Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  Poetry is only concerned with a provisional kind of truth. I’ve been reminded of this lately because someone asked me after a reading at Chattauqua how it happens that my writing is so visual when I am obviously blind. I have been asked this question literally hundreds of times and I’ll likely never elude it. I’m getting used to it. Yet I think that I would like the question more if I thought it had merit.

  The problem is that people think literary writing is the same thing as journalism. It’s as if the audience says: “Nonfiction has to be like a photograph.” They don’t know this is what they’re thinking but this is the ingrown narrative assumption of our time.

  The idea that nonfiction is a form of journalism stems from the years just after the First World War when photographs first appeared in newspapers. Suddenly “the image” was all the rage, even if you wrote for the Kansas City Star or the Columbus Dispatch. Ernest Hemingway wrote a paragraph in his notebook about the carcass of a dead dog beside a railway platform and in effect nonfiction was wedded to the camera, at least in the eyes of the public.

  The thing my well-meaning questioners don’t understand is that I’m not writing prose that’s powered by the appearance of truth (“verisimiltude” is what Henry James called it). I am driven by the vagaries of poetry and the imagery in my prose is entirely unreliable though it feels clear for all of that. I do not write about what I see, I write about what I do not see with words that feel good to the ear. When I write about the morning skin of ice on a birch tree I’m saying it because it feels right, not because I’ve watched it.

  When the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote lines like the ones below, no one thought he was reporting how the moon really looks. He was writing a poem. He was concerning himself with the truth in an unreliable way.

  When the moon rises,

  Moon of a hundred equal faces,

  Silver coins break out in sobs

  In pockets...

  One can get a good sense of the moon from Lorca but it won’t look like the moon in the photo on the front page of the metro section, which is of course why we like poetry and why we wrap fish with the newspaper.

  There’s another reason people are fooled by the clarity of a blind writer’s prose. Most readers have forgotten that language is essentially magical. All nouns are merely images. Man. Horse. Street. Lingonberry bush. If I can write it, or say it, you will see it. No wonder the ancients thought the poets knew something.

  Letter to Borges from Houston, Texas

  I fell down this morning, Borges. I blamed this on the pavement outside the hotel.

  There is something about falling when you’re blind, a kind of synesthesia occurs.

  I fell slowly into a cold paradise of blue.

  It was like falling into the world in the birth wind.

  Do you remember that?

  Falling like this is certainly a kind of nostalgia.

  I had time to think.

  “Only God can conceal God,”

  That’s what I thought.

  My arms were extended like wings.

  Joyfully, falling...

  I should add that no one was awake to see

  me. Borges, did you ever laugh in so much blue?

  Borges: They Are Knocking the Wind

  Out of Me in Iowa City

  Up late, reading alone, I saw how Minturno was fooled by the intricacies of beauty. Unfortunately at that hour there was no one to tell (as a friend once wrote: “Everyone I know is either dead or still asleep.”)

  “Don’t talk to yourself,” I told myself. “Don’t scribble in the margins.”

  When Marsilio Ficino said that beauty was just shapes and sounds he was surely bathing outdoors.

  Neo-Platonists ease their bodies into their warm baths. Close your eyes you can see Minturno bathing under the autumn stars.

  & so I went to bed at last & dreamt of my first city—Helsinki, late fifties—the old man in the harbor selling potatoes from a dory. In the dream as in life that old man was wearing a red shirt, the first I ever saw.

  Minturno: ideal forms are the source of our passionate failures.

  The next morning I walked in the street and felt too many things to be judged a success.

  A man on stilts was handing out fliers announcing the arrival of a circus. It was a French circus. The man was speaking French.

  “Ah,” he said in French, “you are blind.”

  He withdrew the flier and tottered away.

  I resisted the impulse to shout after him in my high school French: “You sound like the first dull minute after a train wreck!”

  The stilts made a metallic tic-toc on the paving stones.

  “Tic-toc, train wreck,” I said to myself, feeling my tongue dent the soft palate. That was my method of keeping silent. Tic toc...

  Letter to Borges from Estonia

  Where I go is of considerable doubt.

  Winter, Tallinn, I climb aboard the wrong trolley.

  Always a singular beam of light leads me astray...

  After thousands of cities I am safe when I say, “It is always the wrong trolley”—

  Didn’t I love you with my whole heart? Athens? Dublin?

  Solo gravitational effects: my body is light as a child’s beside the botanical garden’s

  iron fence—

  But turning a corner one feels very old in the shadow of the mariner’s church.

  I ask strangers to tell me where I am.

  Their voices are lovely, young and old.

  Yes I loved you with my whole heart.

  I never had a map...

  Coordinated, Platonic movement in deep snow...

  Crooked doors & radios in the bread shops...

  Letter to Borges in His Parlor

  What will become of you

  With your Anglican heart & old furniture?

