writing – Planet of the Blind

Malamud, William Boyd, and Squishless Fiction

I’ve been thinking all afternoon about Bernard Malamud. He understood the mixture of milk and iodine that constitutes adult consciousness. He could be tender, strict, sentimental and then unsentimental, having the realism of Zola and the darkness of Kafka. It’s customarily said we are lost. Malamud asks us to consider in what ways this is so. And in what ways it isn’t.

The second consideration is where the harder aspects of literary consciousness reside. “Middlemarch” is just so.

I’d add Dos Passos to this list along with Dostoevsky and Toni Morrison. For me, too much contemporary fiction is just squishy. Wave your Updike or your “Fleischman is in Trouble” but come on, contemporary fiction is squish and has been so for decades.

Enter William Boyd whose work defies the squish. His people are not cartoons coated with style. Boyd knows this and writes in his novel “Any Human Heart”:

“Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary—it is the respective proportions of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.”

The novel is built around this. No squish.

Without giving too much away the narrator, Logan Mountstuart is a strange mixture of Augie March and Don Quixote but with more of the former’s discernment. He wanders the world having left his native Uruguay and meets everyone in the kaleidoscopic art scene of the 20th century. Its his comic irony that makes him:

“Picasso seems to me one of these wild, stupid geniuses—more Yeats, Strindberg, Rimbaud, Mozart, than Matisse, Brahms, Braque. It’s quite tiring being with him.”

Comic irony, that self awareness which springs from knowing who you were when younger and then, who you are now, becomes the locus of the narrator’s sensibility. He’s Bellow without the bullshit:

“Reading Nabokov’s Ada: an intermittently brilliant but baffling book— an idée fixe on the rampage, leaving friendly readers stunned and exhausted behind. I have to say that as an admirer of style—a loaded word, but actually best thought of as a synonym for individuality— VN’s mannered artfulness, his refusal to let a sleeping word lie, becomes in this book more and more like a nervous tic than a natural, individual voice, however fruity and sonorous. The studied opulence, the ornament for the sake of ornament, grows wearing and one longs for a simple, elegant, discursive sentence. This is the key difference: in good prose precision must always triumph over decoration. Wilful elaboration is a sign that the stylist has entered a decadent phase. You cannot live on caviar and foie gras every day: sometimes a plain dish of lentils is all that the palate craves, even if one insists that the lentils come from Puy.”

I remember a friend, a budding novelist announcing that he was “Henry James without the bullshit” which is amusing enough but it wasn’t true. And like Malamud, there’s no bullshit in William Boyd. No squish. The scalpels take care of it.

D.H. Lawrence and the Blind Kid

I fell in love with D. H. Lawrence as a high school student. His poems reached me first; then the essays. I don’t know if it matters what kind of reader I was back then. We spend so much time pre-fronting our subjectivities nowadays but yes I was legally blind. I read what I could get via long playing records and tapes from the Library of Congress. I listened slowly and in more than ordinary solitude. (It wasn’t possible in those days to hear a record while sitting under a tree.) I received my Lawrence in dark rooms.

When I entered college in 1973 I found no one was teaching Lawrence. He was considered a kook. At best he was a polemicist for psychoanalysis and at worst a pornographer but in any case professors assured me he was nothing more. If you wanted an English moralist you were instructed to read Hardy.

The photo on my freshman I.D. shows a boy-child who was 5′ 6" tall and weighed 102 pounds. I’d barely survived a bout of adolescent anorexia. I started reading poetry in the hospital. I read this:

“The Uprooted"

People who complain of loneliness must have lost something,
lost some living connection with the cosmos, out of themselves,
lost their life-flow
like a plant whose roots are cut.
And they are crying like plants whose roots are cut.
But the presence of other people will not give them new, rooted connection
it will only make them forget.
The thing to do is in solitude slowly and painfully put forth new roots
into the unknown, and take root by oneself.

Of course I read all the poems of Lawrence I could find in recorded formats. "The Ship of Death" with its Egyptian incense, "The Snake" and the lesser known "Almond Blossom":

“Trees suffer, like races, down the long ages.
They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through
long ages
Like drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black,
The alien trees in alien lands: and yet
The heart of blossom,
The unquenchable heart of blossom!”

