The first thing I want you to do is go to this website:
http://www.wretchesandjabberers.org/mobile/
I am lucky today to be in Burlington, VT for the premiere of Gerry Wurzburg’s new film: “Wretches and Jabberers”–a film that follows the travels of two non-speaking autistic men from Vermont as they circle the globe to meet other autistic people who communicate by typing.
The title of the film comes from an observation by one of the autistic “stars” of the movie, a young Finnish activist named Antti who declares in a memorable scene in a Helsinki cafe that the world can be divided into two camps: those who see people with autism as “wretches” and the wretches themselves who see “normate” people as “jabberers”.
The observation is provocative, politically incorrect, sharp and smart. The “Jabberers” talk without taking thought for what they say, speak automatically, and by turns their thinking, especially about disabilities is largely flip and uninformed. The “Jabberers” think that autistic people are wretches. Why not then be a self styled politically awake and poetically aware “wretch”?
Why not indeed.
(The Finnish word for wretch is an old one by the way–it appears many times in The Kalevala. A wretch is someone who is suffering outrageous bad fortune and all alone, typically lost in a dark forest.)
As a blind person I know all too well that the general “able bodied” population thinks that people with disabilities are barely on the human railroad. (Just check out how few of us pwds are employed here in the United States or abroad).
Poetry comes from a great distance to reach the page. All poets know this. Each word is as old and strange as a sea shell or the tooth of a mastadon. Words are as magical as the alphabet itself. Imagine if you can how astonished the first readers were when they saw how letters could be combined into diamonds, moon beams, eye lashes, the hooves of horses. Language is pregnant with dream stuff and body stuff we can scarcely exhaust in a thousand lifetimes. This is why we love poetry so. And its why we return to people like Antonio Machado or Cesar Vallejo or Basho. Poetry reminds us that every instance of being alive is stranger and more interesting than you may have thought. Words are surprise engines. Words are the tickets to the unconscious. Words are pure love when they come to the page from a great distance.
We could argue that “jabberers” don’t write poetry.
For all too long now, the jabberers have believed that people with autism who are not speaking or who are not conventional speakers are devoid of substantive intellectual lives and talents. We are lucky to be living in an age when these dreadful presumptions are on the wane. They are of course not on the wane “fast enough” and I put that in quotes because its too easy to type it without quotes and because if you’re an autistic person who is brilliant and who needs to type to get your words across you need a world that understands this, celebrates it, conceives of it as part of the human railway.
This film is rich, not just for its narrative of autistic travel but for its discovery of a worldwide “battalion” of young autistic activists who need not only to share their stories but who also need a worldwide revolution in understanding about their culture.
It’s the latter term that really makes the “Jabberers” nervous. There are tons of education department exceptionalists and autocratic behavioral psychologists who have staked their careers on the notion that non-speaking autistic people are not talented or reachable or smart on the inside. The very idea that autistic people can learn to type, first with help, then later quite often independently is still a troubling idea to the more conservative elements in education circles, or some circles.
But I know poetry when I find it. Always have. The stars of this film are poets, philosophers, activists, spiritual, funny, sad, desperate, alive and ready for a world stage.
They have named me an honorary wretch.
I can’t tell you how proud this makes me.
See this film when it comes anywhere near you.
S.K.
Burlington, VT
Planet of the Blind 
I saw it last week in Syracuse–I liked it very much as well.
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Lucky man, Burlington is a lovely town. Is the premier at UVM?
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