Disabled people don’t need interlocutors

Disabled people don’t need interlocutors. We can talk to ourselves. I’ve often thought we are best alone. Some years ago I read a poem by the American poet James Tate wherein he describes a man who’s so lonely he goes to a stock yard and buys a sow’s ear which he sews to the back of his couch that he may have a listener. Tate’s poem ends with that which is fine but of course he leaves out the low voice of the man rising and falling as he divides up the future and arranges grains of sand. I’m digressing of course.

The disabled are alone even when they’re in crowds. We talk inside the carapace, the Iron Maiden, the filigreed Venetian mask, whatever you want to call ableist projections—we’re not of this world according to the “man on the street” and so the Hell with it, I’d rather talk to the inside me. Now the jailer’s cat listens to birdsong and stays hungry. I confess I’d like to have an authentic talk. And I have three adult friends who are, at present, non-disabled, who understand me when I discuss my sow’s ear life inside the carapace of disability in the big normative world. Just so you know: that last sentence was a pleasure to write. I’m digressing of course.

Alone with my sow’s ear I reckon how the world of normalcy presses against me. Its a heavier thing than gravity. Normalcy world speaks like Iago. “Trust me,” it says. “We’ll understand you today.” Little sow, they were joking. My blindness scares the daylights out of them. Isn’t that funny?

My “inner life” of disability is a sort of desolate wildness. Its also despairingly lovely. The non-blind sometimes know what its like where I live—Gunnar Ekelof wrote:

“My world is a dark one
But I will go home in the darkness
Through the grass, under the woods.”

If you object and say I’m mystifying blindness that’s OK. I champion your right to say what you like. And if you’re blind like me and you don’t talk to a dismembered porcine ear, that’s OK too. I don’t worship life so much as I worship learning to use life. Each of us must do this in his, her, or they singular way. Each life is an experiment. The lines of force are on the inside however and as Emily Dickinson said, “where the meanings are.”

As for mystifying blindness all I can tell you is that my world is a dark one…I go home in darkness…and yes, through the grass, under the woods…

Ekelof is my interlocutor. I hardly need a couch or a dead pig’s ear to talk to him. He wrote:

“I had a confused feeling I was inside my own eye which was opening again.”