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Disability and Narrative Dollars

I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of “performativity” where disability is concerned, not because I’m against “doing” (re-visioning) cultural representations of the disabled body—far from it—but because disability differs from Judith Butler’s fungible sense of gender embodiment in two singular ways. Though the disabled body has been seen historically as a site of reception for pejorative and ruinous definitions, no disabled body is truly static, since, in fact, the disabled body doesn’t exist. Only architectures of opposition exist. Secondly, “doing” the disabled body is simply a reified and subjective experience, because, to borrow from Wallace Stevens, and alluding to my point above, disability is the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”. Only architectures exist and protesting them might be a better idea than cripping the crippled body. When I say these sorts of things I’m viewed as the Christopher Hitchens of disability studies…a contrarian…but really, I don’t like empty play. You’re not a disability activist because you’ve adopted an ironic stance toward the language of representation.

The imprisonment of devalued bodies is the work of capitalism. Only justice can change this.

And a renewed Marxist clarity. I don’t mean by the latter a fixated review of disability as trope, but a potent resistance to the crisis of economic representation that haunts what we’ve come to call the “diversity” landscape and which is, of course a misnomer.

“All the President’s Men”—“Follow the money…” To which we add: “See what the money has done.”

Black bodies in prison in the USA, disabled bodies in sweatshops in Malaysia…they are one and the same.

So I like “play” or street theater but only insofar as it refuses the autocracy of narrative dollars.

The ADA at 25 and the Embracing Problem

The Americans with Disabilities Act is turning 25 and there are lots of blog posts and opinion essays circulating right now. The ADA was (and remains) a landmark accomplishment and it is entirely worthy of reflection, especially in these highly partisan times when Capitol Hill can’t agree about the merit of dental hygiene much less civil rights. Yet if I read one more essay about how important it is for people with physical challenges to “embrace” their disabilities I may combust spontaneously like Dickens’ Mr. Krook.

For the sake of clarity I have nothing against embracing. I love a good embrace. In fact, I’ll embrace almost anything—trees, people, eggplants, even toy ponies, but yes, I’m cynical about abstract embraces. This is because (as Ernst Cassirer once said) we are symbol making animals and we tend to make symbols most often when we want to sell something.

At its core, “embrace your disability” means “love yourself, no matter how you appear” and you may very well say, “no one in his right mind should be opposed to this principle.”

But I am. Opposed. The premise is treacle. It’s American gibberish.

I have no desire to embrace my disability. I’m blind. I’ve learned how to live despite the fact. I am not more beautiful because I’m blind. I’m not less beautiful because of it. In this way, blindness is like a lawn mower. It’s a thing in my life. Who embraces his lawn mower? Maybe Frank Zappa did, I don’t know.

Embrace your disability is the lazy lingo of late stage neoliberal capitalism. It means, at its core, you alone stand for something beautiful against the wide world. Your value is yours alone. That’s too much for me. It should be too much for anyone.

Its OK to like yourself but by god, embracing blindness, autism. spinal cord injury—why? Why can’t these things be no more significanct than house shutters or blue jeans?

I like the motto of the National Federation of the Blind:

“The National Federation of the Blind knows that blindness is not the characteristic that defines you or your future. Every day we raise the expectations of blind people, because low expectations create obstacles between blind people and our dreams. You can live the life you want; blindness is not what holds you back.”

If embracing means raised expectations, I will soften my stance.

But more often than not, the term “embrace your disability” is gratuitous. “Why by god, you need to love your crippled-ness above all else…” In essence the “embrace” is a religious idea. All too often it takes the place of vigorous communitarian work. The phrase suggests your distinguishing singularity is what matters. I’m not sure. Not sure at all.

Perhaps I’ll feel differently tomorrow. But I doubt it. I endorse universal human rights. I embrace my dog.

Why the New York Times Failed James Tate

One of my favorite quotes about obituary writers appears in Mark Helprin’s novel “Winter’s Tale” and it goes like this:

The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes.

I was put in mind of Helprin’s squib when I fell onto William Grimes’ obit of the poet James Tate which was clearly ripped from the notebook of a lazy tourist. Given Mr. Tate’s prominence one can scarcely imagine a vaunted paper like the New York Times approving so many cliches in any paragraph let alone the opening one:

Mr. Tate burst on the poetry scene in 1967 with the collection “The Lost Pilot,” selected for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets while he was still a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Julian Symons, in The New Statesman, greeted Mr. Tate as “an ironical, original, self-absorbed poet who glances with amusement at love, humanity, himself.”

