And by Helen Keller, I mean, of course, Helen Adams Keller (1880–1968), the activist, lecturer, author, socialist, academic and, most famously, the deaf-blind, born beneath the sprawling English boxwoods and strangling ivy, the cloying scent of magnolia and honeysuckle, rose and smilax, that cloaked the grounds of Ivy Green, the 640 acres of land surrounding the simple, white-clapboard home of Virginia-cottage construction on North Commons Street in Tuscumbia, Alabama, built by Helen’s grandfather a year after Alabama’s integration with the growing Union. The daughter of Arthur and Kate Keller, granddaughter of Charles W. Adams, ex-brigadier-general for the Confederate Army, distant relation of Robert E. Lee and of hardy Massachusetts stock, with familial roots stretching back to the cultural hub of Zurich, Switzerland. The little Helen born with the powers of sight and hearing but who was tragically stricken at one year and seven months with a bellicose inflammation and congestion of unclear origin that forever deprived her of these basic sensory gateways to the exterior world. The Helen who, although already capable of using over fifty gestures and signs to communicate (however crudely) by seven years of age, was destined for a more significant education due to the reputed linguistic successes of Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman, of New Hampshire (formerly of Hanover), who was famously known as the first deaf-blind American child to gain a considerable education in language (reading and writing English) after receiving instruction from a Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe at the Perkins School for the Blind in south Boston, which was recommended as a suitable facility for Helen’s education by the scientist, engineer, inventor and influential innovator Alexander Graham Bell, who was contacted by the Keller family at the recommendation of another doctor. The young Helen who was assigned to the tutelage of Anne Sullivan Macy, originally of Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, the twenty-year-old former student of the PSB (herself being visually impaired from trachoma), who arrived at Helen’s cottage at Ivy Green in March of 1887 to reside with the Keller family and to provide Helen with a rigorous introduction to the world outside the black and silent prison into which she had been so cruelly sentenced by childhood illness (the Anne Sullivan Macy who would remain Helen’s close companion and confidante for the rest of her [Anne’s] life). The child-Helen whose portal to the hitherto enigmatic world of shape and touch relied upon grasping that people, places and objects (nouns) bore specific and individual names – or, as Helen was shown over many arduous and combative and frustrating lessons from Anne Sullivan – that these shapes could be differentiated from one another by unique arrangements of letters, drawn upon her open palm until the life-altering and moving connection could be made: that the letters drawn upon her hand corresponded with the objects she touched, that they had a physical referent outside of their own shape and feel (Helen’s first ‘word’ understood being water, or W-A-T-E-R, associating the word with the feeling of cold well water pouring over her hand – as is dramatized in the 1957 telefilm, the 1959 Gibson stage play and [famously] the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, among other theatrical and cinematic interpretations, including the 1919 silent film Deliverance [not to be confused with the 1972 Burt Reynolds/Jon Voight film of the same name], the 1954 documentary Helen Keller In Her Story [winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1955], the 1984 made-for-TV movie Helen Keller: The Miracle Continues and the 2005 Bollywood film Black, which won dozens upon dozens of screen awards). The Helen who, once having grasped this basic linguistic notion of sign and signified, moved with Anne Sullivan in 1888 to the Perkins School for the Blind to receive instruction, and six years later to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York, from where she travelled to the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Allston, Massachusetts, where she learned from Sarah Fuller, of Weston, Massachusetts, herself a disciple of the teachings of Alexander Graham Bell (a determined advocate for the education of deaf and blind people). The Helen who enrolled in the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, now known as the Cambridge School of Weston (a high school in Weston, Massachusetts), at sixteen years of age, before gaining admittance to Radcliffe College, the women’s liberal arts college, one of the Seven Sisters colleges and coordinate college for Harvard University, now known as Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (a college education funded by the industrialist, financier and philanthropist Henry Huttleston Rogers, a leader of Standard Oil, who was introduced to Helen by American writer and public speaker Samuel Langhorne Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain, who was a great admirer of Helen’s efforts to triumph over her disabilities and a similarly committed anti-capitalist) and from which she graduated at the age of twenty-four with a Bachelor of Arts and the profound distinction of being the first deaf-blind person to ever earn such a degree. The intrepid Helen who continued to learn to sign words and to read Braille, and through discerning the vibrations issuing from other people’s mouths during conversation, burned with a great desire to speak as others did, learning to understand what others said to her by placing her fingers (her sense of touch enhanced by her lack of vision or hearing) upon their faces; and with this method, she was soon able to articulate words, speaking for the rest of her life (albeit with the understandable distortions of a deaf person), and even giving countless speeches to packed halls of eager admirers. The plucky and courageous Helen who thereafter committed her life to the causes of the underprivileged, under-represented and overexploited. The Helen who eagerly joined and promoted the cause of the SPA, or Socialist Party of America (in particular, supporting the campaigns of Eugene V. Debs, a union leader and co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, who ran for presidency