Month: February 2015

What call? Call me Ishmael. Call me early or late. Call me an unpleasant fact of nature, a lusus naturae or worse. Say I’m so unsuited to community I must be housed elsewhere—asylum, hospital, prison. Whatever you do, don’t say in the manner of Phil Ochs—there but for fortune goes you or I—Americans can’t stand fortune; can’t stand luck; people who are poor deserve their fate; the disabled are insufficiently competitive for life in the open. They are a burden on the rest of us, don’t you see? I made my fortune, let him make his own. I’m sorry she needs a wheelchair, a breathing tube, a service animal, talking computer, prosthesis; I’m sorry she has a temper because of PTSD or some other spurious invisible condition. 
I say I’m sorry—that’s what we do in this country. I’m sorry for you. 

“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist,” wrote Julia Kristeva. OK. And that’s because belief is harder than ambition itself. 
And that’s because belief is not as disectable as faith. With faith you get to ask a hundred questions, questions ever more complex, see hermenutics, Paul Ricouer, Martin Buber. See the linguistic turn in hermenutical philosophy. But the depressed person, who for the sake of argument is Ishmael, is the girl with the breathing tube, is the wheelchair butterfly—she’s forced into the camp of disbelief in a hundred singular ways. They are not subtle. Suppose you wanted belief—something casually spiritual, suitable for a depressed Sunday. You’ll find Anerican churches are protected from having to abide by the Americans with Disabilites Act. Diid you know this? Perhaps its better to be a radical, sullen atheist. At least you’re not begging for entrance. 

Call me Ishmael. 

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

Melville’s whaling ship was a floating asylum. A sheltered workshop. It beckoned the abject, it created disabilities. There were reasonable accomodations on board. Ahab had holes grooved into the decks to fit his artifical leg. The masts were perches for schizophrenia. 
The captain and crew were the ones who stopped begging for entrance; who chose brutal lives of delirium on the open sea. Whenever today I read of developmentally delayed men, locked in a warehouse in Iowa, forced to slaughter animals, scarcely paid, I think of Herman Melville. Without irony. Life without faith requires no irony.

America with your history of eugenics. 
With your hostility to the global charter on disability rights.
With your jails, stocked with psychiatric patients—worse than the Soviet Union. We are Gulag Los Angeles; Gulag Rikers Island; Gulag Five Points in Upstate New York. 
America with your young Doctor Mengeles. 
With your broken VA. 
With your war on food stamps and infant nutrition. 
With your terror of autism and lack of empathy for those who have it. 
Wih your 80% unemployment rate for people with disabilites. 
With your pity parties—inspiration porn—Billy was broken until we gave him a puppy. 
With your sanctimonious low drivel disguised as empathy. 
With your terror of reasonable accommodations. 
With your NPR essays about fake disability fraud, which is derision of the poor and elderly. 
With your disa-phobia—I wouldn’t want one of them to sit next to me on a bus. 
America when will you admit you have a hernia?
When will you admit you’re a lousy driver?
Admit you miss the days of those segregated schools, hospitals, residential facilities—just keep them out of sight. 
When will you apologize for your ugly laws?
When will you make Ron Kovic’s book irrelevant?
America, you threatened Allen Ginsberg with lobotomy. 
Ameica you medicated a generation of teenagers for bi-polar depression when all they were feeling was old fashioned fear. 
When will you protect wheelchairs on airlines?
When will you admit you’re terrified of luck?

 

What call? Call me Ishmael. Call me early or late. Call me an unpleasant fact of nature, a lusus naturae or worse. Say I’m so unsuited to community I must be housed elsewhere—asylum, hospital, prison. Whatever you do, don’t say in the manner of Phil Ochs—there but for fortune goes you or I—Americans can’t stand fortune; can’t stand luck; people who are poor deserve their fate; the disabled are insufficiently competitive for life in the open. They are a burden on the rest of us, don’t you see? I made my fortune, let him make his own. I’m sorry she needs a wheelchair, a breathing tube, a service animal, talking computer, prosthesis; I’m sorry she has a temper because of PTSD or some other spurious invisible condition. 
I say I’m sorry—that’s what we do in this country. I’m sorry for you. 

