Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  To some degree, the question involves architecture. As Tobin Siebers writes:

  When a disabled body moves into a social space, the lack of fit exposes the shape of the normative body for which the space was originally designed...While people with disabilities have little power in the social world, their identities possess great theoretical power because they reflect perspectives capable of illuminating the ideological blueprints used to construct social reality.2

  Genre classification matters less to me than the ability to engage these “perspectives capable of illuminating,” as Siebers describes, to enter concretely here: a compressed stanza (in the sense of “room” or “dwelling”)—to hear its acoustic potential, implied lineation, sonic logic.

  By calling my poetics “Exhibits,” I evade a specific genre label and enter the gallery (as my collection is titled: Galerie de Difformité), where exhibits A, B, C, etc., aggregate among other genres like a curated collection and thus involve narrative(s), even when seemingly otherwise. Generally in a gallery, there’s not a determined path, since each vectored variation suggests alternate paths and, thus, requires choice. Guided by some curator and bound by a traditional entrance and exit, displacement is engaged: to draw awareness to where we are, where we’ve come from, where we might yet go.

  In the context of Galerie de Difformité, dismembered from a larger body (that is, the book), “Exhibits” exist through-and-with other mani-pulations (since “exhibit” involves the hand, literally, meaning “to hold out”) and carry political implications: allied with exhibits, as in a legal trial. By re-imaginging old tropes (disability as dysfunctional, partial, ugly, freakish, monstrous, etc.), my poetics of deformity attempts to tap the “theoretical power” to which Tobin Siebers refers. To make this process manifest, I am inviting people to materially deform my deformity-filled book before and after its publication, to collaboratively redefine deformity (directly or indirectly articulated: as beautiful, useful, desirable, engaged, worthwhile, complicated, confounded, ________ [fill in the blank]). In addition to the online display (http://difformite.wordpress.com), selected deformations will join an actual exhibition, to travel in the tradition of antiquated freak shows.

  Since poetics is not platitude, but rather hinged to perception, this collaborative gallery of material deformations evokes questions rather than answers, within and outside the body of any “Exhibit.” With deference to da Vinci too: “If the sound is in ‘m’ and the listener in ‘n,’ the sound will be believed to be in ‘s’ if the court is enclosed at least on 3 sides against the listener.”3 Analogy may be made with Galerie de Difformité: if a sound is made in one Exhibit while Gentle Reader resides in another, (s)he may seek out additional Exhibits to coordinate the orchestrations.

  What can we learn about sociocultural beliefs about deformity by engaging in material acts of deformation? The verdict is still out, and will be, if ever decided: always deforming (or said another way: evolving). Beyond that, deformation sounds a bit like defamation: not to be confused. By asking readers to metamorphose the physical object of the book, I am asking them to participate in a creative act that might be viewed, from one cultural stance, as an act of defamation, in contrast to what otherwise might be considered spiritual, communal, and/or healing (in the vein of Navajo or Tibetan sand-paintings), not to mention a number of other connotations. As Galerie de Difformité looks forward and back like the two-headed Janus, it masquerades as a funhouse of mirrors, reflecting distortions (less of bodies than of perceptions) of whoever enters.

  In participating in this masquerade, I cloak my experiences in language rather than wear it as a badge. Life has taught me some ironies of this fraught word: “disabled.” The better I am at maintaining my physically adaptive lifestyle, the more “normal” I appear, even if never achieving that level of function. Nor can I shirk being “disabled” in order to participate: in education, in employment, etc. Caught between these two wor(l)ds— “normal” and “disabled”—I wonder: is there a way for poetics to pave ways for new states of being?

  Just as the narrator of my “Exhibits” (a deformed reincarnation of Dante’s Beatrice) is recontextualized throughout Galerie de Difformité, her beauty and deformity are left to the eye of each beholder. As I write in an apologia for the collection: “The many faces of Bea, taken together, suggest what’s missing. The seeking of Bea becomes the seeking of ‘we,’ ever changing. More than trying to decipher her, then, her ability to change may serve as a better guide.”4

  In following Bea—less her persona than the questions she embodies—I am interested in our ability to change perceptions of ourselves, our expectations for and explanations of our bodies, our definitions of deformity and disability, our physical and psychological and sensory capacities for metamorphosis—and how this is embodied in the voice. Physiology underscores language; bodies are tethered to voices (vocal, gestural, what have you): living and breathing. Like John Cage famously went into an anechoic chamber (“a room without echoes”) to hear absolute silence: hearing two sounds, one high and one low (which the sound engineer identified as his nervous system and blood circulation), Cage realized that true silence doesn’t exist. Although silence in my “Exhibits” may be less visually apparent than in lineated poems (in terms of white space, as described by Mallarmé), it exists as pulses of nerves and blood, coursing within its boxed-in body, as Cage discovered in his echo-proof chamber. Only here, outside such a chamber: echoes reverberate.

