Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

Listened to:
From WNYC's "RadioLab" -- A a segment from a show from December last. The first five and a half minutes or so of this 33 minute segment is about the joy of a man at the end of a three-month solo trek across Antarctica. And then, from then on, it's the story of a Holocaust survivor who tried to invent a new communication system that he hoped would end all war... That, it itself, would have been fascinating. I was not expecting it to end up revolving around children with cerebral palsy living in an institutional home/school/hospital in the 1970's in Ontario, Canada... but it did (Content note-- it ends on a fairly tragic, ironic note):

Mr. Bliss

For something completely different, also from "RadioLab": Liev Schreiber reads Italo Calvino's The Distance of the Moon; written in Italian in 1965, and translated into English in 1968... i.e., before we landed there...
(Content note-- one of the main characters is written as Deaf for metaphorical/symbolic reasons as a sort of Magic!wild-man/Innocent-Primitive)

Read:
Found by way of "Rolling around in my head": Reclaiming memory: Searching for Great-Aunt Sarah (Content note: institutional life and death in the early 20th century)

From "Rolling around in my head" Directly: The Better Way (content note: neither tragic nor ironic-- includes a crying baby)

Watched:
And a child shall lead them -- going-on-eleven year-old Stephanie leads a blue-grass band of adult white men... You can tell she's the leader in this particular set, because she sets the tempo for their playing, and signals the final chorus of the first song with a straight-leg kick (a standard signal in folk music):


(Content note-- precocious kid on stage and occasional out-of-focus camera).

This moved me not so much for the cuteness factor, but the aplomb and grace of one so young in front of an audience -- maybe that's her "un-cuteness"?

I was never exactly happy with this particular poem (I still think The second poem is the best, so far). But today's entry at "Rolling around in my Head" (blog): http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com/2012/05/no-ones-tone.html really brought home how unhappy I was with it, and more important, why.

So I wrote it over from the beginning, this afternoon:


THE MONSTERS' ANXIETY

Protected from the mainstream's quickened pace,
We're gathered here like flotsom in the weeds
United just by coming to this place:
"The Campus Registry for Special Needs"
As different from each other as from those
Who tell us where to sign, and where to go.

We know that we are lucky to be here,
And neither locked away, nor even dead.
And yet, in spite of Love, we still have Fear:
The knowledge: "I'm a monster" in our heads.
We're set apart, like coins in some machine --
Been counted, sorted, "valued," all our lives.
We've felt the stares of pity: cold and keen,
And yet, the pity rises in our eyes.
For we, as well, have learned what elders taught
On how to know an Adult from a Child,
So our identities are fragile -- caught
Between what's in our dreams and what's been filed.
We wait together in this quiet hall;
We glance. But do we see the Truth... at all?

It's been in the back of my head to signal boost and promote this idea for the last couple of weeks, but, well... I kept putting it off, in part because I wasn't sure what I wanted to say about it, if anything. And now the date is tomorrow, and there's no more room for putting it off.

Dave Hingsburger (and many of his blog readers, Yours Truly included) want to have an "International Day of Mourning and Memory" for those people who have been sent away to live Institutional Lives because their minds and/or their bodies are different. And when they die in these places, they have no family to mourn or remember them* ...

Dave Hingsburger explains his reason for the date in this post: http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com/2012/01/january-23-international-day-of.html and his reasoning is pretty compelling, imnsho.

He has also posted links to a video & song that tells the true story of one such person who was sent away to live in one of the more "progressive" institutions, back in the 1930s. Here: She Never Knew (She Never Knew) [trigger warning for hate speech graffiti]. This song was running through my head yesterday, as I was writing up my post on "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", and I have THOUGHTS about it. But I think there are enough of those to make their own post. So maybe I'll post about it on Tuesday (Tomorrow, I'll post about remembering those who've been locked away, as my means of observing the day).


*In doing Google searchers for images for my Monsters In Town! song, I learned that institutional "homes" in Minnesota wouldn't even put family names on the grave markers on their grounds, because being connected by name to someone so defective would be too shameful for the survivors... So the grave markers would only have the patient's case file number.

This last Monday (December 4, 2011) haddayr posted this link to "The Invisible Backpack of Able-Bodied Privilege Checklist" over at the B-tch on Wheels blog:

http://exposingableism.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/the-invisible-backpack-of-able-bodied-privilege-checklist/

I, personally, think it's a fabulous list, and everything on it is true... And you should read it, and think about it, and remember it.

But: a) Its focus is very specific to mobility-based disability (so it misses issues that come up for people with invisible, sensory, or intellectual disabilities) so if I had my druthers, I'd rename it to something like "ambulatory privilege" or "bipedal privilege; and b) while every privilege she lists is important and true, I think that some of the privileges she lists are not quite as important as others (at least, to me).

