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Greetings, everyone, and thank you for joining us this evening for the first of what we hope
will be many events to be held on the SU campus on disability cultures and identities as experienced
and expressed through creative writing. I'm Diane, Diane Wiener, the director of the Syracuse
University Disability Cultural Center, and I'm delighted to be with you this evening.
After some words of thanks I'm going to introduce Professor Steven Kuusisto, who will introduce
our distinguished guest, Ms. Anne Finger. Tonight's event, Disabilities as Ways of Knowing:
A Series of Creative Writing Conversations, featuring writer Anne Finger, is made possible
through the Co-Curricular Departmental Initiatives Program within the Division of Student Affairs
and co-sponsorship by the Disability Cultural Center, the Renee Crown University Honors
Program, the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies -- kind of misty sound
in this microphone. Should I sing? Maybe I should sing some jazz.
Anne: Beth is gesturing to you, she's got an idea about -- Beth: Pull it a little further --
Diane: This way? Still can hear me? All right then. Hear me in Nebraska probably, right?
The Burton Blatt Institute, the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, the Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Slutzker
Center for International Services, the Creative Writing Program, the Disability Law and Policy
Program, the Disability Student Union -- woo hoo, DSU. The Beyond Compliance Coordinating
Committee -- woo hoo, BCCC. The Disability Law Society -- yay, DLS. Verbal Blend, and
the Nu Rho Poetic Society. Very special thanks go to Radell Roberts.
Yeah, let's have a hand for Radell, really. [applause] Rachael Zubal-Ruggieri. Cyndy Colavita.
Clapping is good, you can clap too. [applause] Monique Gadoua. Linda Zimack. Cedric Bolton.
Alex Umstead. Joel Whitney. Neal Coffey and the crew filming tonight from the video production
unit. Our CART provider, Sally Maiorano, who is not able to be present but is here virtually
and remotely, and by proxy. Our ASL interpreter Michele Pilchen,
[applause]
Tara Sweazey from Aurora, Leah Deyneka, Gerard McTigue -- McTigue, excuse me, and everyone
else who helped to coordinate tonight's event, everything associated with preparations for
Anne's visit, of course, and as well as the student luncheons coordinated for Anne and
hosted with her. So now I have the enormous privilege of introducing
my friend and colleague, Professor Steven Kuusisto, who knows how to use a lavalier mic, because
I do not. Steve is a graduate of Hobart College and the Writer's Workshop at the University
of Iowa. He has studied as a Fulbright Scholar in Finland and currently directs the Renee
Crown University Honors Program at Syracuse University, where he holds a University professorship
in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. He speaks widely on literature, diversity,
disability, education, and public policy, is the author of Eavesdropping: A Memoir of
Blindness and Listening, and the acclaimed memoir Planet of the Blind, a New York Times
Notable Book of the Year. His debut collection of poems, Only Bread, Only Light, was published
in 2000 by Copper Canyon Press, and we have another volume forthcoming, Letters to Borges,
any minute now from Copper Canyon Press, right? [Steve: Yes.] Yeeha. Recognized by the New
York Times as, "a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional
candor," Steve has made numerous appearances on television and numerous other programs
including, but not limited to: The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline NBC, National Public Radio,
and the BBC. And I've been waiting for this part: And heeere's Steve!
[Applause and laughter]
Steve: You should have seen me on Animal Planet. [laughter] Rowl! [laughter]
Thank you, Diane.
What does embodiment mean in literary terms? It means that Ahab and the white whale and
the man named Queequeg and the one called Ishmael are all struggling to get a fiercer
grip on physical form. Each has a limp, or a gash in his side, or a missing limb, or
a shiver that comes after dark.
Always the turn toward embodiment comes from irony, from self-consciousness.
The British actor Stephen Fry, in his wonderful memoir about being bipolar, writes, "it's not all
bad, heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and
self loathing, they're not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I
would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter, and all the
mad intensities that made and unmade me."
And here is a quote from Herman Melville, no stranger to thinking about disabilities:
"Consider them both, the sea and the land, and do you not find a strange analogy to something
in yourself, for as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there
lies an insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of
the half known life. God keep them. Push not off from that aisle, thou canst never return."
Embodiment is a practice -- the willful deployment of language that both makes and unmakes us.
Anne Finger exemplifies the literary arts of making and unmaking, over and over again,
in terms that are at once lyrical, full of history, full of cultural analysis,
reportage,
stream of consciousness, and perhaps most important of all, what Tom Wolfe calls the
building block of good nonfiction, scene-by scene-construction.
Anne Finger is the winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in fiction for her recent collection
of short stories, Call Me Ahab. If you don't know this collection, you must. Race out and get it.
You can even buy it from Amazon.
Diane: Buy it tonight, probably.
Steve: Anne Finger is also the author of Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History
of Polio. And a book I really admire, Past Due: A story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth.
Anne has taught creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit. Deetroit.
Anne: Deetroit. Steve: and at the University of Texas at Austin,
as well as workshops in the community, as writer in residence at the women's building
in LA, at the San Francisco independent living resource center, and in elementary, middle,
and high schools. She was the president of the Society for Disability Studies and remains
active in the disability rights movement. This is just a fraction of all that she does.
It is a privilege to have her here at Syracuse. She spoke to my honors class in nonfiction
writing in memorable and powerful ways just a short time ago. I am really thrilled to
be able to give her a big, warm, orange welcome.
[Applause] Anne: Thank you.
Steve: Ooh, you've got one too.
Anne: Yeah, but that's for the -- that's for the recording, so I need both of them.
Steve: You are a two-microphone person. Anne: I'm a two-mic girl.
