Beauty Is a Verb
Page 6
I stepped
out
there is no room
in the air
search for a chamber
chambre
where the top of the bed
descends quietly
and crushes the lady
or the unicorn
on the tapestry
stirs
the wall opens
steps lead up
cold air
touches
the skin
you cry out
yes, oui
sans merci
should I be
where I am
the guidebook said
take the steps up
it was in French
of course
I mistrusted the words
La-bas
Allez tout droit
a ghost beckoned
above the rampart
I saw below
your hand
waving
3.
Richard has left us in limbo. He did this by putting himself in limbo. We are paralyzed now, paralyzed by Richard, who lies paralyzed in the hospital. If he had died “naturally” or by “accident” or committed suicide, everything would be just fine. We would be free of him and we might even know more about life—that is to say death—which we can try to prepare for or be surprised by or perhaps even control by choosing the right moment.
Utterly sexually satiated, we drunkenly trooped out of the apartment of Richard’s delectable new plaything that he’d stolen from one of us. As always, he was leading the way; obscenely lecturing on our magnificent animal natures. He reached the top of the stairs with us pushing hard behind him. Then suddenly he bent forward, raised his arms wide, and pronounced in birdlike twittering tones, “We can fly!”
Richard did fly. And we could not tell—as his beak and wings shot forward—if the whole thing was a dramatic exit from life that he had carefully planned, or a spontaneous gesture that was a miscalculation, or something more sinister. All we do know for sure is that we’re still stuck with Richard.
4.
HBO is on
it doesn’t matter
(don’t move
in a narrow bed)
my sister
fell off
a ladder
another sister totters
MS doing its lazy work
she props herself carefully
in a narrow bed
and while the TV chatters
she plays dead
HBO is on
I turn it off
it doesn’t matter
the bed shakes
like a ladder
5.
Wallace, the blood runs blue
towns are named for you
your family of senators.
Not Harvard, Choate, Sutton Place
but a tiny railroad flat
in an aromatic slum.
Your pride three rooms:
kitchen of strong food
and roaches everywhere.
Wallace, the blood runs
with alcohol, with pints of vodka
and gallons of cheap wine.
Living room full of kids for cock-
tails after you abandon the ancient
upright typewriter and the pages
that tell over and over
of your discovering the eternal youth
of a youth’s enticing buttocks.
Paterfamilias, you wrote
of David and of Jonathan and Jamestown
and everything was gay, gay, gay.
The fops founded America
and the queens came to you
and you were mother too.
Falstaffean saint of sage advice
for every waif
you saved from suicide.
Wallace, the blood runs
down the rickety stairs
you take a tumble
backward, all lechery lost.
Was there someone with you
feral and beautiful?
6.
The invention of stairs was a mistake. The Babylonians and Egyptians, who codified and glorified the invention, were also the inventors of civilization, another mistake. The lake-dwellers, who first created steps, at least lived on water.
Susan Schweik
THE VOICE OF “REASON”
Said, Pull her up a bit will you, Mac, I want to unload there.
Said, Pull her up my rear end, first come first served.
Said, give her the gun, Bud, he needs a taste of his own bumper.
Then the usher came out and got into the act:
Said, Pull her up, pull her up a bit, we need this space, sir.
Said, For God’s sake, is this still a free country or what?
You go back and take care of Gary Cooper’s horse
And leave me handle my own car.
Saw them unloading the lame old lady,
Ducked out under the wheel and gave her an elbow.
Said, All you needed to do was just explain;
Reason, Reason is my middle name.
Josephine Miles’ widely anthologized poem, “Reason,” appears in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and elsewhere with a note citing her most widely quoted statement: “I like the idea of speech—not images, not ideals, not music, but people talking—as the material from which poetry is made.” “Reason”’s focus on what Miles called “the spare and active interplay of talk” clearly appealed to academic editors of the postwar period (perhaps not surprisingly, since Miles was an academic herself, the first woman to be tenured in the English department at the University of California at Berkeley). The accompanying note in the Norton foregrounds Miles’ talk-based poetics as the reason for “Reason”: the poem’s material is its method. And yet the footnote screens as much as it reveals. Its focus on “people talking” deflects attention from what, in this particular scene, they are talking about—the other material from which “Reason” is made.
What they are talking about is the question of whether a disabled woman can get access to a movie theater. Although nothing in “Reason” identifies Miles with her “lame old lady,” and although she was by no means “old” at the time of the poem’s first publication in 1955, this was indeed material of intensely personal significance for the author. Miles lived with rheumatoid arthritis from the age of two, mostly in a state of severe and visible physical disability. For years, unable to use a wheelchair, she employed personal care assistants to help her move from place to place. (During the Vietnam War years, when she actively involved herself in antiwar politics, she was left behind more than once when a gathering was teargassed and no one thought to help her leave the space.) When I first met her in our common workplace in 1984, at a reception for new faculty, she was carried into and across the room by a young aide.
