July 18: Hermann of Reichenau (1013-1054)

[Image description: A painting showing a brown robbed monk, Hermann, holding a crutch in one hand and a book in the other, with a harp nearby, and the words "Salve Regina," the name of his best known composition; found here]

Maybe some of the fine medievalists blogging about disability history can help with this one: I saw reference to Hermann von Reichenau's birthday today (the Catholic Encyclopedia gives the date as 18 February instead; still, five years till his 1000th!). The son of a nobleman, he didn't walk, and was hard to understand when he spoke, so the assumption is usually that he had CP or something similar. He was called "Hermann der Lahme," or "Hermannus Contractus" or Hermann the Lame, Hermann the Twisted. At age 7 Hermann entered the monastery at Reichenau. There, he became an expert on Arabic mathematics and astronomy, composed hymns and poetry, and wrote historical chronicles and treatises on music theory and math games. He seems to have introduced the astrolabe to central Europe, among his other accomplishments.

The relics on display here seem to include part of Hermann's skull? Am I seeing that right?

While I'm on the subject of cloisters, I recently read Mark Salzman's Lying Awake (Vintage 2001), a short novel about a cloistered nun in 1990s California who's diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. But Sister John, a published poet, experiences her seizures as ecstatic spiritual revelations, and isn't sure she wants to lose that by having the recommended neurosurgery. The story follows her decision-making, the conversations she has with doctors and priests and her sisters in the community. It's thought-provoking, because the life of a woman religious involves vows and habits of selflessness that affect her criteria for deciding about medical treatment. (If the author's name rings a bell, Mark Salzman is married to filmmaker Jessica Yu, who won the Academy Award for her 1996 short-subject documentary Breathing Lessons--about Berkeley poet Mark O'Brien, who used an iron lung.)

Michael Chabon, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"

An early passage of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) caught my attention today:

Thirteen-year-old title character Sammy Clay and his estranged father, a vaudeville performer called "the Mighty Molecule," but born Alter Klayman near Minsk, are talking in a hammam in Brooklyn in the 1930s, reminiscing about Sammy's earlier bout with polio:

"You were so heavy to carry," his father said, "I thought you have to be dead. Only also you were so hot against the hand. The doctor came and we put ice on you and when you woke up you couldn't walk anymore. And then when you come back from the hospital I started taking you and I took you around, I carried you and I dragged you and I made you walk. Until your knees were scraped and bruised, I made you walk. Until you cried. First holding on to me, then on to the crutches, then not with crutches. All by yourself."
"Jeez," Sammy said. "I mean, huh. Mom never told me any of this."
"What a wonder."
"I honestly don't remember."
"God is merciful," the Molecule said drily; he didn't believe in God, as his son well knew. "You hated every minute. You just as good hated me."
"But Mom lied."
"I am shocked."
"She always told me you left when I was just a little baby."
"I did. But I came back. I am there when you come sick. Then I stay and teach you to help you walk."
"And then you left again."
The Molecule appeared to choose to ignore this observation. "That's why I try to walk you around so much now," he said. "To make your legs strong."
This possible second motive for their walks--after his father's inherent restlessness--had occurred to Sammy before. He was flattered, and believed his father, and in the potency of long walks. (106-107)

May 11: Stanley Elkin (1930-1995)

[Image description: Stanley Elkin, head-and-shoulders view, he's wearing glasses and has a close-cropped white beard and curly hair; he's smiling slightly]

There is no way in the world I could ever take revenge on the disease that has disabled me. It just seems to me that disease, because it flirts with death, is a rather important subject to write about.

--Stanley Elkin

American writer Stanley Elkin was born on this date in 1930, in New York City. Elkin was a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1972, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS); from the mid-1970s, he used a wheelchair or a walker.

Elkin's experience as a disabled person was reflected in his critically-acclaimed fiction, which had long tended towards dark comic observations, inventive language, and complicated plots centered on deeply flawed characters. Ben Flesh, the main character in The Franchiser (1976), has MS too; in Magic Kingdom (1985), the plot follows a group of terminally ill children who are treated to a Disney World vacation by a wish-granting charity. The children resent being made into pitiful spectacles by the charity's publicity, and wish only to be left alone together to share as peers. The novella "Her Sense of Timing" (1993) is about Professor Schiff, a political geographer with MS, who uses a wheelchair, and must prepare and host a party without the expected help of his wife. In 1993, Harper's Magazine published "Out of One's Tree: My Bout with Temporary Insanity," in which Elkin describes a two-week, prednisone-induced psychosis he experienced from prescription medication for his MS.

Stanley Elkin died in 1995, from complications following heart surgery. His papers are at Washington University in St. Louis.

Byatt on aging as "noticing one's body more"

One of the books I read on vacation was AS Byatt's Sugar and Other Stories (Vintage International 1992), in part because I find there's great luxury in reading a book of short stories one after the other, like eating a whole can of Pringles (without the crumbs). Byatt's a bit chilly and grim for the heart of summer, for the Bay of Naples, but it's a slim volume and it's been on my TBR shelf for a while.

Quite a number of these stories are about women and aging--a theme found elsewhere in Byatt's short stories (see, for example, "A Stone Woman" and "The Pink Ribbon," in Little Black Book of Stories Vintage International 2003). Here, perhaps the most haunting portrayal of aging women's bodies is "In the Air," where we find this description of the main character:

Mrs. Sugden had become a walking barometer. Her hip joints knew when the temperature or the pressure was about to drop. Her sinuses ached was the clouds closed, before the clouds closed. A kind of lightning-conductor ran down her thickened neck into the pads of her shoulders and down her upper arms. I have my health, that's the main thing, she told people[...]. But having one's health didn't mean that one didn't daily notice one's body more, as a nuisance, that was, as an impediment, not as the springing thing it had once been. There were things between it and the outer world, like the horny doors she had observed in childhood on hibernating snails. She didn't see so far or focus so fast. She noticed her hips, on the Common, and had to make a real moral effort to see the hooded crow, or the hovering kestrel. (162)

Mrs. Sugden feels vulnerable in her aging body as she takes daily walks with her dog--she thinks through the various scenarios of a possible (inevitable, she supposes) attack upon her. One day, she walks with a blind woman who has a guide dog, and briefly feels the safety in that companionship, but only briefly. (The blind character, Mrs. Tillotson, explains about the "terrible, very frightening" adjustment period when she gets a new guide dog, and the way she uses routine to manage independently. She chides a character who says he "admires her." Still, her character seems to function mainly as confirmation that Mrs. Sugden's media-hyped fears about a lone woman's safety are justified, whether or not a woman can see the warning signs.)

The taut sense of fear in this story has been noted elsewhere, but it's the detailed description of Mrs. Sugden's physical experience of aging that I found most striking. (This story is also discussed in Jane Campbell, AS Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination [Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2004]: 95-96. Gotta love Google Books some days.)