“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist,” wrote Julia Kristeva. OK. And that’s because belief is harder than ambition itself. 
And that’s because belief is not as disectable as faith. With faith you get to ask a hundred questions, questions ever more complex, see hermenutics, Paul Ricouer, Martin Buber. See the linguistic turn in hermenutical philosophy. But the depressed person, who for the sake of argument is Ishmael, is the girl with the breathing tube, is the wheelchair butterfly—she’s forced into the camp of disbelief in a hundred singular ways. They are not subtle. Suppose you wanted belief—something casually spiritual, suitable for a depressed Sunday. You’ll find Anerican churches are protected from having to abide by the Americans with Disabilites Act. Diid you know this? Perhaps its better to be a radical, sullen atheist. At least you’re not begging for entrance. 

Call me Ishmael. 

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

Melville’s whaling ship was a floating asylum. A sheltered workshop. It beckoned the abject, it created disabilities. There were reasonable accomodations on board. Ahab had holes grooved into the decks to fit his artifical leg. The masts were perches for schizophrenia. 
The captain and crew were the ones who stopped begging for entrance; who chose brutal lives of delirium on the open sea. Whenever today I read of developmentally delayed men, locked in a warehouse in Iowa, forced to slaughter animals, scarcely paid, I think of Herman Melville. Without irony. Life without faith requires no irony.

America with your history of eugenics. 
With your hostility to the global charter on disability rights.
With your jails, stocked with psychiatric patients—worse than the Soviet Union. We are Gulag Los Angeles; Gulag Rikers Island; Gulag Five Points in Upstate New York. 
America with your young Doctor Mengeles. 
With your broken VA. 
With your war on food stamps and infant nutrition. 
With your terror of autism and lack of empathy for those who have it. 
Wih your 80% unemployment rate for people with disabilites. 
With your pity parties—inspiration porn—Billy was broken until we gave him a puppy. 
With your sanctimonious low drivel disguised as empathy. 
With your terror of reasonable accommodations. 
With your NPR essays about fake disability fraud, which is derision of the poor and elderly. 
With your disa-phobia—I wouldn’t want one of them to sit next to me on a bus. 
America when will you admit you have a hernia?
When will you admit you’re a lousy driver?
Admit you miss the days of those segregated schools, hospitals, residential facilities—just keep them out of sight. 
When will you apologize for your ugly laws?
When will you make Ron Kovic’s book irrelevant?
America, you threatened Allen Ginsberg with lobotomy. 
Ameica you medicated a generation of teenagers for bi-polar depression when all they were feeling was old fashioned fear. 
When will you protect wheelchairs on airlines?
When will you admit you’re terrified of luck?

 

And thinking about death, as I am wont to do. 
Note: I don’t think of death while mowing the lawn. 
Note: I don’t fear having a heart attack because I’m shoveling snow. 
I suspect this mordancy has something to do with my ancestry. 
My great great uncle had to dig graves in the snow. That’s how it was in old Finland. 
Don’t kid yourself, muscle memory will bring back your great great uncle very quickly. 
I also thought about Thomas Paine. Today is his birthday. I wondered how many of my neighbors have read “Common Sense”. 
Poor Thomas Paine: the writer most responsible for the American Revolution—but only six people attended his funeral because he was an open critic of Christianity. 
Thomas Paine. My kind of guy. 
“Ph well,” I thought. “At least there’s plenty of snow to go around.”
For some reason I thought this was particularly funny. 
Snow irony. A gift from my great great uncle. 

And thinking about death, as I am wont to do. 
Note: I don’t think of death while mowing the lawn. 
Note: I don’t fear having a heart attack because I’m shoveling snow. 
I suspect this mordancy has something to do with my ancestry. 
My great great uncle had to dig graves in the snow. That’s how it was in old Finland. 
Don’t kid yourself, muscle memory will bring back your great great uncle very quickly. 
I also thought about Thomas Paine. Today is his birthday. I wondered how many of my neighbors have read “Common Sense”. 
Poor Thomas Paine: the writer most responsible for the American Revolution—but only xic people attended his funeral because he was an open critic of Christianity. 
Thomas Paine. My kind of guy. 
“Ph well,” I thought. “At least there’s plenty of snow to go around.”
For some reason I thought this was particularly funny. 
Snow irony. A gift from my great great uncle. 

