Category: Uncategorized

 

Someone aims to steal your shirt though he lacks talent.

Neighborhoods sink in a gravel of loose ideas–

befouled nostalgias about dim sleep and militias. 

A pal says all lingering romanticism is under our fingernails.

As Transtrømer said, “A helmet with nothing inside has taken over.”

  

 

Time will say nothing but I told you so. 

I woke this morning to the cries of birds in snow. 

 

Out here in the cold I start to fly. 

I was a boy not long ago. 

 

A single note of an oboe comes–

its a friend’s voice after years.

 

Time will say nothing but I told you so. 

I woke this morning to the cries of birds in snow.

 

So many I’ve lost. Many haven’t returned. 

A single note of an oboe comes–

 

its a friend’s voice after years. 

Time will say nothing but I told you so.

 

Out here in the cold I start to fly. 

I was a boy not long ago. 

 

 

 

Under the surface most stories have some relation to disability. Moby Dick is a disability narrative as much as anything else and we know that Abraham Lincoln suffered so keenly from bi-polar depression he frequently went without sleep for days at a time and that one such episode preceded his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Accordingly it comes as no surprise to discover a thread about life with a hidden disability in the story of Adam Swartz, the information visionary who committed suicide last January. 

 

In an excellent piece for the New Yorker by Larissa MacFarguhar on Swartz’s struggles we read of his private pain from colitis, his bouts of frequent depression, and his struggle to make sense of his life by means of blogging. The latter was, it seems, not so much a method of overt connection in the manner of the best disability blogs but more a cris de coeur posted in public space. MacFarguhar writes:  

 

He didn’t think of his blog as published writing, exactly, nor was it a private journal, since it was accessible to anyone. It was something in between. He wrote about things in his blog that he didn’t tell his friends—about his depressions, about his ulcerative colitis. It was not clear who he imagined his readers to be. 

 

It is not clear to any blogger who his or her readers might be, but disability activists tend, in general, to speak both for themselves and others, a line of public discourse that demands emotional candor and a probative style. In Swartz’s case, blogging was neither confessional nor communitarian but something in-between. I think his indeterminacy is tragic and his story underscores why disability studies matters. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Brenda Brueggemann have written, disability studies demands the integration of embodiment and identity into a discourse on human rights: 

 

The study of disability in both literary criticism and the humanities in general is a grass-roots scholarly movement that has emerged from the academic turn toward identity studies, an awareness of the need for diversity in scholarly topics, and the recognition that disability is a political rights and integration issue. Disability studies in the humanities seeks to overturn the medicalized understanding of disability and to replace it with a social model of disability. This view defines “disability,” not as a physical defect inherent in bodies (just as gender is not simply a matter of genitals, nor race a matter of skin pigmentation), but rather as a way of interpreting human differences. In other words, this critical perspective considers “disability” as a way of thinking about bodies rather than as something that is wrong with bodies. Within such a critical frame, disability becomes a representational system more than a medical problem, a social construction rather than a personal misfortune or a bodily flaw, and a subject appropriate for wide-ranging intellectual inquiry instead of a specialized field within medicine, rehabilitation, or social work. Such a critical perspective extends the constructivist analysis that informs gender and race studies.  This approach to disability looks at such issues as changes in the way disability is interpreted over time and within varying cultural contexts; the development of the disabled as a community and a social identity; the political and material circumstances resulting from this system of assigning value to bodies; the history of how disability influences and is influenced by the distribution of resources, power, and status; and  how disability affects artistic production. It also insists on the materiality of the body–its embeddedness in the world–by focusing on issues such as equal access for all, integration of institutions, and the historical exclusion of people with disabilities from the public sphere. 

 

Swartz, for all his genius with the digital commons couldn’t conceive of blogging about pain and the representational oppressions of embodiment as a larger struggle. The development of disability as a social identity is not a trivial matter for each time a man or woman with hidden illnesses claims political language he or she will not be defined by others.

 

 

10.   Blindness must be a ticket to utter existential misery and though I may not know any blind people, I know misery. In fact, I’m such a wretch already, if I lost mysight I’d have to kill myself. 

 

9.     Therefore blindness equals death. Since no one knows what real death is like, blindness will have to do. This is easy because I don’t know any real blind people anyway.