Let's -- does that sound good? OK, great. Hi, everybody, and thank you for
that wonderful introduction, Steve. And thank you to everybody for coming tonight and for
everybody who made this visit possible. Thank you, Steve, and Diane and many, many other people.
So I'm going to read two things this evening.
I'm going to read from this essay in the Seneca review, which Steve and -- Ralph Savar--Savarese--is
that how you pronounce his name? Co-edited, and I found out a little while ago that this
essay was named a notable American essay, that book that comes out every year of best
essays of the year. Which nobody told us about. Steve: No, we didn't even know!
Anne: Right, no. Steve: They're sneaky.
Anne: I couldn't remember the dates on it, so I was Googling it and there it was. I was
quite excited to find that out. Of course, I didn't win and get my essay printed in the
book, but I was still happy to be in the back of the book.
So this essay is called Walking to Abbasanta, and it's -- just to give you a little bit
of background, it is about an Italian political theorist, Antonio Gramsci, who -- is sort
of the leading theorist of western Marxism and had a quite significant disability and
spent most of -- he lived from 1889 to 1937. And he had -- spent most of his adult life
in prison, under Mussolini.
The bodiless head of Antonio Gramsci floats on silkscreened posters; beneath the great
globe may be a few lines of text -- the phrase that became his motto: "Pessimism of the intellect,
optimism of the will" or, "We are living in the interregnum, when a great variety of morbid
symptoms appear." These posters were once thumbtacked to walls in collectives in Berkeley
or Boston, and now are matted and framed, hung on the walls of the tasteful (but still
slightly funky) living rooms of these now-comfortable radicals.
These owners of these posters have become psychoanalysts or union organizers or artists
or professors. If they are professors, they write papers which they preface with quotes
from Gramsci (as ministers preface their sermons with verses from the Bible): "The bourgeoisie
lies in ambush in the hearts of the proletariat," or "Each human being is not only a synthesis
of his existing relationships, but a summary of the entire past."
I want to give the great mind a body: A disabled body. More than those vague allusions in asides
and footnotes to his medical condition, his suffering in prison, his courage. In the introduction
to one of the English editions of Gramsci's Letters from Prison, he is even described
as "having the appearance of being a hunchbacked dwarf."
A footnote follows, which I think will perhaps explain the difference between *being* a hunchbacked
dwarf and merely *appearing to be* a hunchbacked dwarf-- but alas, it does not.
At the Protestant cemetery in Rome, the caretaker, a cigarette dangling from between his lips,
asks, "Inglese?" "Si, Americana," I answer. He hands me a xeroxed sheet in English, with
letters made wavering by having been copied and recopied, the first line of which reads:
"Smoking is absolutely forbidden in the cemetery." The caretaker gestures to his left and says,
"Keats, Shelley." "E Gramsci?" I ask. "Ah, Gramsci." He smiles and points in the opposite
direction. I walk away from the parte antica, beneath the pyramid erected to the memory
of -- Caius Cestius, praetor and tribune of Rome in the first century B.C., whose heirs
joined in the craze for aping the conquered, and built an Egyptian pyramid right here in
Rome. In that ancient meadow, the graves of 19th century foreign sculptors and poets who
drowned in the Tiber, are scattered in careless profusion, like the anemones, daisies, and
violets that Keats was happy to hear were growing in what would be his final resting
place. An angel weeps with Victorian abandon. A stone infant sleeps. I walk along the straight
rows of graves in the newer part of the cemetery until I find the stout monument with the Latin
words carved on it, "Cinera Antonii Gramscii," the ashes of Gramsci, "1889-1937."
A body of words, then.
Leonardo da Vinci drew a sketch of Vitruvian man, whose body showed the perfect geometric
symmetry so prized by the ancient Greeks. The drawing superimposes two positions of
the figure on top of each other, one with a body in the shape of the letter T, another
with arms and legs spread. Put the point of a compass in his navel, and draw a perfect
circle from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. With his arms stretched out,
his body makes a perfect square. God is a geometer and the non-disabled body illustrates
his first axiom. Draw a figure from the body of a hunchbacked dwarf, and the circle morphs
into a distorted oval, the square lists to one side. God is a pregnant woman, a cripple,
she is a mathematician of the ***. From Rome I go to Sardinia, the island where Gramsci
grew up. Every morning, I am woken up in the guest house in Donighala Fegedu, by the clattering
of bells at seven in the morning. I imagine a mother of giants banging a wooden spoon
inside an enormous black kettle to rouse her seven lazy giant sons. Over coffee, just-baked bread,
spread with marmalade made with bitter honey, I communicate telegraphically with
my landlady. -- "Oggi Ghilarza. A Casa Gramsci. Si. Casa Gramsci. El treno?" "No, el autobus."
"Ah, el autobus." I caught a ride into town with a couple of German tourists from the
same guest house. Traveling made me a child again. I sat in the back seat of their BMW
and stared at the ruddy-brown necks creased with white of these two grown-ups, who had
been methodically roasting themselves on the beach ever since they arrived on the island;
a child listening to the only occasionally comprehensible speech of the mysterious adults.
They dropped me near the bus station; I counted out the unfamiliar Italian money, clutching
my bus fare in my hand. The bus drove inland, pulling off the highway to let off and take
on passengers at every exit from the autostrada, the driver's arms moving in ballerina-like
arcs, as he maneuvered the squat bus through narrow streets. We passed a medieval stone
wall, on which someone had spray-painted, in English, SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME.
