The Voice of "Reason"
Said, Pull her up a bit will you, Mac, I want to unload there.
Said, Pull her up my rear end, first come first served.
Said, give her the gun, Bud, he needs a taste of his own bumper.
Then the usher came out and got into the act:
Said, Pull her up, pull her up a bit, we need this space, sir.
Said, For God’s sake, is this still a free country or what? You go back and take care of Gary Cooper’s horse And leave me handle my own car.
Saw them unloading the lame old lady, Ducked out under the wheel and gave her an elbow.
Said, All you needed to do was just explain; Reason, Reason is my middle name. (Miles 1983: 93)
Josephine Miles’s widely anthologized poem, “Reason,” appears in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and elsewhere with a note citing her most widely quoted statement: “I like the idea of speech—not images, not ideals, not music, but people talking—as the material from which poetry is made.”1 “Reason"'s focus on what Miles called “the spare and active interplay of talk” clearly appealed to academic editors of the postwar period (perhaps not surprisingly, since Miles was an academic herself, the first woman to be tenured in the English department at the University of California at Berkeley). The accompanying note in the Norton foregrounds Miles’s talk-based poetics as the reason for “Reason”: the poem’s material is its method. And yet the footnote screens as much as it reveals. Its focus on “people talking” deflects attention from what, in this particular scene, they are talking about—the other material from which “Reason” is made.
What they are talking about is the question of whether a disabled woman can get access to a movie theater. Although nothing in “Reason” identifies Miles with her “lame old lady,” and although she was by no means “old” at the time of the poem’s first publication in 1955, this was indeed material of intensely personal significance for the author. Miles lived with rheumatoid arthritis from the age of two, mostly in a state of severe and visible physical disability. For years, unable to use a wheelchair, she employed personal care assistants to help her move from place to place. (During the Vietnam War years, when she actively involved herself in antiwar politics, she was left behind more than once when a gathering was teargassed and no one thought to help her leave the space.) When I first met her in our common workplace in 1984, at a reception for new faculty, she was carried into and across the room by a young aide.
In the image of Miles as described in the previous sentence, I recognize her as disabled, relying on what Lennard J. Davis (1995: 12) has identified as one key modality through which disability is constructed: “The person with disabilities is . . . brought into a field of vision, and seen as a disabled person.” So crucial is the gaze to the process of constituting disability in this formulation that Davis goes on to put the point even more forcefully: “Disability is a specular moment.” “Reason” hinges on exactly such a specular moment. Interrupting its interplay of talk, the poem turns from saying to seeing: “Saw them unloading the lame old lady.” Yet the return of idiom in “Reason”’s aphoristic final lines (“All you needed to do was just explain; / Reason, Reason is my middle name.”) signals what I take to be the poem’s subject: how disability is also a spoken moment, one made in discourse.2
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Notes
- See Ellmann and O’Clare 1973: 823. The quotation comes from an interview with Josephine Miles conducted by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun between 1977 and 1979, now housed in the oral history collection of the Bancroft Rare Book Library at the University of California at Berkeley. Marjorie Larney’s (1993) edition of excerpts of that interview has the “idea of speech” passage on its back cover.
- A note on what I mean by “disability.” For two very useful summaries of the history and politics of the definition of the term, see Johnstone 1998: 5–13 and Epstein 1995: 13–17. Epstein reprints and analyzes a 1993 U.S. National Institute of Health chart illustrating some crucial distinctions between the terms impairment, disability, and handicap as they have been defined in the contemporary literature of physical health and rehabilitation. The watershed definition is that of the World Health Organization in 1980, with its three-part distinction between impairment (defined as “any loss or abnormality of psychological, physical, or anatomical structure or function”), disability (difficulty with tasks), and handicap (social disadvantage resulting from impairment or disability). Epstein compares this with the later revisions suggested by the U.S. National Advisory Board on Medical Rehabilitation Research in 1993, in which “functional limitation” takes the place of disability, and disability comes to describe what the WHO had called handicap: the range of social, cultural, and environmental arrangements that stigmatize, isolate, and oppress people whose bodies deviate from a supposed norm in form or function. This 1993 revision is in line with the use of the term disability in much of the work of contemporary disability activists and theorists, and in general I will follow its model. I proceed here with the sense, informed by much recent work in disability studies, that, as Thomson (1997: 15) puts it, disability “is an overarching and in some ways artificial category. . . . The physical impairments that render someone ‘disabled’ are almost never absolute or static.” Rather, they are “dynamic, contingent conditions.”