What Disability Knows: Part Two

1.

 

People with disabilities know that the physical body, particularly in its most diverse and unusual extensions resists interpretation. At the cultural level interpretation is the reasoned analysis of difference but history shows us there’s no such thing as reason when we are in the provinces of strangeness. Its a mistake of The Enlightenment to have imagined such a possibility.

 

2.

 

Carl Jung:

The vast majority of people are quite incapable of putting themselves individually into the mind of another. This is indeed a singularly rare art, and, truth to tell, it does not take us very far. Even the man whom we think we know best and who assures us himself that we understand him through and through is at bottom a stranger to us. He is “different”. The most we can do, and the best, is to have at least some inkling of his otherness, to respect it, and to guard against the outrageous stupidity of wishing to interpret it.

 

3.

 

The cripple, the blind, the wheelchair user, the deaf who speak with their hands, are in fact, collectively, only “inklings” to a general population that fears physical calamity. People with disabilities cannot be interpreted by normal people, or “normates” to borrow Rose Marie Garland-Thompson’s term. The best that can be achieved by those who do not currently have a disability is that they will muster a partial sense of what this otherness is like–as a means of respecting it. And in turn as a token of that respect that they will resist interpretation.

 

4.

 

Disability cannot be a metaphor. All metaphorical constructions of disability are products of sentimentality. Able bodied assumptions about physical  catastrophe depend on emotional extravagances. Sentimentality is of course always the other side of aggression. This is a condition of a primitive and pejorative process of symbol making.  Accordingly, the worst thing that can happen to a person with a disability who seeks to create art is that he or she will succumb to this sentimentality. The “overcoming narrative” is a prime example of sentimentality in the service of emotional extravagance.

 

5.

 

I will answer myself, reply to myself without speaking.

 

6.

 

Every victory contains the germ of future defeat. (Jung again.) Let us allow disability to reside on a symbolic level as the victory (a matter of civil engagement) and the unlocking (symbolically) of defeat–the body is ephemeral, inconclusive as a reliable agent of beauty–indeed we do not know what beauty is. That is the germ of defeat. Once the normates get around to understanding this they will live with less terror. That defeat will be the germ of a future victory. Imagine no longer needing to look young; to pretend in a chain reaction that your contentment lies in physical resemblance.

 

7.

 

I do not believe that disability is married to normativity. I do not believe in the “mainstream”. Recently I told a group of artists and advocates for people with disabilities at The Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, DC that “the mainstream is one of the great, tragic ideas of our time. There is no mainstream. No one is physically solid, reliable, capable as a solo act, protected against catastrophe; there is only “the stream” in which each one of us must work to find solace in meanings.”

 

8.

 

I cannot represent the flight of an arrow with a drawing. And I can’t describe the lines of luck.

 

Did you notice that no one can?

 

–Stephen Kuusisto

Iowa City

July 31, 2009