A sign indicated the exit for GHILARZA, ABBASANTA, SANTU LUSSURGU," in blue and white, with a
yellow and black sign on top of that which read "Ristorante OK Corral." [laughter] The
bus stopped — I'm not making this up. Could I make this up? The bus stopped in Abbasanta;
I boarded a second bus for Ghilarza. I wasn't sure where to get off that bus, or how to
ask, so when I saw a yellow and black sign with the words "Casa Gramsci" and an arrow,
I rang the bell and made my way down the aisle. I walked in the direction of the arrows, leaning
on my cane, but after a while the signs disappeared, and I asked first one passerby, then another,
"Dove Casa Gramsci? Dove Casa Gramsci?" I managed to understand the directions I was
given: It's straight ahead, keep going, keep going, it's not far. Grazie, grazie. Here,
I was not a sharp-tongued, smart disabled woman; here I was an almost-speechless, sweet
crippled girl, "brava ragazza," the people in Donigala call me, a good-hearted girl,
a mensch. I know how to say, Yes. No. Please. Thank you. Where is the bathroom? How much
is your cheapest room? I am an American woman. I don't speak Italian. And just in case, although
I haven't had to use it yet: I am having an asthma attack. I need medical care urgently.
Almost speechless. When I used to get manual muscle tests done ("Okay, now I'm going to
try to push your leg down and you try to keep me from pushing it down," the doctor says,
and then writes down a number -- 0 for no muscle function; 1 for a trace, 2 for weak,
3 for fair, 4 for good), the doctors would just check my legs. Then they started doing
my upper body, my arms.
The last time, the doctor said, "Stick out your tongue; okay, same routine," pressing
against it with her finger, "move it to the left, okay now don't let me push it back,"
I wanted to cry. Even though she told me right away, "You've got a little bit of weakness
in your neck, on the right side, but your tongue's fine," I could only think: "I need
this mouth." But here in Italy I get along without it. Almost. Siesta was beginning,
and the streets were more and more deserted, the houses presenting their flat, blank faces
to me. I walked and walked and walked, my left knee aching. I promised myself a Tylenol
with codeine as a reward when I got to Casa Gramsci. Although polio affected both my legs,
my left has always been much stronger than my right, so my body has been, always been
divided, neatly divided in two: my left leg was good and my right leg, bad. My right leg
is a flapper, swinging through life free and easy, never doing any work, just along for
the ride. We could call her Claire, a bright and tinkly name. A year ago, when she went
through her mid-life crisis, and a doctor said to me, "I can't promise you're not going
to lose that leg," that had seemed perfectly apt for her -- she was the gal who might go
out for the proverbial pack of cigarettes one night and then, one thing leading to another
and then another, end up by never coming home. But my left leg! We'll call her Sonya. That
Stakhanovite! She worked and worked and worked. I saw a movie she starred in once--I think
it was at the Orson Welles in Cambridge, Mass., or maybe it was the Electric Cinema in Notting
Hill Gate in London. She played a Russian soldier who took out three Nazi tanks with
a rifle. It wasn't until three minute -- twenty minutes into the film, when she pulled off
her cap and shook her long blonde hair loose, that the audience even realized she was female.
I saw her again just a few weeks ago, when I went to visit the city Mussolini had just
— had built south of the Tiber. She'd posed for a statue of a muscled consul of imperial Rome.
This gal could wade the Tiber, she could cross the Rubicon! But a few months before
I came to Sardinia, I'd gone to a doctor who'd been amazed at the amount of lateral movement
I had in my left knee (the ideal body doesn't have any). Like a child showing off his favorite
toy, he rocked my femur from side to side and said to his resident, "Look! Look! Look
at all that lateral play!" The next day I winced every time I stood up; the morning
after that, I woke up screaming in pain. "Labor's a ten," my friend Kathleen said. "Eleven,"
I said. Perhaps I would have a knee replacement, perhaps a brace would do: in the meantime,
another doctor sent me off to Italy with a bottle of Tylenol with codeine. The Ghilarza
I was walking through was nearly a hundred years removed from the Ghilarza Gramsci had
lived in. Then it would not have been so different from Tepotzlan, the town in Mexico where I
spent the summer before this one. When Antonio lived here, the countryside would have been
noisy with the braying of donkeys, the cluck of chickens, the plaintive cries of sheep
and goats. Unspayed *** who had given birth so often that their empty, stretched-out
*** flapped obscenely against their legs must have trotted merrily along these streets.
Flip-flop, flip-flop. ***-tat. ***-tat. But this was all wrong: I was seeing this scene
through my late-twentieth-century, North American eyes: eyes which, despite my feminism, see
floppy *** as obscene. The smells of *** and animals that filled me with a queasy sadness
in Mexico would to him have just been the rich, fecund smells of the country.
In the front room of Casa Gramsci was a blown-up print of his cell in the prison at Turi, so
grainy it was a form of pointillism. An anti-Seraut, teasing apart not light, but the varieties
of darkness. There was a solitary guide--seeming to violate the Italian principle that every
museum must be guarded by two men, one fat and one thin, a Laurel and a Hardy, an Abbott
and a Costello, one of whom will look at my name and city in the visitors book and ask,
"Detroit?" furrowing his brow, to which I will respond, "Detroit Pistons," and mime
the action of dribbling a base-- a basketball, at which they will both smile and say, "Ah,
si, si, si, Detroit Pistons." But this solo guide had heard of Detroit--it's the Turin
of America. He kept talking and talking to me; I could understand every third or fourth
word he said. One room was filled with books, with brown paper covering the windows to keep
the sun from fading them.
The guide told me these were all books by and about Gramsci, translated of -- translations
of his work into Japanese, English, Chinese. We climbed the narrow stairs without a railing.
