Planet of the Blind

“Creative Writing and Disability Studies: Liminal Epistemologies”

--“Life is a hospital where every patient is obsessed by the desire of changing beds.”
--Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen


1.

What can we learn from poetry about the body and the culture of bodies? Is what we see in a poem merely a figurative illustration of extrinsic historical or political truths or can a poem create a new and unforeseen nexus of identity and consciousness? As scholars concerned with the social construction of disability identity we know instinctively that the answer to the question is determined by our own rhetorical stance toward figuration. A poet is Aristotelian if she’s aiming to look beyond history for the subject of her poem. A poet is essentially Platonic if she is working in the service of verisimilitude. These categories aside we know that Ezra Pound was echoing Aristotle when he said that the poet is “the antennae of the race”. The Aristotelian imagination probes in the unknown space ahead and reports back to the great segmented worm of culture.The poet Richard Wilbur writes: “The mind is like some bat/ Beating about in caverns all alone/ Trying by a kind of senseless wit/ Not to conclude against a wall of stone.” Poetry is instinctive, far-seeing in its peculiar interiority, re-constructing the world that surrounds it. This vision of poetry holds that figurative language is exploratory, (neo)constructionist, progressive, lyrically alive.

2.

Again Baudelaire: “It always seems to me that I should be happy anywhere but where I am, and this question of moving is one that I am eternally discussing with my soul.” One can say that lyric poetry in general is concerned with moving as an operation that defies analysis. The soul is always the totem of irresolvable and competing desires. In poetry the soul is a synonym for the reliquary; it is a place. We position the furniture of our suffering in the soul’s room. But the lyric insists there is life outside the hospital--life beyond the ward. Notice that lyric poetry concerns itself with containment. One can add adjectives that work well with suppression: abject containment, unaware containment, irrational containment—disability studies scholars will recognize this impressionistic terrain as inherently akin to the historic figurative language of disability—the lyric concerns itself with the conditions of individual abjection and is always therefore a fit medium for exploring disability awareness. The modernist Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo wrote the following lyric in the 1930’s as Italy was descending into Fascism:

And Suddenly It’s Evening

Each of us is alone
At the center of the earth,
Pierced by a ray of sunlight,
And suddenly it’s evening.

I don’t know of any more beautiful cris de couer from the Age of Existentialism. My feeling is that lyric discord, rendered almost always in figurative darkness represents the creation of what the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung referred to as “individuation” a state where the conscious and unconscious modes of thought are brought into harmony. The condition of the mind in such poems is fearful, repressed, circumscribed, and lost. The lyric mindscape is blindness whether the poet behind the poem is literally blind or not. The lyric occasion does not represent blindness. It merely works from the epistemological and psychic locus of blindness. I do not mean figurative blindness but the very real step-by-step navigation of the unknown. The urgencies of perception are necessarily reckoned with care.


3.

Claiming disability (Simi Linton’s term) is to claim the lyric. In turn the lyric is the mode of poetry that best resists the falsifications of narrative imprinting. If people with disabilities have been exiled by history, by the architectures of cities and the policies of the state, then the lyric and ironic form of awareness is central to locating a more vital language. The exile that belongs to oneself,/the interior exile…(Richard Howard) We claim disability by lyric impulse. And by lyric impulse we rearrange the terms of awareness. The lyric mode is concerned with momentum rather than certainty. This is the gnomon of lyric consciousness: darkness can be navigated. The claiming of disability is the successful transition from static language into the language of momentum. But of particular importance in this instance is the brevity of the lyric impulse. The urgency of short forms reflects the self-awareness of blocked paths and closed systems of language. The lyric reinvents the psychic occasion of that human urgency much as a formal design in prosody will force a poet to achieve new effects in verse. Igor Stravinsky put it this way: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. We are in a hurry. We must tell the truth about the catastrophe that is human consciousness. And like Emily Dickinson who feared the loss of her eyesight we will tell the truth but “tell it slant”—the lyric writer may not have a sufficiency of time.