in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920 [this last attempt made from within prison]). The Helen of vehement suffragist, pacifist and socialist sympathies, working tirelessly against industrial oppression and capitalist exploitation, joining the Industrial Workers of the World in response to perceived inefficiencies of the SPA and conceived as the remedy for ongoing systems of oppression and subjugation that reduced the role of women, children, people of colour and those with disabilities to slavery, lending her assistance to the co-founding of the ACLU (or American Civil Liberties Union) and the HKI (or Helen Keller International organization) – despite such political and social efforts being routinely glossed over by American interpretations of her life and work in order to downplay the connections between oppression and capitalism, socialism and Christianity, that defined and motivated the rest of her life. The literary Helen of numerous and widely translated writings – most famously the 1903 autobiography, The Story of My Life (not to be confused with the 1988 Jay McInerney novel Story of My Life), written when Helen was a mere twenty-two years old while studying for her Bachelor’s degree, and the text that provided the basic source material for The Miracle Worker and other dramatic interpretations of her turbulent youth. The Story of My Life followed, in 1908, by The World I Live In, giving its readers insight into Helen’s day-to-day struggles and observations and beginning with a description of how it feels to pet and scratch her dog, claiming that ‘in touch is all love and intelligence’ (Helen being a renowned lover of canines throughout her life, even introducing the Japanese Akita breed to the United States after visiting the Akita Prefecture in the Tohoku Region of northern Honshu, Japan, in the 1930s, and falling in love with an Akita known as Kamikaze-go [and younger brother Kenzan-go] given to her as a gift from the Japanese government immediately before the global turmoil of World War II began, ending Helen’s trips to the Land of the Rising Sun [and soon-to-be Axis power] for some time). The World I Live In followed in 1913 by a collection of socialist essays dubbed Out of the Dark, which was eventually followed by the story of Helen’s conversion to Swedenborgian Christianity, My Religion, in 1927 (posthumously re-released as Light in My Darkness in 1994). The Helen who received the highest civilian award in the United States – the Presidential Medal of Freedom – in 1964, awarded to Helen by Lyndon B. Johnson, then President, and who was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. The Helen who died peacefully in her sleep – sle
ep being the only time when, we may presume, she could see, or hear, regardless of what those images and sounds were, or how accurate, as with Milton in the heartbreaking ‘Sonnet XXIII’ – on the first of June (the birthday of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Griffith and Alanis Morissette) in 1968 at 3:35 p.m. at eighty-seven years of age at home in the town of Easton, of Fairfield County, Connecticut, accompanied by Winifred Corbally, long-time companion, who sat by her side while she drifted off into that last, gentle sleep. The Helen who endures in memory as one of Gallup’s Most Widely Admired People of the Twentieth Century, the visage upon the 2003 Alabama State quarter, in name as the Helen Keller Hospital of Sheffield, Alabama, and as many streets in Spain and France and Israel and Portugal, and the enduring Helen Keller Services for the Blind. The Helen depicted in the Edward Hlavka statue in the United States Capitol Visitor Center, featuring her as a child standing beside the famed well of her youth where the linguistic connection was first made, the statue adorned with a plaque bearing her famous quotation, ‘The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart’: a pedestrian-enough sentiment (and one no doubt copied and reinterpreted on countless greeting cards, fridge magnets, shared images on Facebook, picture frames, coffee mugs and dog sweaters) that, through its nauseating iterations and mass-produced expression, generally slides beneath the radar of conscious acknowledgement, becoming a part of the sentimental mush of capitalist apologetics and opiating reassurances, of the surface glut of meaningless information absorbed in each blink and breath; but we must remember that such mass production has denuded the profundity of such a quotation. This is the Helen Keller who could not see or hear; all aesthetic beauty – the face of a lifelong friend, the glory of a desert sunset, Handel’s ‘Lascia ch’io pianga,’ Michelangelo’s Pietà, the laughter of children – was denied her, utterly. The Helen who simply cannot have known whether the most beautiful things in the world could not be seen: she had to trust to the only beauty she could interpret and experience – which is an interior beauty, in its quiet surges of emotion and proud breakthroughs of intellect and moments of religious yearning, of faith. And part of our pity for Helen, the Helen who inspires in all mature observers a deep sadness as easily as she inspires awe and respect, stems from this quotation – do we trust her claim that the beauty of the inside can defeat the entire world without? And can we confront our sadness in reflecting on what our own hearts feel, or are incapable of feeling? Simply, is there anything inside us equal to or worthy of the beauty of the world? We trust that Helen’s black and silent interior world is beautiful, tough, determined, disciplined and divine – the place that inspires all our admiration, adoration and even fear – more beautiful than, perhaps, a baroque aria or the roofs of Florence at dusk or the blue teardrop of the Earth from a satellite’s photograph or the first cries of our newborn daughters and sons – perhaps. But this is also the Helen who is now a black space, circumscribed by the square parentheses of birth and death, ashes interred in the Washington National Cathedral in the darkness of the mausoleum next to lifelong friend and teacher Anne Sullivan, and all interior flowers lost to our imagination, passing into dust, leaving us to search our own stomachs for something to trade or offer to match the world in its variety and savagery – a world rising all the more indifferent to us in her absence.