The guide took my arm; I didn't know how to say in Italian: No, thank you, that just makes
it harder for me to walk, so I said nothing. The house-transformed-into-a-museum had the
serene lack of clutter that houses of the well-to-do can muster. I filled it up with
the sounds of the seven Gramsci children, the smells of diapers and of oranges
stewing with bitter honey for marmalade; I imagined rooms so crammed with furniture that
he had to crawl across a bed to reach a dresser. Back downstairs, I saw the thing I had come
all this way to see. In Mexico, it was not the visit to the house of Frida Kahlo, where
I'd expected to be moved, walking through the rooms I had seen so often in photographs
that I could say, yes, there are the miniature cups on the wall, there's her painted body cast;
it wasn't there, but at a haphazard visit to Casa Trotsky,
because it was just a few blocks away, and I thought I might as well. And there it wasn't
the room where Trotsky was murdered, but the sight of the shoes of his companion, Natalya
Sedova, that astonished me. They sat on the floor of the half-closet in their bedroom,
those shoes for feet so tiny they seemed to have come from another species, a cousin to
my gross, over-fed race. Shoes for the feet of a Russian peasant who had grown up hungry,
hungry, always hungry. Shoes for stunted feet; tiny, black bird shoes that had been soled
and resoled, mended; shoes that had shaped themselves to her misshapen feet; those shoes
that she had worn for twenty, maybe thirty years. It was those shoes, heroic and pathetic,
that I had come to see. Standing in front of the glassed-in display case at Casa Gramsci,
I saw the bronzed death mask and the cast of his dead right hand: what I had come to
Sardinia, without knowing it, to see.
Comrade, I wanted you to be a gaunt Donatello. I wanted the years in the fascist prison to
have burned you clean of the boy-revolutionary look with which you glare out at the camera
in the photograph on the cover of the Notebooks. (You wrote in one letter from prison: "Now
I have eleven teeth left, and all of them are loose," and listed the foods that made
you sick.) I thought your dying would have made you thin and saintly. I didn't expect
you to look like a Mafia don, puffy and gross, triple-chinned, to look like one of those
men who had tumbled into middle-age in his early thirties, slid in on thick slathers
of butter and glugs of olive oil. Gramsci's body was like one of the abandoned houses
I used to drive by in Detroit. I'd look at them and try to figure out what happened to
make them spiral down like that, hollow-eyed, battered: what makes the spirit go out of
a place? The guide pointed out the two stone balls that Gramsci exercised with. Gobetto,
he said, hunchback. Si, si. I know, I know he was a hunchback. That's what brought me
here. "I am a very short man, but he was much shorter than me," the guide said, holding
his hand at the level of his shoulder. And then, only twenty or twenty-five minutes after
I got there, I left. I had promised myself a cab from Ghilarza to Abassanta, but there
were none around, and so I walked and walked and walked. I tried to keep myself in the
sliver of shade cast by the houses that abutted the narrow sidewalk. I stopped, not so much
to draw a deep breath, as to press my hand against my hard-beating heart, to feel the
sweat that had collected on my chest, mottled my silk blouse. Like a high fever registered
on a thermometer, it was outer confirmation of an inner state. Yes, you are working hard,
old girl. A woman standing in the doorway of a house opposite stared frankly and openly
at me, as she had been doing ever since I entered her field of vision. She stared at
me, as I passed her, and, although I did not look back, I am sure she stared at me until
I disappeared--this strange limping foreigner, in this place far inland, where few tourists
come. I started to walk again, feeling proud of myself for making this difficult journey,
walking from Ghilarza to Abassanta, making my way alone through the Sardinian countryside,
a hardy soul who would do my New England ancestors proud, living on less than 20,000 lire (about
$13) a day, on good country pane, espresso, oranges, cherries, latte, formaggio, and acqua
minerale--and Tylenol III, which perhaps my New England ancestors wouldn't approve of
so heartily--getting along without a car, when even my rough-and-ready budget guidebook
says that this is the place where you need a car;
feeling lonely (counting the days--18--until my friend Cecilia would arrive); feeling the
sense of absorption in my own world in which-- into which the dislocation of travel thrusts
me; aware of my own foolishness (why, when I had schlepped all the way to the bus station
yesterday, didn't I at least write down the times when the bus passed through Abbasanta,
instead of merely confirming for myself that I could get back in the late afternoon, so
that now I was hurrying to the station when perhaps I didn't have to hurry or perhaps
I should have been in even more of a hurry); at that moment when I straightened myself
up and began again my walk towards the train, I saw that boy, trudging this same path nearly
a hundred years before. A hunchbacked boy trudged along under the relentless Sardinian
sun. He was walking from his village, Ghilarza, to the next, Abbasanta. The bell in the squat
church in the square behind him clanged out the hour with a single flat ***. He stopped,
balanced four cumbersome tax ledgers on the garden wall of one of the fine houses he was
passing, pulled a yellowed handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his brow. His father
had been sent to prison years before, sacrificed by his own faction to another, in a bureaucratic
intrigue as intricate as those of the Court of Louis XIII (although the part of Cardinal
Richelieu was played by a pig farmer). On account of the father's imprisonment, the
family was impoverished, and so the boy was forced to go to work in the tax office, to
walk between one office and the other, using dry riverbeds because there were no roads.
The boy claimed to remember almost nothing of his father. But when he made this gesture,
dabbing at his forehead with a folded handkerchief, he could sense his father's hand moving through
his. He was no longer a schoolboy who swept the back of his hand across his brow. A year
ago, when he was twelve, the first sprouts of his *** hair appeared, and he had felt
a quirky pride, and a sense of amazement--his body, too, would turn into a man's. He straightened
himself up, pulled his shirt, sticky with sweat, away from his chest, swallowed hard
to soothe his parched throat, picked up his four awkward ledgers, and started to walk.