4.

Poetry about the body looks beyond the constraints of physicality. The lyric is in this manner a metaphysical pursuit. William Blake’s sick rose is the mandala of consciousness:

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

The body is not our own. In lyric time the body is faced with the urgencies of the Elizabethan memento mori. This self-awareness we describe in terms of the body is equivalent to what disability advocates refer to as the condition of being “temporarily abled” but it’s useful to understand this condition as a crucial circumstance of imaginative and spiritual consciousness.
One thinks of T.S. Eliot’s narrator in “Gerontian”: “I an old man,/A dull head among windy spaces.” How should consciousness proceed in the company of the failing body? This has always been the lyric occasion. In her booklength poem an Atlas of the Difficult World Adrienne Rich writes:


I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.


5.

Lyric consciousness is “stripped” consciousness. The word is menacing because the world is invariably opposed to youth, sexual freedom, multi-racial identities, disabilities, the poor…
In Adrienne Rich’s poem momentum and the deciphering of language are equivalent. The lyric occasion demands a larger future because it is the epistemological equivalent of the alphabet—
a new alphabet, one acquired in transition or in pain. Emily Dickinson thinks of this epistemological circumstance as an equation:


I reason, earth is short,
And anguish absolute,
And many hurt;
But what of that?
I reason, we could die:
The best vitality
Cannot excel decay;
But what of that?
I reason that in heaven
Somehow, it will be even,
Some new equation given;
But what of that?


The lyric intelligence is Emersonian, ”transcendental” and concerned with instinctual knowing. Lyric poetry is not inherently opposed to materialism or the body—but neither is it concerned with the body as the figurative representative of spiritual or divine perfection. The broken body is as good as the one without blemish. But what of that? In this view the body is not a vehicle of transcendence. The lyric is akin to Emerson’s “other half” of man—the mind beyond the body’s confining narrative preoccupations with the establishment of a representational self.

6.

As it became a component of English departments the discipline of creative writing began to be understood as the teaching of craft. But the signature work of contemporary poetry has been concerned with the narrative constraints of identity politics and the languages of social enforcement. Poets as diverse as W.S. Merwin, Gregory Orr, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Primus St. John, Patricia Goedicke and hundreds of others have turned the lyric impulse toward the (re)visioning of social and intellectual freedom. It seems right that in “claiming disability” the work of poets should occupy more than passing interest to the emerging field of disability studies.
In turn the crucial question is “What can (re)visioning suggest in disability terms?”


7.

Walt Whitman is the progenitor of the “disability memoir.” His discovery of lyric prose, first as a hospice nurse, and then as a man experiencing paralysis represents the creation of a wholly conscious rendering of altered physicality in prose. Whitman begins his reminiscence in a wholly new mode. This is not the metaphorized body of the strapping, ideologically constructed man of robust, democratic labor:

Specimen Days

A HAPPY HOUR'S COMMAND
Down in the Woods, July 2d, 1882. -- If I do it at all I must delay no
longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of
diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-'65, Nature-notes of 1877-'81, with
Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and tied by a big
string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this hour, --
(and what a day! what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and
blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never
before so filling me body and soul) -- to go home, untie the bundle, reel out
diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another,
into print-pages. (Whitman 689)


This is the lyric Whitman, the disabled poet working to shape and re-shape his memories as well as his present circumstances. He does so with fragments, jottings, things untied, things untidy, nature notes, bureaucratic memoranda… He is announcing his intention to create a “lyric collage” –and by announcing that this is for the printed page he is also announcing that this is a work of art, one created out of a new urgency.
Here is Whitman again, writing of his increasing paralysis and its effect on his ways of living:

