SubscribeFebruary 19th, 2012
awesome / ASL poetry
via deafjam
November 16th, 2011
try this
I’m assuming most of you don’t know ASL well enough to follow much of what is being said in this performance. So if that’s the case, try this. Mute your system and just watch them. Not just their hands, but all of them. How they move, how they use space and their bodies in space. See what you get. Write down somethings about how they feel, what they are communicating to you.
Then turn up your volume.
I bet the sound track isn’t too much of a surprise.
November 16th, 2011
poetry and revelation
I started taking a short poetry class on story and silence. There only 4 classes and I’ve been to one, and already worth the money (only $200) I paid to take it.
But there was this thing on the first night, a thing that has me thinking.
We each have to do a mini project for the class and so spoke to what we thought we might do – where our work evokes silence, for example, and how to get that on a page. It came to my turn / I felt such resistance. My story is interesting I suppose. All these disparate elements come into my poetry—ASL, Salish, the idea of verb-centered reality/language, synesthesia, witchcraft, atheism, academia, philosophy – essentially where Mary surfaces is in the interstices between those various stones in my experience. I feel a bit like grass growing up through the cracks in a cobble stone road. It is such a hard thing to explain—do you know what smuckum is or táqwu and how that might fit with the wyrd—and part of the reason why I haven’t sought publication until recently. I always feel like I am being difficult on purpose. As if by trying to talk about what it means to experience the world like Mary is posturing – centre-staging.
One time a person said, well why don’t you just say it and the thing is I just had, and what I had said had not been understood, not heard. This is not a complaint. Not at all. It’s just an observation that I speak from a really different place some of the time. I know lots of you know this feeling because we all have different pasts, different feelings, different ways of understanding. But imagine that you are the only deaf person in a world of the hearing. And you try to use your voice, you know what you want to say, and they know what they want to hear…but how could you, as the deaf person, get what it means to be deaf across to someone? I mean ASL is fundamentally different from voiced languages because it uses space in ways voiced languages cannot. There are important parts of ASL communication that cannot be translated into voiced languages.
But more importantly, does the difficulty of “translation” say anything at all about what it means to be deaf? To be hearing? To be a Salish speaker (which I am not, although it is definitely one of my “cobbles”) or an English speaker (which I am). Not really. But it is still an issue that takes so much effort on both sides that it is hardly done. We all have our cobble stones which guide where we can sprout but when the layout of the stones is very, very different, and when none of us realize just how different, communication can be a precarious affair.
My response to the danger and difficulty is to not talk about it much and to learn as much about normative society as I can – so I can pass (no, other people do not hear blue hisses). I do speak to my experience here of course, or at least sometimes. But not in public. I’d rather make something up. Something simple and clearly of the norm. But for this class I didn’t because poetry matters to me. And I felt horrible. Like I was trying to brag around about who I am. yech. Bottom line – I don’t do autobiography. Writing a memoir feels like the worst idea in the world.
Still, all this got me thinking about ASL again, about how sign space is used and how to translate sign space (not ASL signs but the active space that a signer uses to communicate) into paper space. We are to write 2 new poems exploring a “companion” poet’s use of spatial/sound signifies to code or organize the paper-space to reflect sound space. I did have a paper poet I was going to use, but thought I’d use a deaf person’s poem I saw happen on a Portland street instead. Figuring out how I might use what I saw in the production of a poem about living life from the verb’s point of view is turning out to be rather fun. Now the question will be if anyone else will be able to connect with it.
Regardless of that though, the exploration will make my poetry stretch, and that is what the course was designed to do. So discomfort aside, it’ll do.
November 15th, 2011
awesome / deaf poetry for the hearing
November 23rd, 2010
mental chaos and intellectual growth
The last few days have been rather odd mentally. Partly it’s the cold. This nasty little cold snap has me holed up inside struggling to stay warm. When I took the dog out this morning I found myself grumbling internally – Calgary, this is just like frakking Calgary, sunny and frakking cold. So I went back in, divested myself of the gloves, scarves, extra socks, extra sweater - don’t like this, don’t like – made lemon tea and put on my slippers to keep my feet from getting so cold; I resolved to stay inside until this passes over on Friday. (But coffee, my stomach whinges.)
