and most vulnerable, like a fish gasping on a hook. The mirror exercise, she said, would help me isolate each “secondary characteristic” of my stutter — the eyes squeezing shut or glancing down, the mouth twisting closed or sticking open — in order to address it.
I told her that the thought of doing such a thing, which required not only confronting but also scrutinizing this most dreaded version of myself, made me want to throw up. I felt queasy even reading a decade-old report from a different speech therapist describing my “eye closures and aversions” and “excessive muscular tension in the lips.” Actually seeing them in real time seemed unbearable.
Stuttering feels like a loss of control, first over your speech faculties, then over the way others see you. Their faces betray a mixture of discomfort, confusion and pity. Eventually they’ll either ask if you’re OK or simply look away. The response is understandable: Everything about my halting speech and distorted face signals that something’s wrong. Talking is supposed to be effortless, but when I speak, it can sometimes look painful. Moving through the world, leaving in my wake what feels like a trail of discomfited strangers, I’ve come to fear the sight of my stutter.
A couple of months after that speech-therapy session, I was struck by the memory of a jarring sculpture I once encountered. I had no clue where I’d first seen it or even its name, only the feeling it stirred in me. I turned to Google and finally found it: “The Vexed Man,” one of several dozen “character heads” by the German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. (The sculptures’ titles were assigned not by the artist but by an anonymous writer in 1793.) Made between 1770 and Messerschmidt’s death in 1783, the series of busts depicts faces stretched to their expressive limits — they pucker, gape, scowl. For centuries, their extreme countenances have unsettled viewers and stumped scholars, many of whom consider the sculptures evidence of their creator’s mental decline. The art critic John Russell once described the heads as “people who are at odds with themselves and with life.”
When I see them, I see myself — a stutterer. “Stutterer” is another word for someone who is often at odds with herself and with life. Unlike me, though, Messerschmidt seems to take no issue with making his viewers uneasy. Another of the busts, titled “A Hypocrite and a Slanderer,” depicts a man with his head hung low, eyes cast down; his brows are scrunched together, jaw clenched and mouth locked in a tense frown. I gather from his taut facial muscles that he’s exerting himself, though his averted gaze suggests he’s ashamed of his own efforts, defeated by them.
It’s a state I know well. Taken together with the other heads, he suggests this state deserves to be cast in metal or etched in stone. Lingering over the character heads, I’m moved by Messerschmidt’s decision to preserve these fleeting expressions — the same ones that, when they appear on my own face, I assume are unsightly and unlovable.
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The post What Disturbing Art Can Teach Us About Our Own Shame and Fear appeared first on New York Times.