If you’re lonely by circumstance and you’re in "alien lands" then you’ve got to make something of it. You must believe the "unquenchable heart of blossom" is the signature of all things.

Lawrence was disabled. Like so many people born in the latter part of the 19th century he had tuberculosis. He was born on September 11, 1885. He was ten years younger than Thomas Mann who’s canonical novel "The Magic Mountain" offers the best description of the social psychology of TB.

No one has written with greater lyric urgency and intelligence than Lawrence about the side by side flames of soul and death. And yes eventually they become one flame but our work is different for now. We must adore them both:

“Medlars and Sorb-Apples"

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness.

I love to suck you out from your skins
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour
Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:
Stream within stream.”

Jeffrey Meyers writes in his excellent biography of Lawrence:

“Lawrence’s life and character were strongly influenced by the progress of his disease. He had (at various times) all the symptoms of consumption, which intensified toward the end of his life. He suffered from irregular appetite, loss of weight, emaciation, facial pallor, flushed cheeks, unstable pulse rates, fever, night sweats, shortness of breath, wheezing, chest pains, frequent colds, severe coughing, spitting of blood, extreme irritability and sexual impotence. The toxemia of Lawrence’s lungs influenced the state of his mind and provoked febrile rages. As John Keats had told Fanny Brawne, emphasizing the gulf between the sick and the well: “A person in health as you are can have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like mine go through.” Witter Bynner wrote of Lawrence’s stoic attitude but uncontrollable anger: “He had never given me any evidence of his illness by complaint in words or faltering in spirit but only by bursts and acts of temper.”

One supposes Bynner wasn’t much of a reader when it came to Lawrence’s poetry since poem after poem stills us, stands us on the by turns dark, then evanescent unseeable line between living and dying; between apprehension and the vatic. Here’s the end of
“Medlars and Sorb-Apples":

“Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.
I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,
Orphic, delicate
Dionysos of the Underworld.
A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture,
Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.
And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
A new gasp of further isolation,
A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying,
frost-cold leaves.”

"Parting, partner, infusing, twain," "a new gasp of further isolation."

This is conceivably the greatest description of disability as lived experience at the center of the body as ever you’ll find.

Dear Bear

It’s been a year since I had a major heart attack. The surgery was brutal even as it was successful. When I was in intensive care I fell in and out of consciousness. One morning I woke to see a black bear walking past the glass wall separating my room from the external corridor. I asked for strawberries because that’s what the bear would have eaten. I believed in that bear.

Now, one full year has gone by. I’m still discussing things with the bear.

I recall Wordsworth:

“Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
‘This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain?’”

Two halves of a life were debating, rather bitterly, like unhappy twins. Both had studied the classical methods of confession so were voluble but insincere. Neither half knew how to escape forward. Anyway, it was late in the day when shadows spread across the lawn like symbols of past actions when the transitive life stood between them—one may call her “future pneuma perfect” though it scarcely matters for she can take care of herself.

“What,” she said, “causes you to think the past is definitely settled? Don’t you know it’s changing right now, beneath your feet?” “This is the future of resignation—patience, day-dreams, small plantings…”

My bear is F.P.P.—the future pneuma perfect is both in my head and out in front of me.

In turn I must ask “what does it mean when I say I’m after something?” And what does forgetting mean while going forward? And what the hell is forward? I’m Karl Jasper on methadone.

Once, when I was a college student, on a study abroad trip to the Greek islands, I rented a motor bike because my pals were doing it. Some of them knew I couldn’t see, or at least I imagined they knew, for I while paraded around without asking for help, I was halting and clumsy. But it was the late 70’s: no one had any language for disability and hey, I was an unlikely guy and so were we all. We rented our motorbikes on the island of Santorini—a dark crescent that rises steeply from the sea—it’s all that remains of a larger island that vanished in a volcanic flash in the 16th century BCE.

We rented the motorbikes in Fira from a man who was listening to a football match on the radio and who scarcely noticed us. He didn’t need to see our licenses, only required a credit card and we were off. I followed a boy named Roger who wore a red windbreaker. If I stayed very close I could track his jacket with my left eye. I saw his rectangle of red bobbing up and down. It was the flag in a bullfight. The sharp curves and severe hills of Santorini wound like a lethal high speed ribbon under my wheels. I swayed and dipped but I held that red flag in view, or imagined I did, and unlike my classmates, I saw nothing of the panoramic ocean or cliffside ruins, or pelicans crossing the road on foot.

