Visible Difference – Andy Jackson

Southerly Journal: four more excursions into poetry & bodies

Last month, I was the guest blogger for Southerly Journal. For those of you who missed it, I made various attempts at hacking through the dense undergrowth around poetry, form, embodiment and otherness (as is my wont). I won’t reproduce the posts here, but here are some teasers and the links… Thanks to Tessa Lunney and David Brooks at Southerly for their support and kind words.

1. Normal Land: Poetry, Disability and Solidarity (by way of Ian Dury and Quippings)

The more I immersed myself in poetry – reading it, writing it, performing it – the more I began to feel that poetry derived its power from the bodily experience of solidarity. The Macquarie Dictionary defines solidarity as “union or fellowship arising from common responsibilities and interests” or “community of interests, feelings, purposes”.⁷ Solidarity is complex, especially because what is “common” is not always obvious. Solidarity can be latent, persisting underneath our social reality, in our biology and chemistry and physical interdependence. Something needs to unearth and activate it, some experience or event which prompts us to recognise that our lives are inextricably connected.

2. Poetic Tourism & Deforming Form: India, Ghazals & Otherness

I’ve suggested elsewhere that we encounter poems as physical objects, textual bodies which have their own particular shape and energy, as a result of the subjectivity embedded in them¹⁴. Each poem is a mix of order and chaos, of expectation and surprise. On the page, and as sound, poems are instances of particularity, where precise detail catches our attention and where form refers back to cultural norms. And, in my experience, the ghazal is a particularly heightened example of this. There is a “normal” ghazal, just as we have a certain image of a “normal body”, and it is in the ways in which we depart from this norm that intrigue and frisson occurs. Of course, relatively normal bodies and formal ghazals, too, have their own undeniable, disruptive energies.

3. Poetic Epigenetics: Bodily memory, silence & community

What my body is and what it isn’t seems like a pretty straightforward distinction. But perhaps “my body” as a phrase isn’t quite right – it assumes certainty and singularity, yet if we look closer, in spite of the continuity and stability we feel in our bodies, we might detect numerous possibilities, even multiplicity.

Certainly, when I look back at what I’ve written over the years, I can see the inflections and energies of other poets and writers. They course through my body and writing as disturbance and affirmation. And I can’t imagine who I am without recalling them. Think of this as poetic epigenetics.

4. “Becoming-Marfan”: Poetry, Genetics & (Auto)Biography

Becoming proliferates in the soil of the complex instability of each body. The writer mines the multiplicity of their body in order that their writing becomes truly creative and viscerally connective. The writing implies not just one writer and one reader, but many others. Deleuze asserts, “[h]ealth as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people that is missing”.¹⁵ Reading this kind of writing involves a kind of recognition, a sense that the reader’s own intuitions and bodily stirrings have been acknowledged, and even encouraged. The lone reader, sensing other hypothetical readers, suspects the existence of a community she might belong to, or come to belong to. In fact, she creates it by affectively engaging with the text and her own multiplicity.

strangers and the responsibilities of being strange

Most of us in the West feel increasingly isolated from each other, monads with our heads craned towards our smart-phones, or wandering the aisles half-conscious. The proliferation of both social media and cafes is part of the same dynamic – we long for human contact, yet we’re nervous about stepping outside our comfortable circle.

Talking to strangers is unsettling, in both senses – a little frightening and potentially liberating. That goes for all of us, but for those of us who are visibly different, whose bodies are obviously non-conformist, the approach of a stranger carries some peculiarly acute dilemmas.

I want to mention just two examples, and dwell for a moment in the gulf between them.

Late last year, at the local organic grocery, my partner and I were placing the last few items in our basket. Pumpkin, kipflers, silverbeet, most likely. It’s a narrow shop; you have to breathe in or walk sideways to pass people in the aisles. As we were leaving, a woman approached me with a vague smile on her face, her posture leaning slightly towards me. “Hello..”

I used to run a cafe, and I’m visibly memorable, so I assumed she recognised me; I smiled and said hi in return. She asked me how I was going, suggesting things must be pretty difficult. She told me she had a friend who specialised in alternative treatment, and that her own back pain was greatly relieved by visiting her. Oh, ok. She didn’t know me. It was going to be one of those “unsolicited charity conversations”.

