I realized today that my retirement plan is:
1) Going for walks...I just went for the most fantastic walk in the semi dark and the black elevated train roared by. I noticed for the first time that there were all kinds of stars behind it. 2) Getting back to the kind of deep immersion reading I did as a kid. 3) Visiting this little used bookstore near me run by a very old man. 4) Taking the bus. I took the bus all the time when i was a little kid. I took the bus last week and it was magnificent. The bus driver gave me the biggest smile when i got on. The bus is a little kind community. Plus it's free after...a certain age which is my age. 5) Going to Kennywood, the iconic amusement park here and riding the roller coaster/s. I was in the area recently and the juxtaposition of the amusement park and a very industrial landscape behind it (in Braddock, which has received a lot of national attention) was so wild. Other things TBD.
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An intro to my chapbook, "Everything Far Becomes Near"-- a short talk before my reading on January 12
Ann Conway Before I read, I would like to introduce the thinking behind this book of poems which are in part autobiographical, but that I hope will connect with others’ experiences. Over thirty years ago, I found out I had hearing loss this way: I was teaching at Northeastern University in Boston. The class was “Sociology of Alcoholism” and there were 110 students, many of whom were cops, as there was and is a large Criminal Justice program at Northeastern. It was intimidating but I learned a lot from it...one of those experiences I now look back on and think, did I really do that? And even more, did I really do that for $,1200 ??? It was a good class, but I could not hear the students in the back, so I visited an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor at a nearby teaching hospital. After the hearing test, the doctor said flatly, “You’ve lost 25% of your hearing and you’re going to go deaf someday.” I was stunned. I said, “What about hearing aids” He replied, “They’re not much good.” He seemed determined to discourage me and leave me hopeless. I left the hospital in tears. I was not just devasted by the diagnosis, but by its implications. All my life I had fought against brokenness and disability. I knew the subjects intimately. My mother lived with severe hearing loss. The whistle of her ineffectual hearing aids was the background music of my childhood. She was also very much encased in herself, solipsistic and trapped. My mother, like my father, was a deeply damaged person—damaged because of her history. She was 44 and my father was 50 when I was born. I grew up in a gritty, harsh Irish Catholic world where there was not much quarter given to people, although ironically, there was also a tremendous sense of the visceral, of beauty and of grace in that world. However, my parent’s histories were full of loss and pain and by the time I arrived, their marriage was in name only. So, that was my association with deafness—imprisonment in the self and despair. In addition, my two older brothers were diagnosed as schizophrenic when I was a little girl. Terry was seven years older than me, Brian five years older. They both arrived at the RI state mental hospital, Howard, not long after they were diagnosed and throughout my childhood they were in and out of it. They were overmedicated and brutalized, especially Terry. I consider my disabled brothers to have been murdered and maimed by the “system” and by societal indifference. This still goes on today. Some of these experiences are described in the poems. This was disability to me. My experiences exacerbated my horror at the hearing loss diagnosis. I had resolved as a teenager to not be broken. I fought to leave that early world, and I did. I tried to avoid the subject of hearing loss for ten years, but it was difficult. Living with hearing loss means living with a lot of what feel like petty humiliations. People often think you’re ignoring them and become irritated. In addition, after the diagnosis, I never received any health education from any provider on how to cope. This was ironic, because I have worked in public health for 30 years and at one time, I ran a health education center. Federal monies allow us to provide all kinds of education programs for people at risk for or living with chronic diseases. There is almost nothing that addresses hearing loss, especially that which causes people to live in the marginal world of the hard of hearing—between the “non-disabled” and “disabled” worlds. This is very strange, because between 38-48 million people in the US live with hearing loss. While one is more at risk when you become older, it is rapidly increasing among young people due to noise damage. It is also a worldwide problem due to globalization and people’s employment in industries with little or no occupational health programs: The World Health Association (WHO) reports that: Around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss (1), and 34 million of these are children. It is estimated that by 2050 over 900 million people will have disabling hearing loss. After ten years, I finally got hearing aids which have been a great help although they take a while for your brain to get used to. Their average cost in the US is $5K for a pair (which is often necessary) and generally they are not covered by insurance or Medicare. This is a disgrace. During this time, I also experienced a sea change in how I dealt with deafness—I self-identified and asked for help. As I had been very driven not to be “broken”, this was hard for me. A friend of a friend, a Brooklyn, NY motel owner helped me to become assertive. Now I am very clear about my hearing loss and ask for help. When I do not self-identify, I get into trouble which has included being detained in a federal courthouse because I pretended to hear a security instruction instead of asking for clarification. Despite progress, I think there is still an underlying moralism in how we deal with “disability” perhaps because in many cultures it is still seen as a mark of an unclean spirit, a flaw. I also have experienced quite a bit of unwitting paternalism which stuns me. I consider my deafness to be not a disability per se, but a different way of life. I’m anarchic in this. For me deafness allows a way to subvert the culture and not live according to its rules. It has given me the gift of empathy for the broken members of my family and elsewhere. My thinking here has been influenced by an essay, “Blindness” by the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, which I may touch on later. Deafness also provides one the opportunity to embrace silence. You have to learn this. My deafness has led me to become more sensitive to silence—and to music, interestingly enough. Because I have been forced to be more attentive in other ways than just hearing, I also think deafness allows me to stay out of the compulsory inattention/sense of being overwhelmed in our culture. My thinking about silence has been informed by The Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, a British feminist and writer. Many books about silence explore silence as a therapeutic tool to help us cope with the pandemonium of our culture. Or silence is explored in relation to spirituality, as the great spiritual and religious traditions integrate silence into ritual and practice. Maitland explores the topic broadly, using an anthropological and historical approach. She examines the silence of the past, of the dead, of the voiceless, including those we shut away, such as the old, the disabled and the numberless in prisons. One topic she explores is the ever-increasing number of people in solitary confinement. But she also explores the silence integral to music and to the apprehension of the ineffable and of beauty—of a child being born, of the myriad glories of the natural world, of music that brings us to tears, and of what some may call God. I have some very dear friends who lost a son suddenly two days after Christmas--he had an unknown heart condition. They are not religious but we've had conversations about the veil between life and death. I found this NPR interview about the Irish writer John O'Donoghue which I think is beautiful and hopeful .
I'll be reading the poem below and other new work at The White Whale Bookstore in Bloomfield 5-7 Sunday. Reception to follow! Hope to see you.
Details here: www.facebook.com/events/520615645451260/ A Maine painter has a strange eye disease where he sees not a thing, but its version. For a fishing boat, he sees a lobster boat, an ocean liner, a small ferry. How lovely, I think, how strange. Deafness is akin, one thinks, “What is that first, unintelligible noise?” Always the need to repeat I lean, strain, tire. “I will not let blindness intimidate me,” said the joyous late Borges, blind poet, National Librarian, who understood limitation’s freedom and relief. The hell with it, this sort-of-deaf woman says and plays around, creating her soundtrack to the human condition, a background score: Verdi, Ravel, Gregorian chant, Amy Winehouse, Van Morrison, SOAK the Irish girl. I would never have heard you if not for this. It’s lovely, the banal is vanquished, mundane conversations one does not hear are reimagined as sparkling wit. I substitute myth and old tales for what I hear of the earth’s mystery: rattling leaves are the wind of God; the trill of the wood thrush is the nightingale I’ve forever hoped to hear. I weep with love for the world, as when I was a shocked delighted child. In this way deafness lets me soar. |
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