American poets who do not identify as being disabled have long used crippling and crippled tropes to signify everything from abjection and spiritual despair to picaresque comedy. My view has always been that since no one is lower on the rungs in America than her poets, and since poetry is often a relatively adolescent art, glib objectification of the disabled is an easy and juvenile matter. Here is a well known poem by James Tate that goes a long way toward illustrating my contention about callow tropism:
Deaf Girl Playing
This is where I once saw a deaf girl playing in a field.
Because I did not know how to approach her without startling
her, or how I would explain my presence, I hid. I felt
so disgusting, I might as well have raped the child, a grown
man on his belly in a field watching a deaf girl play.
My suit was stained by the grass and I was an hour late
for dinner. I was forced to discard my suit for lack of
a reasonable explanation to my wife, a hundred dollar suit!
We’re not rich people, not at all. So there I was, left
to my wool suit in the heat of summer, soaked through by
noon each day. I was an embarrassment to the entire firm:
it is not good for the morale of the fellow worker to flaunt
one’s poverty. After several weeks of crippling tension,
my superior finally called me into his office. Rather than
humiliate myself by telling him the truth, I told him I
would wear whatever damned suit pleased, a suit of armor
if I fancied. It was the first time I had challenged his
authority. And it was the last. I was dismissed. Given
my pay. On the way home I thought, I’ll tell her the truth,
yes, why not! Tell her the simple truth, she’ll love me
for it. What a touching story. Well, I didn’t. I don’t
know what happened, a loss of courage, I suppose, I told
her a mistake I had made had cost the company several
thousand dollars, and that, not only was I dismissed, I
would also somehow have to find the money to repay them
the sum of my error. She wept, she beat me, she accused
me of everything from malice to impotency. I helped her
pack and drove her to the bus station. It was too late to
explain. She would never believe me now. How cold the
house was without her. How silent. Each plate I dropped
was like tearing the very flesh from a living animal. When
all were shattered, I knelt in a corner and tried to imagine
what I would say to her, the girl in the field. What could
I say! No utterance could ever reach her. Like a thief
I move through the velvet darkness, nailing my sign
on tree and fence and billboard, DEAF GIRL PLAYING. It is
having its effect. Listen. In slippers and housecoats
more and more men will leave their sleeping wives’ sides:
tac tac tac: DEAF GIRL PLAYING: tac tac tac: another
DEAF GIRL PLAYING. No one speaks to anything but nails
and her amazing linen.
Deafness, the real nature of deafness exists nowhere in this poem. Moreover, deafness morphs into blindness and a figurative representation of ur-childhood—innocence and simplicity so refined it becomes victimhood. Forget that living flesh and blood deaf girls (or deaf boys) are alert, sentient, far sighted, and entirely in the world. For the purposes of Tate’s poem a deaf girl is a succubus in a petticoat, Lolita without language.
And we’re meant to read the poem as an inccubus/succubus dream, a vignette all sparkly and nearly hallucinogenic. A play on Blake’s innocence/experience. Tate’s narrator is both repulsed and turned on by weakness and feminine simplicity. Accordingly he’s disabled himself by the experience, robbed of his own capacity for self-narration. Disability is catching, as we always knew. In fact deafness becomes a contagion. A hetero-normative wet dream plague.
In the hands of able bodied male poets, disability is almost always presented as abjection or lost innocence. It is overtly or vaguely sexualized. Sometimes disability stands for the imagination itself as in this poem by Robert Bly:
A Dream of Retarded Children
That afternoon I had been fishing alone.
Strong wind, some water slopping in the back of the boat.
I was far from home.
Later I woke up several times hearing geese.
I dreamt I saw retarded children playing, and one came near,
and her teacher, face open, hair light.
For the first time I forgot my distance;
I took her in my arms and held her.
Waking up, I felt how alone I was.
I walked on the dock,
fishing alone in the far north.
In Bly’s poem a retarded girl and her teacher are angels straight out of the Romantic imagination. In Jungian terms they are his “anima” his inner feminine spirit. Just as women are angels or whores in the masculinist imagination, the disabled are sacred or profane. Disability as figuration is not only adolescent as I said above, its also a reaffirmation of ableist taxonomies. Presumably when Bly wakes up and feels alone, his retarded children have gone back to the asylum.
