I know a man who soars above the city every night. In his dreams, he twirls and swirls with his toes kissing the Earth. Everything has motion, he claims, even a body as paralyzed as his own. This man is my father.
我認識一個人, 每晚自由翱翔於城市夜空; 在他的夢裡,翩翩起舞, 腳趾親吻著大地。 萬物皆動,他如此宣告, 縱使全身麻痺如他。
Three years ago, when I found out that my father had suffered a severe stroke in his brain stem, I walked into his room in the ICU at the Montreal Neurological Institute and found him lying deathly still, tethered to a breathing machine. Paralysis had closed over his body slowly, beginning in his toes, then legs, torso, fingers and arms. It made its way up his neck, cutting off his ability to breathe, and stopped just beneath the eyes. He never lost consciousness. Rather, he watched from within as his body shut down, limb by limb, muscle by muscle.
他,就是我的父親。 三年前,當我發現 父親發生嚴重的腦幹中風, 我走進他的加護病房, 在蒙特婁神經學研究中心, 我發現他癱瘓在病床上, 戴著呼吸器, 麻痺緩慢地封閉他的身體, 從腳趾開始,接著是腿, 軀幹、手指和手臂, 一路麻痺到脖子, 阻斷了他的呼吸能力, 繼續上行到眼睛下方才停止。 他從沒有失去意識, 而是從內在觀看這一切, 看著自己的身體停機, 四肢從腳到手, 肌肉一條接著一條。
In that ICU room, I walked up to my father's body,
在加護病房裡,我走向父親的身體,
and with a quivering voice and through tears, I began reciting the alphabet. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K. At K, he blinked his eyes. I began again. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. He blinked again at the letter I, then at T, then at R, and A: Kitra. He said "Kitra, my beauty, don't cry. This is a blessing." There was no audible voice, but my father called out my name powerfully. Just 72 hours after his stroke, he had already embraced the totality of his condition. Despite his extreme physical state, he was completely present with me, guiding, nurturing, and being my father as much if not more than ever before.
我的聲音顫抖,眼淚奔流, 開始逐一唸出英文字母: A、B、C、 D、E、F、G、 H、I、J、K, 唸到 K,他眨了一下眼睛。 然後我再從頭開始, A、B、C、 D、E、F、G、 H、I, 唸到 I,他又眨了一下眼睛。 接著是 T, 接著是 R, 接著是 A, Kitra,我的名字。 他說:「Kitra,我美麗的孩子,別哭, 這...是個祝福。」 父親並沒有發出聲音, 但對我的叫喚卻響亮無比。 中風後才短短 72 個小時, 他已經欣然接受了整件事實。 儘管身體極度受挫, 他卻完全與我同在, 引導我, 呵護我, 做我的父親,絲毫不減, 甚至更甚以往。
Locked-in syndrome is many people's worst nightmare. In French, it's sometimes called "maladie de l'emmuré vivant." Literally, "walled-in-alive disease." For many people, perhaps most, paralysis is an unspeakable horror, but my father's experience losing every system of his body was not an experience of feeling trapped, but rather of turning the psyche inwards, dimming down the external chatter, facing the recesses of his own mind, and in that place, falling in love with life and body anew.
「閉鎖症候群」 是許多人最恐懼的夢靨, 法文有時稱這種狀態為: "maladie de l'emmuré vivant" 意思是:「活生生被圍牆禁錮的疾病」。 對許多人來說,或許是絕大多數, 癱瘓是無以言喻的驚駭。 但是我父親的經驗, 雖然他喪失了全身的功能, 卻不覺得受困, 反而轉向內觀, 靜下外在的擾嚷, 面對自己心靈的潛默。 然後在那深處, 愛上新的生命和身體。
As a rabbi and spiritual man dangling between mind and body, life and death, the paralysis opened up a new awareness for him. He realized he no longer needed to look beyond the corporeal world in order to find the divine. "Paradise is in this body. It's in this world," he said.
