Blindness

I recently watched Blindness, the film based on the book of the same name by Jose Saramago—a book which I very much enjoyed and count among my all-time favorites. Only after seeing the movie did I learn of protest at the film’s production. Advocacy groups for the blind apparently took offense at the film’s (and presumably, the book’s) use of blindness as a metaphor for moral decrepitude. This is understandable, but it made me question myself and my sensitivity to such issues since I didn’t find anything offensive in either the book or the film. Did I simply miss it because I am not blind? Or is there more to this issue?

First, I believe my understanding of the use of metaphor in the story differs from the understanding of the protestors. Where they see the film showing blind people behaving as “monsters,” I see the film as showing norms suddenly struck blind behaving as monsters. This is a key difference.

I have touched on this idea before, and will no doubt revisit it many times in the future: disability is more than a physical or mental phenomenon; it is a psychic one (as in psyche, not ESP). A person who is injured and loses the use of their legs is disabled, but is not suddenly a disabled person. They are a norm with a disability. It may take many years (if ever) for them to stop seeing themselves as a defective “normal” person. This is how I view the characters in Blindness. They are all (with one notable exception) norms, not blind people. Perhaps that’s why I don’t find their depiction offensive. I do believe that norms in that situation would be helpless, would be afraid, would be lost, and would resort to baser instincts. (What little faith I have in norms.)

In that context, blindness becomes a handy method for exploring humanity’s failings and society’s frailty. Furthermore, as I read it from a disabled person’s perspective, I see how debilitating the fear of disability is in norms. All the norms in the story fall apart when they become disabled; they are terrified and become helpless in the face of that terror. It’s actually quite damning of normate thought—at least as I read it, which to be fair, may never have been in Saramago’s mind as he was writing it.

The story also explores, not just literal, individual blindness and its possible consequences, but societal blindness. Part of the reason society falls apart in the story is that individuals need to know they are being watched if order is to be maintained.

The second issue at question is the use of disability as metaphor. For as long as art has existed, disability has served as a metaphor for weakness, immorality, and evil. Words like “lame,” “deaf,” and “blind” are fraught with meaning that goes beyond disability. To what extent are we to try to alter the meanings of these words, to remove their negative connotations? Is that even possible?

It is possible that there is something inherently symbolic in disability and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to remove all symbolism from the disabled body. Another question is whether doing so would be desirable. In all I’ve studied of people with disabilities, it seems that the more “normal” the disabled person, the more they desire normalcy, the more they desire to erase any stain of “otherness” from themselves. The true freaks embrace their otherness—perhaps because they have no choice.

This is clearly an issue that deserves more exploration than I can give it here. I am not trying to say that the use of the disabled body as something symbolic is good or bad, only that there’s a power in it that instead of denying, perhaps we could learn to utilize.

Again, perhaps I am not qualified to speak about this, since I am not blind. That is part of the problem of the disabled community: its disparateness. But I hope some of these points are valid.

Romance and loss

I have been listening to Small Change a lot lately. It’s populated with beaten-down, world-weary souls, longing for small things: the end of the work shift, or a job at the filling station and a shot at the waitress in the diner. This is a life I have never known, and, I suspect, Tom Waits has never known (he was 24 when he wrote these songs and, by all accounts, did not have a particularly hard childhood—another testament to his genius).

I find the world he creates in this album extremely romantic. Why? Is it the simplicity of these lives? They just want a job that will pay the bills and time to spend with their baby. That’s the best they can hope for, and it’s a pretty reachable goal, unlike my own. They don’t chase after the trappings of the bourgeoisie—fancy clothes, gourmet food, the latest appliances—like I do. And they’re free. They’re on the road, or they have no ties to hold them to any one place, as I do.

I was talking to one of my friends about this, and she said, “But that’s kind of sad, isn’t it? If you’re free to go anywhere, that means you have no one who loves you back home.” I had to agree with her; it is sad. But I think that sadness is essential to romantic ideals. Think about the archetypes we idolize: the cowboy, the gumshoe, the vigilante; they’re all lonely; they all have demons. What’s so romantic about that? Why is Romeo and Juliet the quintessential romance, and not Much Ado About Nothing? It’s loss, not gain, that defines romance. We feel for those who have less than we do, and we can see their lives as perhaps more reachable than the lives of the rich and famous. We might wish we were rich and could live happily ever after, but it’s those who die young that we raise to sainthood. Do we really wish that for ourselves? Are we all, on some level, flagellants?

My mother the madam

You might have heard about this mother in the UK who is pleading for women to have sex with her son. Her son is 21, a virgin, and oh, he has Down syndrome.

That's the pivotal point, really. Take that out of the equation, and it's just an odd story. With it, the story raises all sorts of questions.

My gut response is that this mother's actions are really demeaning for disabled people (and virgins) everywhere. When I dig a little deeper, I see that it's really more troubling than that.

The mother spouts a lot of ostensibly disabled-sensitive talk. She questions society's response to People of Difference, as I like to call us. "Why should these people be kept separate and pigeon-holed when they have the same emotions, desires and feelings as so-called normal people?" she asks, quite reasonably.

