I, Ripper

I laughed, loving again a wit based on shock, which I had not encountered in so pure a form. Perhaps Wilde had it in him, for his was also a sharpness of the knife as applied to moral convention (and how, as it turned out, poor man!). I wondered then, as I do now, if Wilde knew Dare and borrowed from him. I knew I would borrow from Dare. And I certainly have!

“So,” he said, “the Irish journalist who’s really a music critic wants a solution to the mystery of J-U-W-E, does he?”

“I’ve read and heard so many, I yearn for a thing I can believe in.”

“Not for you, then, satanic or Masonic ritual, ancient cockney slang, the ravings of a ill-educated lout who cannot spell a three-letter word and would, if challenged, produce C-A-E-T for cat? Are there others?”

“Some seem to think it Chinese. Or rather the pronunciation of a Chinese pictogram. Others place its derivation in the steppes, where Russia runs out and tribal Cossack elements begin. Language, most agree, is at the heart of it.”

“I do, too. Indeed, it is language.”

He reached into a briefcase I had not noticed and pulled out a volume, not a book but more than a newspaper, a kind of heavily bound journal of the sort I would later learn was a part of medical and scientific worlds.

“Here is your answer,” he said, “and congratulations on being the second man in London to behold it.”

I took it eagerly.

“Pages 132 through 139,” he said helpfully.

Alas, they were in German, as was the whole damned thing.

“Sir, I have no German.”

“Why, you have been advertised to me as a sort of genius.”

“I have taught myself Pitman shorthand and am able to read French, which I taught myself as well. I am known as a wit and have some potential as a writer. But that is where it stops, alas.”

“All right, then. The journal you have before you is Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Augenheilkunde. Which playfully translates into the ‘Journal of Comparative Ophthamology.’ On the pages specified, a brilliant German opthamalogist – that is, eye doctor – named Rudolf Berlin has published a study entitled Eine besondere Art der Worthblindheit (Dyslexie). Does that clear things up a bit for you?”

He was playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse. But he wasn’t meaning to eat me – rather, to enlighten me. To do so, he had to destroy me. Thus is education built.

“You know it hasn’t, sir,” I said.

“I think rather too much of myself, don’t I? I find myself so amusing. Always had that problem. All right, then, Herr Doktor Berlin’s title translates as ‘A Special Kind of Word Blindness,’ and in parentheses he has coined a term for a condition relevant to our inquiry here.”

“And that is—”

“This condition posits an interference between what the eye records and what the brain receives. He called it dyslexie, or in our more felicitous tongue, dyslexia.”

“You’re saying—” I was struggling with the concept.

“I am saying Jack has a condition known not as stupidity or insanity or immorality or even cannibalism, but while he may indeed have all those, his condition is scientifically called dyslexia. He is dyslexic.”

I nodded, even if my eyes were occluded with confusion.

“Put simply: He looks at the letters J-E-W-S and that is what he sees, but as his eyes send that information brainward, they become, by tangled paths not yet understood, J-U-W-E-S. To him, J-U-W-E-S is objective reality. He has no idea he’s ‘misspelling,’ though assuming that he’s mature, he’s presumably aware that he has certain spelling and reading problems, but as no diagnosis for his condition existed until last year, he has spent his life quietly devising strategies to get around it. His friends, his family, his society, none of them has any idea he has this condition because he has gotten so damned good at hiding it. But it tells us certain things. For example, he is certain not to have a job in any firm or institution that demands carefully written reports, which lets out most forms of science, medicine being one. There goes the mad-surgeon theory. His infirmity would hold him back, even make him a laughingstock. He must therefore be in some action- or behavior-intensive line of work, such as policeman or soldier, perhaps a surveyor, or an architect. His form of the condition may not at all affect his acuity with numbers or images, so he could be an engineer, a retailer, a manufacturer, what have you. He might be very gifted in verbal expression, and thus a barrister, a sales representative, a stockbroker, a carnival barker.