In the image of Miles as described in the previous sentence, I recognize her as disabled, relying on what Lennard J. Davis has identified as one key modality through which disability is constructed: “The person with disabilities is...brought into a field of vision, and seen as a disabled person.” So crucial is the gaze to the process of constituting disability in this formulation that Davis goes on to put the point even more forcefully: “Disability is a specular moment.” “Reason” hinges on exactly such a specular moment. Interrupting its interplay of talk, the poem turns from saying to seeing: “Saw them unloading the lame old lady.” Yet the return of idiom in “Reason”’s aphoristic final lines (“All you needed to do was just explain; / Reason, Reason is my middle name.”) signals what I take to be the poem’s subject: how disability is also a spoken moment, one made in discourse.1
In this essay, I wish to gloss “Reason” differently, substituting for the usual footnote about the idea of speech another set of ideas from new work in disability studies. I wish to place “Reason” not only within the history of American poetry, but also within the history of American constructions of disability, fol
lowing Miles in showing what the one has to do with the other. I also wish to reclaim Miles for disability studies. This last project matters not because the field needs to find exemplary literary ancestors (although disability studies on the whole still lacks the sort of basic archival groundwork that necessarily preceded, and indeed therefore made possible, the post-Foucauldian critique of “reclamation” that has occurred in feminist and queer studies). It matters because disability studies needs to understand its histories. And literary disability studies can benefit from a look at a writer whose professional role gave her a heightened consciousness of language-making and a particularly sharp set of tools for expressing a set of social ambivalences about disability that were by no means hers alone. The very aspect of Miles’ work that most aligns her with recent “social model” theories of disability—her focus on discourse—may paradoxically have prevented some readers today from recognizing in her poems a significant body of writing on disability. Miles’ apparently affable and conciliatory rhetoric, her seeming poetics of cheerful overcoming, concealed a keener form of social comment.
“The [politicized] anger I am talking about,” writes Albert Robillard, “does not arise within a general social order, but within the social order achieved through just this talk...and with just what these [social] members make of the talk...the perception of disabled bodies is...an interactional category.” In a variety of ways, Miles’ poetry of “just this talk,” I will argue, anticipates aspects of later social models of disability.2 This does not mean that Miles’ poems reveal her to be a premature disability rights activist in the guise of a modern poet, but that when we read her early poems within their own historical context we can find both a critique of and a swerve from the standard discourses of disability in her day. In a sense, too, we can read in her poems signs of the conditions for the emergence of a new contemporary social group—but only if that group is understood in both broad and complex terms. If Miles’ poems of the 1940s and 1950s seem to capture a version of the “language of the disabled” before there was a disabled community imagining itself as such, this may in part be because—as the recently rediscovered 1942 disability memoir, Katharine Butler Hathaway’s The Little Locksmith, has also helped show some historical sources present discourses of disability that prove, upon critical examination, to be braver, subtler and more ingenious than standard narratives of the development of contemporary disability consciousness can generally account for.
Two things complicate—perhaps even seem to contravene—my invocation of an activist, social model of disability as a tool for reading Miles. The first is Miles’ own public resistance to being identified, later in her life, with the broadbased disability rights movement—or indeed, from her youth on, with the category of “disabled” at all. The second is the striking absence of Miles’ writing from the scholarly work on disability and literature that has been inspired and organized by social model theory.
Miles consistently refused to define herself in terms of her “medical condition”; she never represented herself in later years as part of any particular identity politics or collective struggle around disability issues. In a late-1970s interview, she commented breezily on a library that was inaccessible to her: “They didn’t build it personally for me, that’s all.” Often, she described her impairments as productive limitations, invoking Robert Frost’s description of free verse as playing tennis with the net down: “One of the great problems in living now is that people have such a multitude of choices to face, and in an existential world making choices is everything. It’s when choices are limited that it’s easy to make intelligent decisions, and my choices were always very limited.” (Larney 1993: p.82). In 1979, though she did go on to stress the importance in her own life of her struggle for economic self-determination, she presented the Independent Living Movement, which had originated in part on her own campus, as largely irrelevant to her concerns: “Independence today, especially in relation to disablement, means physical independence or personal independence. It’s very curious, but neither of these crossed my mind very much.” (Larney 1993: p.81)
Quotations like this pose a problem for anyone attempting to enlist Miles in a contemporary poetics of disability presence.3 The biographical archives by and large offer few inroads for critics looking for the “ragged edge” of a subversive disability consciousness, and plenty of opportunity to pinpoint examples of internalized oppression. I am uninterested in this tack for many reasons (beginning with—but only beginning with—my sense that as a nondisabled reader I do better to examine my own relation to disability oppression than to criticize anyone else’s).4 The problem in reading Miles and disability is in part a theoretical one; that is, it requires a calling into question both of Miles and of disability as organic and self-evident concepts. We might read Miles’ refusals to identify with disability or with a disability rights politics in the context, for instance, of Henri-Jacques Stiker’s (1999: p.134) stringent critique of the category of “disability” itself in the twentieth century:
The “thing” has been designated, defined, framed. Now it has to be scrutinized, pinpointed, dealt with. People with “it” make up a marked group, a social entity...The disabled, henceforth of all kinds, are established as a category to be reintegrated and thus to be rehabilitated. Paradoxically, they are designated in order to be made to disappear, they are spoken in order to be silenced.