He thought of the spigot, some two hundred meters distant, where he would be able to
stop and get a drink of water, sit down on a stone bench. It seemed a long way away.
The hunchbacked boy, trudging along under the unrelenting Sardinian sun, could not imagine
that these rainless summers, much crueler than the winters, wilting the crops and sending
the sheep mad with the heat, would someday make this island a paradise. Foreigners will
come to this clump of dirt, the dirt God had left over when he finished making the world
and threw down in the middle of the mocking sapphire waters of the Mediterranean. The
people who grew from this rocky soil will sell the tourists who come to lie in the sun
plastic sunglasses, and rush mats, and suntan lotion, and hot dogs, and flip-flops made
in the People's Republic of China. Like all the islanders, the boy feared and hated the
sea: it had brought them nothing but invaders, and it left in its wake the sluggish sea-swamps
breeding mosquitoes, which left a fog of malarial lethargy over the whole island. It was 1904.
Antonio could not imagine the tourists who would arrive in their Fiats and Audis and
BMWs, carrying luggage--genuine leather or knock-off vinyl--crammed with T-shirts emblazoned
with the names of American universities; bicycling shorts; bathing suits of neon pink, green,
yellow; their radios blaring Pink Floyd and Italian remakes of American rock'n'roll oldies.
They will barrel along the autostrada, past the signs that will say, "GHILARZA, ABBASANTA,
SANTU LUSSURGU," in blue and white, with a yellow and black sign on top of that directing
them to the "Ristorante OK Corral."
The music coming over their car radios will be broken up by the news broadcasts: Italy has
banned neo-fascist skinhead rallies; in the former Soviet Union, a special health commission
has issued a report on malnutrition among old age pensioners. The boy cannot imagine
either Soviets or fascists, never mind neo-fascists, the post-Soviet world. Nor could he imagine
that the street he was now walking along will be renamed after him: Via Antonio Gramsci;
in fact, that in nearly every town and city on this island, there will be a via, corso,
or piazza bearing his name. He reaches the spigot, fills his cupped hands with water,
and sits down on the stone bench, his feet dangling above the earth, his back aching.
Later on, he will write about how relations of power are embedded everywhere, but for
now, this knowledge is only the pain, as he sits on this seat made for normal men. Thank you.
[Applause]
And how are we fixed for time?
We're fine? OK, I'm gonna read one other story.
This story is called Helen and Frida. And
it grows out of a experience that a lot of people who are disabled as a children have,
which is being at home, watching television alone. In my case it was after surgery. I -- And
I knew this had been a very formative experience in my life and I started to write about it
for this short story collection, trying to jump sort of straight ahead in some of the movies
I actually had seen, and I ended up making it weirder. No, I've got plenty of water,
thank you, but I should probably have a drink right now before I start.
I'm lying on the couch downstairs in the TV room in the house where I grew up, a farmhouse
with sloping floors in upstate New York. I'm nine years old. I've had surgery, and I'm
home, my leg in a plaster cast. Everyone else is off at work or school. My mother recovered
this couch by hemming a piece of fabric that she bought from a bin at the Woolworth's in
Utica ("Bargains! Bargains! Bargains! Remnants Priced as Marked") and laying it over the
torn upholstery. Autumn leaves--carrot, jaundice, brick--drift sluggishly across a liver-brown
background. I'm watching the Million Dollar Movie on our black and white television: today
it's Singin' in the Rain. These movies always make me think of the world that my mother
lived in before I was born, a world where women wore hats and gloves and had cinched-waist
suits with padded shoulders as if they were in the army. My mother told me that in The
Little Colonel, Shirley Temple had pointed her finger and said, "As red as that rosebush
over there," and then the roses had turned red and everything in the movie was in color
after that. I thought that was how it had been when I was born, everything in the world
becoming both more vivid and more ordinary, and the black and white world, the world of
magic and shadows, disappearing forever in my wake.
Now it's the scene where the men in blue jean coveralls are wheeling props and sweeping
the stage, carpenters shouldering boards, moving behind Gene Kelley as Don Lockwood
and Donald O'Connor as Cosmo. Cosmo is about to pull his hat down over his forehead and
sing, "Make 'em laugh..." and hoof across the stage, pulling open a door, only to be
met by a brick wall, careening up what appears to be a lengthy marble-floored corridor, but
is in fact a painted backdrop. Suddenly, all the color drains from the room:
not just from the mottled sofa I'm lying on, but also from the orange wallpaper that looked
so good on the shelf at Streeter's (and was only $1.29 a roll), the chipped blue willow
plate: everything's black and silver now. I'm on a movie set, sitting in the director's
chair. I'm grown-up suddenly, eighteen or thirty-five.
Places, please! Quiet on the set!
Speed, the soundman calls, and I point my index finger at the camera, the clapper claps
the board and I see that the movie we are making is called "Helen and Frida." I slice
my finger quickly through the air, and the camera rolls slowly forward toward Helen Keller
and Frida Kahlo, who are standing on a veranda, with balustrades that appear to be made of carved
stone, but are in fact made of plaster. The part of Helen Keller isn't played by Patty
Duke this time; there's no Miracle Worker wild child to spunky rebel in under 100 minutes,
no grainy film stock, none of that Alabama sun that bleaches out every soft shadow, leaving
only harshness, glare. This time Helen is played by Jean Harlow.
Don't laugh: set pictures of the two of them side by side and you'll see that it's all
there, the fair hair lying in looping curls against both faces, the same broad-cheeked
bone structure. Imagine that Helen's eyebrows are plucked into a thin arch and penciled,
lashes mascared top and bottom, lips cloisonnéd vermillion. Put Helen in pale peach mousseline-de-soie,
hand her a white gardenia, bleach her hair from its original honey blond to platinum,
like Harlow's was, recline her on a Bombshell chaise with a white swan gliding in front,
a palm fan being waved overhead, while an ardent lover presses sweet nothings into her hand.
