The Mortar Board Disability Blues

Back when I was in college a friend who lived across the hall wrote a poem about sadness. I don’t remember it exactly but I remember his characterization of the “blues” as being inside his sleeves. There are lots of blues—some walk around our beds or get in our bread as Leadbelly sang. Some blues creep inside our shirts. My experience of the blues often reflects a consistent and winnowing wish to cry. The world is too much with me. I feel the pain of friends and their families, the sorrows of students, and the terrible ache of world grief—from Nigeria to Los Angeles, Syracuse to Sao Paolo. Static, oxygenated suffering surrounds me—us.

 

The blues in my sleeves or crawling up my neck are worsened by the information age. One hour of online reading can so entirely damage me I can scarcely move. I get up, go outside, walk the dogs, visit people, push steady and exhausting abstractions of mind into engagements. We are tribal beings. We’re meant to be in the longhouse or sit around a fire. If we’re involved in the world the blues will go dormant at least for a time.

 

You might ask “how can something be static and oxygenated at the same time?” Unmoving things and oxygenation seem incompatible—isn’t oxygenation a saturation process? I’ve mixed my metaphor. But if you have the “disability blues” you know about this mix. Today I found out a conference being hosted at my university doesn’t have accessible materials for disabled participants. There’s the usual after the fact finger pointing but what anyone with a disability knows is these oversights are products of the atmosphere of normative activity. Last fall I attended a symposium at Hobart and William Smith Colleges only to discover it wasn’t accessible. The American Philosophical Association doesn’t think it needs to make its events accessible. The academic atmosphere at all too many colleges and universities will paralyze you if you weren’t already feeling paralyzed. Or if you don’t like that analogy—it will blind you. What? No sign language interpreters? What? Only one interpreter and no signing at break out sessions? What? You need an accessible rest room? I see these things all the time.

 

So I have the blues. They’re spread from my sleeves. They’re in my mortar board…