  Are you waiting for insects at the geraniums?

  What is there to love anymore my friend?

  Some days I too don’t feel like going out.

  Secluded with my gramophone

  I play Flores Purisimas, zarzuela,

  Caruso—over & over...

  Once, years ago, I got lost in the vast cemetery of Milan.

  I had my dog; I was taking roses to Toscanini’s tomb.

  It was an ordinary day,

  Men were digging graves.

  Confounded in the ballyhoo Italien,

  The tombs carved like sailing ships,

  I talked to perfect strangers:

  Women alone with grief,

  Men walking “on doctor’s orders.”

  It is good, Borges, to have a mission, don’t you agree?

  Only Bread, Only Light

  At times the blind see light

  And that moment is the Sistine ceiling,

  Grace among buildings—no one asks

  For it, no one asks.

  After all, this is solitude,

  Daylight’s finger,

  Blake’s angel

  Parting willow leaves.

  I should know better.

  Get with the business

  Of walking the lovely, satisfied,

  Indifferent weather—

  Bread baking

  On Arthur Avenue

  This first warm day of June.

  I stand on the corner

  For priceless seconds.

  Now everything to me falls shadow.

  Sheila Black

  WAITING TO BE DANGEROUS:

  DISABILITY AND CONFESSIONALISM

  I have XLH, commonly known as vitamin-D resistant rickets because the symptoms mimic those of nutritional rickets—sharply bowed legs and an unusually short stature. “It is usually classed as a form of dwarfism.” I was over forty the first time I read that—on a description of the illness posted on-line from the Merck Manual. I was shocked. “Dwarf” had been a word that I had never heard or used in reference to myself. But it made sense when I thought about it. Still, it was hard to say: “I am a dwarf.” />
  When I think about why I am drawn to confessional poetry—confessional poetry which M.L. Rosenthal first defined as consisting of “sexual guilt, alcoholism, repeated confinement in a mental hospital” among other subjects—I think of my disability (p.7). Rosenthal asserts that in “confessional poetry” such “difficult” subjects are “usually developed in the first person and intended without question to point to the author himself (herself?).” I do not like my automatic association of disability with shame, but there is no question it is there. The first time I read that my illness was “a form of dwarfism,” I suffered a sudden hot flash—my cheeks reddened, my palms burned—I felt somehow ashamed of myself. Even though—as my disability is a genetic one—I bear no responsibility for it whatsoever.

  When I was growing up my mother used to say that the cause of my illness—she called it “my illness” or, more commonly, “my legs,” as in “the reason your legs happened to you”—was that when I was two months old, I caught the red measles. She said my fever rose so high “it must have done something to your DNA.” In fact, this explanation makes no sense. No fever can change the coding of the DNA. My mother insisted this because she said “there is no other record of anything like this in our family.” Only years later, did I realize why she kept repeating this story, because it was a way of saying what had happened was not her fault. Later, when she came to understand that XLH occurs often out of the blue—due to spontaneous and unexplained mutations in the genetic structure—she appeared to accept it, but I could tell she did not find this as soothing an explanation as the red measles. I could not understand her guilt until as an adult I reviewed my old medical charts. I discovered that when, as a young toddler, I began to exhibit radical bowing of the legs, the doctors believed the reason was that my mother was not feeding me properly. They ordered her to keep charts of every meal she fed me. They asked her if she was lying when she reported giving me milk many times a day. Shame and guilt, the rock-bed of the confessional.

  In recent years, confessionalism has become a favorite target of a multitude of poetry critics, often employed as a symbol of all that is wrong with poetry. Among the accusations: confessionalism relies too much on the poet’s own experiences; it reflects a “reality television” aesthetic in which artistic power is predicated on the revelation of lurid secrets or personal trauma. Yet the silencing of or scorn for such so-called charged material is often itself a kind of corrective repression. As a few perceptive critics such as Cate Marvin have pointed out, dismay at the confessional is often specifically addressed at the more powerless (women, minorities) who seek to marshal its power. Furthermore, the direct association of confessional poetry with “true confession” is naïve and problematic. In “Female Trouble: Women’s Transgressions in the Confessional Mode,” Marvin writes:

  ...confessional poets set up their camp smack in the middle of the dangerous border that separates the poet’s lived experience from the poem he/she has created. However, what makes the project exciting and dangerous is the poets’ refusal to remain faithful to the truth, as opposed to offering strictly biographical revelations. Confessional poetry is never earnest; rather, it is mercilessly manipulative of the reader...(p.31) .

  Put simply, the confessional poem relies for its charge not simply on the presentation of problem material, but rather on the self-conscious presentation of it before a specific audience. In this sense, the confessional poem is much closer to the dramatic tradition of poetry—the dramatic monologue, the staged scene—than it is to a simple narrative of truth. As a result, confessional poetry, far from being dominated by the personal, often becomes a place where the personal and the political intersect in surprising, exciting and potentially subversive ways.

