Tomas Transtromer, Disability, and Your Local Cocktail Party

There’s a poem by the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer entitled “Below Freezing” which begins: “We are at a party that doesn’t love us.” Almost all socialized people know the feeling–the disconnect between a formal occasion and the brutal realities of the subconscious. As a person with a disability I experience it all the time. I’m at the party on sufferance, provisional, accepted only in a guarded way. 

 

Years ago, (around twenty years ago, now that I think of it) I went to a faculty party at the small college where I was an adjunct professor. I entered only to realize that I was being surveyed, appraised, categorized, and dismissed by dozens of near strangers. “We are at a party that doesn’t love us” zinged into my mind. Because the first seconds of a cocktail party require the ability to make eye contact I’m an abject social failure.  My eyes wander, jump, drift, hop like birds. It’s next to impossible to mingle and enter the little circles of casual conversation. 

 

Transtromer’s poem is more interesting though, for he plumbs the depths of analytical psychiatry with astonishing clarity:

 

“Finally the party lets the mask fall and shows what it is: a shunting station for freight cars. In the fog cold giants stand on their tracks. A scribble of chalk on the car doors.”

 

In short, just beneath the veneer of the party stands the machinery of the holocaust. I submit if you’re a wheelchair user, a blind man, or a member of the LGTB community–just to name a few dis-normative body types–you will “get” Transtromer’s associative image immediately. Beneath the party is a history of cultural sanctions against people who “cripple” the normal. Then Transtromer says:

 

“One can’t say it aloud but there is a lot of repressed violence here.” 

 

I’ve been thinking of this poem quite a lot lately. The poem ends this way:

 

“I work the next morning in a different town. I drive there in a hum through the dawning hour that resembles a dark blue cylinder. Orion hangs over the frost. Children stand in a silent clump, waiting for the school bus, the children no one prays for. The light grows as gradually as our hair.”

 

Transtromer’s poems speak elegantly and cleanly about the social lying that is often committed in our names and that we easily shrug off because we want so desperately to belong at the party.