So you see I’ve been a bit techy of late. You understand that this mood plays its part because intellectually I feel like when I came back in with the dog, into the more-or-less-warm, that I found the house littered with a stunning array of bones. Now you realize this is a metaphor, but it really did feel like that. The thing is that I can’t tell how many critters (ideas/theories/bits of understanding) are scattered in my*house* and so the process of sorting is taking time.
Here are some *critters* that I think are almost certainly disarticulated across the *house*.
I’m reading Carl Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy. I haven’t read it in over two (maybe three?) decades so it is as if I am reading it again for the first time. I can feel myself remembering Oh yes, I remember his obsession about how others might disrespect his insights and bleh, the Christian thing to dive under – again, but I think I totally missed the implications of his assumptions about the reality of a god-force and how the god-within will probably relate to the god-without. This is odd, since it is the fundamental similarity between Jung’s theories and Western esoteric practices like alchemy. I suppose this lack of comprehension is understandable in one so young reading a book like this and what’s true is that reading this book of his is rather like reading an alchemical treatise. I have to keep sorting, sifting out the above-below assumptions endemic to this kind of thought and re-articulating them in some more coherent pattern and I probably didn’t have the mental wherewithal or ancillary knowledge to do that when I first read it. Still, I must have had some glimmer because I’ve never really trusted the idea of a collective unconscious and archetypes, regardless of how useful they can be as concepts, because I cannot locate them. I mean, where does Jung think these *things* rest and how do they come to be in each mind? Archetypes, in particular, remind me too much of Platonic Ideals and that is a bad thing.
I’m also reading Harlan Lane’s When the Mind Hears, which is a history of the struggles of the Deaf to survive the good intentions of the hearing world. Not that Lane really sees the good intentions. He’s angry in much the same ways as the AIM boys were/are angry at the non-Indian world. Minority community suffers and one of the consequences of that is rage. It’s a superb book in that it is the result of devoted and first-class scholarship and it most definitely provides a window into at least this one aspect of the embattled Deaf world (the one you will experience as a hearing person – if you are one – is rage and its behavioural script – exclusion – if you spend any time in the Deaf world). In Jung’s terms, the hearing world is the projection site of the Deaf shadow.
Henry Real Bird’s Horse Tracks is another book that is *falling apart* under the strain of multiple connections. I have to say this book is having a profound impact on my thinking about both poetry and philosophy. I’ve rarely met a book that is so exactly right for the moment that I can feel its working so clearly. I do think that this poetry is the key to the *bones* littering my house. It’s like a chemical that dissolves muscle and ligament to leave the pristine bones ready for re-articulation.
I’m also reading moon in a dewdrop, writing of zen master dōgen and Each Moment Is the Universe zen and the way of being time. I have to read these books like I read Real Bird. Slowly. The thought system is so fundamentally different from my own that to have any hope of absorbing such ideas I must approach them delicately, like I would the nest of a spring robin. Here’s an example from dewdrop:
As usual
cherry blossoms bloom
in my native place,
their color unchanged—
spring.
This poem, called “Inconceivable Mind of Nirvāna,” takes up the theme of cherry blossoms, which in Japanese poetry typically symbolize the world’s transiency. But Dōgen, contrary to our expectations, suggests that something about the cherry blossoms goes beyond change.
In contrast with birth and death, which constantly appear and disappear, the tranquility of nirvana is timeless. Yet according to Mahāyāna Buddhist teaching, nirvāna is experienced only in birth and death. Thus timelessness is experienced in momentariness.
I’ve been working through this passage for over a week now.
