Unchosen Gifts of Debility
A poet on the consolations he was forced to find
Thank you for your comments on masculinity and the potential for violence on Monday. I’ll be sharing the reading from JPII and givenness that I promised soon—our 4mo started rolling this week. A tumultuous time! For now, a quiet prompt for the weekend.
Via Fare Forward, I found this poem from D.S. Martin, which felt like a good fit for the Other Feminisms community.
Blindness
By D. S. Martin
I praise you for my blindness not my
diminishing ability with fine print
but the way you cause me to move
securely where I'd never move on my own
the way I can't see so must rely
on your whisper the way I can't hear
so must rely on your touch the way
I can't discern where you're leading
since that is where you're leading
Over the weekend, I’d love to hear any of your own recommendations (poetical or otherwise) about the gifts that can come from dependence. And it’s fine to also share works that are about real grief at what is lost; whatever else is gained.
I’d also offer this New Yorker profile of a photographer with glaucoma, whose vision is progressively narrowing:
“For twenty-five years, this Sword of Damocles has been hanging over me, and I have had to treat each project as if it is my last,” Pellegrin told me. But the blindness never actually materialized—the progression has slowed, and possibly halted, and to the extent that his field of view has narrowed it does not harm his work. If anything, he said, he has come to see glaucoma as an ally, a kind of secret weapon—“albeit a very tortured one.” It imbued his work with “a kind of finality,” he said. “It gave an urgency to everything I do.”
Today, Pellegrin speaks of blindness as a kind of spectral presence in his mind—not because it is imminent but because for nearly as long as he has been a professional photographer he has been grappling with the implications of what it would mean if it were. He found inspiration in a passage about a group of devoted calligraphers in Orhan Pamuk’s novel “My Name Is Red.” “They would copy the Quran with beautiful, meticulous handwriting, all of their lives,” he told me. “And to go blind, at the end of their lives, was seen as the completion of their opus, their life’s work. They had spent all of themselves and all of their vision.” He added, “They gave their eyes to God.”
I’ve been reading Brisbane by Eugene Vodolazkin, which is a contemporary novel about a Ukrainian/Russian musician who is losing his ability to play due to Parkinson’s. I’m not done with the novel yet, but as I near the end he’s putting on a concert with a girl who is dying from liver failure and the beauty of them both coming together in this struggle to make music despot their illness is absolutely heartbreakingly gorgeous.
I'm always, always going to recommend Heather Lanier's Raising A Rare Girl for anything even remotely related to this. It truly drives home what it means to live as if you believe human life is infinitely valuable without any regard for its usefulness.
In my own life, I'm finally in a place where I can not only recognize my limitations but act on them. I'm starting to say no to things if I don't have the energy for them, which sometimes means that if I've worked my usual five or six days in the week, I can't go see friends on Saturday night, not if I want to have energy for church in the morning without having to "borrow" that energy from what I need to be ready to do well on Monday, starting off the next week right. The limits of what I can do without wearing myself out haven't moved much: the change is not in myself, but that now they are becoming visible to other people. I am very fortunate to have good people around me who don't try to make me feel bad for taking care of myself, or shame me for being less outgoing than someone else, but I often catch myself berating me for being lazy or a weakling or not caring enough about the people who want me to do things with them.
A very unchosen gift --- both very unchosen and very much a gift, which sometimes I can recognize --- is that sometimes I have to let people help. I don't like being vulnerable to people or letting myself become indebted, or on a more superficial level, letting people see just how bad the state of my house has gotten when I let them in to help clean it, because I'm supposed to be a capable adult with her priorities straight, which means taking good care of my surroundings. But, as I've read in several places, if nobody ever needed help, nobody would ever /get/ to help anyone else, and would be prevented from doing good deeds that way. I'm making an occasion for the people around me to do noble things because of my inability to go to Walmart, or do the dishes this week, or whatever it might be.
Obviously because I'm still able to go to work most days every week, I'm a lot more able than a lot of other people, and that still often makes me wonder (though logically I know it's wrong) whether, because so many other people have it so much harder, I even deserve to ask for help for my petty troubles. There too I can be an opportunity for people to do a good thing by reminding me of the proper way of looking at things.