Disability as Wild Spirit

We should say, those of us who traffic in the analysis of disabilities, and moreover in the analysis of the symbolism of disabling illnesses, that the premise that disability is a means of intellectual strength is not broadly understood.

A body challenged is in symbolic terms conceived as a trembling and despoiled ruin so that the able bodied read disability with the grayness of fear. Meanwhile people with disabilities persist in writing narratives of overcoming "the affliction" in terms that perpetuate the oozy despoilments of the broken body. Seldom do we see disability conceived as wild spirit, the attainment of alternate speed. I believe that disability must be understood as epistemology, philosophy, as poetry.

As William Empson once wrote in his poem "To an Old Lady": "Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet/Revere; do not presume to think her wasted."

But let's look beyond reactive figures. Let us suppose the old lady knows something?

Suppose that blindness, deafness, autism, the ague, suppose it was suddenly rich, spawning roses and snows of the mind.

The blind man was incorrigibly mathematical. He understood a great deal about the sunlight in the garden which hardens and grows cold. He did not need to beg for pardon.

The deaf woman was never aimless and alone. In silence she saw (or felt) the arbitrary qualities of the architecture. No one asked her for advice.

Disability is soundlessly incompatible with the "too much talk" of able bodied minutes.

The able bodied sense their values blurred when pausing even minutely to think of altered bodies. Figurative bodies are epistemological engines burgeoning all around us and miscast as prisons.

The broken body was suddenly rich and its half vision was a long flowing net of gold.

 

S.K.

Comments

[Astrid]

So how is your description of disability in this post, different fromt he "spiritually gifted" stereotype? I at least have had people (often but not necessarily religious people) tell me something like: "Oh you may be physically blind, but within the mind you must have so much vision." It does not, to me,s ound like a compliment: I am not spiritually/intuitively gifted (and if I were, it'd be unrelated to my blindness). I may notice sounds that sighted people don't notice, bu tnot only is it not always a blessing, but sighted people *could* notice these same sounds if they paid more attention.

Of course, I agree with you that the "helpless creature" stereotype is as harmful, but why do you need to substitute it with another symbolism, rather than just asuming that disability is as human as any other characteristic is? Maybe I misunderstood you and you were meaning it only in the poetic sense (although in that case I think I've seen plenty poems using this symbolism), but I'm not sure.

[Connie/Stephen Kuusisto]

I seldom respond to comments on my posts but Astrid's remarks are worth a zap back. In calling for an understanding that disabilities offer their own ways of knowing I am suggesting that each mind has capacities that are not sufficiently understood. This is doubly so for the person with a disability. Spiritual sentimentality always suggests that the blind must have inner vision but my argument would be that the blind can find their ways or be infinitely better at mathematics or perceptive in hundreds of ways that have a good deal to do with the neuro-plasticity of the mind. This idea sounds at first like Victorian sentiment, but it differs in several ways. Nor in this instance do I intend to sound like Oliver Sachs whose heraldic representations of disabled people are often designed to say, "Wow, look at what an interesting thing this disabled person is." What I mean to suggest is that the mind, all minds, are dynamically talented and superbly capable and that in a world still enthused by standards of I.Q. and of "outcomes measurements" --both forms of analysis that spring from 19th century efforts to warehouse people with disabilities--that until we understand the vast capacities of mindfulness we will not understand the varied carols we all sing. Finally I'll say that if you talk too much to church types you will always hear the same nonsense. I like church. But I don't take my intellectual life from what I hear at the tea and cookie hour. Blindness doesn't make you a poet. But it can make you a very fast thinker when you need to think. Notice I use the word "can". There are people for whom none of these thoughts will apply. Sic vita...