Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

So -- The Submissions Call for the Disability Blog Carnival went up today at Rolling Around in my Head. It reads, in part:

(Quote)

Just write about the things you commemorate. I'd like this to be a joyous carnival - let's give the lie to the fact that we in the disability community live lives of quiet sorrow and tragedy. Let's make it clear that we are a raucous group of people who can party with the best of them.

(Unquote)

Oof. I guess that means If my grief over Mother's Death would not be a good match, then.

... Meanwhile, while my overall life is far from tragic, I have always really hated being in the middle of loud, raucous parties. I know he was going for the opposite of "quiet sorrow," for rhetorical effect... but still.

But I still want to contribute to this. So I have ten days or so to come up with something completely new.

So I guess this is my "Turn Signal."

[Cross-posted from naarmamo]:

Today, I took a picture of a monster that I drew last month:



And used it to make a new, over-the-top, cheerful, desktop theme for myself:



[End of Cross-post]

I'm really pleased at how the program icons fit between ze's hands. Though I wonder how long it will be before it becomes too cheerful.

And now, you know what programs I keep most easily to hand -- the clearest picture of my life's priorities!

naarmamo is a comm started by jekesta ... six years ago, now ??

Anyway, it's loosely modeled after National Novel-Writing Month. Only instead of creating one long piece of writing, the goal is to create one small piece of art each day... so at the end of the month, you will have 31 new pieces of art to your name that didn't exist before.

And "Art" here is defined as loosely as possible -- seriously.

In the past, we've had:

People doodling designs in the soap suds while they took a bath, or
Artfully arranging the jars of jelly they just made,
Full-blown, carefully painted landscapes,
Journal (100 pixel square) Icons
Brief pieces of composed ditties...

And everything in between.

Anyway, participating in this, for me, has been a way to lift my spirits through the hump that is the summer doldrums. So you can be damned sure I'll be doing this again. I thought, here, that I'd like to make a list of things I'd like to try, this year. So if I get stumped, mid-month, I can come back and remind myself of ideas I've had (not necessarily in this order):

A hand-drawn sketch of my own, bare, feet (they are the part of my body I am least comfortable with, and I want to get more comfortable with them) Problem: Getting a way so I can actually see them while in a position to draw them...

Another facial portrait (I've done one every year, it's a thing)

Make a video response to Vi Hart's Squiggle Inception (specifically ~ 3 1/2 minute mark)

More monsters -- this time, ones that are explicitly disabled -- perhaps after a run-in with a knight. Although... my "monster on wheels" is disabled... I drew another adult version who was able-bodied -- with eight tentacle legs, instead of four...

Some three-dimensional art... tactile.

Write a song -- maybe my own version of a Geek pride song.

And ...other stuff...

It's been a damned long time since I posted something silly to this here journal (these here journals, since they're mirrored).

That should change. I need a vacation from the Srs Bzns in my head.

Maybe it's time to Google for some Limericks, instead of Sonnets... \

Or knock-knock jokes. Or similar conundrums.

Fun Facts:

The first definition listed under "conundrum" in the Miriam-Webster Dictionary is: A riddle where the answer involves a pun. The definition of "conundrum" as "a serious or complicated problem" is definition 2. b

The origin of "conundrum" is unknown (I bet someone just made it up because it sounded both funny and pretentious).

Its first appearance in writing (that has survived to be known to us, that is) was 1645.

So. Shall I go on a Conundrum Hunt? Shall I bring back my quarry for your feasting pleasure?

Pied Piper of Hamelin: The Children Left Behind.

I think my conclusion is the soap-boxiest (soapiest-boxed?) I've written yet. But I'm feeling a good bit RAWR!!

So, May first is coming up. Beltane for the Pagans, Labor Day for union workers (everywhere but the U.S.), and for a large-(ish) population of Persons with Disabilities Online, it will be the Eleventh Annual B.A.D.D. [Blogging Against Disablism Day].

Before I give my reply saying announcing where I'll be posting my entry, I have to decide what I want to post.

