Miles reacted to this oppression publicly in a variety of ways. She spoke about her feelings of having been betrayed and excluded by nondisabled women: “I not only didn’t have women role models, I don’t think women were very helpful to me at all. They were rather obstructive. I can’t explain it...” (Marie and Offen 1978: p.2). She allied herself with the Women’s Caucus in her English department in the 1970s, telling interviewers, “I realize that sometimes for sheer justice’s sake a category has to get some recognition...You know, nobody philosophically believes in special treatment of categories...but what if a category has not been treated even up to par? So this is a philosophical issue which hit me pretty great, and there’s still plenty of people fighting it” (p.22). At the same time, she portrayed herself as resistant to all categorization and underscored in particular her complex relation to gender. She wrote a remarkable play during the 1950s, House and Home, in which gender and domesticity become so stylized, so alterable, so artificial and performative, that perhaps only now, with Judith Butler as a guide, can we begin to understand it as a very queer text, one whose mocking of heteronormativities might be said to have something to do with Miles’ departures from 1950s norms of domestic femininity.9 But Miles followed up her strongest statement of gender trouble—“I just don’t feel the sense of the significance of the woman’s category for me”—by dancing away from disability as an explanatory tool, and displacing it through reference to generational difference and professional ethos: “I haven’t had the whole child-family experience. But I think this is part of the past, in that professors in the old days didn’t, so that wasn’t so strange either” (Teiser and Harroun 1980: p.36). Always the hint of, and then the backing off from, the “strangeness” of disability.
Academic studies that focus on Miles’ poetry or on biographical sketches of the author have tended to follow her lead, either downplaying the significance of Miles’ rheumatoid arthritis or framing her within a narrative portraying her as triumphantly transcending (or pragmatically avoiding) her physical condition.10 Miles is commonly said to have addressed her own experience of arthritis only late in life, in the directly autobiographical sequence of poems that makes up the beginning of her 1979 volume Coming to Terms. In these late poems, the best known of which is “Doll,” Miles wrote her own version of autopathography, contributing to a historical moment in which autobiographical narratives of illness or disability were coming into their own. By the late 1970s, disability was becoming increasingly destigmatized, a trend that made books like Coming to Terms possible and that autopathographies like “Doll” sought to advance. This certainly accounts for some of the appeal of Miles’ late disability poems. There is another reason, too, for the preponderance of critical focus on Coming to Terms. “Doll” and its surrounding poems return to the scene of the childhood onset of Miles’ arthritis. “Doll”’s subtle and spectacular disability effects—its exploration, through the figure of the doll, of the corps morcelé; its seemingly matter-of-fact but skittish and unsettled uses of the story of recovery; its depiction of a coming into identity embedded within a matrix of social relations—are worth exploring in detail, and are beyond the scope of this essay. What I want to emphasize here is another factor at work in the critical fixation on these late poems as the sole examples of writing disability in Miles’ oeuvre: the poems play out the “before-and-after” scenario identified by Yvonne Lynch as a dominant disability narrative. Lynch (1997: p.127) points out that representations of disability in film and television commonly focus on the transition from “unimpairment” to impairment, a form that works to secure the identification of a nondisabled audience. “Why is there such a concentration on that transition?” she asks. “It isn’t the only dramatic thing that ever happens in a disabled person’s life.”
Long before Coming to Terms, in fact, Miles’ poems came to terms of disability, though not easily legible terms, since they neither employed the before-and-after plot nor utilized the autobiographical imperative that made her late poems popular. These earlier poems have not been recognized—at least not publicly—as poems about disability. In 1935, the same year that the League of the Physically Handicapped sat in at the Emergency Relief Bureau, for instance, Miles achieved her first major publication, a set of lyrics in the famous anthology Trial Balances. The group of poems concluded with “Physiologus,” a poem that ostensibly contrasts—and finally conjoins—curable afflictions of the body and irremediable suffering in the mind:
When the mind is dark with the multiple shadow of facts,
There is no heat of the sun can warm the mind.
The facts lie streaked like the trunks of trees at evening,
Without the evening hope that they may find
Absorbent night and blind.
Howsoever sunset and summer bring rest
To the rheumatic by change, and howsoever
Sulphur’s good medicine, this can have no cure—
This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never
To be burnt out like fever,
But slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it,
Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly
Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length
To the tongue’s tip and the finger’s tip most lowly,
And will belong to the body wholly. (Miles 1983: p.7)
Employing the 1930s discourse of rest and rehabilitation (perhaps at FDR’s Warm Springs, or in Palm Springs, where Miles was sent to recover as a child), “Physiologus” opposes to this therapeutic theme one narrative of remedy only, that which comes “at length / To the tongue’s tip and the finger’s tip.”11 The poem offers a kind of counterdiagnosis of rheum, or stream, in which the dark, unconscious “fact” of a congealed rheum thaws into written or spoken language.
