Somewhere Over the Multicultural Rainbow, Bluebirds Fly

an essay by Mark Willis (1994)

I flunked out of college when I was 21 years old. I did it deliberately. I wanted to know that I could get straight F's the way I had gotten straight A's. And I needed to take some control of a situation that was mostly beyond my control. My eyesight was changing, the result of a genetic retina disease, and I was rapidly losing the ability to read. If I could read for only half an hour a day, I decided that I would choose what I wanted to read, I would write what I needed to write. When I look back, I am prouder of that decision than anything I have done since in the groves of academe.

I burned the bridge behind me with an attention to detail not unlike ritual. I kept a book from the university library, John Cage's Silence. It is a collection of the composer's essays and meta-poems about sound, music, and language. A line from Cage's "Lecture on Nothing," and the musical time-signature in which it was scored, had a profound impact on my understanding of poetry:

I knew that keeping the book would lock up my files in the university computer. I would not cross back into academe until I had built a new bridge for myself, and jumped through a lot of bureaucratic hoops along the way.

The timing of all this was fortunate, really. Had my eyesight changed dramatically when I was four, I might be selling flowers on a street corner today instead of writing an essay. I began to work as a newspaper reporter when I was 16, so my basic, transferable job skills were in place before I ever got out of high school. About the same time, I began the daily practice of what I regard as "my own" writing, what Allen Ginsberg calls the "private, unpublishable literature that goes 1400 mph." Throughout 25 years of writing, my life has swung in varying arcs between these two poles: the journalist's public voice and the would-be shaman's barbaric yawp.

Newsrooms around the country began to convert to computer terminals in the early 1970s. I couldn't read a computer screen then, so that side of my writing closed indefinitely. The other side did not. I turned to the simplest, freest, most accommodating form of writing -- poetry -- which required no more technology than a pen and paper. Poetry existed thousands of years before any writing technology; it needs only voice and memory to flourish through oral tradition. What we call Homer is now a Great Book read by elites. First it was a song, a blind man's memory chant on a street corner: heard by everyone within earshot, remembered by many, a triumph of the oral tradition.

I left academe to enter an oral tradition with dimensions unknown to me at the time. Entering it required a faith different from academe's, and poetry was my guide. A poem was just about all that I could manage to read with my eyes. Reading a poem was so slow and labor-intensive that memorizing it became almost effortless. Eventually, I stopped sending my poems to the obscure little magazines that published them. The isolated, time-warped process of publication meant nothing to me. Poems needed to be spoken, heard, and metabolized by living, breathing people.

In the year after I left college, I wrote my first book of poems, called Shaking the Pumpkin. I published it myself in two distinct ways. The work-in-progress was performed publicly three times. And as I finished each poem, I copied it on a beat-up Underwood typewriter (a newsroom relic), put it in an envelope, and sent it to someone who would find it unannounced among the bills and junk mail. I wooed my readers one at a time. I trusted them to carry the poems around the world, to have exotic lives apart from me. I heard one last month in New York. Its reader, Tom Roberts, remembered the poem better than I did after twenty years. That act of memory and recitation was the best recognition a poem could have. There is more to say about poetry and the life-long process of adapting to a disability. But that is another essay. Let me fast-forward eight years, and several adaptations, later.

I returned to the university for the most compelling of reasons: parenthood and the need to feed a family. I figured that I could get a minimum-wage job as a student writer and turn it into a real job within a year. That is how I came to the School of Medicine. I have worked for four deans of medicine in ten years, and I still have all my fingers and toes and most of my self-esteem.

Getting a job was my main motivation, but there were other considerations prompting my return to academe. Adaptive computer technology had finally caught up with my eyesight. The first time I saw a demonstration of an enlarged computer display, at a pioneering computer conference sponsored by the American Council of the Blind of Ohio, I knew that I would summon the devil and sell my soul to get one. I brokered a leveraged buy-out using the possibility of a computer to land the job and the likelihood of the job to get the computer. It was the best deal I've ever done.

Writing about medical science was an appealing new vocation for me. I had been reading widely in the fields of perception psychology and metacognition, trying to understand better the nature of my own sensory perception. Science writing honed my ability to explain how I perceive. Like poetry, science writing is driven by metaphor and analogy. It strives to translate complex ideas into clear, concise forms. Science writing, at its very best, approaches the simplicity and elegance of poetry. It gave me entree to scientists and clinicians in many different disciplines. From them, I gained a private education in the sciences, in one-on-one interviews, not in 400-seat lecture halls.

I use two basic voices in my work. One is guided by the standard of the Associated Press news style. The other voice is what I call DEANSPEAK. It is the discourse of higher education tweaked to its most rarified register, the one used by college administrators when they sing to themselves. Facility with this discourse is my bread and butter and that scares me to death. Sometimes I have felt like a prisoner in its prose. Sometimes I thought my own voice, my own writing, was gone.