Quit work at Washington, and moved to Camden, New Jersey -- where I have lived since, receiving many buffets and some precious caresses -- and now write these lines. Since then, (1874-'91) a long stretch of illness, or half-illness, with occasional lulls. During these latter, have revised and printed over all my books -- Bro't out "November Boughs" -- and at intervals leisurely and exploringly travel'd to the Prairie States, the Rocky Mountains, Canada, to New York, to my birthplace in Long Island, and to Boston. But physical disability and the war-paralysis above alluded to have settled upon me more and more, the last year or so. Am now (1891) domicil'd, and have been for some years, in this little old cottage and lot in Mickle Street, Camden, with a house-keeper and man nurse. Bodily I am completely disabled, but still write for publication. I keep generally buoyant spirits, write often as there comes any lull in physical sufferings, get in the sun and down to the river whenever I can, retain fair appetite, assimilation and digestion, sensibilities acute as ever, the strength and volition of my right arm good, eyesight dimming, but brain normal, and retain my heart's and soul's unmitigated faith not only in their own original literary plans, but in the essential bulk of American humanity east and west, north and south, city and country, through thick and thin, to the last. Nor must I forget, in conclusion, a special, prayerful, thankful God's blessing to my dear firm friends and personal helpers, men and women, home and foreign, old and young."


In lyric terms this prose is necessary to assure the poet’s survival. Gregory Orr’s useful polarities of lyric incitement come to mind: Whitman is experiencing “extremities of subjectivity” as well as the “outer circumstances [of] poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one.” As Orr points out: “This survival begins when we "translate" our crisis into language--where we give it symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it” --see Orr's insightful book "Poetry of Survival" the most elegant analysis of crisis recast as fragmentary immanence.

SK



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No Odd Job Too Small

Have you been pining for another deformed criminal mastermind?  Are you tired of all the clean cut post-modern corporate bad guys who can’t be distinguished from your local insurance agent?  Are "thrillers" and detective novels letting you down when what you need is some old fashioned freak show figuration?

Well rest assured.  The latest James Bond novel, "Devil May Care (James Bond) " written by Sebastian Faulks (under the imprimatur of Ian Fleming Productions) carries on the misadventures in the "Fleming-way" world of disability villainy.

The writing is terrible and you’ll have to stagger over more patriarchal cold war clichés than one supposed could be arranged between the covers of a single book, but that’s okay because the chief evil-doer is a dude named Gorner who used to be a Nazi but then became a Commie and all because "back in the day" when he was a student at a British prep school the other boys made fun of his deformed left hand.

Bond learns of him from "M" and here’s how it goes:

"The man crops up everywhere.  One of his hobbies is aviation.  He has two private planes.  He spends a good deal of time in Paris, but I don't think you'll have much difficulty in recognizing him."

"Why's that?" said Bond.

"His left hand," said M, sitting down again, and staring Bond squarely in the eye.  "It's a monkey's paw."

"What?"

"An extremely rare congenital deformity.  There's a condition known as main de singe, or monkey's hand, which is when the thumb makes a straight line with the fingers and is termed 'un-opposable'.  Being in the same plane as the other digits, it can't grip.  It's like picking up a pencil between two fingers." M demonstrated what he meant.  "It can be done, but not very well.  The development of the opposable thumb was an important mutation for Homo sapiens from his ancestors.  But what Gorner has is something more.  The whole hand is completely that of an ape.  With hair up to the wrist and beyond."

Something was stirring in Bond's memory.  "So it would be larger than the right hand," he said.

"Presumably.  It's very rare, though not unique, I believe."

Yep.  In "Devil May Care" (the title is completely irrelevant) you get a socio-pathologized Nazi-cum-Commie Social-Darwinized "missing link" who wears an oversized white glove in a vain attempt to hide his monkey paw.

The book aims for balance because Bond’s best friend, the redoubtable Felix Leiter of the CIA has lost a leg and an arm and now gets around on his true grit.  So you get dueling cripples in this book which of course makes the whole thing acceptable.

I can only add that this book should be divided into halves.  Each half should then be thrown away.  You can accomplish this whether your thumbs either do or do not work.

Trust me.

S.K.

Harriet McBryde Johnson: She will be deeply missed.