We can read here vestiges of Miles’ own experience of unpredictable flareups and remissions, and of early-twentieth-century systems of physical rehabilitation—and perhaps, also, in the poem’s initial stark distinction between the cured rheumatic body and the incorrigible mind, traces of another history of disability in Miles’ life. In the 1920s during her teen years, according to Miles, her father fought a bitter legal struggle against his insurance companies for his right to compensation for the dangerously high blood pressure that had forced him to retire. When brought to court, the case hinged on a contested definition: whether hypertension was to be understood as a disabling condition. Eventually, Miles’ father won his case; he died within the year, when Miles was eighteen, of a massive stroke. According to her testimony, Miles’ adolescence occurred, therefore, in the context of a life-and-death economic and legal struggle, close to home, over what constituted disability.12 “Physiologus” may be read as a poem in which that which is visible and can abate (some flare-ups of arthritis, for instance) is set up against that which is invisible and cannot (a father’s high blood pressure, but also the strong pressures of memory, worry, grief, trauma), and both are finally collapsed, as distinctions between normal well-being and abnormal malady blur, into the single mode of resolution the poem accepts as possible—the talking or writing cure.
This poem complicates a model of Josephine Miles as cheery prevailer. Miles’ public stance in 1935 may have generally resembled that of the liberal polio survivors working in high-level positions in FDR’s administration, whose view of disability Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger (2000: pp.46-47) characterize as “a private tragedy most appropriately dealt with by sympathetic public support of individuals’ striving.” But “Physiologus” suggests she also had something in common with the far more radical organizers of the League of the Physically Handicapped: a critique of the basic opposition that underlies the framing of the category “physically handicapped”— the binary distinction between “normal and disabled” (or between “sick” and “well” or “incurable” and “cured”) that operates not just as “a description of a group ...[but] as a signifier for relations of power” (Baynton 1997: p.82).
Throughout her career as a poet, Miles consistently countered sentimental, charitable, medical and heroic narratives of disability. She did this in a variety of ways. Her earliest poems employ diffused, submerged and refracted images of the body; her poems of the Vietnam War years extend to a broad concern with the body politic and body politics.13 But these poems still write disability. To look for its traces in Josephine Miles’ poetry is not to reduce her or her work to (one aspect of) the corporeal; it is to recognize how the poems incorporate—involve, re-cognize, work out of, work into—the totality of Miles’ experience: social, physical and emotional.14
Take, for instance, the poem “Care” (Miles 1960: p.126), which winds around the double meaning of its title: care as (giving) aid, as (feeling) distress. Addressing an unnamed “you,” the poem contrasts this “you / That makes me worsen” to “Most that I know” who “make me better than I am, / Freer and more intent, / Glad and more indolent.” I had read this poem indifferently many times over many years before the obvious occurred to me: it explores not so much general forces of sociability as the specific dynamics of personal assistance service, the relationship between “attendant” and “client.”
For a long time, this subject was simply illegible to me. We have no literary history of the “poetry of attendance,” no named genre within which to place this lyric interaction, however intensely charged with feeling the dynamic might be. Collections of love poems, for instance, do not generally include examples of erotic or affectionate poems addressed by disabled clients to paid personal care assistants or vice versa. Miles’ poem to a bad attendant takes the relationship seriously.15 In a move with implications not just for attendant-client relations but for interactions in general between disabled and nondisabled people, “Care” reassigns and complicates lack, transferring lack off the body of the disabled speaker and onto the inadequate and projecting attendant: “Or do I learn your lack, / Not mine, and give it back, / As mine, the empty lack as mine / That makes me worsen?” By its end, the poem takes the phrase put into the mouths of disabled people thought to be in need of care—“Help me! / Help me”—and alters it, both by making the question of whether to say it the subject of the lyric speaker’s meditation and by changing its conditions: the speaker considers herself at risk not physically but spiritually, threatened by the hate and disdain she feels for her clueless aide. Miles is commonly understood as a poet of the everyday. The poem “Care,” a meditation on the effects of being improperly assisted, is one of many in which Miles’ “quotidian” incorporates the daily life of disability.
“Care” may be the most moderate hate poem ever written. Its affability is marked both at the beginning of the poem, with the assertion that most caregivers do far better than the one addressed, and throughout, in its staging as a meditation on the state of hate rather than as an expression of rage itself. Here is a poet who seems, in the words of an influential review of her work by Denis Donahue (1975: p.442), to have no ax to grind.16 But in Miles’ poems, affability goes hand in hand with avowal, not denial, of the intricate set of social relations that constitutes “disability.”17
Though rarely articulating them in the form of complaint, these poems do express grievances: against the negligent and hostile assistant, for instance, or the clinician or social worker, or—to return to “Reason”—against the man who blocks access in the parking lot. They may be contained grievances, compressed into poems like the grievances in Miles’ 1966 poem of the same name: “I keep one or two and press them in a book, / And when I show them to you they have crumbled / To powder on the page.” But, as that poem concludes: “The stems of grievance put down their heavy roots / And by the end of summer crack the pavement” (Miles 1983: p.156). There is—as the poem itself makes clear—anger in “Reason” (and in reason). Think, for instance, of the way the man’s final giving of an elbow to the “lame old lady” suggests not only chivalry, but also shoving, “elbowing aside”; think, too, of the charged use, twice, of the harsh word “unload.” Enough pavement-cracking ammunition lies behind the wisecracking in that “unload” to justify the speculation that Emily Dickinson’s (1955: no. 754) “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” may be an intertext for this poem, which is tense with the dynamics of being loaded and unloaded, of being animate with anger but dependent on another to move one about.