In Charles Simic’s poem “The Initiate” disability functions as both spiritual and political stigma:
The Initiate
St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses
As he passed me on the street.
St. Theresa of Avila, beautiful and grave,
Turned her back on me.
“Soulmate,” they hissed. “It’s high time.”
I was a blind child, a wind-up toy . . .
I was one of death’s juggling red balls
On a certain street corner
Where they peddle things out of suitcases.
The city like a huge cinema
With lights dimmed.
The performance already started.
So many blurred faces in a complicated plot.
The great secret which kept eluding me: knowing who I am . . .
The Redeemer and the Virgin,
Their eyes wide open in the empty church
Where the killer came to hide himself . . .
The new snow on the sidewalk bore footprints
That could have been made by bare feet.
Some unknown penitent guiding me.
In truth, I didn’t know where I was going.
My feet were frozen,
My stomach growled.
Four young hoods blocking my way.
Three deadpan, one smiling crazily.
I let them have my black raincoat.
Thinking constantly of the Divine Love
and the Absolute had disfigured me.
People mistook me for someone else.
I heard voices after me calling out unknown names.
“I’m searching for someone to sell my soul to,”
The drunk who followed me whispered,
While appraising me from head to foot.
At the address I had been given.
The building had large X’s over its windows.
I knocked but no one came to open.
By and by a black girl joined me on the steps.
She banged at the door till her fist hurt.
Her name was Alma, a propitious sign.
She knew someone who solved life’s riddles
In a voice of an ancient Sumerian queen.
We had a long talk about that
While shivering and stamping our wet feet.
It was necessary to stay calm, I explained,
Even with the earth trembling,
And to continue to watch oneself
As if one were a complete stranger.
Once in Chicago, for instance,
I caught sight of a man in a shaving mirror
Who had my naked shoulders and face,
But whose eyes terrified me!
Two hard staring, all-knowing eyes!
After we parted, the night, the cold, and the endless walking
Brought on a kind of ecstasy.
I went as if pursued, trying to warm myself.
There was the East River; there was the Hudson.
Their waters shone like oil in sanctuary lamps.
Something supreme was occurring
For which there will never be any words.
The sky was full of racing clouds and tall buildings,
Whirling and whirling silently.
In that whole city you could hear a pin drop.
Believe me.
I thought I heard a pin drop and I went looking for it.
Presumably Simic’s narrator, searching for the pin does so on his hands and knees, groping, for we’ve already been told he’s a blind child:
I was a blind child, a wind-up toy . . .
I was one of death’s juggling red balls
On a certain street corner
Where they peddle things out of suitcases.
The city like a huge cinema
With lights dimmed.
The performance already started.
So many blurred faces in a complicated plot.
Of course Simic doesn’t mean blindness as blindness. He means it as abjection and stigma. He means it as a dark force from on high. The narrator catches his blindness from St. John of the Cross who’s wearing the signature dark glasses of all blind beggars. The entire city becomes a mise en scene where blindness and disfigurament are played out against the horrors of modernism. In the end our man who is blind in spirit is left reading the pavement with his fingers in search of a pin. In his essay “In Praise of Pins from Tool to Metaphor” Jaap Harskamp suggests that the pin is:
“a constituent part of Adam Smith’s capitalist theory on productivity and the division of labour, a sharp symbol of European social criticism on the degradation of industrial life (the production of pins and the promise of progress became a hotly debated issue), a literary metaphor for female oppression and subordination and, last but not least, a weapon in the campaign for women’s liberation. In French literature of the later nineteenth century in particular, female insubordination became intertwined with references to needlework. There are of course many examples of virtuously stitching women, but allusions to pins and needles, sewing and knitting, tended to bear a negative relationship to the picture of domestic bliss which they appear to evoke. At the same time, the story of the pin points to some complex patterns in the embroidery of European, i.e. Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Scottish interaction and communication.”
Simic’s poem leaves its narrator wholly in the grip of helplessness and horror—but these circumstances are filtered through blindness and disfigurement as metaphor. One wants to say: sometimes a pin is just a pin.
Planet of the Blind 