I started Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream specifically because of B.A.D.D..* So I could post there, again, but only if I write something that fits there. And I'm drawing a blank, right now on a story or other piece of literature (before the start of the Great War in 1914) that's I could use to discuss in broad strokes the role that Disability, itself, plays in our world today.

But I'm having ALL THE THOUGHTS about what original of art or prose, or poesy I could write on the subject of Ableism/Disablism. Right now, I want to go find a mountain top and a megaphone, and preach to all the parents:

"You are only allowed to have ONE 'Greatest Wish' for your child, ever, when that child is born. Do you really want to waste your wish on normalcy?! That's it?! That's all?!"

But if I post such an entry, it would be posted here, not at "Plato's Nightmare." ... And I'm feeling kind of iffy, at the moment, about strangers traipsing in with mud on their boots.

And meanwhile, I'm literally falling asleep at my keyboard, and can't find any more of what I want to say, so I'm going to stop now, and go to bed...

But if I write something new and modern like that

*I actually started it about a week earlier, so there could be some content there already when people visited for the sake of my B.A.D.D entry 2011: The Lame Smith God, and the two sides of "myth"

So -- it boils down to this: the central thesis of Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream (if a blog can be said to have a thesis) is that modern society's attitudes and official policies toward the disabled classes are rooted in ancient superstitions and fear of evil, which advanced science has done nothing to overturn. That:

A) Those with unexplained differences (especially physical, visible, differences) were believed to be omens sent by the gods, rather than actual people in their own right.

B) That ostracizing people so marked became standard policy, in a vain attempt to fool the gods and averting punishment for sins.

C) That over the last several millennia, scientific knowledge has gradually, through a series of minute steps, replaced the Divine explanations of disabilities with tangible, empirically understood causes, but that there has been no parallel refutation of the assumptions that were originally based on those primitive explanations. So society is still working with the policy that "Ostracizing the Disabled Classes is the best way to protect general society from evil."

BTW, this doesn't come up in the blog itself, but I firmly believe that it's the Medical-Industrial complex that is still the greatest promoter of this philosophy (Did you know that the Rx symbol for prescriptions was originally a written prayer to the Roman god Jupiter -- Rex Deii?)

Anyway, with the Disabled being marked by society as living omens, I've become intrigued by those hints about the disabled acting in the role of storyteller -- i.e. someone with a direct, eerie, connection between the Supernatural and Humanity. According to (some) legends, "Mother Goose" was a tenth century queen who either: a) had one human foot, and one goose foot, or b) gave birth to a human son with a goose's head -- these are the legends that don't try to make her a mortal woman who lived in New England in (relatively) modern times, around when the first book of nursery rhymes were published.

And that's where my asking for advice comes in. I'd love to write up a post for "Plato's Nightmare" about these legends about M. Goose. But all my Googling leads me to websites where the paragraphs about Queen Bertha Broadfoot have all the exact same wording, and they all lead back to the same Wikipedia Article, which is both a stub, and lacking in references.

So I posted the question as a thread on Mudcat. And I got a few responses, but the first few of them just repeated the tidbits of info I'd already found... until November, when an anonymous poster gave me a new version of the "Goose-footed" legend, with details I'd not come across before, and it was juicy and actually had the structure of a story. But the story was also brief, and, since the poster was anonymous, I could not engage a in private correspondence asking for more detail. And a never came back. So I left that tantalizing bit as another dead end.

And then, today, another anonymous poster chimed in with one line, claiming to be the queen's direct descendant. So here's my question: should I just post the thread, itself, as a blog entry, with notes and comments, even if I can't cite textual source? Or, maybe just selected messages from the thread?

So, anyway, to help you decide, here is ( The nine-message thread in its entirety, dating from June 23, 2011 to March 28, 2011 )

http://platosnightmare-aesopsdream.blogspot.com/2012/03/goose-girl-at-well-feelings-of-distrust.html

I meant for this to be a February post, but instead, February passed without a single blog entry. This is my failing.