Thank you Karl Jasper, I think…and thank you Bear.

**
So now I’m old and I still don’t know what its about. “It” which can be attached to the possessive but can also stay bound in itself like Hamlet’s nutshell.

Once, (again) on a trip to China with multiple artists, I was the only one to hit a ceremonial bell by throwing a coin.

Thank you Karl and Bear.

We children hid among trees and watched the old woman who we’d been told “had a lobotomy”and we saw her as a witch. We dug into our foxhole. She came out of her trailer home and swept her garden path with a broom. We were speechless, ambiguous little creatures in the presence of nameless adult suffering.

This is why memories in the middle of the night can’t be assuaged by TV. The sadness of others carries us. From moment to moment I get down on my knees and touch the ground with my hands. If forgiveness isn’t possible at least I can tap some Morse Code. Dear defenseless dead, do your teeth still chatter? Dear Bear…

Of Gratitude, a Heart Attack, and Poetry

One year ago today I had myself a heart attack. To be honest I actually had the symptoms of heart failure over a period of about ten days. I honestly believed that I’d pulled a muscle in my sternum while lifting a carry on bag into an overhead compartment when boarding a plane. I made the classic mistake of googling my symptoms. A pulled sternum muscle can, said AI, cause shortness of breath and pain in the center of your chest. Put ice on it, or heat. Take Advil. Etc. I flew from upstate New York to Iowa City to visit a friend who’s been unwell. We walked around the town. We strolled beside the Iowa River. We’d walk a few feet and then I’d have to sit down. I explained my muscle pull. I had no idea I was having a full blown heart attack. When I returned home to Syracuse, New York I again had trouble walking across campus. I asked a friend if she could carry my brief case. It was that muscle thing. I went one more day believing I had simple strain. And then, on Good Friday it came over me, I was having a heart failure. The thing that put me over the top was that I had the compulsion to lie down. And a little voice in my head said, “you’re not going to get up, this is a serious moment.”

My wife Connie drove me to the emergency room. There are multiple hospitals in Syracuse. I chose the closest, “Upstate” a teaching hospital associated with the State University of New York. It didn’t take them long to confirm that I was having serious heart trouble.

My father died on Easter Sunday from a sudden heart attack. Here it was, Good Friday. Would I also die on Easter? I wanted to call Carl Jung on the phone. I wanted someone to tell me about magic numbers and fate.

I won’t go on about the triple bypass surgery, which is physically devastating. It’s taken me a year to feel like myself again. Today on my anniversary I’m almost me. Sometimes when I move my upper body I can feel the wires holding my chest together—there’s a little shift inside me like a transmission that catches when accelerating. This is normal. Its not painful, just weird. And of course while I say I feel like me again I’m not the same me. My rebuilt chest is misshapen. The long incision scar remains tender. I’m told that’s likely permanent. And I take a veritable armada of pills. Blood thinners, blood pressure pills, a daily statin bomb, vitamins, a baby aspirin. And there’s another pill which I don’t remember and can’t say what it does but its small and always drops to the floor and being blind I have to get down on my hands and knees and grope for it lest a dog come along and eat it.

My surgeon, the man who saved me, is a refugee from Iran. He came here as a young man. He’s arguably one of the finest heart surgeons in Syracuse. On the night before my operation we talked about Persian poetry. I felt lucky, even under tremendous stress. I felt cared for.

One of my resolutions is to never overlook the happiness of others. At its core this is pure democracy as Jefferson knew it. You have the right to pursue happiness and my job is to help you find it. I really mean this. I’m currently raising funds in order to publish first rate books of poems by disabled poets. I’ve published six books in this series https://www.ninemile.org/propeland will be releasing two more this summer. In these dark times we each have a job. And because I’ve received a second chance at life I like to imagine I know what to do.

Each morning I gather mosses…

Each morning I gather mosses, even in January, even when bending to customary tasks. Washing dishes, I touch the moist earth. It’s a game I play to keep alive.

Generally, I think human beings would be better creatures if they talked with their feet.

Go on. Push the child you once were into the deep end. The kid will do fine.