父親是位拉比,和屬靈的人, 擺盪在身與心、生與死之間, 癱瘓為他開啟了新的意識, 他領悟到自己不再需要 超越肉體世界, 才能追尋神聖。 「天堂就在這個身體裡面, 就在這個世界。」 他說。
I slept by my father's side for the first four months, tending as much as I could to his every discomfort, understanding the deep human psychological fear of not being able to call out for help. My mother, sisters, brother and I, we surrounded him in a cocoon of healing. We became his mouthpiece, spending hours each day reciting the alphabet as he whispered back sermons and poetry with blinks of his eye. His room, it became our temple of healing. His bedside became a site for those seeking advice and spiritual counsel, and through us, my father was able to speak and uplift, letter by letter, blink by blink. Everything in our world became slow and tender as the din, drama and death of the hospital ward faded into the background. I want to read to you one of the first things that we transcribed in the week following the stroke. He composed a letter, addressing his synagogue congregation, and ended it with the following lines: "When my nape exploded, I entered another dimension: inchoate, sub-planetary, protozoan. Universes are opened and closed continually. There are many when low, who stop growing. Last week, I was brought so low, but I felt the hand of my father around me, and my father brought me back."
頭四個月,我睡在父親身邊, 盡我所能地照顧他, 減輕他所有的不適; 了解那種深層人性心理恐懼, 害怕無法求救。 我的母親、姊妹、弟弟和我, 我們圍著父親,形成醫治的蛹。 我們變成他的發話筒, 每天好幾個小時唸字母, 寫下父親藉著眨眼, 悄訴出來的講道和詩作。 他的病房, 化身為我們醫治的殿堂。 他的床畔, 安慰著前來尋求建議 和屬靈輔導的人。 透過我們, 父親可以說話, 昇華心靈, 一個字母又一個字母, 一眨眼再一眨眼。 我們的世界裡, 一切都變得緩慢而溫柔, 讓醫院病房的喧囂、瘋狂、死亡 淡褪下去。 我想朗讀父親中風後第一個禮拜, 我們聽寫下來的內容。 他寫了一封信, 給教堂的會眾, 信末的幾句話是: 「當我的項頸炸開, 我進入了另一個次元: 初生, 俯瞰塵世, 細微, 一個個宇宙開啟、封閉,生生不息, 很多人在生命的低谷 停止成長。 上星期,我被擊打到如此卑微, 但我感覺到父神的手扶住我, 我的父神把我帶了回來。」
When we weren't his voice, we were his legs and arms. I moved them like I know I would have wanted my own arms and legs to be moved were they still for all the hours of the day. I remember I'd hold his fingers near my face, bending each joint to keep it soft and limber. I'd ask him again and again to visualize the motion, to watch from within as the finger curled and extended, and to move along with it in his mind.
沒有做他的聲音時, 我們是他的雙腳和雙臂。 我移動他的臂膀, 假想我若整天動彈不得時 會希望得到的舒展。 我記得我把他的手指拉近我的臉, 幫他彎曲每一個關節, 以保持柔軟彈性。 我不斷地請他 想像這個動作, 從體內看著每根手指彎曲, 再打開, 用意念跟著手指一起動。
Then, one day, from the corner of my eye, I saw his body slither like a snake, an involuntary spasm passing through the course of his limbs. At first, I thought it was my own hallucination, having spent so much time tending to this one body, so desperate to see anything react on its own. But he told me he felt tingles, sparks of electricity flickering on and off just beneath the surface of the skin. The following week, he began ever so slightly to show muscle resistance. Connections were being made. Body was slowly and gently reawakening, limb by limb, muscle by muscle, twitch by twitch.
有一天,我眼睛的餘光 看見他的身體曲行如蛇, 不自主的痙攣流竄過四肢。 剛開始,我以為是自己的錯覺, 花了這麼多時間照料這癱瘓的身軀, 迫切想看到任何東西自己動起來。 但是他告訴我他有感覺到蜇麻, 斷斷續續的電流 搔著他的皮下。 接下來的一週, 他開始出現極其微弱的肌肉抗力, 刺激和反應開始有連結, 身體柔緩地甦醒, 四肢一個接著一個, 肌肉一條接著一條, 抽動一下接著一下。
As a documentary photographer, I felt the need to photograph each of his first movements like a mother with her newborn. I photographed him taking his first unaided breath, the celebratory moment after he showed muscle resistance for the very first time, the new adapted technologies that allowed him to gain more and more independence. I photographed the care and the love that surrounded him.