Last night over dinner with friends I learned that Harriet McBryde Johnson has passed away.

My first thought was: “How can we tell our sorrow from our bread?”

We had been talking around the table about untimely death. Not so long ago my friend Deborah Tall died young from breast cancer. She was just hitting her stride as a poet and editor. Her memoir “A Family of Strangers” (which was Published just weeks before her death) is a stunning accomplishment.

Now Harriet has died at 50.

America has lost a disability rights leader and a pioneering voice for dignity and justice.

I don’t want to write obituary prose. I can’t bring myself to do it.

Harriet McBryde Johnson’s wonderful memoir “Too Late to Die Young” should be on America’s summer reading list.

She had the unshakable determination to stand up for the rights of the disabled and she took on public figures who would demean or discount the lives of people whose disabilities scare the pants off of shallow “normates”.

When Jerry Lewis opined in a 1990 “Parade Magazine” piece that in his view being disabled must be like being half a person—Harriet McBryde Johnson took him on.

When Peter Singer opined that certain lives are not worth living she took him on.

She took people on in court as an able attorney.

She took on the Democratic party when it couldn’t see why Terry Schiavo’s story was more than just one family’s tragedy.

She fought for the dignity of human life and fought those forces that would diminish our human experience with sophistry and outworn symbolism.

She will be deeply missed.

Let us carry her flag.

S.K.

LINKS:

Yesterday, from Kay Olson's The Gimp Parade, where you will also find numerous links to her writings:

Overwhelmingly sad news today: Harriet McBryde Johnson has died at age 50.

Image description: The photo shows Johnson in a flowered-print navy dress looking toward the camera. She sits in her wheelchair, though the image is a close-up focusing on her and not the chair. Johnson leans forward, right elbow on knee, chin in right hand. She's a middle-aged white woman with dark hair in a very long braid trailing over her shoulder and into her lap. She's not quite smiling, but looking interestedly back at you.

The Post and Courier of Charleston, SC, provides a preliminary notice, with a more formal obituary expected soon

Also:

Beth Haller from Media dis&dat,
at a loss for words,
Sad News,
RIP, Harriet McBryde Johnson

New Book: The Lolita Effect

I was out of town - As the mother of two I'm sorry I missed this reading... ~ Connie

University of Iowa News Release
April 25, 2008

Professor: profit motives behind sexualization of 'tween girls

At Abercrombie & Fitch, little girls were sold thong underwear tagged with the phrases "eye candy" and "wink wink." In Britain, preschoolers could learn to strip with their very own Peekaboo Pole-Dancing Kits -- complete with kiddie garter belts and play money. And 'tween readers of the magazine Seventeen discovered "405 ways to look hot" like Paris Hilton.

This kind of sexualization of 'tween girls - those between the ages of 8 and 12 -- in pop culture and advertising is a growing problem fueled by marketers' efforts to create cradle-to-grave consumers, a University of Iowa journalism professor argues in her new book.

Gigi Durham will read from "The Lolita Effect" at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 8 at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City.

"A lot of very sexual products are being marketed to very young kids," Durham said. "I'm criticizing the unhealthy and damaging representations of girls' sexuality, and how the media present girls' sexuality in a way that's tied to their profit motives. The body ideals presented in the media are virtually impossible to attain, but girls don't always realize that, and they'll buy an awful lot of products to try to achieve those bodies. There's endless consumerism built around that."

Match Girls For Everyone!

