Philip DowdLOGOS, MYTHOS AND DISABILITY POETRYIn 1999 Dara McLaughlin wrote "Cobalt Blues." McLaughlin was made paraplegic by the radiation therapy she was given for cancer, and later died from the long term effects of the treatment, in this poem there is no room for the saccharine triumph story. It is a statement of fact. COBALT BLUES The first verse describes the scene, depersonalized and uncomfortable, everyone has left the room, she is left on the X-ray table waiting for the radiation therapy for cancer… They look in through a window The doctors and the technicians are watching from safety, fingers steering the robotics. Every day is like this The scene is set Lying perfectly still, still cold To place this very hard hitting poem into context, normative language fails to adequately address McLaughlin's experience of the cancer killing'the great weapon Cobalt 60' or how she became a paraplegic and eventually killed her. The realisation that there will be the moment when According to Karen Armstrong's, 'A Short History of Myth' (2005) 'Logos', is the rational, pragmatic and scientific, unpoetic thought that enables men and women to function well in the world. Medicine is supposed to be rational, pragmatic, and therefore scientific, but it wasn't always according to Willis (1983) who writes of the historical takeover of health by allopathic medicine in Australia. However, it is 'mythos' that gives gives meaning. Most of the ancient myths were recorded as poetry. If in fact the role of mythic poetry is to offer an explanation of the world, the question arises is this a function of the new disability poetry? It could be true that one of the roles of disability conscious poetry is to attempt to explain the role of disability and give meaning to the experience of disability. If one of the roles of poetry in general is to translate this 'mythos' and give meaning to life in general, then it could be argued that disability poetry serves a similar purpose for disabled people. If this linking of poetry to myth and meaning is real, then extending this use of mythology to the lives of physically disabled people is possible. Steven Brown in Movie Stars And sensuous Scars, (2003, p. 72) writes of his perception of disabled heroes and the creation of a disabled mythology, People with disabilities have struggled to be liberated from an oppressive society. This kind of fight lends itself not only to heroes, but also to fascinating stories. This is not a nationalistic struggle, but a human one. It begged mythic telling. When I began this adventure I knew little about scholarly definitions of mythology. But I knew the struggle of people with disabilities, our struggle, was an epic one. Despite my academic background as a historian this was not a story I wanted to tell in a straightforward manner. Myth is more accessible to the average listener than history. Myth permits us to be creative and expand our tales into stories that may be repeated and retold for generations. Myth can place our battles into a universal language understood by every culture. I first read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces after deciding to proclaim our mythic lives. Campbell became known to many Americans when Bill Moyers conducted a series of interviews with him on Public Broadcasting Stations. Campbell argued the prime function of myth is to supply symbols that carry the human spirit forward. Each individual I'll discuss in the remainder of this essay has done exactly that. Each has moved us from some kind of static state to a more dynamic one. Many examples of the role of poetry can be found throughout the mythical storytelling traditions of both the east and the west, including The Iliad and the Odyssey of the Homeric tradition (written 6th century BC), The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2,000 BC) of Mesopotamia, which contains the earliest recorded mention of a Noah like flood, the Mahabharata of India and Norse mythology. It is this capacity to give meaning which logos cannot do, but which the poetic aspects of 'mythos' can bring to light, that has importance to poetry in general and disability poetry in particular To place this in terms of disability, the disabled person requires the medical, the rehabilitative, the scientific and practical, such as pain clinics and pain controlling medications, but these fail to offer meaning. The scientific approach must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. According to Roger Prentice (4th October 4, 2007) 'Mythos' and the poetic, in contrast, are not concerned as much with practical, external matters, but with meaning. The medical model of disability bases itself in logos that is a scientific-rational view, but being happily disabled defies rationality. Karen Armstrong in an interview with Steve Paulson, (30th May 2006), Going beyond God, puts it this way: As for scientists, they can explain a tremendous amount. But they can't talk about meaning so much. If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina, you want to have a scientific explanation of it. But that's not all human beings need. We are beings who fall very easily into despair because we're meaning-seeking creatures. And if things don't add up in some way, we can become crippled by our despondency. I would add disability to the list of things that can result in despair. In the pre-modern world, there were two ways of arriving at truth. Plato, for example, called them mythos and logos. Myth and reason or science. We've always needed both of them. It was very important in the pre-modern world to realize these two things, myth and science, were complementary. One didn't cancel the other out. Agreeing with Armstong, the literary and linguistic 'Logos' construction of disability is basically auto/biographical, event 1 happened before event 2, so event 2 was caused by event 1. But, what if event 2 wasn't caused by event 1, we try to read a connectiveness into the structure of biography. Since disability is often a major event horizon, in that it changes or challenges most subsequent thoughts and actions, it requires 'mythos' and the poetic to interpret and to give life meaning. In this interpretation the disabled poet has the role of the blind poet/mythic historian Homer to interpret 'mythos', to give meaning to the lived experiences of physical disability in all the pain. An example of this retelling of old myths to explore the experience of disability will be discussed next. According to a discussion between Armstrong and Atwood (29th October 2005) The truth about myth's interpretations of myth are never stable. This conversation on the understanding of mythologies, and the potential for reinterpretation and rewriting of mythology is an important point. Armstong for example says there are good myths too, like that of the hero, about how you have to be bold and strike out for yourself on a lonely path, go out into the unknown, face all kinds of dangers, and come back with something that is of value to your community. The point about myths is that they are never ever definitive. Sophocles changed the myth of Oedipus, for example, and made him tear his eyes out. Atwood's response to Karen Armstrong makes the interesting point that The Romantics went for Prometheus, who had the temerity to steal fire from the gods and was chained to a rock and had his liver eaten out by an eagle every day as punishment. He had defied the established order, so people like Blake, Byron and Shelley went for him in a big way. To pose a mythological interpretation of disability, and the concept of the hero, who does not overcome, but instead shouts and taunts the gods by his very existence, might be found in a reinterpretation of the mythic character, Prometheus. In the play Prometheus Bound written by the ancient Greek poet/play-writ Aeschylus in about 430BC, we have the heroic character, Prometheus, a god, who is punished for giving mankind fire, by being chained to a rock far away, where a vulture eats his liver by day but however much the bird eats re-grows at night. I believe with very little alteration such a mythic tale as Prometheus Bound can be reworked as a metaphor, for not overcoming or curing disability, and not stoically accepting it either. The myth of Prometheus instead offers a third approach that of the defiant deviant. The play has been suggested as a metaphor for disability culture. A simple rewriting would have Prometheus being placed in a wheelchair, braces and other normalizing devices, still defiant of Zeus, destiny and science, as a powerful metaphor for disability culture. It is this ability to translate and reshape a metaphor as old as this myth, retelling the reshaped myth, as metaphor suiting disability cultural consciousness, that allows the power of the poetry to fulfil its potential. References Armstrong, K, 2005, A Short History of Myth, Publishers Group West, New York.
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