I play the part of Frida Kahlo.
It isn't so hard to imagine that the two of them might meet. They moved after all, in
not so different circles, fashionable and radical: Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin
and Mary Pickford, joining the Wobblies, writing in the New York Times, "I love the red flag.
. . and if I could I should gladly march it past the offices of the Times and let all
the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle. . ."; Frida, friend of Henry
Ford and Sergei Eisenstein, painting a hammer and sickle on her body cast, leaving her bed
in 1954, a few weeks before her death, to march in her wheelchair with a babushka tied
under her chin, protesting the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala.
Of course, the years are all wrong. But that's the thing about the Million Dollar Movie.
During Frank Sinatra Week, on Monday Frank would be young and handsome in It Happened
in Brooklyn, on Tuesday he'd have gray temples and crow's feet, be older than my father,
on Wednesday, be even younger than he had been on Monday. You could pour the different
decades in a bowl together and give them a single quick fold with the smooth edge of
a spatula, the way my mother did when she made black and white marble cake from two
Betty Crocker mixes. It would be 1912, and Big Bill Haywood would be waving the check
Helen had sent over his head at a rally for the Little Falls strikers, and you, Frida,
would be in the crowd, not as a five-year-old child, before the polio, before the bus accident,
but as a grown woman, cheering along with the strikers. Half an inch away, it would
be August 31, 1932, and both of you would be standing on the roof of the Detroit Institute
of the Arts, along with Diego, Frida looking up through smoked glass at the eclipse of
the sun, Helen's face turned upward to feel the chill of night descending.
Let's get one thing straight right away. This isn't going to be one of those movies where
they put their words into our mouths. This isn't Magnificent Obsession, blind Jane Wyman
isn't going to blink back a tear when the doctors tell her they can't cure her after
all, saying, "and I thought I was going to be able to get rid of these," gesturing with
her ridiculous rhinestone-studded, cats eye dark glasses (and we think, "Really, Jane,");
she's not going to tell Rock Hudson she can't marry him "I won't have you pitied because
of me. I could only be a burden. I love you too much," and then disappear until the last
scene when, as she lingers on the border between death and cure (the only two acceptable states),
Rock saves her life and her sight and they live happily ever after. It's not going to
be A Patch of Blue: when the sterling young *** hands us the dark glasses and, in answer
to our question: "But what are they for?" says, "Never mind, put them on." We're not
going to grab them, hide our stone Medusa gaze, grateful for the magic that's made us a pretty girl.
This isn't Johnny Belinda, we're not sweetly mute, surrounded by an aura of silence. No,
in this movie the blind women have milky eyes that make the sighted uncomfortable. The deaf
women drag metal against metal, oblivious to the jarring sound, make odd cries of delight
at the sight of the ocean. Squawk when we are angry. So now the two female icons of
disability have met: Helen, who is nothing but, who swells to fill up the category, sweet
Helen with her drooping dresses covering drooping ***, who is Blind and Deaf, her vocation;
and Frida, who lifts her skirt to reveal the gaping, ***-like wound on her leg, who rips
her body open to reveal her back, a broken column, her back corset with its white canvas
straps framing her beautiful ***, her body stuck with nails: but she can't be Disabled,
she's ***. Here stands Frida, who this afternoon, in
the midst of a row with Diego, cropped off her jet black hair ("Now see what you've made
me do!"), and has schlepped herself to the ball in one of his suits. Nothing Dietrichish
and coy about this drag: Diego won't get to parade his beautiful wife. Now she's snatched
up Helen and walked with her out onto the veranda.
In the other room, drunken Diego lurches, his body rolling forward before his feet manage
to shuffle themselves ahead on the marble floor, giving himself more than ever the appearance
of being one of those children's toys, bottom-weighted with sand, that when punched, roll back and
then forward, an eternal red grin painted on its rubber face. His huge belly shakes
with laughter, his laughter a gale that blows above the smoke curling up toward the distant,
gilded ceiling, gusting above the knots of men in tuxedos and women with marcelled hair,
the black of their satin dresses setting off the glitter of their diamonds.
But the noises of the party, Diego's drunken roar, will be added later by the Foley artists.
Helen's thirty-six. She's just come back from Montgomery. Her mother had dragged her down
there after she and Peter Fagan took out a marriage license, and the Boston papers got
hold of the story. For so many years, men had been telling her that she was beautiful,
that they worshipped her, that when Peter declared himself in the parlor at Wrentham,
she had at first thought this was just more palaver about his pure love for her soul.
But no, this was the real thing: carnal and thrilling and forbidden. How could you, her
mother said. How people will laugh at you! The shame, the shame. Her mother whisked her
off to Montgomery, Peter trailing after them. There her brother-in-law chased
Peter off the porch with a good old Southern shotgun. Helen's written her poem:
What earthly consolation is there for one like me
Whom fate has denied a husband and the joy of motherhood? ...
I shall have confidence as always, That my unfilled longings will be gloriously satisfied
In a world where eyes never grow dim, nor ears dull."
Poor Helen, waiting, waiting to get *** in heaven.