Why do I hate novels with this kind of plot? And why are so many of them being written these days? The "young girl who leaves home without a plan and no clue novel" is everywhere This is the plot summary for Fay a novel by Larry Brown. Read on:

Fay Jones had no education, hardly any shell you can't call what her father's been tryin’ with her since she grew up "love." So, at the ripe age of seventeen, Fay Jones leaves home. She lights out alone, wearing her only dress and her rotting sneakers, carrying a purse with a half pack of cigarettes and two dollar bills. Even in 1985 Mississippi, two dollars won't go far on the road. She's headed for the bright lights and big times and even she knows she needs help getting there. But help's not hard to come by when you look like Fay. There's a highway patrolman who gives her a lift, with a detour to his own place. There are truck drivers who pull over to pick her up, no questions asked. There's a crop duster pilot with money for a night or two on the town. And finally there's a strip joint bouncer who deals on the side. At the end of this suspenseful, compulsively readable novel, there are five dead bodies stacked up in Fay's wake. Fay herself is sighted for the last time in New Orleans. She'll make it, whatever making it means, because Fay's got what it takes: beauty, a certain kind of innocent appeal, and the instinct for survival.

I don’t mean to be disingenuous. I really don’t know why these match girl novels, almost exclusively written by men, are all over the place.

Is it simply a function of male boomers who now have daughters working out their conflicted feminist schadenfreude?

SK

Oprah, If Only You Had Read the Book!

In 1998 I published a memoir entitled “Planet of the Blind” and much to my delight some good reviewers praised the book.  The memoir received strong reviews in The New York Times and USA Today and suddenly I was invited to be a guest on National Public Radio’s superb program “Talk of the Nation”.

This was heady stuff for a guy who had been writing poetry for 18 years.  In the poetry world you are very lucky if you have a hundred readers and let me tell you, 100 readers is pretty much beyond the wildest dreams of most of the talented and deserving poets I’ve met along the road.

Each time something good happened where the book was concerned my wife would say, jokingly, “Yeah, that’s great; just let me know when Oprah calls”  We would chuckle about that.

The reason we’d laugh about Oprah is that “Planet of the Blind” is not the kind of book that haunts the bestseller lists.  The book isn’t lurid; it’s not angry; it doesn’t even have much of a plot.  In fact it’s such an odd book that it’s difficult to describe.  It’s in part a history of blindness in America and part a “coming of age” story by a writer who largely grew up feeling ashamed of his blindness.  The story isn’t particularly unusual and even worse from a sales standpoint; I have an addiction for big words. 

Congratulations Simi Linton, author of "My Body Politic"

As mentioned previously on this blog, Simi Linton has a blog called Disability Culture Watch, which she categorizes as "A disability-focused commentary on the arts".  Here is an excerpt from her "About" page:

"There is an emerging cadre of dancers, actors, writers, performance artists, and painters who are actively engaging with both the fact and idea of disability. The most exciting work explores what disability provides the artist, rather than what feats someone can perform despite disability. When disabled artists use their unique bodies and voices, something innovative happens.  My job is to follow these turns and twists on the cultural map, selectively reporting and critiquing this vital phenomena."

Simi is the author of My Body Politic (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and recently she has been awarded grants, one from the Puffin Foundation and one from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, to develop a stage adaptation for the book.  Congratulations, Simi!  We can't wait!

With permission from Simi, the summary of her book, as found on her web site, is copied below for our review.  Follow this link to learn more, as well as to hear two selections from the book, read by the author herself. 

As mentioned previously on this blog, Simi Linton has a blog called Disability Culture Watch, which she categorizes as "A disability-focused commentary on the arts".  Here is an excerpt from her "About" page:

"There is an emerging cadre of dancers, actors, writers, performance artists, and painters who are actively engaging with both the fact and idea of disability. The most exciting work explores what disability provides the artist, rather than what feats someone can perform despite disability. When disabled artists use their unique bodies and voices, something innovative happens.  My job is to follow these turns and twists on the cultural map, selectively reporting and critiquing this vital phenomena."

Simi is the author of My Body Politic (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and recently she has been awarded grants, one from the Puffin Foundation and one from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, to develop a stage adaptation for the book.  Congratulations, Simi!  We can't wait!

With permission from Simi, the summary of her book, as found on her web site, is copied below for our review.  Follow this link to learn more, as well as to hear two selections from the book, read by the author herself. 

Superfest International Disability Film Festival

Guess whose book was made into a film that won an award?!  Yep!  Keep reading! 