  As a person with a visible disability, I have often felt intruded upon, defined and even circumscribed by the gaze of others. As a child, I don’t believe I truly conceived of myself as disabled or different (the word for what I was in my day was crippled) until I started school, at a Catholic convent in Rio de Janeiro run by an order of mostly English and Irish nuns. Here my legs were immediately tagged as a sign of God’s will, God’s mystery, even God’s love. Yet for all the talk about how God loved everyone, and people like me were somehow special proof of this, I also attracted an uncanny amount of hostility. In my class was a boy named Gabriel who was in the most classical sense beautiful. He had golden hair; he was tall; he had a crooked and somehow endearing smile. Everyone appeared to turn to him as sunflowers turn to the sun. And he, from the very first, hated me. The mystery of his hatred grew as vast and immutable as the mystery of how day turns to night. In the playground—a cobbled courtyard surrounded by a thin fringe of grass—he would follow me chanting, “There goes ugly girl.” Once he and another girl asked me if believed in fairies. I said I did. He picked up a stone and threw it at my cheek. When it cut me, and I bled, I went to the nuns crying. He said I was lying; I had tripped over my own crooked feet. The nuns believed him, and I—why did I do this?—recanted. Later that year, I would read little picture books about the lives of lions; the “natural order” of predator and prey. All of this would make some kind of intuitive sense to me, but it was a sense that bordered on despair. There was an order, an order I did not understand, hooked together with Gabriel and I, with God’s mystery, God’s judgment, God’s order, and I was on the wrong side of it. “Don’t stagger like that,” our teacher, Sister Agnes, would say to me with irritation as we lined up for morning prayers. “Of course you can’t help it, I suppose, but it does seem to me you could at least try to put your feet straight and walk like other people.”

  I think about why I tell this story—a “true” story more or less—or why it might have meaning. The story for me is obviously how I was a victim, but if it stops there, it is not a story with much lasting interest or value. It is perhaps more interesting as an allegory of power—Gabriel and I as symbols of forces beyond us, positions we have in a sense inherited—the ugly “crippled” girl, the beautiful “golden” boy. Yet to tell it as pure allegory leaves out the hot, dense, embarrassing, complex ways in which we as individuals reacted to the situation. Often that year I tried ineffectually to win Gabriel’s and, by extension, my teacher’s approval. I tried by wearing my school uniform longer than was the custom. By putting straight my crooked feet as often as I could remember to. By pretending to like and admire whatever they liked and admired. I am sure they tried too. Gabriel’s cruelty to me—how ironic that he should be named for the archangel—mounted as the year went on. Yet was it entirely personal? I can’t imagine it was. He too was performing for an audience, carrying out a role he felt bound to play—or perhaps he was just poking at me as you might poke at a hill of ants, out of childlike curiosity. What will they do? What does it mean that they live, too, in this world, but appear so other?

  Late in the year, Gabriel accused me of deliberately kicking in the tall, ruby-colored stained-glass window of the school chapel. I knew I was in big trouble when a group of nuns came bearing towards me across the playground like an Armada of black ships. I panicked—and ran out of the school grounds. A group of street people caught me and dragged me back through the school gates. At first, the fact that I had run (barely run, actually, since I was at this time extremely bow-legged) was taken as evidence of my guilt. But when the Mother Superior asked that I recreate what I had done, I could not lift my leg high enough to reach the window. And it became apparent, because of the precise way my legs were twisted, that it would have been “physically impossible” for me to have kicked it in. Gabriel was in disgrace. Yet the pleasure of victory I might have been expected to feel instead had the ashen taste of the worst kind of defeat. I often thought years and years after I would like to write a “confession” of how I had kicked in the window, except I hadn’t. I had never even conceived of doing such a thing, until I was accused of it. Yet I could not help feeling that the whole incident echoed or reflected something inside me—I was angry, and I would have kicked that wi
ndow in had I been able, had I been braver, had I thought of it. I recount this simply to express the ways in which the truth of experience, or its inner meaning, tends to blur or bleed over the more you contemplate it. Hated because I was different, that very hatred transformed me into someone who hated.

  As a poet, a storyteller, I am attracted to the unruly and confrontational elements of the confessional, to the ways it complicates personal truth through a presentation that makes the audience continually question whether the speaker is to be trusted. I think hard about why this element of unreliability, the trickster aspect of confessionalism, appeals to me. And I think the answer has to do with the positions historically available to the person with a disability—or, more pointedly, the paucity of those positions. For instance, in the story above, no matter how I try, I cannot see myself as anything other than “crippled.” The most striking thing about me as far as this story is concerned is the fact that I have crooked legs.