 

8.     I saw a blind person once and he was begging outside of Bloomingdales. Ergo, all blind people are in extraordinary existential misery. I will call them “the blind” without comic irony.

        Again, I don’t know any real blind people. 

 

7.     God made blind people as exemplary models of spiritual longing. Clunk clunk, here comes Jesus with some gooey mud.  

 

6.     Blind people may have compensatory powers like Tiresias. That’s because although God punishes them, sometimes he takes an almost inexplicable liking to one or two of them. 

 

5.     This is easy because I don’t know any real blind people anyway. Art for art’s sake. 

 

4.     Blind people in particular and disabled people in general are not part of the true diversity. Don’t compare crippled people (defective, lame, retarded, deaf, whatever you want to call yourselves…)

        with my able bodied sisters and brothers.

 

3.     If you’re that way, well, you probably deserve it.

 

2.     I don’t know any real blind people but I’ll bet they’re defective in all kinds of ways, hence, perfect for protean cliches about angst.  

 

1.     I think the blind tune pianos? But they’re not real artists, or Ph.Ds, or professors, or opera singers. I mean, I’ve never met one, have you?

 

 

The dog has the smell of bread, and though she’s moving now her fragrance trails. I turn on a lamp thinking there might be a cartoon version of her scent, “stink lines” in the air but only dust motes appear, full of motile contradictions. I see sparkles but not faces. I wonder if dogs see motes. We, dog and man, decide to go out. She’s at the door. I take her hint. In snow I see nothing. Light falls into the gray sea. My dog, my loaf of ancient bread, walks me among the trees. 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: After I posted my dismay about Lera Auerbach’s operatic revival of Maeterlinck’s  1890 play “The Blind” on Facebook, her publisher Sikorski removed the following description from its website: 

 

“At a lonely clearing in a wood, a group of blind people await the return of a priest who led them there in order to enable them to enjoy the last rays of the sun before the beginning of winter. Only the sound of the nearby sea can be heard. The longer they wait, the more restless the blind people become; in their desperation they realise that they are helpless and cannot move from their place. Their fear escalates to naked terror when they discover the corpse of the priest. The blind people form a circle round the dead man and begin to pray for forgiveness and salvation. Steps become perceptible during the prayer. The presence of something mysterious makes the blind people panic; they pray ever more fervently. In his mother’s arms, the small child, the only person in the group who can see, breaks out sobbing. What does the child see? Is it rescue, the rescue so ardently hoped for, or is it death?”

 

**

 

Here is Maeterlinck’s mise en scene, and the play’s opening dialogue:

 

 

A very ancient northern forest eternal of aspect, beneath a sky profoundly starred. In the midst, and towards the depths of night, a very old priest is seated wrapped in a wide black cloak. His head and the upper part of his body, slightly thrown back and mortally still, are leaning against the bole of an oak tree, huge and cavernous. His face is fearfully pale and of an inalterable waxen lividity ; his violet lips are parted. His eyes, dumb and fixed, no longer gaze at the visible side of eternity, and seem bleeding beneath a multitude of immemorial sorrows and of tears. His hair, of a most solemn white, falls in stiff and scanty locks upon a face more illumined and more weary than all else that surrounds it in the intent silence of the gloomy forest. His hands, extremely lean, are rigidly clasped on his lap. To the right, six old blind men are seated upon stones, the stumps of trees, and dead leaves. To the left, separated from them by an uprooted tree and fragments of rock, six women, blind also, are seated facing the old men. Three of them are praying and wailing in hollow voice and without pause. Another is extremely old. The fifth, in an attitude of mute insanity^ holds on her knees a little child asleep. The sixth is strangely young, and her hair inundates her whole being. The women, as well as the old men, are clothed in ample garments, sombre and uniform. Most of them sit waiting with their elbows on their knees and their faces between their hands; and all seem to have lost the habit of useless gesture, and no longer turn their heads at the stifled and restless noises of the island. Great funereal trees, yews, weeping willows, cypresses, enwrap them in their faithful shadows. Not far from the priest, a cluster of long and sickly daffodils blossoms in the night. It is extraordinarily dark in spite of the moonlight that here and there strives to dispel for a while the gloom of the foliage. 

 

 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

Is he not coming yet? 

 

SECOND BLIND MAN. 

You have waked me! 

 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

 

I was asleep too. 

 

THIRD BLIND MAN. 

I was asleep too. 

 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

Is he not coming yet? 