A memory: just before heart surgery (mine), one of the hospital interns who spoke no English tried talking to me using a translation app on his iPhone. But I couldn’t read it. I was thinking about the probability of death. And we couldn’t talk.

Now give me that damn candy and leave me alone!

Trying to live well and grieving all the time. You’re one of them, those others.

You know all those “top ten” lists. Here’s a new one—top ten dream clots:

Talking to a dead mother on the phone while a dead father stands over your shoulder and tells you what to say…
Buying strange bread in a foreign land with your hands tied behind your back and a gag in your mouth…
Old acquaintances gathered in a gentle place, a room with soft lighting, and all the old wounds and wrongs have been forgiven. Trouble is, we were in a funeral home. And one of us, probably me, had tracked dog shit all over the fancy carpets.
You’re pretending to see as you did during childhood. You’re in the softball game. Nothing you do will lead to a good outcome. But you want so desperately to fit in.
A train and you’re on it. Perfect. And your uncle who was sinister in life is next to you talking about vodka.
Dreaming
Of the little girl
Who was beside me
In the infant hospital
All those years ago
Blind children
Side by side
Her singing
Savage laughter
You see yourself in mirrors
Them ovoid ass bad pants
A mannequin’s poor dream
Mozart

Improbable yes but I dreamt of him
And though we were in a room
Rain fell and it was beautiful
Water coursing down the walls

“We only get so much”
He said—“opera is for the young”
“String quartets, for dying”
He was there alright

I tend to not have nightmares. My dreams are odd though. They tend to be like Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about waiting for the dentist.

I recognized they weren’t living men
There was a blind man there, not me,
And he had a dog, not mine
In the cafe
With red curtains
My twin brother
Who died at birth…

Spinoza and Giving Up on Contemporary Fiction…

If, like me, you admire Spinoza, you’re a problem. Here’s a spoonful:

“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.”

False wonderment and ignorance. The peanut butter and jelly of American society. Yum yum! Donald Trump is selling bibles! Yum yum! The mob can’t get enough. Spinoza of course understood the role of clergy in the promotion of faux miracles. If you truly believe this then you’re the problem. You’re the problem in almost every group. You’re always going to ask “what’s wrong with this story?”

Ernest Hemingway called this sensibility the “bullshit detector” and he was almost right. He meant that first rate writing uncovers or subverts falsities. But what if the dominant narrative of your age is all nonsense? Americans are intensely attracted to victimhood. Everyone is now an undeserving wretch.American fiction is, nowadays, almost entirely unreadable. Every new novel is concerned with sub-Cartesian victimhood. It is unbearable. Do you understand false wonderment? Three divorcees go to a summer house and while walking through a tangle of spider webs come to understand themselves. The interpreter of nature and the gods is Dr. Phil. Self-help tabloid fluoride is in the water.
Yum yum! I’ll get no credit for saying this. I’ll likely be attacked. And don’t read this as an attack on women writers. Men are equally caught up in the sad victim story telling industry. In fact everyone is caught by the shoelaces with this collective hive drone.

Someone recently asked me what fiction I was currently reading. I’m reading about evolution.

How many burdens do you carry daily?

How many burdens do you carry daily? If I ask myself this question I admit I don’t know the answer. It’s like asking “what should I be doing?” It’s a fool’s game.

Here’s the problem: I carry some baggage because I’m disabled. “No big deal,” says the heart (which I’m told sits reliably in the center of the chest and not to the right hand side as depicted in cartoons.)

The heart is optimistic. It knows it must be. Every pulse beat is optimism.

Now the brain is different. It’s read Duns Scotus and Neruda and Kafka and Hannah Arendt and Frederic Jameson and “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” and at least a thousand books on disability and who knows how much gloomy nonfiction—so the brain is disposed to contrarian thinking whenever joy comes up.

Alas my brain is more than a little bit like my Finnish grandmother.

Her name was Siiri and unlike her Apple namesake she was gloomy. She couldn’t help it. She was very Lutheran and her husband was a minister during the Great Depression and they’d come to the U.S. to escape hunger and why wouldn’t you become cautionary and somber in the face of a world of gravity and scarcity?