There are some ways in which zen is like Real Bird’s underlying philosophy and so I feel a kinship, but there are fundamental differences that disrupt that. I suppose what is happening is that my mind is rebelling and trying to gather the pieces in a way that feels coherent. I’m trying, in other words, to make meaningful a disparate group of *bones* and perhaps this isn’t the best plan. I expect I’ll go ahead with it though.
I’m also reading about ASL poetics and a novel about deaf people and being Deaf, then there’s Mitchell’s Iconology and Hitchcock’s Remarks on Alchemy and this odd little study (from 1786) called A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. Maybe I should put it all down and go get a Harlequin romance. Or better yet go see Harry Potter. (I am really, really looking forward to that.) So I recognize my *bone* filled *house* is my own fault but at least it’s interesting. I do expect the current chaos to resolve eventually and out of it, probably, will come some intellectual understanding of how the parts fit, and if not that, at least some better understanding of the parts themselves.
July 16th, 2010
Entertainment about Deafness
There was a mini series called The Silence produced in the UK this year in which one of the main characters is deaf. It is a crime drama and only ran to four episodes and I have only watched part of the first, but I am not watching it for the story as much as for the portrayal of deafness.
It is how deafness is presented and experienced that is fascinating to me. The young woman is portrayed as having a cochlear implant, and if you’ve been paying attention to this blog, you know that my niece has one. One of the things the show does right away is give the audience a taste of what it might be like to hear through such an implant. Part of that is what I experience with my niece. She can hear what individuals say to her fairly clearly but she cannot discern individual sounds if there is too much background noise and so in large family gatherings she is often just as left out as she was when she couldn’t discern sound at all. Another couple of bits that impressed me was the attention to details such as the doorbell that flashes blue and the character’s father’s speech when he distinguishes for a relation between the ability to discern sound and the ability to hear. It highlights the activities of the other characters which are to treat the young woman as if she could hear as they do, just because she has an implant. So far I really like it.
There’s an article about it from The Guardian which talks a little about some of the apparently relatively minor problems in the film about the reality of living with a cochlear implant, should you want to know more. She’s right, the author, there is very little on mainstream channels that just includes deaf people as if they were a part of the regular world. I doubt it will ever catch on but I am always glad when bits like The Silence come out.
July 2nd, 2010
“Eat your brains” in ASL – cool
When my deaf niece and I lived together I would interpret songs for her as they came out of the radio but we never did one this cool.
via Pharyngula
July 13th, 2009
Deaf-Genocide-Hearing
I’ve been reading A Journey into the Deaf-World and although I find it interesting, useful and informative, it also pisses me off. By the time I got half-way into chapter 3 the text had already done it twice. I’ve chosen one part of one sentence to explicate my anger.
Here is the sentence:
“ASL has struggled for survival and evolved into its present form, despite hearing efforts to eradicate it”
(A Journey into the Deaf-World 43).
I am not arguing the facts. Some hearing people tried to stop some deaf people from using sign language. I am going to argue against the subtext of the sentence.
Look again at my sentence: “Some hearing people tried to stop some deaf people from using sign language.” I used “deaf,” not “Deaf.”
I did it on purpose. What the sub-text of this sentence argues is that what those (hearing) people tried to do is stop some deaf individuals from using sign language. It further suggests (because of my choice of capitalization) that those persons were not really trying to stop deaf individuals from becoming Deaf individuals (that is, from becoming part of a distinct cultural entity instead of just an individual with a different sensory skill set). It is highly unlikely, in their zeal, that these anti-signers had the Machiavellian wherewithal to see the larger, cultural implications of their actions. They just weren’t that far-thinking; not that smart. It takes a particular kind of arrogant, self-obsessed genius to plan and carry out genocide (whether cultural or biological), and most of us, despite being self-obsessed are simply not coherent enough to carry out big (if socially evil) plans like genocide.
