My friend Joe Blair has written a superb post entitled “The Physics of Hatred” and he’s got me thinking about the warrens and barrel vaulting of human misery. (This is not to say I don’t customarily think of these things, but Joe has me stretching, laying out the chalk lines for a new room in my head.) Backstory: Joe is the father of a son who has autism. He and his wife Deb have lived the cold hydropathy of parents of disabled children—a tribe that’s larger than any other, and one that is customarily used to disappointments, cruelties, toxic hierarchies, and outright hostility. In this way, Joe is an expert when it comes to what we call social psychology in academic circles, and what’s called street smarts everywhere else. His post lays out, expertly, the horrid social dynamics that accompany alienation, by which I mean alienation, for the tale has much to do with late stage, post-industrial capitalism which is vicious and only teaches viciousness. You must read his post to see the emotional intelligence of a terrific writer in action. Back to my chalk lines.
What we like to call “diversity” in the US, especially in the academy is essentially a larger and more communitarian idea, incorporating class struggle, relief for urban and rural poverty, all the global struggles for human rights. This work is the core, the foundation of what it is to be human—one may think of it as a meal for the soul. We nourish one another by our work. Its really important for North Americans to understand the complexity of nourishment as action. I love what Paolo Freire says in his famous book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life,” to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands–whether of individuals or entire peoples–need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.” So we’re talking about true nourishment. Some days you find this in poems, other days it resides in standing up for inclusive education—for classrooms where students with disabilities are educated alongside their peers. Sometimes nourishment comes from meeting blind and deaf people in Central Asia and sharing stories of struggle and hope. Lyric writing is the best place I’ve found for combining multiple strains of thought into a moving unit of political consciousness. I wrote a prose poem for my friend Bill Peace who is a disability rights advocate and a wheelchair user. The lyric brings forward several feelings and ideas at once:
Prose Poem for Bill Peace
“Most days, as disabled people, we’re screwed…” (author)
Dear Bill—I’m green in my knees, green ribbed. I spent today alone with a dictionary. Sometimes I find words from the age before newsprint. Catabasis, a trip to the underworld…The Greeks understood: anger increases after death. Odysseus’ mother was the first zombie in literature, hungering for a bowl of blood in the twilight of Hades. I fear the dead are full of sorrows. Meanwhile half the houses hereabouts are crammed with sadness and the strictures of fear. To forgive is not so simple. Dictionary: discourse, utopia, harmonia…Some days words are immanent, warmer than the streets.
So another way to look at nourishment is that it is the source of imaginative thinking as well as progressive political thought. Thank you Joe Blair. Thank you!
Planet of the Blind 