Not Frida. She's so narcissistic. What a relief to Helen! None of those interrogations
passing for conversation she usually has to endure (After the standard pile of praise
is heaped upon her--I've read your book five, ten, twenty times, I've admired you ever since...
come the questions: Do you mind if I ask: Is everything black? Is Annie Sullivan always
with you?): no, Frida launches right into the tale of Diego's betrayal " . . . of course,
I have my fun, too, but one doesn't want to have one's nose rubbed in the *** ..." she
signs into Helen's hand. Helen is delighted and shocked. In her circles,
Free Love is believed in, spoken of solemnly, dutifully. Her ardent young circle of socialists
wants to do away with the sordid marketplace of prostitution, bourgeois marriage, where
women barter their hymens and throw in their souls to sweeten the deal; Helen has read
Emma, she has read Isadora; she believes in a holy, golden monogamy, an unfettered, eternal
meeting of two souls-in-flesh. And here Frida speaks of the act so casually that Helen,
like a timid schoolgirl, stutters, "Y-You really? I mean, the both of you, you . . . ?"
Frida throws her magnificent head back and laughs.
"Yes, really," Frida strokes gently into her hand.
"He *** other women and I *** other men -- and other women."
"***?" Helen asks. "What is this word?" Frida explains it to her. "Now I've shocked
you," Frida says. "Yes, you have . . . I suppose it's your Latin
nature..." I'm not in the director's chair anymore. I'm
sitting in the audience of the Castro Theater in San Francisco watching this unfold. I'm twenty-seven.
When I was a kid, I thought growing up -- being grown up would be like living in the
movies, that I'd be Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny, riding a horse through the Australian
outback, or that I'd dance every night in a sleek satin gown under paper palms at the
Coconut Grove. Now I go out to the movies, two, three, four times a week.
The film cuts from the two figures on the balcony to the night sky. It's technicolor:
pale gold stars against midnight blue. We're close to the equator now: there's the
Southern Cross, and the Clouds of Magellan, and you feel the press of the stars, the mocking
closeness of the heavens as you can only feel it in the tropics. The veranda on which we
are now standing is part of a colonial Spanish palace, built in a clearing in a jungle that
daily spreads its roots and tendrils closer, closer. A macaw perches atop a broken Mayan
statue and calls, "I am queen/I am queen/I am queen." A few yards into the jungle, a
spider monkey *** on the face of a dead god.
W-wait a minute. W-what's going on? Is that someone out in the lobby talking? But it's so loud--
Dolores del Rio strides into the film, shouting, "Latin nature! Who wrote this ***?" She's
wearing black silk pants and a white linen blouse; she plants her fists on her hips and
demands: "Huh? Who wrote this ***?" I look to my left, my right, shrug, stand
up in the audience and say, "I guess I did." "Latin nature! And a white woman? Playing
Frida? I should be playing Frida." "You?"
"Listen, honey." She's striding down the aisle towards me now. "I know I filmed that Hollywood
crap. Six movies in one year: crook reformation romance, romantic Klondike melodrama, California
romance, costume bedroom farce, passion in a jungle camp among chicle workers, romantic
drama of the Russian revolution. I know David Selznick said: 'I don't care what what story
you use so long as we call it Bird of Paradise and Del Rio jumps into a flaming volcano at
the finish.' They couldn't tell a Hawaiian from a Mexican from a lesbian. But I loved
Frida and she loved me. She painted "What the Water Gave Me" for me. At the end of her
life, we were fighting, and she threatened to send me her amputated leg on a silver tray.
If that's not love, I don't know what is--"
I'm still twenty-seven, but now it's the year 2015. The Castro's still there, the organ
still rises up out of the floor with the organist playing "San Francisco, open your Golden Gate..."
In the lobby, alongside the photos of the original opening of the Castro in 1927, are
photos in black and white of lounging hustlers and leather queens, circa 1979, a photographic
reproduction of the door of the women's room a few years later ("If they can send men to
the moon, why don't they?") Underneath, in Braille, Spanish and English: "In the 1960s,
the development of the felt-tip pen, combined with a growing philosophy of personal expression
caused an explosion in graffiti. . . sadly unappreciated in its day, this portion of
a bathroom stall, believed by many experts to have originated in the women's room right
here at the Castro Theater, sold recently at Sotheby's for $5 million. . ."
Of course, the Castro's now totally accessible, not just integrated wheelchair seating, but
every film captioned, an infrared listening device that interprets the action for blind
people, over which now come the words: "As Dolores del Rio argues with the actress playing
Frida, Helen Keller waits patiently--" A woman in the audience stands up and shouts,
"Patiently! What the *** are you talking about, patiently? You can't tell the difference
between patience and powerlessness. She's being ignored." The stage is stormed by angry
women, one of whom leaps into the screen and begins signing to Helen, "Dolores del Rio's
just come out and --" "Enough already!" someone in the audience
shouts. "Can't we please just get on with the story!"
Now that Frida is played by Dolores, she's long-haired again, wearing one of her white
Tehuana skirts with a deep red shawl. She takes Helen's hand in hers, that hand that
has been cradled by so many great men and great women.
"Latin nature?" Frida says, and laughs. "I think perhaps it is rather your cold Yankee
nature that causes your reaction ..." And before Helen can object to being called a
Yankee, Frida says, "But enough about Diego. . ."
It's the hand that fascinates Frida, in its infinite, unpassive receptivity: she prattles
on. When she makes the letters "z" and "j" in sign, she gets to stroke the shape of the
letter into Helen's palm. She so likes the sensation that she keeps trying to work words
with those letters in them into the conversation. The camera moves in close to Helen's hand
as Frida says, "Here on the edge of the Yucatan jungle, one sometimes see jaguars, although
never jackals. I understand jackals are sometimes seen in Zanzibar. I have never been there,
nor have I been to Zagreb nor Japan nor the Zermatt, nor Java. I have seen the Oaxacan
mountain Zempoaltepec. Once in a zoo in Zurich I saw a zebu and a zebra. Afterward, we sat
in a small cafe and ate cherries jubilee and zabaglione, zabiglione, I'm not sure how to
pronounce that, washed down with glasses of zinfandel. Or perhaps my memory is confused:
perhaps that day we ate jam on ziewback crusts and drank a juniper tea, while an old Jew
played a zither. . . ." "Oh," says Helen.
