Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday September 27, 2009

What is a handicap, anyway?

By Jim Taylor

She can’t “hear”
        All this, and she is profoundly deaf. She has been since she was 12.
        “Unfortunately,” she writes in an essay on hearing, “my deafness makes good headlines.” Of hundreds of articles written about her each year, she says, “More than 90% are so inaccurate that it would seem impossible that I could be a musician.”
        Obviously, her loss of hearing is no handicap. But what is a handicap?
        During the 1970s, I went through that painful period of adjusting my language to what was called, often derisively, “political correctness.”
        So we avoided words like “crippled” or “retarded.” Rather, people were described as “disabled” – or even “differently abled” – to avoid stigmatizing those who functioned with fewer senses or limbs than normal. Even the term “normal” became suspect; it implied that others were not.
        It wasn’t just a matter of being “correct.” I felt the anger of people treated like helpless idiots simply because they occupied wheelchairs or had trouble hearing.
        “Does she like ice cream?” the waitress asks a paraplegic woman’s companion.
        “She can hear and speak for herself,” retorts the woman in the wheelchair.
        Occasionally, in Toronto, I attended Robert Rumball’s Centre for the Deaf. After his Sunday morning worship service, everyone gathered for coffee in the hall. Often, I was the only speaking person present. Otherwise the crowded room was eerily silent – until some group suddenly burst into raucous laughter over a joke narrated in sign language.
        In that context, which of us was handicapped?

Negative implications
        Unfortunately, all the words in our language that deal with a loss of sensory inputs or physical outputs – all the words that collectively describe deafness, blindness, loss of mobility, or arrested mental development – all imply some kind of deficiency.
        But Dame Evelyn Glennie is clearly not deficient.
        In her essay on hearing, she suggests, “Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air…If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or do you feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration… the body’s sense of touch takes over. We tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration; in reality they are the same thing.”
        “If we can all feel low frequency vibrations,” her essay continues, “why can’t we feel higher vibrations? It is my belief that we can; it’s just that as the frequency gets higher and our ears become more efficient they drown out the more subtle sense of ‘feeling’ the vibrations.”
        She performs her concerts barefoot, listening through the soles of her feet. She maintains that she can “distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on my body I felt the sound.”
        Clearly, she has honed a sense that the rest of us don’t even know we have.

Miraculous music
        Perhaps it is not Glennie who has lost one of her senses. Perhaps we have let an innate sense atrophy.
        Which should make us question what constitutes a “handicap.” Certainly, an absence of conventional hearing has not restricted Dame Evelyn Glennie’s career.
        Would Glennie have been a better musician if she had full hearing? The question is meaningless. Would Stevie Wonder have been more creative if he could see? Would Stephen Hawking be a better mathematician if he were not confined to a wheelchair?
        These people are what they are. It doesn’t matter whether they achieved their status because of or in spite of their, umm, disabilities.
        The amazing thing is not how Dame Evelyn Glennie “hears” her music. The amazing thing is the music she makes.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



“About time you figured that out,” James West wrote about last week’s column, in which I suggested that our concept of endless growth is a gigantic Ponzi scheme, paying today’s investors with money expected from tomorrow’s investors. “Look at the US one dollar bill. It’s got the pyramid instead of the parting of the Red Sea or some other image of the promised land free of masters and slaves.”

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About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

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