And if that doesn’t satisfy your appetite for pap, hold on to your bowl for here’s the second crot:

A prolific writer, he turned out one collection after another, none of them slim. “The Ghost Soldiers,” published in 2008, contains nearly 100 poems. He won a wide following, especially among younger readers attracted by his colloquial style, his gift for making unexpected connections, and his ability to extract humor from dark places. John Ashbery, one of his most ardent admirers, called him “the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous.

Grimes’ meretricious blab (culled from second hand sources no less) laden with limp lingo and a patrician tone suggests the passing of a first rate American poet deserves nothing more than granulated rubber.

I had to rub my eyes. You’d imagine, reading this that James Tate turned out innumerable fat books of verse, all of them colloquial and vaguely adolescent. Moreover you’d assume the English countryside is home to tiny cows.

Later Grimes tries to right himself but fails to recognize the jokes buried in an interview with the poet Charles Simic and the parodic sensibility Tate brought to discussions about craft–an inheritance from Marcel DuChamp and Stephen Mallarme.

Indeed I thought of Mallarme while reading Grimes as he said famously a newspaper is fit only for wrapping fish.

No one outside of Norman Podhoretz would go to the obituaries for literary consciousness but let’s remember Walter Whitman’s optimistic suggestion that a nation of great poets should be a nation equally filled with great readers.

You will never know from Grimes that James Tate was a student of aleatoric findings in language; that he was deeply read in the contingencies of philosophy; and was a lyric poet of breathtaking originality.

I will let the poet have the last word:

Dear Reader

I am trying to pry open your casket

with this burning snowflake.

I’ll give up my sleep for you.

This freezing sleet keeps coming down

and I can barely see.

If this trick works we can rub our hands

together, maybe

start a little fire

with our identification papers.

I don’t know but I keep working, working

half hating you,

half eaten by the moon.

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A Brief Essay on Squalorship

Over lunch yesterday with my friend P (whose identity I shall protect, for he is a goodly man) I uttered the word “squalorship” when detailing “accide”—the term for academic indolence. We laughed at the refinements of mispronunciation. Then, since I’m a blind person, I forked up a slice of lemon from my mediterranean salad. I chewed and swallowed. As for “squalorship” I prided myself on having coined a new term.

Resisting accide I decided to look it up. “Squalorship” is, according the Seadict online dictionary:

The living conditions available to a student who has been issued a

student loan from the Federal or Provincial governments;

also the living conditions available once the collection agencies

start looking for the loans to be paid back.

I ate the lemon. I wondered “what is my name now” having swallowed. I thought “there are divisions of waters between the living and the dead; on the far shore, outside of time, where money is useless, has my father, long gone, also eaten a lemon?”

Here in the half destroyed world where we paint the walls blue, where children leave finger prints on the windows, what reconnaissance do we have? Which protean shape of identity becomes me, or you?

Lemon eater. Glad fool. Resisting accide. Still demanding cut glass ideas against Lilliputian strings.

Post lemon, its taste still on my tongue, I walked up a hill and thought of John Locke and his Letter Concerning Toleration. Locke, because he was Jefferson’s muse—more than Montesquieu or Hume. Why Jefferson with lemon? I’m preparing a course on Jefferson’s lives of ideas, both the good ones and the bad.

“That any man should think fit to cause another man — whose salvation he heartily desires — to expire in torments, and that even in an unconverted state, would, I confess, seem very strange to me, and I think, to any other also. But nobody, surely, will ever believe that such a carriage can proceed from charity, love, or goodwill. ”

Excerpt From: John Locke. “A Letter Concerning Toleration.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/2Z92L.l

Of converted states I know very little, I confess. I can admit this much. And like Jefferson, I’m more of a deist (small “d”) than a contrarian Christian.

I love Locke’s figure (transitive) of a carriage. If salvation has value it must reside in motion. If motion has value it must be progressive.

What do I believe? Resisting accide. Value in the proper carriage.

“What of squalorship?”

College should be free.

Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson and George Washington both enjoyed lemons.

Disability vs. the Wounded: Some Thoughts on Permanence and Nomenclature

Disablement is to disability as the spider is to the cricket. They belong to the same Linnean grid but not in the same terrarium. The reasons are many, but strictly speaking, disablement is transitive implying that just perhaps it has a back door, much like a tarantula. In other words you might not always be in the hole. “Disablement” suggests impermanence, as does the term “wounded warrior”. You’re not disabled if you’re wounded; not a cripple if your present circumstance is marked by disablement.