I was in a reasonably optimistic mood and felt ok about being open with her. People rarely talk about embodiment, so perhaps this was a chance to share my own version of being human, and move pleasantly onwards. I told her I have Marfan Syndrome, which for me has meant an unusual shape, but actually no pain, luckily and gladly, and smiling while I said how ironic it is.

“Oh, you must have pain”, she said.

“Um, no, not really, no more than anyone, probably less, actually”.

This went back and forth for a while. I kept telling her my experience. She kept insisting she could help me with the problem I didn’t have.

Eventually the pointlessness of it ate away at my resolve. I was polite, direct, with perhaps just a hint of impatience. “I’m sorry, I really have to go, I’m really fine, OK?”.

She was stunned, almost mortified. “Ughh, I was only trying to be helpful!”. I’m reminded that my body seems to raise all sorts of questions that “demand” answers, and that fundamentalism is not limited to religion.

Fast-forward to just a few weeks ago. I’m in the middle of a busy period, wrestling with a thesis and other obligations, rushing into the local supermarket to pick up a few essentials. I only notice my own low-level stress when the little girl in the pink princess outfit cuts me off, running obliviously through the aisles – “Daddy! Look at me!” – and I’m instantly irritated. I try to avoid them, head down another aisle. Of course, being tired, I become indecisive and end up staring at a wall of condiments, unsure.

Suddenly, there’s “Dad” at my side. “Uh… hi…”, he says, casually but nervously, “my daughter was just asking me about your back, and I told her it’s better to ask than to stare, so I’m sorry to bother you, but is it ok if I ask you?”.

At these moments, a certain texture of solidity in my body comes up against a fluid world. I’m face to face with my own reluctance to engage, but underneath there is a way of being that accepts, even relishes, interconnection and the blurring of boundaries. Decision time, in a split second.

I tell them both, as simply as I can – yes, this is my spine, it’s just more curved than straight, and I’m healthy. Everyone has different shaped bodies. The little princess smiles, shyly looks down at her feet, then around the store. She’s obviously happy to meet someone unusual, but just as obviously awkward and a bit bored now.

Dad tells me they’ve asked other people before, and apparently she likes to hug people goodbye. Sure, why not? So, a hug and a brief chat later, we go our separate ways. Through the aisles and towards the checkout, with a slight crack in normality.

For a long time, though I wouldn’t have said it this way, I deeply resented my body and the kind of attention it attracted (and continues to attract). I wanted to be invisible, to move through the world with the anonymity I imagined everyone else had. Peoples’ eyes were like the rays of a harsh summer sun, the intensity magnified through the glass of my own discomfort. They burnt and hurt.

And nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Ecce Homo’

I have come gradually, fitfully, with some reluctance, to a realisation that this is the life and the body I have. Autonomy and self-determination is a mythical horizon. The love and support that I have been given over the years is evidence of that – without it, I would still be rushing back to the shadows, wishing for the impossible. In the face of the current neoliberal economy and consumerist culture, in spite of my own self-doubt and fragility, I want to build the connections that nourish myself and others. I want this life.

So, I think that being strange carries a kind of responsibility. There is no prescription, but I would suggest two guiding principles – openness to the unpredictability of the encounter, and respect for the particular embodied subjectivity of the other person. These principles go both ways of course.

For those of you who are strange and are often approached by strangers, I can’t tell you how to respond, though. We all have to find our own way of dealing with this “responsibility”, whether it be a repertoir of answers or a reserve of attitude that we draw on. Each body is unique, and each person makes their way through difference with their own temperament and aspirations. After all, we are more than what makes others stare at us.

For some other thoughtful and useful perspectives, try Carly Findlay’s blog post, Carly’s guest blogger Bailey, and Haley Morris-Cafiero’s provocative photography project.

Feel free to suggest other links or your own suggestions or insights – I’d love to see them.

reverberations and affinity

Sometimes an acquaintance transforms into a friend. Time passes, random events intervene and affinities flower. Recently, I went to a Quippings event at Hares & Hyenas bookshop in Fitzroy – one of the most mind-blowing literary/performance events you are ever likely to encounter. The next one is on 30th November and is entitled “Piss on Pity”, if you want a hint. And you really should go. Even if you’re not from Melbourne.