I’m not really disabled but the “D” follows me around. He’s a shadow. He’s a shadow who’s roughly 7 years old and he wants to show me the picture he’s just drawn. He is in short, annoying. 

“C’mon, look!” he says. “Look!”

I look. Its a Jackson Pollock on the back of an envelope. 

“That’s your blindness,” he says, proudly. 

I try explaining that blindness isn’t so complicated. I tell him its like having brown hair. Its only a component part of a life. 

“No,” he says, “Blindness is what everyone sees and so you live inside it, just as Pollock lived inside his paintings.”

The D has a point. Even on my best days I can’t control the pesky public. 

“Besides,” he says, “blindness becomes you.” 

“You mean that ironically?” I ask. 

“Oh,” he says, “of course I do.” 

“So I could conceivably “un-become” blindness?”

“No, that would be an illusion,” he says. 

Then he adds: “If the public thinks your blindness is the whole shebang, its the shebang.”

And because he’s roughly 7 years old he says: “Nyah nyah!” 

“If you go water skiing, you’re a BLIND water skiier!” 

“If you take a walk, you’re a BLIND guy taking a walk.” 

“Get over it!” 

“Here, look at what I drew!” 

“Now you’re really being ironic,” I say.

“I’ll describe it for you. Its a man being chased by bees.”

“How Dantesque of you,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, “I’ll have to read him.”  
 

In grad school I ran into a blind undergrad named Frank. I was exiting the English building as he and his guide dog Bruno were coming in. Bruno was a giant Black Lab and he bowled through the door just as I opened it. All three of us collided. Undergraduate essays flew everywhere.  

Frank was a funny kid who thought nothing of telling strangers he’d lost his sight while having vigorous sexual intercourse and that the advantages of blindness were, in his estimation so great, he was paying Jesus a daily fee not to cure him.

We went to a downtown bar for coffee. “No one orders coffee here, so they’ll always make you a fresh pot,” Frank said. Then he added: “And the waitresses love my dog.” 

He was right, both about the coffee and the waitresses.: “Its Frank and Bruno!” shouted a girl from someplace out back. We were waited on by three young women. Bruno got a bowl of Coca-Cola with ice.

“Is he supposed to drink that?” I asked. “No,” said Frank, “But its his favorite thing.”

“You don’t give him beer, I hope…?” I asked. “No beer,” said Frank. “Bruno’s my driver.”

In the weeks to come I’d learn a lot from Frank. He carried his blindness lightly; parried with sighted people, most of whom as I came to see, were either clueless or intrusive, routinely asking insensitive questions: “How did you go blind?” “When?” “Do you have dreams?” “How do you dress yourself?” 

In the years to come, when I got my own white cane, and then a guide dog, I would have to field these questions too. 

“I see that being blind is like being the guy in high school with all the little notes stuck on his back,” I said. 

“Yeah that’s pretty much it,” said Frank. “Ask me stupid questions.” “Oh come on, you can try harder than that!” He laughed. 

Bruno drank his Coca-Cola and ate the ice. 

 

 

In grad school I ran into a blind undergrad named Frank. I was exiting the English building as he and his guide dog Bruno were coming in. Bruno was a giant Black Lab and he bowled through the door just as I opened it. All three of us collided. Undergraduate essays flew everywhere.  

Frank was a funny kid who thought nothing of telling strangers he’d lost his sight while having vigorous sexual intercourse and that the advantages of blindness were, in his estimation so great, he was paying Jesus a daily fee not to cure him.

We went to a downtown bar for coffee. “No one orders coffee here, so they’ll always make you a fresh pot,” Frank said. Then he added: “And the waitresses love my dog.” 

He was right, both about the coffee and the waitresses.: “Its Frank and Bruno!” shouted a girl from someplace out back. We were waited on by three young women. Bruno got a bowl of Coca-Cola with ice.