  2 Exhibits from GALERIE DE DIFFORMITÉ

  Exhibit “H”

  Finger painting. Prints on walls in the Lascaux caves. Veronica’s veil, an act of acheiropoietos (“not made by the hand of man”), seated near the right Hand of God. Relics of St. Ninnidh in Ireland, St. Stephen I in Hungary. Guidonian hands were solemnized, marked with syllables joint by joint for sight-singing, illuminated in manuscripts. Manu-factured. Manu-mitted. Mudras. Hypocrites and Galen practiced palmistry, reading between lines and mountains—of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Mars, Luna, the Sun—the veritable cosmos, held in hands. Wrapped in papyrus or gloves, cut into wood by Vesalius, cast and sculpted by Rodin, photographed by Lange, burned in Dresden, painted with henna, holding a stylus or spoon, living hand-to-mouth. Skin and sinew conceal phalanges, metacarpals, knuckles. On the other hand, get all hands on deck, in order not to be short-handed or reduced to shorthand, studied by graphologists, or perhaps, too heavy-handed to be written, held in hand, kept on hand, growing out of hand—

  This is a language of clasping; hence, to lose hands denotes loss of possession, custody, charge, authority, power, disposal, agency, instrumentality—putting into other hands what wants to be held in your own: “terminal part of the arm beyond the wrist, consisting of the palm and five digits, forming the organ of prehension characteristic of man.” (And woman—albeit by Roman law, that four-letter word conveyed the power of husband over wife.) Left-handed, I have already joined hands with another (here we are) to change one definition that seems to rest in my hands, as I want a hand in something else, nothing underhanded, preferring the archaic meaning, “breath,” as articulated in A devoute medytacyon, in which Hampole wrote in 1340, “His nese oft droppes, his hand stynkes.” 1 Nothing like the sun, roses, snow, those eyes and cheeks and breasts; what of her hands? That four-letter word, like a curse. Unless substituted, striated, with meaning: a hand, a breath. (Breathe.)

  In printing, a conventionally extended forefinger drew attention to what came next, like a lion’s gaze in Luxor, or a colon prompting an actress in a play: Antigone, who dies by her own hand, or Medea, who cries: “Let no one deem me a poor weak woman who sits with folded hands, but of another mould.”2 Made by lost wax, four-armed Shiva has another pair of hands waiting in the wings—unlike A. afarensis, A. africanus, H. sapiens—me.

  Thus, Into Thy Hands I commend my Spirit, amid this flourishing chorus of voices, and submit:

  My hands. Crippled, as they are. As exhibit A, B, C, and the rest. This is my Gallery, what
I will display, cued by the hand that rocked the cradle too hard, breaking rules and a body, making it deformed, having to learn to breathe all over again. To remobilize the spine, the neck, the arms and, last but not least, the hands. And so I stand before you, trying to raise a conventionally extended forefinger to draw attention to what comes next:

  Exhibit “U”

  Here comes the unclasping—there is no way to hold onto this. It’s a matter of resistance, then release. Hands stroke strings, press keys, pull stops, as scores direct fingers forward through bars, movements, cadences, and cadenzas. Musicians learn about touch through painstaking practice, sensing every inch of an instrument, to elicit its tonal center. (True of a vocalist, too, whose instrument is the body, prone to the dissonance of disease, and warbles of woe.) A cellist learns “through mastering movements like vibrato...the rocking motion of the left hand on a string which colours a note around its precise pitch; waves of sound spread out...like ripples from a pool into which one has thrown a stone.”1 The arm is an orchestra, then, with fingers as instruments among instruments (thumb, palm, wrist, elbow, shoulder, the body)—“miracle of form and function,” capable of the greatest delicacy and danger.2

  With abilities to play violins, pianos, guitars, flutes, and harps comes the capacity to pull triggers, throw punches, and detonate bombs. Aristotle wrote: “A man can have many defences [sic] and always change them, and can have any weapon he pleases on any occasion. For the hand is a claw and a hoof and a horn, and a spear and a sword, and any other instrument whatever.”3 Avowing danger and debilitation, this thesis (deforming as you read) does not follow like Clockwork but re-views paleoanthropology and the evolution of Homo erectus, through which “this new hand reflected a modification...and brought with it the opportunity for a new class of situational knowledge based on as yet unexplored and undefined use of the hand. This change by itself was nothing but a mutation until its utility gave it the status of an adaptation.”4 Both instinctive and learned, manual manipulations have taught the mind through movements—faster, lighter, longer—to apprehend new thoughts.

  To learn to play an instrument, then to lose the ability to play, is like dying.

  Lying apprehensio (at the root of grasping and cognizance), we are what we feel—touch & play—like What’s Bred in the Bone: “the hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand.”5 “Put your finger into every bottle,” Swift advises, “to feel whether it be full, which is the surest way, for feeling hath no fellow.”6 Diderot wrote that Chardin “use[d] his thumb as much as his brush,” and a long history reveals communicative hands: holding a stylus, quill or pen, reckoning or gesturing through three-dimensional signs.7 Ars memorativa involves metonymy and mnemonics, embodied by “the first instrument,” “the framer,” “the most noble and perfect organ” by (and about) which Helkiah Crooke wrote in 1615: “we promise, we call, we dismisse, we threaten, we intreate, we abhorre, we feare, yea and by our hands we can aske a question.”8

  What was the question?