I don’t know about you but I’ll take gloom over despair. I know about this. I have depression as well as vision loss. I ride two horses, one black and the other white. Or something like that. Maybe I’m a shark with two brains: one of appetite and the other of more appetite.

I don’t know as much about the mysteries of consciousness as I pretend.

But I know this: the burdens I carry are the burdens of others.

If the subject is disability, well, I speak up for disabled faculty, students and staff who struggle to acquire basic accommodations both in my own workplace and around the world.

Burden number one: this can make me unpopular. As with racism or misogyny or homophobia the advocate can be characterized as a malcontent almost instantly.

I’ve never completely gotten used to this. The “this” being disapprobation for speaking out against ableism.

I read as much as I can by scholars and poets of color; gay and trans writers; black writers; women writers. And yes, men. I’ve yet to find anyone who’s more deep tissue wise than Walt Whitman.

Last week I participated in a live online town hall discussion about service animals. In the Q &A period several apparently non-disabled questioners asked things phrased thusly:

“Do we have to?”

As in “OK, service animals are legally allowed to enter my space, but can’t we tell those darned blind people where they are to make their dogs relieve themselves?” Or: “OK, a child with a service dog comes to public school—do we have to help that child?” (As if being disabled requires extraordinary extra help; as if a disabled child is a burden.)

I became upset.
I said the following:

“I went to public school before the ADA. I have been told by teachers and school administrators that I’m inconvenient; or worse—that I don’t belong.”

“Frankly, I hope there’s a room in Hell for school administrators where they’ll get to sit throughout eternity with Joseph Stalin, Richard Nixon, and the man who invented the roach motel.”

Then I signed off.

I’ll never not be offended by ableism.

I’ll never sanction the winks.

Just try those questions out if you substitute race or gender or sexual orientation for disability.

How many burdens do any of us carry?

They’re much lighter when we hold them up to scrutiny.

Big Men Be Victims…

I’ve never been good at organizing. I could screw up a “one car funeral” as my maternal grandmother liked to say. She never said this of me. I was too young. One supposes childhood gives one an inoculation against incompetence. Which gets me to my question: at what age does the incapacity vaccine wear off? The poet Robert Bly argued American adults have the emotional maturity of eleven year olds. He further argued that television and all pop culture is designed to enforce this. If men, and yes, women are eleven forever than the culture has done its job. I find I can’t be persuaded to abandon this view.

Barack Obama was in fact an adult. He was a neighborhood organizer before turning to politics. I think he was the last fully fledged grownup to occupy the White House. Biden was old but his lack of personal irony made him more of a boy than we generally admit. We have had very few adults in the presidency. You can count them on one hand. Eisenhower, Truman, FDR, Lincoln and Washington—the rest have been boy-men despite their accomplishments. Andrew Jackson? Child. Teddy Roosevelt? Child. No one knows what Calvin Coolidge was. Jefferson, for all his intelligence, was peevish.

This is why as democracies get tired the people want a Big Child to lead them. All tyrants are eleven year olds. You know who I’m talking about. Here are some characteristics of fifth graders: Very sensitive to praise and recognition; feelings are easily hurt; Because friends are very important, can be conflicts between adults’ rules and friends’ rules; Caught between being a child and being an adult; Loud behavior may hide their lack of self confidence; Are moody, restless; often feel self-conscious and alienated; lack self esteem; Challenge authority figures; test limits of acceptance…(see: https://www.seedlingmentors.org/developmental-characteristics-of-eleven-to-thirteen-years-old-grades-6-8/)

Bly puts it this way: “The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.”

― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

When I see Putin or Trump I see baby men with toy soldiers. And yes, they feel like victims…

Yeats and Ruth Benedict

“Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination.”

  —Ruth Benedict

You can cross the snowy fields and see castles and diamonds because imagination is there. In Scandinavia they call it troll power. You know the world as trolls do. This is why children can’t answer the question “what did you do today?” And its why poets can’t reply honestly when asked “where did you get that idea?”
When imagination rules experience we’re at a loss for words, at least at first. Later we grow up—the editor inside us who’s an adult tells us experience is not of the imagination at all. In general this is what MFA programs do. The study of creative writing is good for the delete button. When Yeats writes of faeries he’s telling us to resist this. In his 1901 essay “Magic” he says:

“I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are —
That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.”