“Is he supposed to drink that?” I asked. “No,” said Frank, “But its his favorite thing.”

“You don’t give him beer, I hope…?” I asked. “No beer,” said Frank. “Bruno’s my driver.”

In the weeks to come I’d learn a lot from Frank. He carried his blindness lightly; parried with sighted people, most of whom as I came to see, were either clueless or intrusive, routinely asking insensitive questions: “How did you go blind?” “When?” “Do you have dreams?” “How do you dress yourself?” 

In the years to come, when I got my own white cane, and then a guide dog, I would have to field these questions too. 

“I see that being blind is like being the guy in high school with all the little notes stuck on his back,” I said. 

“Yeah that’s pretty much it,” said Frank. “Ask me stupid questions.” “Oh come on, you can try harder than that!” He laughed. 

Bruno drank his Coca-Cola and ate the ice. 

 

 

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote famously about “the desiring machine”—a way of highlighting the feedback loop between commodities or “products”, advertising, depression, government, and a hundred other dynamics of the abjection industry. In Deleuze’s articulation desire itself becomes reality—hence social production determines that all living beings, even their organs, become machines.
Another way to think of this is that we are no longer beings who wish to acquire things—we are merely acquisition devices.

Borrowing from Antonin Artaud, Deleuze argues that under the tryannay of desire we actually beocme bodies without organs—in effect our very tissue is subsumed by desire.

Now cultural problems associated with disability are familiar enough: activists in dis-communities can recite the catalogue: “nothing about us without us” we say; “defend disability life’ we say; inclusion and community living are a must; we have a host of desires connected to affiliation. They are right.

But Deleuze is right: capitalism enforces illness to maintain its reality. And dis-activists must “out” this at every turn.

And so what do we say about affiliation? Do I merely wish acceptance? A key to the Mens room? “Look! There’s a blind man with a key to the Mens room! Let’s do a Super Bowl ad!”

BTW: Super Bowl ads are “low drivel” and if one loves them, one also loves power. Which is of course to love abjection. Loving abjection means you likely are addicted to inspiration porn. People really do fight for their servitude. (Spinoza)

I do not wish to be docile within my disability. Craving the Mens room. 

What I fear is disability inclusion mis-understood, lived as a singular goal, becoming its own engine of repression—a machine of acquisition, fueled by its repressed, neurotic blood.  

I fear the desire of repression. Not the disability itself. 
 

 

   

It comes fast or it happens slowly. But Sloopy now can’t see. The ophthalmologist asks for his car keys. Its painful for Sloop because from the day he turned 14 in Arkansas he’s driven automobiles. He’s always defined himself as a “sexy beast” driver. (“That’s an American thing,” said my French roomate when I was studying abroad and we were talking about Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road”. In that classic “Beat Generation” travel romance we see “Dean Moriarty” who’s undivided nervous system and imagination are disposed to his hands and feet. He is a new creature: a cross country flat top driver living on amphetimine and accelerated games of chicken and roadside sex. Moriarty who watches telephone poles leap into the sky as he races through Kansas.) Francois couldn’t get it. “In Europe we just take the train and drink wine.”

Sloopy needs his car. In America its a reasonable accommodation. Towns are far apart in the United States, largely because they were founded by people who didn’t like other people. The aim was always to live at least a day’s wagon ride from some other town. As I said once to a room of social workers: “the tin lizzy was essentially a wheelchair for trapped minds.” It wasn’t your fault you were born to fundamentalist stake holders. But Henry Ford was your savior. In America the automobile saved millions from going out of their minds. This is what “On the Road” is about. And this is why Sloopy is devastated for he lives in Iowa thirty miles north of Cedar Rapids and now he’s trapped without true neighbors.

I see future Sloopys every day. They may go blind or they may develop the kind of back problems that prevent people from walking. They will be shunned by the other Sloopys. Yes I’m generalizing. But remember that Sloopy-ville was founded far from other burgs because, well, you see, most Americans are not like Thomas Jefferson; most don’t take a sincere interest in their neighbors. And the sad, superannuated auto was the only anodyne, and Sloopy knew. He knew it and now he can’t get anywhere and predictably his neighbors don’t care. See Rand Paul.     