I've done my damnedest not to get stuck in what is called an academic discourse community. But when I remember my mentors, I recognize where I belong. My community has not quite made it to that somewhere over the multicultural rainbow, that somewhere called academic discourse. Not yet. But we have begun to master the political discourse necessary to make a place for ourselves in the wider world. A place in academe will come in time.

My discourse community includes people who have disabilities. They are people who are composing their lives, as Mary Catherine Bateson describes it, with flexibility, improvisation, and deep personal insight. They are also forging new definitions for a culture of disability, expanding that culture's vision, language, tool-kit, and collective experience.

I have several mentors in this community. The first is my sister Diana. We share the same genetic disease. Although her eyesight is somewhat different from mine, we see the world in much the same way. Diana was instrumental in how I learned to read, not once, but twice, in my life. She was an education major at Ohio State when I learned the first time at age six. The second time came years later when she introduced me to Talking Books from the Library of Congress. Each of us has introduced the other to new adaptation strategies. Each has provided emotional ballast when the other needed it to keep from foundering. Now we are both students again in graduate school. We talk long-distance for an hour every Saturday, to unwind, catch up, and plot our wayward paths in academe. Our mother, who has Alzheimer disease, can't seem to remember that her middle-aged children are graduate students. No longer capable of filtering her thoughts through a veil of motherly reserve, Mom asked Diana once, "Are you sure you two are smart enough to do that?" Now we have something to prove.

Jeff Vernooy has influenced the lives of many college students with disabilities. He was my first "official" contact when I returned to academe, and our shared commitment to the politics of disability led to an enduring friendship. He guided
me through the transition from student to university employee, and he talked me through every Machiavellian twist and turn my career has taken since then. I know I would never have stayed ten years at the university without a colleague like Jeff. Our open-ended lunch-time conversations convince me, again and again, that people with all types of disabilities can make a common culture.

Scott Marshall is the only person I have met who graduated from Harvard Law School and is not infatuated with that credential. His modesty is all the more impressive because he did it as a blind man, but he shrugs it off. "There are too many lawyers in the world," he says. "It's no big deal." Scott is Washington's leading lobbyist for blind people. He brought me, an apprentice still wet behind the ears, into the hurly-burly babble of Capitol Hill. We expended a lot of shoe leather on the Hill during the two-year campaign leading to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

"Shoe leather" is Capitol Hill jargon for honest hard work that is not tainted with the influence of filthy lucre. Disability lobbyists like Scott have no lucre, clean, filthy or otherwise, but they are adept at "living off the land." That is Capitol Hill jargon for stretching the influence of grassroots support. On one of my Washington trips in 1989, Scott took me to the weekly strategy meeting of the dozen or so lobbyists orchestrating the ADA's passage through Congress. He introduced me as the grassroots guy who would deliver the Ohio delegation. He confidently overstated the case, to be sure, but it was the best compliment I ever had.

It was Scott who arranged my invitation to the White House on July 26, 1990 for the ADA signing ceremony. George Bush's staff would never have included me otherwise. Even after I passed through the metal detectors to the South Lawn, I expected an FBI computer somewhere to recall the fact that I had stolen a book from a university library -- or worse. Two thousand people were invited to the White House that day, and surely we were the most diverse throng of Americans ever assembled there. The ADA signing was a landmark in all our lives, but I think most of us would say it is only the beginning. Like the other civil rights laws that preceded it, it will take a generation or more to realize the ADA's full promise of equality, dignity, and independence.

I have learned a lot from Diana, Jeff, and Scott. I know that life is rich with possibilities because our dialogues will continue. The same is true for another mentor. It is the mentor encoded in that random, unmapped twist in my DNA. It is a legacy my children and their children could inherit from me. I don't worry about that the way I once did. It has been the most influential teacher I have ever had. It has revealed the beauty to be found everywhere in imperfection, like the blurring of river and sky in Claude Monet's paintings of Waterloo Bridge. It has taught me to pause often and listen, as Pablo Neruda says, as "an ear coming into the world."

In conclusion, let me say that a discourse community can be more than the vocabulary, rules, and rituals needed to enter it. It also can form around the passion and commitment of people who need discourse with one another because their lives depend on it. Let me expand Michael Oakeshott's seminal phrase. The conversation of humankind is too important to be limited to what is said in boundary-conscious academe. The conversation of humankind will go on jabbering despite the concerns of gatekeepers. The conversation of humankind needs the people who stammer and stumble and put their lives together in a thousand different ways.

Disability, adaptability, flexibility -- these are the heart of the conversation I have joined. What it means to have a disability, for me, is what it means to be alive.

Works Cited

Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.

Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

Ginsberg, Allen. In The New American Poetry. Edited by Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

Neruda, Pablo. "The Art of Poetry." In Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Robert Bly. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.

Oakeshott, Michael. "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind." In Rationalism in Politics. New York: Basic Books, 1962.