  By which we call another name: to learn and make music, language, love. Rendering fingers and joints to measure melodic intervals, or to memorize: it’s an ancient art. Not physiognomic. From West to East; played and sung. Reverential, improvised, referential. Stylized on paper. Conducted or cheironomic. Watch closely—hands may yet grace the air like birds. Taking flight. Imagine the fluttering: that singing.

  Whatever the subject, memory often teaches with a dis-membered hand, drawn (or re-articulated: deformed) by an artist, as if that appendage (peripheral, yet central) could live apart from the body. Like a bone, with a heart-shaped hole. Illustrated & reproduced & re-rendered. Regenerating when split in two, like a planarian. Or imagine: a rebellion of Hands or Bones seceding from the Body, forming their own Kingdom. To be, or not to be:

  ...a quandary, between beheading and begetting. Like M.C. Escher drew a hand coming out of paper to draw another hand that drew the original hand. Round and round. Back where we started: Which came first, as currently conceived—hand or brain, heart or bone—or are they too innately tied to be unbound?

  Nodding to Crooke, will my hands stay tied? “This progresse and insertion of these [flexor] muscles is an admirable and strange worke of Nature: for they are so severed, that the fingers in their motion might orderly follow one another, and each of them bend inward.” With fingers figuratively severed, taking on a life of their own, I ask again: Nothing like the sun, roses, snow, those eyes and cheeks and breasts; what of her hands? Manu-mitting—master or slave, part of (yet apart from) the core of a body, closer than my shadow, as bound as busy. Wings, no longer. Rubbing eyes, itching skin, brushing teeth, holding hands, clasping pens, hefting loads, touching hearts: I have lost and found my flesh. Traversed with lines of fate, and laced by nerves and flexors, hands work wonders within and without, enabling mani-pulations of meaning from matter. Manu-ally, they point the way like Virgil (or me, Bea) to litigious and lofty layers of our lives, to buried scenes and senses too essential to ignore.

  Bernadette Mayer

  STATEMENT ON POETICS

  Ihad a cerebral hemorrhage in 1994. Since then I’ve relearned how to walk but still can’t run or hand write. Like the poets who could never write their poems down, my memory’s improved. I memorize license plates when I’m bored. I’d never have done this kind of writing unless I had to. I can’t do exquisite corpses or take notes. I haven’t been able to afford the voice-recognition computer software and I don’t remember my dreams as often. My right hand is just for show.

  Sonnet Edmund Leites

  I had a dream that

  you showed sensuality

  by showing your penis

  this is what’s wrong

  with the language school

  they didn’t go far enough

  there was a very scary guy

  who threatened us with pain

  you see? the guy who died

  by firing squad chose that

  method over lethal injection

  you can’t be a Marxist-

  Leninist if you have a car

  4th of July Demon Moped

  for Dave Brinks

  fireworks look like jelly fish

  but jellyfish don’t resemble fireworks

  gee, logical causal reasoning

  must be inaccurate. I was hoping

  you’d ask me what those birds are

  I’d say, “they’re swallows,”

  then you’d say, “What are they doing?”

  & I’d say, “they’re swallowing mosquitoes”

  not many jokes are as bad on paper

  as they are in person but this is sure one

  except of course it’s not even a joke

  it’s just a lame thought like omigod

  I found the pudgy pie pan & the slotted spoon

  I also found the spatula; the colander

  never got lost; did you ever list

  all the diseases you don’t have?

  best to a doctor who’s nice

  now that is the end of that

  Chosca Mass Tinek

  I live through the creek

  I do not live the way

  you’d want me to, who

  ever you are, mister!

  or miss peachy keenness

  half the time, it’s as if

  I took a drug you never heard of

  or ingested a substance that made me

  lower-case green as a field in june

  hello sir I can make you turn to stone

  with my wit alone, thank you for blooming

  those that did, the others

  you missed your appointment

  and now you will pay, life

  will be unruly, you must eat

  all your meals at kay’s pizza

  sacrifice someone who looks

  just like you & be buried alive

  till the season of nuclear winter

  when you will rise from the dead

  & die for a
ll our peccadilloes, ok?

  then you will start a pointless

  civilization & be driven from the verdant

  fields of your startling anonymous days

  till the dark time, then you will return

  home for a scone & unexpectedly you’ll have

  a grilled cheese & a cup of the tea

  of your liking & a fine dessert of

  asparagus ice cream with organic foam

  accompanied by a breath mint or two

  EYJAFJALLAJOKULL

  I am the volcano

  & every volcano

  you’ve ever met

  not metaphorically

  but really, I disrupt

  my job title is

  Disrupter In Chief

  rest assured you

  will be disrupted by me

  gently but firmly

  now & forever amen

  backwards I am

  LLUKOJALLAJFAYE

  okay?