WIDE AND BLUE AND EMPTY
June slips into her refurbished office room at 10:49 p.m., full mug of decaf steaming in her hand, and logs in to ICQ Messenger. Finding Chris offline, she minimizes the ICQ Messenger window (heart sinking slightly, but only just – their ICQ date is set for 11:00) and begins a game of e-solitaire, promising herself she won’t wait for more than fifteen minutes before logging off and heading to bed.
It is silent on the second floor of June’s 2,000-square-foot, semi-detached, four-bedroom home – a property of nine-foot ceilings and deep-set cold cellar, two-car garage and oak floors, gourmet kitchen and walk-in pantry – as she waits for her son, Christopher, living across the province in a tiny apartment in Ottawa, to log in to ICQ and to chat with her. June mouths the word warily – chat – feeling a delicious tingle of anticipation. Having bought the internet only three months prior, June still approaches the web as a wild and newfangled landscape, still tinged with the risks of danger and provocation. Every time she logs on she feels bold and daring, strangely and surreally modern. She feels especially sophisticated considering that she, fifty-four years old and feeling absolutely ancient, could actually be in a chat room, and that soon her son might join her and write her text messages in real time, his written phrases appearing in a cute pc window with its accompanying Uh-oh! sound bite. It wasn’t exactly how she envisioned the future, but it was certainly exciting.
Now at 11:33 p.m., June stares into the ghostly illumination of the monitor, her hands bleached and spectral as she sips a second mug of coffee and her eyes leap from card to card, from hearts to clubs to kings, feeling strained and irradiated by the garish forest green of the card table, the bright light in the dark room. She minimizes the window mid-game and restores ICQ: Chris’s name still offline, written in the red italics of ex-communication. June tsks, lifting the mug of coffee with her left hand while using her right to battle with the mouse that she bought (stupidly, she thinks) from a local Dollar Saver. Due to some malfunction in the mouse’s ball, she is forced to repeatedly brush her wrist across her mouse pad (featuring a reproduction of van Gogh’s Starry Night). She takes extra care with every left-handed sip, worried that she might dribble hot coffee across the keyboard: frying circuits, spoiling controls, corrupting mystery.
She tenses. Somewhere close – on her pie-shaped lot, perhaps, or near the cedar hedges of her yard – an animal begins to yelp. A raccoon, she guesses, listening to its high-pitched cries pierce the deep quiet of the Forest Hill night. She holds still, waiting for it to stop. When it doesn’t, she closes the ICQ window, opens e-solitaire and resumes her game.
After Chris’s most recent and rather disastrous visit home, June dared only a kind of laissez-faire motherhood – a most careful dabbling with ‘his life’ that was ‘not hers’ to order and correct. She continued writing him weekly email checkups and sending him occasional Hallmark cards with folded fifty-dollar cheques, yet now more conscious of the threat of smothering and more carefully aware of the freedom and flush of adolescence (case in point: Chris’s frequent LiveJournal.com entries, blissfully unaware of propriety or decorum, detailing some debauched embrace in what untold alley of Ottawa on what untold substance …). It’s been a silent and suffering discipline not to call him at least biweekly to see if he’s okay or eating well or getting enough sleep (those bags under his eyes, that stupid eyeliner and nail polish – who was he kidding?). Not that it seems to matter: his number keeps changing, or the number he gives her turns out to be a ‘cellphone,’ perennially low on batteries or forgotten in another pair of pants. In any case, Chris prefers longhand letters sent via Canada Post – ‘we should actually write each other, Mom,’ he said – which, according to June, communicates absolutely nothing of the moment (the way emails can at least transmit a sense of the living, breathing present). All denied for Chris’s absurd love for the romantic, turning even a simple hello, how are you? into a Victorian chore.
And yet, despite her excitement over chatting, ‘her pro-chat stance,’ in Chris’s terms, June is still somewhat leery of the internet. She has long ago mastered data entry and keyboards, word-processing and spreadsheets and presentations, but there is still something otherworldly and anarchic about the net. It’s as if its hidden engineers – its gods of coding and HTML, silicon and microchips – are secret barons of porn and chaos, inimical to June or to anything she might stand for. As if at any moment she might stumble upon a scene of gore or obscenity, or arouse the attention of a mainframe-destroying virus. She knows such thoughts are inane, but still: there’s no good government, no caring parents, online; it’s the dominion of a million brilliant
and hateful children. But her little sessions of sipping coffee and playing e-solitaire and staring hopefully at the ICQ window demand at least the semblance of surfing, of browsing the bizarre and daunting passages of the web. To do otherwise would be to allow the connection and opportunity to go to waste.
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