But then she ruins it with this: "If he doesn't get a girlfriend, I will feel really bad, because I have sold him this thing that he is like everybody else. That's why I'm working overtime to get this sorted for him." Does her behavior make him "like everybody else"? Does "everybody else" have mothers arranging sexual partners for them.

In fact, under the guise of wanting her son to be "normal," this mother is treating him like a freak.

She's also instilling in her son the same shallow, aesthetically based societal values she supposedly rejects:

1. in order to have any value, you must experience what everyone else does (e.g. having sex, fathering children);

2. implicitly, women are interchangeable and have value only as sex partners, not unique individuals with whom to have a relationship;

3. perhaps most disturbing, as she says she would prefer that whatever girlfriend he gets not have Down syndrome, that "normal" people have a higher commodity value than disabled people and should be sought over others.

Beyond the scope of true disability, this mother seems to have a problem with any sort of freak, i.e., anyone who deviates from the "norm," and she seems to have a very narrow idea of what "normal" is. Apparently to her, if you're not having sex, you're a loser. If you're not a parent, you're a loser. If you're not like everybody else, you're a loser. It's sad, really. And it's particularly sad that she, and many others no doubt, believe that she is truly sympathetic to people with disabilities, when in fact, she is the worst kind of bigot.

The authors who have influenced me

Sylvia Plath


Katherine Mansfield


Raymond Carver


Samuel Beckett


Djuna Barnes

Do things happen for a reason?

There have been times in my life—those times when I feel happy and content—when I have thought that everything has worked out for the best. I may have even thought things had happened for a reason. I suppose it’s comforting, in a way, to think that the direction of your life is out of your hands. We all like the idea of free choice, but what if we screw things up? What if we make the wrong choice and make ourselves miserable? It’s comforting at those moments to believe that there’s a reason for that misery, that it’s all leading somewhere.

But what if it’s not? What if we’ve just made a stupid choice and that’s … it? Then what do we do?

We make a purpose. We say, “I can learn from this,” or “This will make me stronger,” and it often does. It’s important for our sanity to be able to this. We can create great things from our misery, but we can’t say that there’s any purpose to it. There’s no purpose to anything. Life is only one act of coping after another.

She thinks her kid is scared of people with beards, too

Imagine parents complaining about the new black host of a children's television show because their children might be afraid of her. Imagine having the trouble those parents will have if their children see that black person and start asking questions about "blackness," forcing the parents to sit down and have a conversation about "blackness" with them.

I've used what I hope is an unsettling scenario to illustrate a point. (And let me be clear here that I feel uncomfortable casting black people as Other, even if it is merely as an illustration.) Most people who read the above paragraph would feel indignation or outrage at such an attitude toward black people. They would recognize it as racist and reprehensible. Yet many of those people would not feel that indignation when the attitude is directed toward a disabled person.

This is exactly what has happened to the new, one-armed host of a British television show. One viewer wrote that she didn't want her child to see this host because she thought the stump would give her daughter "sleep problems." I wonder how this one-armed television host feels knowing she is so frightening.

It is, in fact, the adult who has the problem. Children tend to be at ease, and ask open, non-judging questions. They haven't been conditioned yet to think there's something wrong with or frightening about disabled people. I feel sad that people can be as prejudiced as the mother quoted above, and I'm sad that they are raising their children to be prejudiced, too.

The thing that really irks me is that disability is still seen as something so different. Even the disabled TV host says, "I'd never comment on anyone's parenting or the time for them to have a discussion with their child about disabilities [...]. It's a totally personal thing and people have to do it when they feel comfortable to do it." Why exactly is disability something that needs to be talked about. Do people have talks with their kids about hair color? "You see, Jimmy, there are some people who are ginger..." I long for a day when disability is seen as a physical difference of no more social consequence than red hair, or at the very least, when we are not be treated as something to be afraid of.

More on embryo screening

This week, we have yet another article from The Slate about embryo screening. It looks like this is the next big thing, creating perfect babies, and we are getting ever closer to that goal.

Who would be interested in such a thing? Follow one of the article's links to a May 2007 Times Online piece, scroll down to the seventh paragraph, and you'll find the answer. Just as I suspected: self-hating freaks.

Surprised? Thought it would be cosmetically enhanced, fake-tan-sporting Upper Middle Class types? Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of those who would take advantage of genetic screening, but that's almost expected. The trouble starts when one starts working to eliminate one's own kind. Instead of advocating for those with ocular disorders, this gentleman and his apparently very accepting wife (imagine—she actually married the freak!) have opted to capitulate to the status quo by not bringing into the world as loathsome and hideous a creature as the father apparently is.

I don't mean to pick on this gentleman. I infer from his drastic response (most parents just pray that their kids will be "normal") that he has suffered much in his life because of his appearance. He has suffered enough that he has come to believe that he, and those like him, are pretty worthless. Worthless enough to be destroyed before birth. He should have realized that those individuals who caused him pain are the ones with the problem. It's their thinking that needs to be changed, not the individuals who so offend their sense of aesthetics.

But it's very easy to say that. How many terata, given the opportunity, would not choose to be "normal"?