And equally, or perhaps even more important, the problem of reading Miles and disability is a historical one, a task supported by new work in disability historiography.
Growing up in an era in which public policy consolidated a model of disability as “incapacity because of medical pathology” (Longmore and Goldberger 2000: p.1-2), Miles consistently presented herself as both agreeable and capable. She came of age in the 1930s, a period in which the most obvious part given to her, the delegitimated role of “cripple,” was countered or altered only by the ideology of rehabilitation modeled by that indomitable overcomer Franklin Delano Roosevelt.5 It is no surprise that she adopted a posture of “continuous, cheerful striving” (p.12). Poems like Miles’ “Reason” enact a certain kind of contract with the reader: a poetics of affability, its liberal mode strikingly at odds with the more militant stance enacted and demanded by later movements for disability rights.6
Recent collections of disability writing have had no use for Miles, finding their precursors in less deferential forebears. Kenny Fries’ 1997 anthology Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, for instance, incorporates not a poem by Miles—or other possible representatives of her generation like Flannery O’Conner or Vassar Miller—but an invocation, from the play P.H.*reaks: The Hidden History of People with Disabilities, of the militant activism of the League of the Physically Handicapped. (The LPH was a group of organizers in the 1930s who occupied New York’s Emergency Relief Bureau in protest of the Works Progress Administration’s exclusion of handicapped people from access to federal jobs.) Toward Solomon’s Mountain: The Experience of Disability in Poetry (Baird and Workman 1986) includes Miller, but not Miles; Miller’s own anthology, Despite This Flesh (1985), has no poems by Miles in it. Nor do the anthologies specifically focus on disabled women’s writing. This last omission especially troubles me, both because Miles’ life was partly shaped by how—in Eli Clare’s (1999: pp.123, 137) resonant phrases—“gender reaches into disability ...disability snarls into gender,” and because Miles’ poems admit a wide variety of feminist readings. “Reason,” for instance, is composed entirely of men’s talk, dime-novel and Western-movie talk, hard-boiled detective talk, but also, first and foremost, car talk. Within this talk, cars as well as (disabled and old) women are gendered feminine: “Pull her up a bit.” Surely, as Paul Friedrich (1991: p.52) has noted, these are working-class men, and class as well as gender dynamics are part of the culture of “Reason” (as Friedrich notes, this is an exchange between “a chauffeur, a trucker [sic] and a valet”); but what I want to emphasize here for a moment
is not the class markings of this dialect, nor its Americanness, but its masculinity. At the hub of the poem is the metonymy of “her”; both woman and car, the “her” is a machine, to be parked, pushed and unloaded.7 If, as Julia Kristeva writes in her review of Stiker’s A History of Disability, people with disabilities are to be seen as “ourselves—not as machines,” the men of “Reason” do not know this, especially where the woman is concerned. The joke of the poem—whether we read it as laughing at the men’s world or with it—lies in part, then, in the way that the playful pastiche of guy talk toys with Cartesian models of (woman’s) body-as-machine. “Reason” seems to allude to the classical age in other ways as well, and perhaps to participate in something approaching, or congenial to, a postmodern feminist orientation. The poem concludes with a scene of cockeyed masculine chivalry toward a patronized “lady.” Whether that chivalry is meaningless is a question the poem raises, but does not overtly answer. It is certainly possible to read “Reason” as a gentle, wry exemplum in the tradition of feminist work described by Susan Bordo (1995: p.41): “Feminist philosophers have frequently challenged dominant conceptions of rationality, morality, and politics through reevaluations of those ‘female’ qualities—spontaneity, practical knowledge, empathy—forbidden (or deemed irrelevant) to the ‘man of reason.’” “Female qualities,” of course, were often forbidden or deemed irrelevant to Josephine Miles by the ableist construction of gender in her culture.8 One oral historian quotes Miles as saying that “some years ago a Dean of Women told her, ‘The very fact that you are a woman sets the cause [of women] back fifty years because you don’t pose the same problems another woman would’” (Teiser and Harroun 1980: p.318). In another version of the same story, Miles describes the dean as saying, “You offer a substitute rather than role modeling. You’re more of a mascot; you’re an exception, so you don’t threaten people” (Marie and Offen 1978: p.26). “It was a cruel remark,” the oral historian continues, “and more cruel because half true” (Teiser and Harroun 1980: p.318). I encountered an even more extreme, but hardly unusual, version of this attitude myself in 1985, when I included Miles’ poetry on the syllabus of a graduate course at Berkeley on modern women poets. One of my colleagues, who had worked with Miles closely for many years, said to me simply, “But Jo Miles was not a woman.”