Frida falls silent. Frida, you painted those endless self-portraits, but you always looked
at yourself level, straight on, in full light. This is different: this time your face is
tilted, played over by shadows. In those self-portraits, you are simultaneously artist and subject,
lover and beloved, the bride of yourself. Now, here, in the movies, it's different:
the camera stands in for the eye of the lover. But you're caught in the unforgiving blank
stare of a blind woman. And now, we cut from that face to the face
of Helen. Here I don't put in any soothing music, nothing low and sweet with violins,
to make the audience more comfortable as the camera moves in for its close-up. You understand
why early audiences were frightened by these looming heads. In all the movies with blind
women in them -- or, let's be real, sighted women playing the role of blind woman -- Jane
Wyman and Irene Dunn in the different versions of Magnificent Obsession, Audrey Hepburn in
Wait Until Dark — we've never seen a blind woman shot this way before: never seen the
camera come in and linger lovingly on her face the way it does here. We gaze at their
faces only when bracketed by others, or in moments of terror when beautiful young blind
women are being stalked. We've never seen before this frightening blank inward turning
of passion, a face that has never seen itself in the mirror, that does not arrange itself
for consumption. Lack = inferiority? Try it right now. Finish
reading this paragraph and then close your eyes, push the flaps of your ears shut, and
sit. Not just for a minute: give it five or ten. Not in a meditative state, designed to
take you out of your mind, your body. Just the opposite. Feel the press of hand crossed
over hand: without any distraction, you feel your body with the same distinctness as a
lover's touch makes you feel yourself. You fold into yourself, you know the rhythm of
your breathing, the beating of your heart, the odd independent twitch of a muscle: now
in a shoulder, now in a thigh. Your ***, in all its patient hunger.
We cut back to Frida in close up. But now Helen's fingers enter the frame, travel across
that face, stroking the downy mustache above Frida's upper lip, the fleshy nose, the thick-lobed
ears. Now, it's Frida's turn to be shocked: shocked
at the hunger of these hands, at the almost-feral sniff, at the freedom with which Helen blurs
the line between knowing and needing. "May I kiss you?" Helen asks.
"Yes," Frida says. Helen's hands cup themselves around Frida's face.
I'm not at the Castro anymore. I'm back home on the fold-out sofa
in the slapped-together TV room, watching grainy images flickering
on the tiny screen set in the wooden console. I'm nine years old again, used to Hays-office
kisses, two mouths with teeth clenched, lips held rigid, pressing stonily against each
other. I'm not ready for the way that Helen's tongue probes into Frida's mouth, the tongue
that seems to be not so much interested in giving pleasure as in finding an answer in
the emptiness of her mouth. I shout, "Cut," but the two of them keep right
on. Now we see Helen's face, her wide-open eyes that stare at nothing, revealing a passion
blank and insatiable, a void into which you could plunge and never, never, never touch
bottom. Now she begins to make noises, animal mewlings and cries.
I will the screen to turn to snow, the sound to static. I do not want to watch this, hear this.
My leg is in a thick plaster cast, inside of which scars are growing like mushrooms,
thick and white in the dark damp. I think that I must be a lesbian, a word I have read
once in a book, because I know I am not like the women on television, with their high heels
and shapely calves and their firm *** swaying inside of satin dresses waiting, waiting for
a man, nor am I like the women I know, the mothers with milky ***, and what else
can there be? I look at the screen and they are merging
into each other, Frida and Helen, the dark-haired and the light, the one who will be disabled
and nothing more, the other who will be everything but. I can't yet imagine a world where these
two might meet: the face that does not live under the reign of its own reflection with
the face that has spent its life looking in the mirror; the woman who turns her rapt face
up towards others and the woman who exhibits her scars as talismans, the one who is only,
only and the one who is everything but. I will the screen to turn to snow.
Thank you. [Applause]
[Applause]
Sure. Yeah, I'd be glad to answer any questions, or hearing comments from people, and do you
want to--. Which mic is which here? This says "Room 100." OK, hang on. I gotta follow the
little cord back here -- there we go.
Diane: Anyone have any questions or comments?
Steve: I will make a comment that I love the deep empathy for both Frida and Helen in
that story. You get pretty far inside them, in ways that contradict the easy and glib
representations. It's really, really well done.
Anne: Thank you, Steve.
Student: I liked your use of imagery in the -- throughout both stories. I'm just wondering
how has -- because you -- some of the language in your stories is more than PG rated, how
has that been received as far as praise or criticism or anything like that?
Anne: I think it hasn't been much of an, of an issue. There was one story I had published
earlier in a magazine called Kaleidoscope where they wanted me to clean up my language,
and I did a little bit and I kind of wish I hadn't done it. You know, I also feel like...
language today is so different than when I was growing up, you know, it's -- I mean,
kids hear the word '***' all the time, you know, it's not such a shocking thing.
It's kind of funny, my son was -- his high school play was the *** Monologues. And I said,
you know, if you had said the word '***' when I was in high school, you would — I'm
not kidding, you would have been expelled from school. Or, at least suspended, and probably
sent to a psychiatrist. So, I don't know, it hasn't been an issue that much.
Diane: Any other questions or comments? Okay, another round of applause for her.
[Applause] Anne: Thank you so much.
[Applause]
Diane: So the bookstore is here, I'm hoping outside, with some books at a table, and there's lots to...