If you click on the link on this blog to The 19th Floor you will see a succinct personal narrative by Mark Siegel about the ingrained and committed life force that keeps him and tens of thousands of other people with disabilities thinking about ways to avoid being institutionalized. Mark is an attorney in Minneapolis but he’s always just a quick turn of events away from having his independence taken away.
Disability is a tough subject for those of us who would write personal narratives because frankly the conditions of disablement place us in provisional states of being and that uncertainty is a daily thing, not some abstract French philosophical condition. As a blind person I must cross the street with the knowledge that I could be a-goner. And because I believe that consciousness is sacred I tend to recite poems in my head while I’m crossing in traffic.
Perhaps I will leave this world unexpectedly while fetching a cup of coffee. Perhaps I will sail out into the stars with Walt Whitman in my final orbit.
Disability is about living freely and it has some sobering and often unspoken realities as well.
Here’s a good poem for crossing the street:
"Mankind owns four things
That are of no use at sea:
anchor, rudder, oars,
and the fear of going down."
– Antonio Machado
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 