So, using her list as a template, and keeping the list the same length, here's my take, behind the cut (some of the items on the list are essentially the same, but put into my own words, for clarity, and a few items have been swapped out):

( Invisible Backpack of Bipedal Privilege (21 items) Checklist )

Writing up my old idea for a Mother Goose Costume, yesterday, prompted me to realize that I need a Mother Goose Journal icon (I'm thinking of using this image, which appears to be 19th C., and shows up everywhere via a Google search, but I can't find an attribution. Do any of you know, or dare to venture a guess?). And that brought up new information about the character that makes me feel quite chuffed and vindicated. So!

The Back-story:
One of my very first presents, ever, was The Mother Goose Treasury, illustrated by Raymond Briggs (of The Snowman fame), with the collection of rhymes taken from the research of Iona and Peter Opie. It was given to me for my second Christmas -- three weeks before I turned 3 years old. And I still have it (The end papers are covered with my beginning attempts to write my name and the number 3 [everywhere but the bookplate pasted to the inside front cover... heh])

This is the first rhyme/ballad/story in the tome -- taking up almost six pages ('cause every verse needs an illustration).

( Mother Goose and the Golden Egg (As I learned it) -- cut for length )

[footnote below]

For the 2000 Holiday/New Year season I wrote and illustrated a novella/chapter book based on this witchy version of M. Goose, and tied her in with Christmas, the Winter Solstice, and Santa Claus. My premise was that the laying of the golden egg was an annual event at the winter solstice, and inside the golden shell was magic that M. Goose shared with Santa, so his reindeer could fly in time for Christmas Eve. I finished it up in the nick of time, had a dozen copies printed and bound by Kinkos, and slipped it into my neighbors' mailboxes as a Surprise!present. Not one adult even acknowledged my efforts... one kid did, though, so I know it was read by at least one of them.

Well, according to Wikipedia, that story was first created as a Christmas/New Year's Pantomime by Thomas Dibdin for the 1806-'07 Yule season -- 17 years before "A Visit From St. Nicholas." And she's even witchier in that original story -- raising storms and summoning ghosts, and I'd really, really, like to see that play, now!

So I was hitting close to a well-established tradition when I imagined her as primarily a Winter Celebration character. Can I sing "I told you so!" now?


[Footnote]: A slightly different (and to my mind, less poetic and more clunky) version is reproduced here: Mother Goose and Her Son Jack, with the additional information that it was first published (and perhaps written by) T. Batchelor in 1815 (but it's completely missing the "odd fish," so imnsho, it's not nearly as good -- and, as a warning: that Web page has an annoying and goofy-looking animated .gif).

So, I'm working up my take on the Grimms' fairy tale Hans my Hedgehog (that version is translated by D. L. Ashliman). I promise I'm being good, and staying true to the original -- even including the "Happy" reconciliation with the emotionally abusive father.*

But the more I've got this going around in my head, the more I want to write my own, fleshed-out, novella-style, version like the stories in the Snow White, Blood Red anthology series. And in my version, Hans would keep his hedgehog skin, instead of shedding and burning it, since the original story is basically about how you can't join society until you are cured. And cures just aren't coming for most people. And also: continuing to claim your humanity and your rights and personal power while being a monster just has many more layers of interest, in terms of storytelling potential, then playing the role of king while being handsome and strong and pretty to look at (imnsho). And in my version, a major subplot would be his relationship with his riding rooster, and how the bird came into his life, and whether it was a normal sized rooster, and Hans was normal hedgehog-sized, or whether Hans grew to human-sized, and the rooster was giant.

Also, in order to get into the proper frame of mind, since Hans' bagpipe-playing is a major plot point, today, I've been wallowing in YouTube videos of German bagpipes. I can't decide whether Hans is playing the full-sized "Shepherd's Pipe" (since he's taken on the job of being a shepherd), or the smaller "Chamber Pipe" (since that's smaller, and closer to hedgehog/boy size. In any case, he'd need human fingers and elbows to play it, so he can't be 100% hedgehog from the waist up...

So, anyway. That's been my day, so far.
*there is not enough "Blech!" in the world to express my true feelings on this.

Remember, yesterday, I posted how another Blogger for BADD is writing about Disability in Ancient Greece? Well, I sent her a private message, and today, she emailed me a link: Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Disability Based on the Hephaestus Myth.

Around about this passage, my eyes started getting teary:

(quote) Bitter Hephaestus does not intend to stay hidden away in an underground cave forever. Stubborn anger toward his mother inspires him to seek revenge. These "negative" emotions engender the courage that is necessary for the disabled outcast to claim his rightful place in the world.