Compositional figures in language and the interpretational capacities of its speakers are seldom in conflict because “usage” predominates. For instance, we don’t think of direct objects as transitive: He was experiencing disablement is both in terms of embodiment indecipherable, and culturally comforting. (He was not disabled.)

A “wounded warrior” is unspecified and as a figure of embodiment unlocatable. In turn, disability is to the propositionalist’s imagination static and local. A pro tem or makeshift physicality is an inference. Disablement is a variable. Disability a constant.

“Can you be cured?” is the baseline proving the love of the transitive.

When I use the term “transitive body” I echo Merleau-Ponty but I don’t mean the body as a subjectivity in a state of awareness but instead multiple embodiments of what Goffman called “spoiled identity” and in turn the culture’s resistance to a crippling stasis.

It would be better for the Wounded Warrior project to stop its appeals to the imaginary transitive but of course such appeals make money, in large part because like religion, the prevailing narrative is metaphysical.

Moreover the transitive appeal of disablement has as its root, the medical model of disability, and proposes sites of overcoming within an extended charity model. That disability is static and requires a profound commitment to civil rights is never part of the TV commercial.

Two Cripples and the Locked Cathedral

Yesterday ambling around downtown Syracuse with my friend Bill who is a wheelchair user, I thought I’d show him the magnificent Episcopal church, because, well, it was a sunny day and we were in admiring moods. The church was locked. We circumnavigated it. All the doors were locked.

I won’t say we needed to go into the church. Bill is a recovering Catholic and I’m a fair weather Christian and mostly what we were after was beauty which if you’re Jungian means we were feeling spiritual but as anyone who’s read Philip Larkin knows, you can love a church for its lambent emptiness.

It was Friday. It was a national holiday. It was the middle of the day. The big church was locked.

“Well,” I thought, “that’s the high Episcopalians for you. Nothing’s more tasteful than a locked door.”

Syracuse is a tough city. Poverty is high. Homelessness is plentiful. Surely it makes sense to lock a downtown church on a holiday. Then I said to Bill: “Well they could let the homeless sleep in the church and show people around when the need arises.”

I invented a homeless man named “Slappy” who has a cot beside the boiler and a bottle of muscatel.

I felt bad for making jokes.

But I also thought, “Jesus would do this.”

Jesus would not understand homelessness and locked churches.

Then I thought, because the church was flying a rainbow flag above its locked door, “there’s pain in the streets every day.”

The locked doors were very red. There was fresh mulch in the flowerbeds.

Disability at the 4th of July

Because this is the summer when the Americans with Disabilities Act turns 25, and since a quarter of a century is generally imagined as the age of solidity, I am, in witness of my dog, today declaring the ADA an adult. Notice I’m calling the act a person, since it’s a custom in the United States to declare accumulations of people individuals. We do this because the primary synonym for person is customer and we sure do love our customers. So I’m nominating the dear ADA a tough customer.

Yes, the ADA is now grown up. Her longevity is remarkable because boy oh boy, did she ever have some enemies, especially when she was just a kid. (Remember Clint Eastwood? How about Antonin Scalia?) Yes, there was a considerable cast of characters (who we can also call a person) who ardently wished to kill ADA in her cradle. I, for instance, have a great memory. I recall Tom Delay saying on the floor of the US Senate in 1990: “The cost to the nation and the economy is going to be dramatic. This goes way beyond the bounds of reason.” Or how about noisome blab from the National Review: “Under the guise of civil rights for the disabled, the Senate had passed a disaster for U.S. business.” ADA’s enemies proposed that euthanizing the child was really for the best. Notice the use of the phrase under the guise of civil rights, as though equal opportunity and civic life are, after all, really, just a fiction, or, to put it more succinctly, they’re a true story only for some. Perhaps the most vigorous opponent of ADA was (and remains) the Chamber of Commerce, which even today, bloviates that accessibility guidelines kill small businesses. (In order to believe this, its crucial to think that “the disabled” are insufficient customers, who live alone, who have no families and spouses and children who also shop.) It’s always staggered me how little the Chamber of Commerce knows about America’s customers. But I digress.

Dear ADA, on this 4th of July in the year of your quarter century, let us remember Thomas Jefferson and his American creed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Dear ADA on this 4th of July in the year of your quarter century, let us remember that it was the consent of the governed, who hailed from both political parties, who brought you forth in the name of Liberty.