Quite a bit is known about genocide since, as humans, we continue to practice it frequently. You can read about it if you like, but I don’t really want to talk genocide. What I am arguing is that it takes a specific combination of human traits to master-mind such an attempt. Most of us—those who placidly go along with our respective governments’ (or other body of authority, i.e. religious leaders’ or educational leaders’) “normalization” of the unwanted group—are willing to look the other way and (often under intense social pressure) wield the club. But those few who sit down and write various “White Papers” about how the “end the Indian problem” (or any other social policy whose intent is the eradication of a particular human group) are (luckily) few and far between.
What the required traits are for the pursuit of others with the intention of eradication is a study for your spare time. The only trait I will mention here is a fairly out-sized fear response to the unknown. Most people when they meet the unknown feel fear, but then when bad things don’t follow (as their bodies suspect might happen), then the fear diminishes and slowly the unknown becomes the familiar. That doesn’t happen with a few humans. They don’t listen to the facts of life; they follow their fear instead.
Who are those people? Well, there are some that are hearing. There are some that are white. There are some that are Turkish. There are some that are male. Some of them are Muslim. But, of course, there are others who are deaf, brown, Armenian, female and Christian. Every group—every group—has some.
So back to – “despite hearing efforts to eradicate it”
Actually it wasn’t because they were hearing. It was because they were either of the Machiavellian few or because they had the traits of the authority-followers who form the vast majority of populations that periodically try to wipe out “difference.”
Another example:
I could say: Children have struggled to survive and evolve into their present form despite adult attempts to eradicate them.
However misleading, the sentence is true. You are probably an adult if you are reading this—Do you take offense at my example? I wrote it, and I did.
The subtext in my example says (amongst other things) that being adult is enough to make a person dangerous.If I wanted to begin to subvert the subtext of the sentence and put it more accurately I could say—Children have struggled to survive and have evolved into their present form despite pedophiles’ (as an example) attempts to destroy them and the general society’s unwillingness to take children’s rights and conditions seriously.It is not the fact that a pedophile is an adult that makes him/her dangerous, it is that peculiarly awful sexual desire for the prepubescent and his or her willingness to act on that desire that makes him/her dangerous.
The corollary: It is not the fact that a person is hearing that makes him/her dangerous.
What I find particularly interesting about subtext is its power. Most people don’t actually like to think. They prefer to take the word of some “authority.” These are the same people who, despite not being the architect of x-specific attempt at genocide, were in fact the reason that so many fell to the few Machiavellian-types who had the particular traits necessary to begin yet another attempt to eradicate difference. In other words: cannons alone can’t make a devastation. Us cannon-fodder and cannon-balls are also necessary.
Living with the misleading subtext, not thinking it through, that is dangerous. It is what convinces us “cannon balls” to stuff ourselves into the policies of our authority-types who have decided we need a good stiff conflict. For example: When certain officials made “Jews caused the downfall of our great nation” the party line, they offered the authority-followers a way to put their pain and fear onto another. It wasn’t particularly well thought out. It certainly wasn’t even remotely true to the facts of the world. And of course it did not turn out well for either the “great nation” or the “Jews” in question.
Putting pain and fear onto another group without clarity of thought and care with expression always ends up badly for all involved. Of course this lesson of history, that war really doesn’t make peace, and that trying to make us all the same (or blame others) never actually works to make us happier, or healthier, or more the same, doesn’t actually seem to impinge on our capacity for reason. But cannon-fodder and cannon balls are not known for their capacity to think things through, and cannons are not known for caring about the fate of either their balls or their fodder.
So I do object as an adult to being lumped in with pedophiles. I also object to being lumped in with those who have lived life according to their fear, regardless of whether the “lumper” is doing it because I am white, hearing, female or just because I am alive. But, bottom line, what I object to the most is those who write/speak/sign such egregious sentences without first thinking about what they actually say. The stupid arrogance of it continues to astound.
Lane, Harlan, Robert Hoffmeister and Ben Bahan, A Journey into the Deaf-World. San Diego, CA: Dawn Sign Press, 1996.