Seeing Disability

I write this from the luxurious condition of temporary disability, laid up for a week or so after arthroscopic knee surgery. My crutches stand in the corner; my knee is swathed in a fat bandage, throbbing and swelling as it calls out for a new ice pack. The luxury is twofold: 1) the knowledge that this is temporary, thus entitling me to all sorts of temporary indulgences--being waited on, having an excuse not to work, not to answer mail and phone calls, or meet deadlines; 2) the time out of time, like those long stretches of boredom on transatlantic flights when one can avoid conversations with seat partners and sink into the world of some utterly distracting novel that one does not have to read for professional reasons--the ultimate regression into childhood for an English professor.

And yet here I find myself answering the call of duty, writing about disability for Public Culture, at a moment when I'm experiencing disability mainly as pleasure. How could anyone be worse qualified to speak on this topic? What subject position could be more inappropriate? (I leave aside my purely amateur standing in the emergent field of disability studies.) Only by imagining this state as permanent, I tell myself, could I come to terms with what this might mean. When I asked my surgeon if I could get a handicapped sticker for parking while I am on crutches, he laughed and pointed out that this would only work if I were going to be on them for three months.

When does the physical pain of a temporary disability, with its visible marks like crutches, wheelchairs, and bandages, turn into the metaphysical pain of disability proper? Is it when the visible mark fades into invisibility and becomes a permanent, unmarked, perhaps even unremarkable and familiar "condition"? Is this a question of time? Three months is the legal requirement. But what is ' the moral, imaginative temporality of the disabled condition? Surely it cannot ' be "permanence," understood as a static, unchanging condition, for there are degrees and stages, better and worse days, within the condition of permanent disability. A close friend of mine has a permanently crippled hand that requires the protection of a plastic sleeve and cloth sling. When people meet him for the first time they invariably ask him what happened, assuming that it must have been a recent accident. To me, after knowing him for fifteen years, the sleeve and sling have become invisible. He rarely mentions his condition, and he is so dexterous with his other hand that I never think about it.

As I move into the second and third days of my disability, after the post- ' operation euphoria fades and the anesthesia wears off, I come to be aware of new realities and new modes of thinking. My household mess becomes a formal, permanent condition, not a project for reclamation. The only order I worry about is immediate and local. Do I have all the medications handy at my bedside? Are my books where I can reach them? Should I leave one crutch downstairs and use just one for the stairs? How can I turn that one trip to the bathroom into a multitasking activity, since normal retracings and to-and-fro trips around the house have now become journeys to be planned in advance? But in the high visibility of the recovering invalid, there is a temporality at work. I know that in a few more days, my crutches will cease to be a novelty, no longer visible or remarked upon. No one will ask, "What happened?" anymore. Not long after that the crutches will literally disappear, stored in the closet for the next occasion. Meanwhile, the world will start to look different as well, remapped in innumerable ways.

This different look is, as we say, "a matter of perspective." The new orderings of my little world, so necessary to keep things at hand, may well look like an intolerable mess to the visitor to my sickroom...