Mastermind on the Illusion of Certainty
And wasn't I? The material we covered in class, at the very heart, I believe, of what it means to be a human being with a human body and a human mind, was material I felt compelled to approach humbly and in communion with others. I did not want to be isolated from the fellowship of the other students as we watched the performances of disability - emotional, thought-provoking, and comfort-threatening material - in person, on the web, and through video. To be "just another student" made me accessible to them, but more importantly for me, it made them accessible to me! Because we were of varying ages, bodies, and disabilities/exceptionalities in this class, of all degrees of mutation as we learned, the multidimensional space was there to practice a non-authoritative, non-divisive, nonhierarchical approach to each other - in the classroom, in cyberspace, and in the workshops, especially Petra Kupper's workshop, in which we worked together somatically to understand our different experiences of embodiment. (See Petra's work at www.olimpias.net). These spaces, dialogues, and experiences reinforced our open approach to each other - they became and we became multi-layered. This poem tries to reflect the complexity of the language we developed. In distilling those discussions down to a discourse on authority, specifically medical authority, I drew upon specific terms that resonated for me and for others in the class. In using this language, rather than the language we are given to discuss disability, I wanted to open up a space where we could continue to think of disability in non-medicalized terms. I was trying to subvert the medicalized notion of "cure" that supports the doctor/patient binary, an issue first raised when Johnson Cheu, a doctoral student in Disability Studies, wheeled into our class and presented his work on "cure" (available at http://people.english.ohio-state.edu/cheu.1). The issue of "cure" ran through our discussions on the web throughout the quarter and appeared in my PowerPoint's group presentation on The Elephant Man. In that presentation, we juxtaposed images of Joseph Merrick's body with images of the doctor's body. The first body was naked, the second richly clothed in Victorian fashion. In one scene from the play, which we enacted on the doctor's body with a laser pointer, Joseph Merrick anatomizes the doctor as the doctor has anatomized him: the "pathology" is reversed. In this poem, I wasn't so much interested in "pathologizing" the medical profession as in extending the jurisdiction, or power to say, of class discussion. That this extension of jurisdiction limits medical authority reflects, I think, the extent to which we are asked to adopt medical language. Thus, the title of the poem, "They Pronounce the Time of Death," drew upon specific visual, performative, and discursive contexts. Much of the language used in this hypertext poem is embedded within these multi-layered contexts. "Sign 'think-hearer,'" a phrase that appears in this poem, is a distillation of the American Sign Language performances we watched on video, the play we studied, Children of a Lesser God, our web based discussions on both topics, and Professor Brueggemann's PowerPoint presentation on Deaf culture, which does not view itself as being "disabled." Similarly, the phrase "How could they see/not the withered arm" distills the web-based discussion of Richard III, the in-class discussion on "monsters," the visual images presented by the PowerPoint group on Richard III, and the issue of "invisible disabilities" and "passing." As with the phrase "Sign 'think-hearer,'" this phrase attempts to evoke a way of knowing and using language not tied to the normative certainty of "speech" or "sight." Within this richly inflected class language, I used terms borrowed from Lacanian psychoanalysis, theory that I was studying at the graduate level that quarter. Lacan is considered high theory and difficult to apprehend, but I think this difficulty is due to the way his theory resists certainty (it mutated and continues to mutate) and eschews empiricism: ideal for this poem that seeks to reform discourse at a conscious and unconscious level. When I explained my poem to the class, I gave them a brief description of his theory to explain the terms, but as I wrote the poem I kept in mind what they meant so that the meaning might be clear through connections and form. I often think that what we insist is intellectually inaccessible reflects the oppressive authority, hierarchy, and division that is visible in physical inaccessibility. The design of the poem seeks to give the reader the opportunity to participate/perform in making her own meaning and in making her own poem. This poem has twenty-one screens with an average of four links on each screen, so it is possible to read/write a number of poems. A few of the links are structured to trap the reader/writer within a phrase grouping, to force the reader to double back and possible "re-see" the language, or to repeat a sequence to evoke emotion. For the most part, however, the reader can navigate the poem with some autonomy. Thus, the reader/writer might perform the poem as she might perform a song on a guitar whose strings are all tuned to the same key: the nonlinear connections are made with language tuned to a particular discourse. I used a simple FrontPage program to construct this poem. If one were to look at the code behind this poem, one would see that its "creation" was almost as nonlinear and interrelated as the reading/writing is meant to be. What the code will not reveal is how time-consuming it was for me to figure out what "application" to use. That took me more time than the writing of the poem. At one point, late on a weekend night, a friend put me in touch with a technology expert, a non-native speaker of English who kept referring to the computer as a "he." This accounts, in part, for my invocation in the poem. It also encouraged me to use this medium to try to make visible the social construction of the ideal, technologized body/mind (gendered male) that medicine disciplines and describes, a social construction that the performance of disability undermines. I hoped not only to participate in undermining that social construction in this hypertext poem, but to heighten awareness, through the interactive performance of language, of an interconnected sense of self and context found and articulated through the "authority" of my interpretation of collective discourse. I selected "Mastermind" as my character (although sometimes I have the "illusion" he selected me) because he "appears" to be the most human: as a thin man smoking a cigarette and peering ominously at the audience, he has none of the hyperdeveloped musculature of the other mutant superheroes and supervillains. As a former carnival mentalist, he symbolizes the past marginalization of the disabled in freak shows, a marginalization that helped them financially support themselves. The writers of The X-Men project a mistrust of the "carnival" onto his "manipulative" character. I also like Mastermind because he troubles the reality/illusion binary. Through his psionic ability to cast illusions, he can change the sensory perceptions of his audience, thus casting doubt on the certainty and obviousness of normative "sense" perception, the same certainty and empiricism I try to trouble in this poem. At one time, Mastermind was a professional subversive, which seems to
be a good description of poets in general. He also, through the complex
story of his personal metamorphosis, was once under the "delusion" that
he had achieved cosmic awareness, and I like any character seeking cosmic
awareness. Although, again, the writers of The X-Men seem to mistrust
Mastermind by characterizing his awareness as a "delusion" in a comic-book
world where anything is possible in alternate realities and timelines.
Mastermind also troubles the male/female binary. After he dies, his daughter
Martinique Jason, who possess similar powers to his, adopts his guise.
Thus, Mastermind is as close to a genderbender as the writers have yet
created. In my cyberform, I may be performing Mastermind, or Mastermind's
daughter in the guise of Mastermind, or even myself projected as an illusion
by Mastermind: Marian E. Lupo x Mastermind! |