身為紀實攝影師, 我覺得必須拍下 他的每一個初始動作, 像母親一樣地記錄新生嬰兒。 我拍下他第一口不需輔助的呼吸、 肌肉抗力乍現帶給我們的歡欣時刻、 以及幫助他更獨立自主的新技術。 我拍下圍繞著他的愛與照料。
But my photographs only told the outside story of a man lying in a hospital bed attached to a breathing machine. I wasn't able to portray his story from within, and so I began to search for a new visual language, one which strived to express the ephemeral quality of his spiritual experience.
但是我只拍得到外在的故事, 述說一個身臥病榻, 接著呼吸器的人。 我無法刻劃他內在的故事, 所以我開始尋找一種新的視覺語言, 努力表達父親精神世界 那種瞬息即逝的感覺。
Finally, I want to share with you a video from a series that I've been working on that tries to express the slow, in-between existence that my father has experienced. As he began to regain his ability to breathe, I started recording his thoughts, and so the voice that you hear in this video is his voice.
最後,我想分享 最近創作的一系列影片之一, 試圖表達父親 滯留生死之間的緩慢存在。 當他漸漸恢復呼吸的能力, 我開始錄下他的思緒, 所以這支影片中講話的是他: 「你必須相信
(Video) Ronnie Cahana: You have to believe you're paralyzed to play the part of a quadriplegic. I don't. In my mind, and in my dreams every night I Chagall-man float over the city twirl and swirl with my toes kissing the floor. I know nothing about the statement of man without motion. Everything has motion. The heart pumps. The body heaves. The mouth moves. We never stagnate. Life triumphs up and down.
自己絲毫不能動彈, 才能扮演 一個四肢癱瘓的人。 但我不相信。 在我的腦海中, 在我的夢境裡, 夜夜, 我化身夏卡爾畫中人物,飄浮起來, 俯瞰城市, 翩翩飛舞, 腳趾親吻著大地。 我完全不知道 何謂無法動彈的人。 萬物皆動。 心會跳動, 身體會喘息, 嘴巴會張合。 我們永遠不會停滯不前, 生命的勝利,高低起伏。」 對我們多數人來說,
Kitra Cahana: For most of us, our muscles begin to twitch and move long before we are conscious, but my father tells me his privilege is living on the far periphery of the human experience. Like an astronaut who sees a perspective that very few of us will ever get to share, he wonders and watches as he takes his first breaths and dreams about crawling back home. So begins life at 57, he says. A toddler has no attitude in its being, but a man insists on his world every day.
我們的肌肉開始抽扭運動, 過一陣子才會意識到。 但是父親告訴我,他的奇異恩典是 能夠活在人類生命經驗的邊陲。 就像太空人有幸欣賞 極少人得以看見的景致, 他驚奇地看著自己重新呼吸, 並且夢想著爬回家門。 他說,就這樣人生從 57 歲開始。 幼童對生命的態度還沒有形成, 但是一個成人每天 都決定著自己的世界。
Few of us will ever have to face physical limitations to the degree that my father has, but we will all have moments of paralysis in our lives. I know I frequently confront walls that feel completely unscalable, but my father insists that there are no dead ends. Instead, he invites me into his space of co-healing to give the very best of myself, and for him to give the very best of himself to me. Paralysis was an opening for him. It was an opportunity to emerge, to rekindle life force, to sit still long enough with himself so as to fall in love with the full continuum of creation.
僅極少數人被迫面對 像我父親這麼極端的身體限制, 但我們都會經歷生命中的停滯。 我知道我就常常面對生命的圍牆, 感覺完全無法超越。 但是我的父親堅持, 生命沒有死胡同。 相反的,他邀請我 進入共同療癒的空間, 讓我展現最好的自己, 而他,也給我最好的父親。 癱瘓對他而言,是個開端, 是生命湧現的契機, 重獲生命的力量, 安靜地獨坐, 久到可以愛上創造的永恆。 現在,父親已經脫離桎梏,
Today, my father is no longer locked in. He moves his neck with ease, has had his feeding peg removed, breathes with his own lungs, speaks slowly with his own quiet voice, and works every day to gain more movement in his paralyzed body. But the work will never be finished. As he says, "I'm living in a broken world, and there is holy work to do."
可以自由地轉動脖子, 也不再需要餵食管, 可以用自己的肺呼吸, 用自己平靜的嗓音慢慢地說話。 每天努力復健, 讓癱瘓的身體增加更多的活動。 但是這工作永遠不會結束。 正如他所說: 「我活在破碎的世界, 還有神聖的工作要做。」
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(觀眾掌聲)