Heracles vs. Bob Dylan

Recall Edmund Wilson's "Yet it is also decreed that he shall be cured when he shall have been able to forget his grievance and devote his divine gifts to the service of his people." Whitehead’s ironies, particularly in having the consultant expect but not experience a recovery from his pain when he devotes his creative gifts to the service of his own people, suggest that the novel, like much recent Sophocles criticism, disavows the Wilsonian view. David Gates, a big fan of Apex Hides the Hurt, learned in a 1997 interview the perils of the romantic assumption that a creative person has been granted insight by illness:

Bob Dylan is fifty-six. Last May, when he almost died –of a viral infection in a sac around the heart . . . the death scare reminded us that Dylan is a major cultural figure –and that we won’t always have him with us. But for Dylan himself, deep thoughts about mortality had to take a back seat. “Mostly I was in a lot of pain. Pain that was intolerable . . . ”

As with Neoptolemos, it is the observers of the anguish who found it to generate insight. The sufferer himself did not find that pain automatically provided transcendence; and no Heracles descended from heaven to help him make sense of his pain. Now, the consultant of course does associate his pain with insight and possibly even with his ability to connect with historical suffering; but the novel ends up reminding us that, however much power we attribute to our words and our stories, however much we expect that "There must be obedience in this," nature and the body are outside the reach of the power we have over language.

Hiding the Hurt

WE WEAR THE MASK

by: Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

E wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes--

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries

To Thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

More Seriously, Here Are Two Singing Activists

You can access a brief video of Cheryl Marie Wade here.

And it turns out (I wish I'd known this earlier) that singing English disability activist Johnny Crescendo has a myspace page where you can listen to five or six of his songs and read his blog! Whoa!

Just for Fun

In the category of disability performance, I found this guy who is living with Swedishness and cerebral palsy and does popular song parodies about disability. Here's a medley that starts out in Scandinavian but continues in English:



Here's a touching song about a failed relationship:



And here's a Swedish drag performance (warning --contains strong language, could be interpreted as transphobic, and I'm not sure the backup performers aren't AB):

Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back

Open thread for questions about and discussion of Vital Signs. In a movie from an activist perspective, there's always a risk that some people will preach to the converted and end up looking unsympathetic to those who are not already on their side: you could discuss whom you found to be most sympathetic in those terms. But you could also talk more generally about whose perspective you found to be most thought-provoking, entertaining, stupid, or relevant to other themes we've discussed. I'm most interested in what worked best for you and in what perplexed you; but you're welcome to mention what you found grating as well.

O'Connor and Moral Judgments

Flannery O'Connor spoke and wrote at some length of how her stories exemplified her conservative Catholic perspective, with their focus on such unfashionable themes as evil, grace, and free will at a time when, in her view, fiction was expected to be nonjudgmental and to consider how its subjects were constrained by personality or society. One of the key statements in her "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" is "It's considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion . . . Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded by the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything. Certainly when the grotesque is used in a legitimate way, the intellectual and moral judgments in it will have the ascendancy over feeling."

1) The liberal Episcopalian Philip K. Dick was a very different breed of Christian; but he was very serious about his Christianity. How do the ideas of evil, grace, and moral judgment show up in Dr. Bloodmoney or in Dick's late discussion of it?

2) How do those moral judgments and suspicion of compassion work out in "Good Country People"? Whom does the story judge and why? What attitude do you feel the story takes?

3) Do you get an idea, from the essay and story, of what O'Connor wants to use disability in fiction for? Do you see any connection with that and the fact that she was herself disabled?

Motivation and Emotion in Dr. Bloodmoney

Although science fiction, historically, has tended to gloss over character depth in favor of other issues, we do get a glimpse of many characters' inner thoughts in a novel such as Dr. Bloodmoney. Who is motivated by fear? Disgust? Anger? Which characters did you find to be psychologically interesting thanks to the account the novel gives of their emotional states? Or did they all seem pretty flat and thinly sketched-out?