Deaf stuff: December 2004 Archives

"It was a mistake to assume that my cousin's universe was a tenuous universe of silence or emptiness. In fact it was a fluid universe of movement, affinity, alliances, sublime extravagances, evanescent pleasures, rendezvous with first-blush auroras, mornings, voyages, mercurial vagrancies, and a momentum forged in rampant elevation, up, up, standing on my shoulders in the water, vaulting circumfusion bubbled forth, embodied in a gulp of waves. His feet slipping from my shoulders and we both fell. It was a mistake to assume his silence was a heaviness, when in fact his silence was a gravity balanced light against the ballast of the world."

Nasdijj, the blood runs like rivers through my dreams, p.170

I had lunch today with an old dear friend - over a decade by golly! Who at one point (after I made some nonsensical polite "filler" type of comment) laughed heartily at my cultural non-deaf-ness. :-) Then, she said I really am "deaf" though, in the sense of being estranged from family. She was referring to my family of origin, with whom my ties are tighter now than in many, many years, but which never nurtured a deep sense of belonging. She likened this to the experience of that vast majority of deaf individuals born into non-deaf families, and the seemingly inevitable distances that arise because of language acquisition issues and a range of phenomenological differences.