For reasons that are hard to fathom many of my friends are suddenly quite ill. Texts and emails popped into my phone while I was traveling last week. It’s not proper to name names. But dear friends, lovely people, just and clear people in my circle are suffering in far flung parts of the country. I wanted to cheer up one of my best and most dark minded friends who’s been undergoing a battery of tests—hence spending hours in hospital waiting rooms. I wrote:
Waiting to see doctors is like wearing a suit of goat’s wool while listening to a pipe organ.
Like eating intestines from a take out box while riding the Greyhound.
Thinking you will become gifted musically if you do or do not get operated upon.
Tasting virtual lemon jello while staring at the bad art in the waiting room.
And the half dead grey forest rustles its leaves…
**
In Disability Studies we talk and theorize crip-epistemologies. The ulterior body, the altered body, the transitive and amorphous body is the condition of freedom, provided you’re seeing your differences as vital occasions of post-normalcy. Such views are thrilling of course—cyborgian prosthesis are now or soon to be fashionable. Normalcy is the grey forest, certainly.
But death is the body samsara—a site of sorrows. Our time here is quick. That’s a hard fashion statement to embrace. But its the only one I know.
Waiting to see doctors is like painting the leaves on trees.
Like returning empty handed from the granary.
I’m hoping for another tomorrow, mindful of the vanity of wishes.
Illness is hard to theorize as freedom. But so is medicine.
My heart beats are symphonic, eternal. So are yours. They won’t fit into medical sociology and counter statements to disableism.
Life is life. Its the breeze in tepid shadows and summer light.
Its a gold mask and a bare foot.
Planet of the Blind 