[snip]

The disabled deity refuses to play the role of the passive victim. Instead he is an active creator in forging his future place in society. Hephaestus' revenge is accomplished in such a clever and artful way that, in the end, it is enriching for the entire Olympian community. (unquote)

And on a lighter note, yesterday also gave me this to read, from Rolling around in my head: Who's confined?:

(quote) When I was pushing out of the restaurant, one little boy, who'd been watching the girls ride on my shoulders and was now watching Ruby sail out of the restaurant, said to his dad, 'Dad, why don't you have a wheelchair too?' I wanted to turn and say, 'Now be nice to your Dad, poor guy is confined to walking.' (unquote)

So, anyway, I've discovered something about myself: I can function with relatively little actual deep sleep, if I'm allowed a long, extended, time devoted to a state of half-dreaming/half-waking. I can get by with as little as five hours full sleep, as long as I have that "buffer zone" to drift in and out of dreaming, gradually leaving one realm, and thinking on it as I enter the next. Eight hours of full sleep are better than five, but not if that means I have to get up right away and hurry about (and thereby forget my dreams). Rushing into wakefulness, even after the "recommended eight hours," tends to give me a migraine.

Since I was planning to leave the house this morning at 11:00a to go to the library. So I set my radio to turn on at 7:00a, knowing that I could drift in and out of sleep quite comfortably with NPR's reporters' voices in my ear (and my radio "auto alarm" turns itself off in an 1hr, 59mins, which gives me two hours for breakfast and dressing).

Cue 7a, and the strange dream:

I dreamt that while I was listening to NPR's Morning Edition with my left ear, I was hearing an an entirely different radio show in my right ear -- inside the ear, like "ringing in the ear," but with actual voices (only, in my dream, I was calling my left "right" and my right "left").

The "phantom radio show" was the antithesis of NPR: one of those Goofy FM radio "Morning shows" with sophomoric sound effects, fart jokes, recorded laugh tracks and a sarcastic disk jockey. And get this: the disk jockey was Satan, and the radio broadcast was originating in Hell. In my dream, I knew that the Goofy FM Show was not real, and probably just the result of a pinched nerve, or something. But I was still annoyed by it, because I was trying to listen to NPR, and I was trying to figure out how to shut it up.

So anyway, as I was dealing with this annoyance, I was sitting at a bar-like table (a long board on brackets in a wall) in a sort of gardening shed/workshoppy place, with flowerpots and gardening shed tools spread out on the table around me (along with the transistor radio on which NPR was playing, and bright sunlight shinging through cracks in the boards. And I was having breakfast.

So who should come up and sit down to have breakfast with me but the voice artist, Fred Newman;* he doesn't doesn't do any sound effects or anything, but I complain to him about the phantom radio show.

...I drift in and out of sleep, and the dream switches to several new scenes. A key one is this (it may have been the last one before I was fully awake):

I'm riding in the front seat of Fred's car (he's driving me around to do errands), and NPR is playing on the car radio (and 'Satan' is still ranting in my ear). We pull into a store parking lot, and as I get ready to get out of the car, I notice that there's a small woman standing there, staring at me (us), and I think: "Oh, Great! Another Pity Junkie!"** and, at first I decide to try and ignore her. Then, I realize she's trying to ask me something, to ask my advice about something. But she doesn't have a very strong voice, and I can't hear her over the two radio shows going simultaneously. I can't turn off the show inside my ear, so I try to at least turn off the car radio.

...And, all of a sudden the inside of the car becomes cluttered with brand new tubes of lipstick: reds, maroons and purples, mostly. And glitter lipstick, at that. And the tubes of lipstick get in my way, and I can't reach (or even find) the radio control buttons.

...

Um, yeah. I get that Satan's Morning Radio Madness was my dream!brain's way of playing with what I was actually hearing from the outside world. I get that the tiny woman who can't make herself heard is probably an expression of my own frustration at being "stuck" right now. And Fred Newman as a Guide/Aide figure kinda makes sense, as his whole career has been about using his voice, (and he has a song on Between the Lions called "Get your mouth moving")...

But glitter lipstick?! Really?! WTF, Subconscious?

---

*(Here's 14 seconds of an audio-visual aid from YouTube, in case you have no idea who Fred Newman is).

**"Pity Junkie" is a term that haddayr posted in gimp_vent, last night, to refer to those who seem to throw themselves in the pity puddle for a good wallow every time they see someone else with something "wrong" with them.

Here they be, in ascending order of WTF / Awesome Sauce!

From spiralsheep: A wee lizard goes adventuring around the world, and ends up in the bosom of a loving family

From gordon_r_d: The best cat-in-a-cardboard-box picture, ever (be sure to scroll down)

From angevin2: A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, or, A Quaint Dispute between Velvet-breeches and Cloth-breeches (and you thought "The Wrong Trousers" was surreal).

To you, from me, with love.

I may actually print this out, and stick it on my refrigerator for reference. It's a lot more understandable (and therefore, useful) than most others of its kind:

Conversion to Metric

[ETA: as alryssa noted, the Conversion Table for Mass has these two comparisons: 4.0 kg = Cat and 4.1 kg = Cat (with Caption). That latter reference point is also a reference to this comic:

In Ur Reality, which is another one I love.]