Anyway, at the last one, I re-met Carly Findlay, prolific blogger, appearance activist, writer and all-round great woman. We got to talking, and she asked me to write a guest spot for her blog, basically telling my story of visible difference. It starts like this –

In the last twelve years, I’ve had the pleasure of quitting four positions – the Commonwealth public service(Child Support Agency, would you believe?), a cafe-venue-bar I co-owned called “Good Morning Captain” in Collingwood Melbourne, Medicare Australia (yes, in a call centre), and a claustrophobic admin job for a micro-managing tax lawyer. And I’ve lived in eight different houses in the last twenty-five years (though, yes, all of them in Melbourne). But there are two things that I could never leave, even if I wanted to. They define me. I’m as inseparable from them as wings from sky, pith from fruit, thought from words.

Those two things are Marfan Syndrome and poetry.

The blog post is here, if you want to know how it ends, but it doesn’t end, really, does it? Poetic language and just being in the same room together can build bridges, sure, but the gulfs between us are perpetual and always at risk of expanding. Everything needs reinforcing, extending, exploring…

Carly herself has just written an amazing post called “On ‘normal and cures and pride”. She writes,

I see two sides to a cure: a medical cure and an appearance cure. I don’t want either. A medical cure (or treatment, as things stand now) may hold worse side effects than Ichthyosis itself. And I think that an appearance cure is conforming to what society expects of me – the expectation that I would want to look ‘normal’ and de-identify with a condition that I’ve become accustomed to and accept. I see it as a bit vain, even.

In the future, I plan to introduce you to other writers, thinkers and activists who I feel affinity with. Virtual community is also real community – full of arguments, passion, embraces, patience and complexity. ‘Normal’ is incredibly narrow. And ‘abnormal? It’s not singular, it’s multiple, innumerable in all its manifestations of beauty and becoming. It’s you.

Staring: How We Look

An eye-snagging stare of intense attention opens a social relationship between two people. The kind of visual scrutiny leveled by a stare is both impersonal and intimate… Staring affords a spontaneous moment of interpersonal connection, however brief, during which two people have the opportunity to regard and be known to one another. So while social rules script staring, individual improvisation can take the staring encounter in fruitful directions.

– Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “Staring: How We Look”

It may appear almost common-sense in its analysis, but this book went against my grain. Thomson is a engaging, erudite and humane writer, and she has written a non-fiction page-turner, but often I found it hard to read. Why? Was it because I disagreed with her? No. It was because I didn’t want to. Staring: How We Look forced me to admit I had lived a lot of my life focussing on only half of the dynamics of staring.

Thomson’s premise is this – there are two sides to staring – not only the starer and staree, but the two competing impulses – the irresistable physical impulse that drags our attention onto an unfamiliar sight, and the cultural injunction, with all its immense strength, to grant each other “civil inattention”. When staring happens, starer and staree make meaning together.

Of course, there are different kinds of stares – blank stares, staring as dominance behaviour, the intense “baroque staring” prompted by scenes of death or decay, affectionate curious staring, confused bewilderment staring, sexual predatory staring, and many more. It’s complex terrain, but Thomson navigates it with intelligence and compassion – she never flinches from our conflicting, very human instincts for violence and for intimacy, for “othering” and for love.

She also emphasises that that meaning-making is never determined in advance but depends on the goodwill of the starer and the staree, the process they engage in, their ability to shift the interaction from staring at an extraordinary aspect of someone’s appearance towards an attention that recognises that person’s broader self. Not that their difference disappears (that happens when people look away); in fact, it finds its proper place.

Staring: How We Look reminds me that the circumstance of staring holds great ethical responsibilities and opportunities. Deep inside me, I do not want it to be inevitable – to find myself as staree or starer can be uncomfortable, even upsetting – but that’s precisely the point. Our sense of what and who is normal or beautiful, or what lives fit into the recognisably human, can too easily become rigid and narrow. We need surprises. We need unusual sights to jolt us out of ourselves.

from his series "State of Grace" (portraits of burn survivors) — "Shayla" by Doug Auld, oil on canvas

Thomson uses the term “visual activists” to describe those people who have stareable bodies who make it their business not only to be seen, but to take charge of that encounter. They are the people who broaden our humanity, who move us towards the hard work of attentiveness, of mutual recognition.

It’s hard work. I’m rarely in the mood for it. But it can be worth it.