Blindness is a visible disability which is of course ironic in a hundred ways. Picture it: a blind woman comes down the street sweeping her white cane before her. She’s just an ordinary person who can’t see but her apparent lack of sight is extraordinary. She’s a cane wielding deviant, outside the flaneur’s contract, the agreed upon “look at me” public sport of open space that began with the industrial revolution and disposable income. After the industrial revolution everyone could join the Easter parade. Everyone could buy something deemed fashionable from the Sears catalogue. And all public space became a proscenium arch; every street became a cafe. The flaneur’s contract holds that everyone wants to be seen, everyone wants to be glanced at. The degree to which you’re good at the sport rests in your capacity to look at someone and not be seen looking, or, for advanced flaneurs, to look and be known for it. There are many variants. But not where blindness is concerned.

The first presumption is that the blind woman can’t stare back and won’t be aware she’s being assessed by the throng. “Throngsters” I like to call them—able bodied people who openly stare at the disabled. They think there’s power in numbers—they belong to the majority. They think their job is to stare at the wheelchair man; the autistic girl, the boy with cerebral palsy. Their staring says many things. You are not like me. You should go someplace else. You are a project for God. You make me uncomfortable. You are like someone else I know, who, despite my best liberal convictions, I feel sorry for. Above all else—you’re not sufficiently fashionable my friend. You’re busting my Throngster Flaneur. 

Of course disabled people know its worse than this. Much of the staring is cruel, accompanied by a moue of superiority. Or disgust. There are architechtonics of disapproval and of power. The throngster thinks his eye beams are like Superman’s X-ray vision, as he sees through the disabled woman he’s also shrinking her; its overtly aggressive—as I categorize you I further reduce you. Its a tiny tiny blind woman that you are. Can you feel it?

The latter question is the fun one since blind people know a ton of stuff—many can actually see something, though not all—and no matter what, we all know you’re staring at us.

Tap tap tap. Cane on sidewalk. Stare stare stare. Teenage boy wearing New York Yankees jersey and popping bubble gum. He stares at the blind girl. She’s not really a girl, she’s a full grown woman, but all disabled people are instantaneously infantilized by throngsters even the very old. Anyway, the blind woman knows she’s being stared at. Maybe she can see him up close. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. Sighted people do a little hitch when they stare at the blind. Like a baseball infielder who’s about to bobble a routine grounder. They pause for a second. If you’re blind you can actually hear the screws in their necks. Tap tap. Hitch. Squeak. And staring, voila.

Every minute of being blind is a “coming out” and this is true for all visible disabilities. Sophisticated blind people are seasoned in the arts of disruption. I’ve actually pointed with my white cane, saying, “I know you’re staring at me, I can feel it. Didn’t your mother tell you that’s rude?” Street performance helps. Sometimes it helps a lot. Once while riding a commuter bus in Columbus, Ohio I was approached by a woman who announced loudly that she’d like to pray for me. I was an obvious mark, being a cripple and all, and I was wearing a business suit (having just come from an actual business meeting) but it was likely the Jesus Lady meant I was merely looking for a job. The throngster stare is always a reducing X-ray. It can reduce you in myriad ways. JL likely believed I was living a disabled life because of some moral failing (mine) and it was from a past life (metempsychosis) and right there on the proscenium bus we would together cast out the giggly snakes of blindness by getting down on our knees and wailing among the college students with their backpacks and Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirts.

I told her (loudly) that she could most certainly pray for me but only if I could pray for her and all the people on this sad, mortal bus, for indeed everyone aboard had genetic defects, probable diseases, social sufferings, had been victimized by parents, lovers, or strangers—I went on and on, my voice rising, my contractual empathy pushing the envelope of the number 6 bus. And Jesus Lady got off at the next stop and several people applauded.

If you’re blind every day is coming out day. But the proper motto is, as Christopher Hitchens once said of Auden’s relationship to Chester Kallman: “Its better to be blatant than latent.”