We are living in the age of new connections because of digital technologies and this is all to the good, inasmuch as the new task of humankind is to become conversant in the arts of joy and suffering, to learn the vocabulary of life itself. This is the kind of thing I think about when I look at facebook and see a photo of a kitten alongside a cry for humanitarian assistance or a call for the affirmation of human rights. Even the braggarts on facebook serve a purpose–they remind us how weak we are and small.
I don’t hold with the Atlantic Monthly’s recent article that proposes we are lonelier because of facebook. I think that people with disabilities will attest, overwhelmingly, that connections are now possible for those of us who have a hard time getting around. The vocabulary of life itself.
Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “Where does humility come from? From sitting down and putting little signs on paper with the hope of expressing something.” Life itself.
This blog is my exercise in humility, for even when I’m thundering against cruelties or social injustices I’m admitting my obvious powerlessness and lamenting my obvious insufficiencies. I never had that opportunity as a child with a disabiity; didn’t get the chance at school–it doesn’t materialize in a classroom. And poetry, for all its glories is often flinty, accepting humility only in doses and with the proper figures. You see, the blog is the place where the vocabulary of insufficiencies gets worked out, at least for me, in this time and place.
A couple of years ago when I was editing a special issue of the literary magazine Seneca Review–an issue devoted to what I called “the lyric body”–bodies of difference; bodies that have recovered from illnesses; bodies that are transgendered; disabled bodies; aging bodies; gay bodies; depressed bodies–all were welcome because all have their inventive and original intelligences–well, when I wrote to people asking them to submit work, one poet, (nameless here) wrote a note proclaiming that she was sick and tired of being asked to write about disability, why don’t people ask her for work about anything else?
What I understood by that note was that she wants a world without identity, a pure world, a place where people are electric and shrewd and compelling on the page, without regard to autobiography. I love that idea. I also love the idea that in winter the sun is trapped inside a mountain in Karelia (bear with me, there are no mountains in Karelia). I love lots of ideas.
For me, poetry and nonfiction are the places where I can explore my daily consternations, hopes, disappointments, acquired understandings, whatever sparkles from the wheel of mind, as Whitman would say.
I am both a person with and without a disability, second by second, but I’m never without the essential humility of personal discord, dismay, surprise, wonder, and dark and bright tears.
Planet of the Blind 
Such a beautiful and provocative post — I’m tempted to quote from you and post on my own blog —
Thank you for your thoughts, for sharing them here — all of them.
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