But Miles’ emphasis on interchange, “the idea of speech,” shifts the scene of grievance away from the “plight” or tension of the disabled individual and toward the “cracking” of the public, the civic, the social. Disability theorist and photographer David Hevey lists progressive stages of disability representation; the last two most-advanced levels are as follows:
The sixth move, then, is to travel off the body...The seventh move would be to record the interface between the person and their space or non-space...between impairment and disablement: the wheel of the wheelchair against the first step of stairs; the gawking of schoolchildren; the lean-over of patronizing men and women; and so on. Such a narrative would record the clash, the paradox, the struggle between the person with the impairment and his or her disabling environment. (Hevey 1992: p.31)18
“Reason” travels off the body in just this sense. Miles is not alone in this strategy; other disabled poets of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s explored verbal forms of traveling off the body that may be read as precursors to the more direct activism of poets such as Cheryl Marie Wade or Mark O’Brien. Take, for example, the views through window frames that occur so frequently in the poems of another Bay Area writer, Larry Eigner—texts that also uneasily invoke poetic tradition’s usual mode of “traveling off,” lyric transcendence. Like Eigner’s work, Miles’ poetry both complicates and accentuates a social model of disability by making it clear that what that poetry travels into, and what it travels in, is (accessible and inaccessible) language. “Reason” does this in two ways. One may be read as a form of social comment on how people talk about, and hear each other talk about, disability; the other refers to nothing but poetry itself. First, the social comment. In her public statements on the pleasures of “Reason,” Miles followed her stress on “the idea of speech” with this statement: “The accents of a limited and maybe slightly misplaced pride interest me. Good, strong, true pride we need more of, and the oblique accents of it at least sound out the right direction” (Larney 1993: p.57). This genial, comic view of “Reason”’s blocking, blustering character, the man who refuses to move his car and then says “all you needed to do was just explain,” offers only the mildest of critiques; the “accents of his pride” are “limited,” “maybe slightly misplaced.” But the focus—however gentle —on his limits, on his misplacement, still strongly revises prior models of the politics of narcissism in scenes of disability.
As Lennard Davis notes in his important essay “Bending over Backwards,” people with disabilities “are often seen as narcissists, particularly by psychoanalysts” and by judges in ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) court cases. “By definition,” writes Davis (2000: p.197), “a concern for one’s disability is seen as self-concern rather than a societal concern.” Or, in Miles’ own words: “I can never quite say why I don’t hit it off with people. I think part of it is that they just fear that I’m going to ask favors” (Teiser and Harroun 1980: p.43). Davis tracks this association between narcissism and disability by turning to a well-known psychoanalytical reading of one of the most powerful representations of disability in poetry: Freud’s discussion of the opening soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Richard explains to the audience that he is “determined to prove a villain” since, because of his deformities, he cannot “prove a lover.” In Freud’s analysis, Richard’s real message (one with which the audience identifies, even as it projects it onto “deformed” Others) is: “Nature has done me a grievous wrong in denying me the beauty of form which wins human love. Life owes me reparation for this, and I will see that I get it. I have a right to be an exception, to disregard the scruples by which oth
ers let themselves be held back. I may do wrong myself, since wrong has been done to me” (Freud 1989: p.593).
In “Reason” and other colloquial poems, Miles devises a vigorous alternative to this particular tradition, one in which colloquy replaces soliloquy. The poem deflects identification, or at any rate renders it elastic and provisional. In “Reason” and elsewhere, Miles develops a (counter)narcissistic poetic that challenges a dominant equation of disability with aggrieved self-absorption, not by evacuating narcissism, but by revealing and reveling in it—as the basis of all (un)reasonable spoken interaction, and as a force that both generates and is tempered by conversation.
This is conversation in poems, and this leads me to my second, and final, point. I want to return to Miles’ “idea of speech” as “the material from which poetry is made.” To read “Reason,” we must finally return to the poem’s claim to make something of “the spare and active interplay of talk”; we must take poetic talking seriously, as a mode in dialogue with, but not identical to, other forms of discourse. “All you needed to do was just explain,” says the man who has been hogging the spot with the best access to the theater, as he ducks out from under the wheel to offer his elbow to the “lame old lady.” “Reason” offers no overt comment on this late attempt to replace selfishness and rudeness with patronizing courtesy: this is a comic resolution, one that mediates as much as it mocks. The poem itself will not explain. Its dialogism exemplifies civility, and in the process, if it skirts the political and emotional risks of open judgment and complaint, it also declines the endless task of “just explaining” that people with disabilities are forced to do, over and over again. To the debate over reasonable accommodation at the curb, it offers not the argumentative voice of reason, but the voice of “reason”—misplaced and re-placed, citational, deflected.
Beauty Is a Verb Page 7