I also wanted to write up my own retelling, because I love the story enough to want to get inside it like that. But every time I sat down to translate Google auto-'bot translation into Actual English, my energy and attention would flag every three sentences, or so. So I ended up just reposting translation from a Good Victorian Lady, instead.

If I had done that to start with, it would have been a February post.

BTW, I chose my Mother Goose icon for this entry, because it's my personal belief that the "Witch" ("Wise Woman" -- Potato, Potahto) is a prototype character for M. Goose.

Translation: What's privacy?

[cross posted from a comment in trouble's journal]:

I'm not sure I read right the first time (and I don't have the spoons to reread, today ['cause virus X]), but there's this thing about changing all user names on Google's Services to Google's standard (I.E. Birth Certificate name)? Supposedly to make it easier for people to know who you are?

"Blogger" (where I have Plato's Nightmare) and YouTube (Where I have a channel) are Google-based, and I'm CapriUni on both. For my own consistency, to make it easier for friends throughout cyberspace to recognize me, I decided 11 years ago, to use CapriUni as my online "face". If Google automatically switches my username on their services, it would actually make it harder for actual people to know who I am, 'cause it would be inconsistent.

In the words of Dave Hingsburger, who proposed this day:

(Quote)
I wonder if we here, in this little community, can start something that might grow. I propose the 'International Day for Mourning And Memory of the Lives of People With Disabilities'. The day would be one of remembrance of those whose lives were not celebrated or remembered, the lives of those who were slaughtered by care providers or brutalized to death by bullies. It would also be a day to remember the entire disability community - the elders who came before and who made the world different and better. It would be a day where a moment was taken to pause and reflect and remember.
(Unquote)

Yesterday, I told myself that I would commemorate this day in the way I best can: by posting something in this journal. Today, I woke up stumped, and drawing a blank. I don't know of anyone in my family who was locked away in an Institution for difference (and that's kind of the point, isn't it?). It's very hard to remember an mourn anyone in the abstract -- people who are left out of history, and whose names are erased.

I know (based on my own vague, toddler-rooted, memories, filled in by stories my mother oft repeated), that I was almost among that number. But I grew up, by the good luck to be born to an iconoclast, mainstreamed, before (Quote/Unquote) "Mainstreaming" became codified and Institutionalized in its own way.

And then, I remembered this snippet from British Medieval History that I found and posted last October: from this website: The Sheredes Project: Spitalbrook Hospital):

(Quote)
The Living Dead

In the Middle Ages, if a person developed leprosy, they would be declared legally dead and lose all their possessions. They would have to leave their family, and go to live with other lepers in a place like the hospital at Spitalbrook. In Medieval times, this would have been outside the village of Hoddesdon.

Lepers were given special clothes, a begging bowl, and a bell or wooden clapper, so they could be clearly seen and to warn other people to keep their distance. They were given these in a ceremony that was modelled on the service for the burial of the dead and, in many places, the leper was actually required to stand in an open grave while the ritual, that marked them as outcasts from society, was performed above their head.
(Unquote)

And it occurred to me that this is what institutional life is like -- whether or not it's actually inside the brick and mortar walls of a "Facility."

'Special-Ed' students are taught under the same roof as 'normal' students, but they're segregated into 'Special' classrooms, and are 'exempt' from going to all-school assemblies. So they and the 'normal' students never cross paths.

Entire suburban developments are built where only the houses that wheelchair users live in are actually wheelchair accessible, and houses that have ramps are "improved" by having them dismantled.

Rather than make all public transit accessible, and properly train drivers, municipalities provide "para-transit" services, where wheelchair users have to call and schedule a ride days in advance, and they're only allowed one able-bodied companion each to ride with them, in the role of an aide.

----

In twenty-first century North America, we're no longer marked as outcasts by ritual and costume, the way we were in medieval England. But we're still outcasts -- still living in a parallel world, skimming along the edges of Public Life, and not fully a part of it. Like ghosts, or like Scrooge on his Christmas Eve travels, we observe and hear, but are neither seen nor heard.

Institutionalization is in the mind and the attitude, not within walls.