Eloquent Brain

The doctors pointed to areas on my dad’s MRI’s and called them eloquent. Eloquent, like the silence falling after a great orator has spoken a final word.

Doctors say brain matter is as soft as tofu, soft enough for a finger to leave an imprint. The cells of my father’s brain tumor descended from a lineage of cells shaped like stars. When cells are cancerous it means that they replicate with enthusiastic disregard for the body’s normal safety checks. Glioblastoma cells are also necrotizing, carnivorous cells that kill neighboring healthy tissue.

“Eloquent cortex is a term that refers to specific brain areas that directly controls function, thus damage to this area generally produces major focal neurological defects”.

Eloquent were the parts of my dad’s brain that executed voluntary motor movements, the parts concerned with walking, standing up from a chair, and kissing cheeks. They are the areas that are concerned with the production and reception of speech. To know words and speak them with our mouths. To understand the jumble of sounds coming to us on air waves as sentences. The areas that know how to make sense of signals coming from the retina, giving the ability to see. It is the eloquent cortex that also controls autonomic responses like breathing. 

These drawings are maps. They are a way of peering into unseen territories and marking them in an effort to understand an abstraction. A mapping of an x-ray of my twelve-year-old torso undergoing treatment for scoliosis, a severe curvature of the spine, or the imaging of my father’s brain tumor as it grew to overcome him. The drawings open up the body to be viewed through its interior, to be seen in its particular vulnerability. They mark the edge of a body, attempting to touch the physical boundaries of a being, in what feels like the pursuit of a ghost.