Thank you to Day Al-Mohamed at Day in Washington for bringing this to our attention.  Congratulations to Sven Werner of Luxemberg for winning the Pamela K. Walker Award.  Our congratulations to ALL actually...

The following is taken from the Superfest 2007 Awards page:

SUPERFEST XXVII WINNERS 

Congratulations to this year's award winners!
   
The following contains a list and descriptions of the     award-winners for SUPERFEST XXVII (2007).
To browse through photos from the award-winning films, click here.

Superfest XXVII Award Winners' List     

Best of Festival   

• The Epidemic [51 min.] Producer: Niels Frandsen, Denmark

Excellence Awards   

• No Bigger Than a Minute [52:30 min.] Producer: Steven Delano, U.S.
• Outsider: The Life and Art of Judith Scott[26 min.] Producer: Betsy Bayha, U.S. 

Achievement Awards    

• Headstrong: Inside the Hidden World of Dyslexia and ADHD [26:41 min.]                         Producers: Chloe Sladden, Ben Foss, Steve Schecter, U.S.
• Stroke [58 min.] Producer: Katarina Peters, Germany
• The Rest of My Life: Stories of Trauma Survivors [25 min.]                                            Producer: Gabriel Ledger, M.D., U.S.   

Merit Awards   

• Carmela [30 min.] Producer: Guillermo Lopez Perez, Mexico
• Darius Goes West: The Roll of His Life[92 min.] Producer: Roll With Me Productions, U.S.
• Mercury Stole My Fire [12:12 min.] Producer: Anitra Nelson, Australia
• Seeing Is Believing [13 min.] Producer: Tofik Shakhverdiev, Russia
• Symphony of Silence [22 min.] Producer: Yves J. Ma, Canada

Spirit Award

• No Bigger Than a Minute [50:15 min.] Producer: Steven Delano, U.S.    

Pamela K. Walker Award   

• Planet of the Blind [20 min.] Producer: Sven Werner, Luxemburg

Emerging Artist Award   

• Let Us Spell It Out for You [2:36 min.]  Producer: Joseph Santini, US.

The Clever Title: Book Reviews and Other Cool Things

I would like to recommend a new literature and "other cool stuff" blog called: "The Clever Title: Book Reviews and Other Cool Things" 

This new blog is hosted, in part, by Ira Sukrungruang, a professor of creative writing at the State University of New York at Oswego.  Ira is a terrific writer, but he's also a great reader and he has what the Victorians used to call a "circle" and what the French used to call an "atelier" and which they call "a posse" in the hood--namely, he has sharp friends who think about the human oddity known as "bookishness"--and which the Victorians called "Englishness" and which the French call "le mot just" and which they call in the hood "hip hop" and which they call in Finland,"not killing yourself because the weather is unsupportive of primate life which is why books were invented in the first place".  (That is, of course, all one word in Finnish.) 

I encourage you to visit this new blog today!  Tell 'em Steve K. sent you...

S.K.

Thank you Laura Hershey of BeyondChron: San Francisco's Alternative Online Daily News

And thank you to Kay Olson of The Gimp Parade for pointing us to this article:

The Dilemma for Disabled Authors, by Laura Hershey‚ Jul. 26‚ 2007 at BeyondChron: San Francisco's Alternative Online Daily News.  Here is an excerpt:

"Three recent books by disabled authors take entirely fresh approaches to the subject of disability, presenting it as a phenomenon both intensely personal and culturally significant.  Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio by Anne Finger, Eavesdropping: A Life by Ear by Stephen Kuusisto, and Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller by Georgina Kleege all follow their own logic; they do not exist in order to answer the same old questions.

They pose new questions -- about history and violence and voice, about sound and sensuality, about education and self-determination. None of these books offer tragedy, platitudes, or easy inspiration. They all tell honest, compelling stories without skirting either individual hardship or social injustice. All three deserve to be widely read for the depth of their exploration, and for the beauty of their language."