The Deaf Men Nodded at the Blind Boy's Recognition

Planet's sophomore Fall semester in 2012 I drove out to help her buy and move iron from the iron store to her art building for a sculpture class. I love that trip. I knew there was a photo I was reminded of by Thursday's photo below of the sun through the windows early morning at my then temporary cubicle; I'm back in my new but same cubicle. The above photo taken in the iron store. Six days until the Highest Egoslavia Holy Day, and I get to see her before then!

Bottles of blackness, this is true: yesterday afternoon a professor that just three days ago I spent fifteen minutes at his request talking about widgets and sprockets to make his pedagogical responsibilities easier to avoid walked into the gym while I was on an elliptical and looked me in the eye with no recognition. He got on the elliptical next to me for fifteen minutes, said excuse me when the sanitizer paper fell to the floor while he was wiping down the machine and broke my rhythm, didn't recognize me. Last evening, buying club soda in the Palisades Safeway, I stood behind a professor I've helped with widgets and sprockets to make her pedagogical responsibilities easier to avoid, she looked at me, I smiled, she smiled back with a total lack of recognition. I'm extraordinarily grateful. Is welcome kick in the nuts of a brazen blogwhore and attention slut to take one from real life to rattle home a more sensible and less dramatic if not a significantly better mood.

• Phil is 75 today. 75. Let Phil sing.
• I've been asked a half dozen times, no, I'm not going to Grateful Dead reunion tour. Unconditional peace and bliss to all who do go.
• Some friends have new content:
• Jim reviews Tom McCarthy's new novel Satin Island. And no, I wouldn't have recognized the Wittgenstein quote. Rimshot noise.
• Holding fast to laughter.
• Dan reviews Tom McCarthy's new novel Satin Island. 
• Piper at the gates of dawn.
• Niedecker and owls.
• :-p made me think of this, a good thing:

TOMAHAWK

Mark Rudman

My deaf cousin had a hand in designing the Tomahawk Missile.

The blueprints open on his desk for what was to become

a show-and-tell-style reunion.

I hadn’t laid eyes on this exuberant man since chance

threw us together at a party given by his best friend

whose brother was your real father’s best friend,

and whose blind nephew appeared, shook my hand,

and, unprompted, said my name:—it was like a blessing.

The deaf men nodded at the blind boy’s recognition.

They held me captive, these two deaf friends, and took forever

with frantic mimicry explaining how they knew each other,

firmly guiding the silent dialogue toward the bizarre

intersection of fates: theirs, mine, my father’s, my mother’s....

The deaf find ways of contacting each other.

They have their on watering holes.

Did he place this decisive warhead above all other

constructions executed during a working life spent

gratefully, perhaps too gratefully, in the government’s

employ designing, mainly, destroyers...?

Final proof he was not handicapped by his handicap?

He married a deaf woman, but his two daughters

are normal; I mean not deaf.... Both were present

and married. One was pregnant. The other became

more and more voluble as this Sunday marathon wore on.

Conversation meant—: asking each other questions.

My cousin scribbled answers alongside the next question

on a pad that rustled like a pet hamster in his back pocket.

It was work, talking to that generation’s deaf.

It was hard not to raise your voice.

I caught my mother trying to catch my eye

across the smoked fish infested spread

as she mouthed a lipsticky    YOU    MUST    E NUN   CI   ATE

Brain-dead from the labor of “catching up”

with veritable strangers with whom I was linked

by blood, I wandered, coffee balanced in saucer,

toward my cousin’s study, in vain hope of tête-a-tête.

He followed, hauled down sheafs from shelves,

while I studied the framed sketches of ship’s interiors.

Had deafness helped him achieve these heights of invention?

His face brightened.   He strained with strangled voice to answer.

Even I could understand “That’s the ticket,”

before he scrawled with Bic on pad. “Deaf...can think better....”

I was about to say “Not all,” that I was asking

about him personally, when his daughter intervened

and said, aloud and in sign, that this was “deafism.”

He signed: “No no, not hearing forced me...”

She signed and spoke, indulgent, resigned, admiring:

“So deafness makes you superior?”

I liked the way she stood up to him, and the way he took it.

Trying not to sound like a boorish upstart in a Q & A

disingenuously grilling Oppenheimer, Einstein or Bohr

with how they felt about their elegant theorems

culminating in so much death, I asked if

he was ambivalent about designing warheads. Question

from left field. Bewilderment squared.

His honked “Wa” was like an inaudible “Come again?”

Forehead painfully wrinkled. Deep-set ridges.

My stomach contracted: Oh God, what have I done?

It wasn’t me asking discomfiting questions to hound

this dear, sweet, ebullient man, who had done his best...;

it was my...duty to ask, which appeared to perplex

this...disembodied intelligence...schooled in

focusing on the problem to be solved just as

Husserl bracketed words, [postponed]

this longing to belong to sentences that mimicked

meaningful action, and to block out the politics and social

contexts that could...derail...the (beautiful) concord

between pure thought and necessity. He had the right to think:

Anyone can design a ship, or a missile, that works

like a bigger bullet shot from a bigger gun;

but to invent one that can stop, turn around,

change directions, now that’s—invention.

She repeated the question in sign and came back

with: “My father doesn’t understand your question.”

I spoke more slowly. “You must feel proud at how

the Tomahawk conducted itself during the Desert War.”

The praise sent him rocking. So that’s what I took so long

to say! He nodded exuberantly in accord.

“Wait. Even though it was for a good cause

doesn’t it bother you that the missile

killed many people.” Question from left field.

Flurry of signs between father and daughter.

“My dad says war is horrible but once you’re in

it’s important to win.” “That was true before,

and true as it pertained to the two world wars,

but Southeast Asian...was another story.”

Groan of dismay. Why should a deaf engineer

be forced to deal with relative ethics too...? War

made the mental challenge of his work more

challenging, as it did the group holed up at Los Alamos.

The heart sinks when these higher mathematical formulations

become subject to weather, and the stray jackrabbits and homo sapiens

“who weren’t supposed to be anywhere near the test site...”

This pacific man could not have thought about what the Tomahawk

did to real live—now dead—people.

He was too immersed in the question of how

to get the missile to think, to take into account—the wind.