—Only this table is certain. Heavy. Of massive wood.
Czeslaw Milosz
Sighted or blind the table is inarguable and so we must think of it is a fact.
“Its time to set the fact,” says mother and children place smaller facts on its smooth surface.
E.M. Forster (who should have known better) wrote: “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
Forster forgot tables. The poor sleep at tables. If they’re lucky they eat at tables, give birth on tables, even die on them among the forks.
**
The Disabled. Tabled. Never at the right one. The culture table. Heavy. Of massive wood.
If they’re lucky the table fits wheelchairs; provides ample space beneath for guide dogs; there’s a place for your assistant or interpreter.
Mostly never the right one. Infelicitous. Crabbed. (The blind know those tables poorly set.)
**
Frank Lloyd Wright: “The truth is more important than the facts.”
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The table can be a diminished fact. The truth is more important than the table.
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And yet sometimes it is all I can do to stand or sit before a table. Merely arriving almost kills me.
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The table—the first reasonable accommodation. We had to get the food higher than the snouts of dogs. We had to learn the word “sit” both for the dogs and ourselves.
**
A deaf man sits at a table. Beside him is his interpreter. Opposite: two job interviewers.
Job interviewer #1: “If we hire you, what accommodations will you need?”
Deaf man: “It depends on the job you offer me.”
Job interviewer #2: “We’ll get back to you.”
This is the table as portcullis. The table standing on its side.
**
This is the table I always wanted: antithetical meal—no dominant cuisine.
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Disability is a tableaux, a tabula, a treatment of tables, since it undermines the furnishings. Here is my Platonic table: shifty but of original form which is to say shifty. The gods are always changing shapes.
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After meals the Greeks slid their tables under beds.
Planet of the Blind 