Dear ADA, here’s one more quote from Jefferson:

“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

ADA: you are standing like a rock!

Dear Eloise, I Just Can’t Get the Slavery out of My Flag

You don’t need to be a Marxist historian to understand the Confederate flag but it doesn’t hurt to recall the central place of social class and economic controls when we remember the origins of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s slaves still matter because they were the human capital upon which the American banking system was founded. Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of New York was the first engine of liquidity in the nation, and though our founding treasury secretary took a dim view of slavery and favored industrialization, much of the nation’s wealth derived from the slave states. Moreover, even after the industrial revolution took a firm hold in North America, slavery drove the engines. When “some” people wave the Confederate flag today they’re attempting to imagine something noble—as if southern heritage has finally been bleached of substance like Wonder Bread. Most who wave the flag want to extoll racial hate.

I wrote a one liner on Twitter last week: “No matter how many times you wash the Confederate flag, you just can’t get the slavery out.”

On Getting Disabled

We talk about the art of getting naked or of flower arranging, but we never speak of the art of becoming disabled. In America disability is discussed simply as rehabilitation, as if living is no more complicated than lighting a stove.

The art of getting disabled is a necessary subject. When we look to history we find examples of this art everywhere. Disabled makers stand against loss. They make something of difference. When traveling in France Thomas Jefferson broke his wrist. A surgeon set the break badly. A major facet of his life was changed forever. He was forced to put aside his treasured violin. In turn he took up long, slow, leisurely horseback rides as a meditative practice.

Blind people don’t necessarily need dogs. White cane travel is a very fine way to get around. But I say guide dog travel is an art. It’s a means toward living much as Jefferson learned to live. Moving in consort with an excellent animal is one way to make a life. Art is mysterious. Some find a path to a certain form. Some find an unlike form.

Oh I know Jefferson sang to his horses. He was very fond of singing. Moving in consort requires it I think.

It’s hard to imagine singing to a white cane.

Do you need to sing to live well? No. I’ve a great good friend who is nonspeaking. But in turn his whole body is music.

My deaf friends sing.

“You got to keep something moving all the time,” said Huddle Ledbetter, otherwise known as “Leadbelly” when asked how he played the 12 string guitar.

Many of my wheelchair pals are dancers.

Several of my disabled friends are comedians.

We crackle, zip, exhale, inhale, sport with our fingers, flap, jump, pop wheelies, and jingle with harnesses.

Resourceful life is practiced. Sometimes it is silly. Art can and often should be frivolous. With permission from curators at the Museum of Modern Art I was once allowed to spin Marcel DuChamp’s famous wheel, a bicycle fork with front wheel mounted upside-down on a wooden stool. DuChamp was a DaDaist. He made art by placing things side by side that did not formally belong together. A MOMA staff member handed me a pair of latex gloves and I pulled them on and with my first guide dog Corky watching beside me, I reached out and gave DuChamp’s aluminum wheel a spin. “This is the steering wheel of my life,” I thought. Eccentric motion. A dog walking life not always understood by others, but simple and smoothly elegant.

No you don’t need a dog, or any other animal if you have a disability. Solo life contains its own joys.

I certainly know some blind folks who would say I’m over the top talking about art in the context of service dog life. I know people who say a guide dog is just a mobility aid. I’m fine with that. As long as they’re kind to their dog machines I’ve nothing to say about this view. To each his own. I have friends who don’t like poetry. I don’t think their worlds are harmed by their disinterest. All I know for sure is what a guide dog can do. Though the stationary wheel of your life seemed forever stopped, she says give it a turn. You’ll be surprised where the imagination can take you.

George Washington’s “Sweetlips”

It’s a game I have, as a means of cheering myself, to think of famous people and their dogs.

In respect to this pastime I can’t think of any of our forebears who affords me greater pleasure than George Washington who truly loved his dogs. You can read about our first President and his canine companions here. I especially love the following:

Imagine the Father of Our Country whistling for his hound, Sweetlips…or rubbing the ears of his coach dog, a Dalmatian named Madame Moose. When it came to pooches, George Washington had a sense of humor – and a tender side, too.

During his lifetime, Washington kept almost every group of dog recognized today by the American Kennel Club. Records show that he owned French hounds Tipsy, Mopsey, Truelove, and Ragman – just to name a few. Greyhounds, Newfoundlands, Briards, and various types of spaniels, terriers, and toys also called the estate home.

And they too probably had awesome names.