He writes a great blog, thanks for posting
this is what he had to say:
Quote:
In a similar manner, I have never written about Asperger’s, which I didn’t even know much about until one of my sons was diagnosed & it became clear just how many of his symptoms were my own. I certainly have never thought of myself as disabled, let alone uttered the phrase: I have autism. And I don’t want my readers to look at my tendency to count sentences, or to build a work around something like the Fibonacci number series, as a symptom. It’s true that I grew up with something I might have identified as Weird Kid Syndrome, hardly a unique condition, but from my perspective being a kid in the lone family of divorce in my grade, coming as a result from the poorest home in my school district & being raised in part by a psychotic matriarch had more to do with the choices I’ve made as an adult & as an artist. If you were to ask me about a disability, I’d be more inclined to respond in terms of the pieces of plastic inserted into the middle of each eye, the result of cataract surgery in my 40s. I see nothing that is not mediated by this technology & am painfully conscious not just that I no longer have anything like the 20-20 vision I had up until my 40th birthday, but that 70 years ago I would have become irretrievably blind. As it is, I constantly have to compensate for & respond to glare because my lenses don’t adjust to different levels of light. A bright light at the head of an otherwise dark room (some movies, many PowerPoint presentations) and my body responds the way an infant does to the excessive noise of a party: it shuts down & I go to sleep. My compensation is that I see a lot of films wearing my dark glasses (which are themselves trifocals). Am I disabled, and if so, what’s my disability? That is a question that every person with a physical or cognitive difference has to answer. I love it that a couple of the poets in this anthology don’t precisely tell you, either.
22 Sep 2011, 8:42 am