 

SECOND BLIND MAN. 

I hear nothing coming. 

 

THIRD BLIND MAN. 

 

It must be about time to go back to the 

asylum. 

 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

We want to know where we arc! 

 

SECOND BLIND MAN. 

It has grown cold since he left 

 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

We want to know where we are! 

 

THE OLDEST BLIND MAN. 

Does any one know where we are? 

 

 

**

 

I was alerted to the upcoming performance of Auerbach’s opera by someone wishing to enlist me as a post-production panelist. I won’t name names, nor do I want to spoil the tenor of an idea–given the offensive and ableist representation of blindness at the center of Maeterlinck’s play, and with no evidence of irony from Auerbach herself, a panel of disability studies scholars to follow the July performance at Lincoln Center may be a good idea. I use conditional language because I’ve been trying (without success) to find a sufficiently tasteless analogy for this revival. A colleague who is a disability studies scholar likens it to staging “Triumph of the Will” or “Birth of a Nation” but I don’t think these will “do” for we fought wars against the “isms” in those examples and last I looked we haven’t broadly resisted pejorative and disenfranchising metaphors of disability in the arts or our politics.  

 

No, my analogy for Auerbach’s re-dedication of Maeterlinck is Amos ‘n Andy the American radio show from the Great Depression (later a series of movies and a TV sitcom) where two white men in black face (Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll) pretended to be aimless and shambling “negroes”.   

 

Lest you think I’m being too hard on Auerbach, here is what she says about the enterprise:

 

“I love Maeterlinck. When I read ‘The Blind’ I thought to myself – this story is a perfect opera. Or anti-opera. And it needs to be done a-cappella. Since some of the characters are continuously praying or chanting – this provides a perfect structure for a chamber-music approach to balancing of the voices where some of the voices provide a constant harmonic base, while the others play more prominent voices.”

 

**

 

Once oppression is reduced to aesthetics you can say whatever you like. Amos ‘n Andy can be reconstituted as an ironic paean to oppression–two white men who had to make their terrible living by lampooning black men in the age of lynchings, You see, its man’s inhumanity to man! 

 

Blindness lends itself to paltry and derisory metaphors–psychic imminence, vaticism, despair, death, compensatory talent, and of course utter hopelessness. These things have no genuine connection with blindness save that figurative influence holds a strong place in the public imagination. One wonders if Ms. Auerbach knows that 70 % of the blind remain unemployed in the United States despite having degrees from Princeton and Swarthmore. One wonders if Ms. Auerbach will stage this production with blind opera singers–though I already know the answer to that. 

 

I was asked to say nothing about the upcoming performance or the effort to create a post-performance panel, as apparently Lincoln Center hasn’t decided whether this disability studies  panel is a good idea. But they’ve apparently decided it will be lovely to have the audience experience blindness by means of artificial darkness and there will be atomizers with evocative scents and controlled temperature shifts for the credulous. I’m thinking odor of wormwood and gall might be nice. A few stinks from the illud tempus of superstitious ideas.   

 

Back to Amos ‘n Andy. Would someone from Lincoln Center call up Al Sharpton and tell him “we’re staging an operatic revival of an old classic–it’s probably a good idea to have a panel, and we’d like you to be on it, but don’t say anything for the time being. 

 

I’m an American poet, memoirist, translator, essayist, professor, public policy advisor, and disability rights activist. As a result I’m suspicious of aesthetes. I’m also chary of neo-liberalism and hipsterism. Don’t tell me to shut up. Here’s what I wrote on Facebook:

 

The description of the opera on Lera Auerbach’s website left me speechless, inasmuch as it employs nearly every conceivable “ableist” cliche about blindness one can employ–blindness is embedded in her précis with more cliches than any one person may creditably imagine. In fact the synopsis is so offensive I’m left with a dislocated mandible which I hope is a temporary condition as I’m at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts and there are no local dentists. How could Ms. Auerbach imagine that in 2013 blindness can still be used as a metaphor for lack of knowing or knowledgeability; powerlessness, spiritual failure, immobility, or worse, stand as a metonymic reduction for death itself?

 

 

It’s interesting to me that of the several disability studies scholars I’ve written to about this, only two have answered–one to say he likes Maeterlinck and while the premise is offensive, a nice panel should do just the trick. Another wrote to congratulate me for standing up for blind people. Most have avoided saying anything–I suspect they want to be on the panel. I know how politics works. 