Yeats had a different view of symbols than the Constructivists or Surrealists. He took them quite literally. The poet Kathleen Raine wrote: “For Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.”

“A kind of magic” begs the question “what kind of magic?” Only Yeats could answer this and he spent his life working to do so. But at its core he believed the magic resided outside the mind. The poet’s job was to translate nascent signals of mystical experience into ordinary language. He loved Newton’s alchemy; Hermes Trismegistus; most of all he loved the story tellers in the Irish countryside—that place and culture vanishing before his eyes. What kind of magic? Preservational. Yes belief is mostly imagination. And the evocation of spirits though we can’t say who they are. This shouldn’t stop poets from trying.

The lived circumstances of disability are contemporary disruption…

The lived circumstances of disability are now at code red in the United States. From the dismantling of the Department of Education (which has historically supervised ADA compliance in schools—from kindergarten to universities) to denying benefits for people who desperately need Supplemental Social Security the disdain and cruelty are “on” as they used to say on the radio. WE are ON WITH 50,000 WATTS OF rock and roll power!

I spent part of this morning walking around the campus of the University of Iowa where I studied creative writing long ago. Later I came back to teach here. The U of Iowa has always been a disability unfriendly place and now, in Trump 2.0 they’ll be free of any corrective government action. This ain’t just the case in Iowa. As colleges and universities ditch their Diversity Programs, many of them are shoving disability compliance under the bus as well.

I’d be in despair if I wasn’t already in despair. Meanwhile I’m reading “After Disruption: a Future for Cultural Memory” by Trevor Owens. It’s just out from University of Michigan Press. He has many arguments in the book and I won’t highlight all of them—the book is nuanced and shrewd. But one salient contention is that the takeover of our public square, pushed as it is by big tech, is powered by the language of “disruption” which of course reminds one of Elon Musk waving a chain saw while high on Ketamine.
The really interesting thing is that according to Owens the premonitory language of disruption was adopted by Silicon Valley from the academy. I confess to never having thought of this. Disruption in feminist studies or disability studies has always meant the ways in which outlier bodies interfere with normative narratives. This much is true and is still true and will always be true. But by adopting the lingo of disruption the Peter Thiels of the world have been able to push the idea that AI and the erosion of the humanities are excellent things. I urge you to read Owens book. But here’s a quote:

“When Silicon Valley co-opted the vocabulary of disruption, it removed the genuinely radical ideas that had come from feminist critical race theory and shifted them into a blunt fear-inducing instrument. While the rhetoric around disruption often comes with a revolutionary sentiment, at its core, disruptive innovation’s roots are in fear. This rhetoric is about making us afraid and pushing us to believe that Silicon Valley has the secrets to how we address the fear of being made obsolete or being replaced.”

One of the interesting things about ableism is that whatever form it takes it occupies the future perfect. There will be time enough to make things right for the disabled but not today. One may fair say “not today” is the motto of the thing. “Non hodie” in Latin. Picture a flag bearing the image of an indolent house cat. Not today will we question our assumptions about discrimination. BTW: ableists also avoid saying “maybe tomorrow.”

If you require accommodations “Non hodie” is the prevailing reply. What’s so demoralizing is that those who ought to be in the fight for disability inclusion are not interested. How can this be? Well, actually, the matter is simple: “there will be time enough to make things right, but not today.” That this “non hodie” includes administrators and faculty tells you how big a muscle ableism really is. But there’s another issue…

And of course there are gaslighting committees—they have names like “Inclusion and Access for One and All” and they meet privately because its all about “non hodie” and private self-congratulation. The folks on these committees don’t suffer from a lack of accommodations. In general they feel pretty good.

Which gets me back to Owens. Feeling good in today’s universities and in the United States has been replaced by resignation, precarity, and a new form of future perfect. Owens expertly explains this contemporary dread. Your embodied disruption is too disruptive. But it all sounds so good:

“Disrupt. Fail faster. Asking, in almost any meeting, “but will it scale?” Over the last three decades the language of Silicon Valley start-ups and venture capitalists has followed digital technologies into a wide range of industries, cultural-memory institutions included. This vocabulary, which historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell call “innovation-speak,” is now a core part of management cultures across the US and beyond.”

I urge disability activists to read this book.