Month: January 2013

 

“In late September many voices

Tell you you will die.

The leaf says it. That coolness.

All of them are right.”

 

–Robert Bly

 

Shadows lengthen under the apple trees. It’s a princely trouble I’m feeling–a problem from a thousand years ago. Something uncoils and I carry it into the house where it rests among my books. This presence, this siren is like a many armed figure of Durga waving her axe, riding a lion over a mound of skulls–but she’s the smallest Durga in the world, small and green as the inch worm I discover scaling the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

 

Fathoms down, under the waves, my long, informal apprenticeship.

 

 

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”

–Walter Benjamin

 

Ruminant cold; clouds like machine parts, nothing fancy, a set of gears low on the horizon, gulls walking sideways in the market square.

 

My childhood wasn’t magical.

 

There were reindeer and old men and drunken sailors.

 

There were trolley cars filled with tough old Finns who had survived two wars with Russia and now retained entire dissertations on hunger in their heads.

 

Lights came on early. Helsinki. A darkness inside a darkness–weather “became” philosophy.

 

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” (Kierkegaard) Snow comes like a sequence of mathematical ideas.

 

The cold is numerical tension.

 

“Don’t spoil my circles,” said Archimedes. I see a very old man making circles on the esplanade–looping circles built by oversized feet in the Finnish twilight.

 

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” (Democritus)

 

Look! A city of opinions!

 

Architectures of opinion!

 

But like Einstein, the snow does not believe in mathematics.

 

The city of my boyhood is a great polyhedron of shadows.

 

I have found in general that shadows are more reliable than ideas of heaven; more of scale with mathematics and poetry; shadows are the daughters of time.

 

Winter in the far north is a miracle multiplied beyond necessity.

 

Leibniz wouldn’t like it here.

 

Even the ravens of Helsinki know the unconscious arithmetic of winter.

 

This is no joke or conceit.

 

I once saw a raven standing in an empty baby carriage.

 

This was just outside a downtown department store.

 

The raven was lifting one foot, then the other, carefully, as though composing a stationary dance.

 

The mind is a question, asked of another question, the imperative, shadow asked of shadow.

 

When the parents came out with their baby the raven was gone.

 

Frank Gardner: Gorilla Spotting From A Wheelchair
(The Telegraph)
January 3, 2013

KIGALI, RWANDA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] In the damp, cool air halfway up a volcano in equatorial Africa, I smelt an odor I had never encountered before. Musty, pungent, tangy, hard to describe yet definitely overpowering. “We are close now,” whispered Augustin, the khaki-clad ranger assigned as our escort. “Please be very alert.” Every one of us who had trekked up the valley that morning was on tenterhooks, aware that something big was about to happen.

We had flown into Rwanda the day before from London, an exhausting 15-hour journey via Nairobi. My wife’s friend Karen had bid successfully at a charity raffle for a three-day gorilla trek, so my wife said, “Go on, you’ve always wanted to see the mountain gorillas; and let’s face it, this is not one for me.”

It was one of those insane now-or-never moments, blowing more than £2,000 on a mad 72-hour dash to a country that deserves weeks of anyone’s time, if not more. But back in the dark days in hospital after I was shot and disabled eight years ago, I remember thinking, “Damn! I wish I had gone to such-and-such a place before I lost the use of my legs.”

And here it was, a dream on a plate, a chance to see the world’s largest primate in its remote natural habitat with a tour company that commendably made light of my disability. “We’ll get you up there no problem,” I was assured via email. I was curious to see how.

Entire article:
Rwanda: Gorilla spotting from a wheelchair
http://tinyurl.com/0103136

Hollywood Tackles Sex And Disability
(The Independent)
January 2, 2013

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] It’s long been said in Hollywood that portraying someone with a disability fast-tracks you to Oscar glory. Yet show them having sex, and film executives squirm. But A-listers such as Helen Hunt and Marion Cotillard — in films funded by some of the world’s biggest studios — are debunking the myth that disabled people can’t have sex on screen, heralding a new cinematic sexual revolution.

The award-winning The Sessions, which opens in the UK on 18 January, is one of the first Hollywood films to explore the subject of a disabled person losing his virginity. The film follows the real-life story of the American poet Mark O’Brien – a polio survivor who uses an iron lung. At 38 years old he sought the help of a sex surrogate, someone who helps people with sexual problems explore their bodies, played by Helen Hunt.

The film, which won the Special Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance festival this year, is written and directed by a polio survivor, Ben Lewin, but is based on the late O’Brien’s account of his own story. “I was taken by the frankness and explicitness of it — which is rarely associated with discussions of sex,” Lewin said. “When I was a kid, we didn’t talk about sex and disability. I get the impression people are more open-minded now. There is an interesting disability-chic movement, and a number of movies looking at similar themes.”

One of these was this year’s Untouchable, which tells the story of a quadriplegic and his carer, who encourages him to pursue love. And Rust & Bone, which won the top prize at the London Film Festival, stars Cotillard as a double amputee who embarks on a sexual relationship.

Entire article:
Hollywood tackles sex and disability
http://tinyurl.com/ide0102136