 

Now Sikorski has taken down the description. Good for them. But the conceit of the production lives on: blind people, aleotoric, driven by cosmological forces beyond our ken, people asleep or in terror. It’s really hard to believe. But then again it’s easy to believe. They don’t teach disability studies at Juilliard.  

 

I know what’s coming: I’m going to be accused of extremism by disability studies scholars who want to be empaneled. But I talk daily to real blind people and they’re suffering, not because they lack education or technology or ambition but because he public still lives in Maeterlinck-land. 

 

The blind are less powerful than the organized deaf, less apparent than wheelchair racers, and since blindness is a low incidence disability its easy to talk about us without hearing an informed response. 

 

Meanwhile I’m going to write an opera in which the blind, like dragonfly larva, crawl over a murky lakebottom singing in indeterminate tones the Mosaic Standard from Ur.

See “Bad Cripple” for a related piece. 

Technorati Tags: Bad Cripple, Lera Auerbach, Maeterlinck, Lincoln Center, American Opera Project, Disability Studies, Blindness as metaphor, Amos ‘n Andy, Contemporary art and disability

 

Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (S&E) provides a broad base of quantitative information about the participation of these groups in S&E education and employment. A Digest highlights key issues and trends through graphics and text, and detailed statistical tables provide data on higher education enrollments, degrees, institutions, and financial support and on employment status, occupations, sectors, and salaries. Links to other NSF and non-NSF sources of data are provided.

(BBC News)
March 1, 2013

LOUGHBOROUGH, ENGLAND– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Whether you like it or not, there’s a good chance you are going to have to work longer than your parents.

Many countries are heading for what is commonly known as the Demographic Timebomb. This means an increasing proportion of their populations falling into older age-brackets.

A combination of longer life and lower birth rates mean an early retirement – or even a normal retirement – may just not be on the cards. Even if your sector or nation is lucky enough to be awash with workers, falling pension returns mean you will probably want to stay on anyway.

Of course, there is already technology available that will solve many of the problems associated with older workforces. These are often designed with disability in mind, rather than age.

“Scan and read applications are becoming increasingly popular,” says Glenn Tookey, chief executive of Sight and Sound Technology. “This technology makes printed or electronic text accessible by speaking text aloud.”

“In addition, the software gives users the ability to write and edit documents as well as including features for note taking, summarising content, and outlining text,” he adds.

But there’s plenty more on the way.

Entire article:
How Old Age Technology could help stop a demographic time bomb 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21535772

(BBC News)
March 1, 2013

CORNWALL, ENGLAND– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] A councillor who said disabled children should be “put down” has resigned.

Collin Brewer, a Cornwall councillor, made the comment to a charity worker in 2011, saying disabled children cost the authority too much money.

He made the comments to a Disability Cornwall member at a stall at County Hall in Truro.

Mr. Brewer said it was unlikely he would be a candidate in the May elections. “I was wrong, I admit it. I will continue to apologise,” he said.

Steve Paget, the chairman of Disability Cornwall, said: “Finally he’s seen sense and resigned. This situation should never have got to this stage.”

Entire article:
‘Put disabled down’ councillor Collin Brewer resigns
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-21612089

(Star-Ledger)
March 1, 2013

NEWARK, NEW JERSEY– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] How would you feel if an internet search about your neurological condition produced a suggestion you be exterminated?

Autism activists have succeeded in getting Google to change the results of its automated search process so that offensive “hate speech” doesn’t routinely show up as a suggested match.

Until today, typing “Autistic people should . . . ” into Google’s search engine would produce four so-called “auto-complete” suggestions: that they “be killed,” “die,” or “be exterminated.”

In response, an autism activist group staged an online protest called a Flash Blog, which encouraged people with autism to counteract those violent suggestions with poetry and positive awareness of the developmental condition.

Another Flash Blog was scheduled for this Saturday, but Google today announced it would be cleaning up the automatic search results to eliminate results the company considers “hate speech,” said Jason Freidenfelds, a company spokesperson.

Entire article:
Google eliminates ‘die’ search suggestion for autism
http://tinyurl.com/ide0301131
Related:
You blogged in Autistic People Should? You deserve credit. (Autistic People Should . . . )
http://autisticpeopleshould.blogspot.com/