McTavish sent me an email telling me who’s teaching my classes this term: a sessional lecturer who hasn’t even completed his PhD. I cringed. My carefully designed syllabi, plotting delicate but sure inroads leading to the full realization of my chosen texts, are in the hands of a mere apprentice. The world bubbles with little injustices.
Spent the last few days bored. Still can’t work up the motivation to do that article. Earlier today I watched a documentary, one of those brown, dry shows they play at midday because they’re saving the juicy stuff for the evening. I sat and watched as the camera lazily panned across a village belonging to a South American tribe: thatched huts, earthen floors, that sort of thing. Even the insects seemed aimless. Then the camera framed a small man wearing a red and yellow headdress. He spoke, his mouth moving elliptically against the translator’s fluid English. He had around his neck what the translator called his talisman, which he never took off and which he and he alone regarded as a sacred object. His tribe at times teased him for his monomania but ultimately they trusted him because of his vision.
I thought to myself, It’s just a frickin claw. I turned off the TV and took out my dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick, a book I’d been meaning to finish for a while. If nothing else, the sabbatical frees up time for me to catch up on my reading.
I tend to think in images. If an image bothers me long enough, it becomes something more, a symbol or a metaphor. When I finished the novel—I’d only three chapters to go—two images budged up against each other: Ahab balancing precariously on his peg leg, his little whaling boat tipping and rocking, his harpoon held high above the surging white whale; and the tribal shaman gently shifting his talisman between his fingers. After a while Ahab and the shaman began to splice together so that the shaman held the harpoon and Ahab, still on the whaling boat, bobbed, the talisman clicking as it loosened and tightened around his neck. Sacred objects, I thought. Objects of their personal mania, sacred to them only. I sat there for a moment. Looked down at my arched feet. My wheelchair. When an idea arises it arises hot. Steam through pumice. To me, my wheelchair is such an object. It is a throne, a talisman that represents what I believe to be the sacredness of disability. But like Ahab’s harpoon and the shaman’s claw, that sacredness might be unearned, or simply esoteric. That’s the danger of monomania. It’s too singular to be believed.
My disability doesn’t feel like just a disability, though. It feels like more than that. Something I’m continuously trying to define. My chair is my Pequod, which I pilot toward either blazing fulfillment or flat tragedy. I don’t know if I’ll be able to drive a harpoon into the heart of disability and create a new ceremony out of its scattered blood. I’m discouraged right now, so it appears difficult, if not impossible.