In the past week we have watched three documentaries about the disabled community for the Dis Doc class. Here are some thoughts on my response to one of these docs, Breathing Lessons, about the life and work of Mark O'Brien.
My initial thoughts upon encountering the following documentary subjects:
OK, this boy is disabled but his is a happy story. He has parents who support and film him. He is socialized and knows to look at the camera. He’s part of a community, even if it doesn’t look like him.
This woman looks composed. She’s a talking head. She is saying something about politics, but seems level-headed and not fanatical. Probably won’t tell me anything I don’t already know and agree with. Her hand shows her disability.
This woman is going to be provocative. She is a performer, and wants to change the way we’re thinking about something. She is probably resentful of a world where her beauty is not upheld, since she’s parodying an ideal of beauty that we like to gawk at.
What is the purpose of my initial, split-second sizing up of a documentary subject before they speak? I suspect it serves to arm me emotionally against what they will say. If I can categorize and classify their comments before they even make them, they are less likely to upset me and derail my sense of rightness in my own life. I suspect that another purpose is to insulate me against intimacy and recognition of myself in that subject. I use that split second to quickly tabulate the way those people are different from me. I can imagine myself like a boxer, sizing up a new opponent (an unfamiliar narrative) and spreading my feet wide, readying myself to take on (protect myself from?) this new narrative.
Mark O’Brien’s mode of storytelling didn’t give me the chance to anticipate and prepare for his message, or to establish this combative/protective stance. He spoke in Breathing Lessons from his stretcher, head propped on a pillow, tilted to the side. His voice fluctuated only minimally. Sometimes at the end of a sentence he smiled, which provided relief to me as a viewer because it constituted a clue to how to feel about what he had said.
For the most part, his language was stripped of what we are taught to appreciate as rhetorical flourishes. His plain speech, adorned only with his own vacuum-assisted breaths, caught me off guard and packed an emotional wallop. When he says “I have fantasies. I get very angry at able-bodied people and I just want to mow them all down with machine guns,” he says it in the same voice he uses to describe the virus that causes Polio. When he says “You have to be lovable. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that,” his words could also be mine. That intimacy with the subject is destabilizing.
His language disarms me.
Arthur W. Frank writes in The Wounded Storyteller that “actually hearing traces of the body in the story is not easy. Observing what stories say about the body is a familiar sort of listening; describing stories as told through the body requires another level of attention.:
Frank paraphrases Martin Buber, saying the body “does not use speech, yet begets it.”
Mark O’Brien as a storyteller seemed to illustrate this phenomenon. O’Brien has polio, and thus cannot move his body from the neck down. Without the traditional vocabulary of body language - gesture, expression, posture - his speech becomes a body language, mediated by the body which is experiencing the illness. His body is his rhetorical device.
The power of his delivery lies in how his words evade all my attempts to pre-judge (and thus somehow blunt the impact of) his comments. I feel incapable of maintaining a distance between his vulnerable body and mine. His words, offered without prelude, force me to see myself in him - fearful of loneliness and boredom, desirous of love and attention, rageful at others who have what I don’t have.
Do I have to prepare myself not to be affected by the stories I encounter? Can I accept that interaction with other humans changes me - that I will always be impacted and altered by my interactions with others? Can I guard less preciously the version of myself that I must protect against uncomfortable narratives? Can I hold loosely in my hand my current sense of “rightness”?
Words he says that resonate with me:
“I feel like nobody really cares what my opinion is.”
“I can feel this illusion of self-sufficiency.”
“You can’t demand love. You have to be lovable. I’m still trying to figure out how to do that.”
“I wonder what meaning life has.”
“I’m very self-conscious about my appearance.”
What does my ability get me, if I still feel these parallels with Mark O’Brien? I’m not as different from him as my vanity wants to believe I am.
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