Planet of Snail (2012)

PLANET OF SNAIL (2012)

 Young-Chan Cho: “All the deaf and blind people have the heart of an astronaut.”

Planet of Snail is a documentary from South Korea. It is very slow-paced and plays with minimal sound to simulate Young-Chan reliance on tactile communication and finger taps as opposed to always using voice. His voice, one might say is the lack of sound. The story follows him along with his wife Soon-Ho. Soon-Ho has a disability caused by degeneration of the spine.

Together the film explores their mutual dependency and quiet, slow lives. The reference to Young-Chan Cho as an astronaut in the Planet of Snail is interesting because I too consider myself an alien. Some things that an able-bodied person can do very easily, I can’t. But, I think from that I gained a desire to explain my worldview. For Young-Chan Cho, it’s the same. On one hand, he talks about his disability as no different than fading memory for a sighted person. When you remember something with sight, it’s never as clear as it was when you saw it the first time. A very insightful critique of sightedness!

    On the other hand, Young-Chan’s poetry reveals a deep understanding of how his life is alien. “What I see in front of me is my reality.” He says. “I am deaf-blind even in my dreams.” In spite of this determination, he encounters obstacles very early on in the film. While taking a Hebrew exam, Young-Chan’s professor says that he had the words in the right order, but his assistant transcribed it wrong. That is, his wife, not his assistant. But, he gets an A+!

    Later in the film, we see Young-Chan eating with friends, who look as though they may be deaf-blind as well. They get into an argument about why he married, and the other friend believes he may never marry. Much of this argument is done through tactile communication and finger tapping. I don’t know Korean sign language, and only understand little bits of American Sign Language, but the finger tapping to me seemed vital to understanding the language. Young-Chan’s friend believes he married Soon-Ho to be a live-in caretaker, which Young-Chan Cho denies, but seems shaken by.

   Through his friend, we see his clay crafts, including a mug shaped like a naked man. Young-Chan explains that he didn’t like that one very much. Soon-Ho says that sometimes he takes care of her, because sometimes her pain is so bad that she can’t even pick up the phone. “I couldn’t even say hello. I could only make screeching sounds.” She says. Nonetheless, we see Soon-Ho helping Young-Chan around the house more often than vice versa: Fixing a light, helping with food, walking on the beach, even helping to organize Cho’s play with his friends.

     The film ends with a solo trip to a doctor's appointment, where he admits he was scared to be without his companion. “I felt colder.” He says.  Then, Young-Chan Cho goes swimming, where he says he can open his eyes and see a different world. (As opposed to The Planet of Snail.) In closing, he says he's only waiting to see the most precious things. He and I have much in common. We are both astronauts; we both use words to paint our lived experiences with disability; we have many of the same fears. What will happen to me when my friends and caretakers are gone? The film explores these fears, which at times seem to contradict his coping mechanisms…art and poetry which transcends his body.

    The film is very slow-paced, but there was enough going on that intrigued me that I never lost interest. I love movies about disability experiences, other planets, and other cultures and ways of life. I identified with the main character; but only insofar as he uses art to overcome his disability, such as I try to do. The rest was new to me: The finger tapping, Young-Chan Cho’s beautiful descriptions of his disability in poetry, having a partner vs. having friends, and negotiating each other’s disability. These were all wonderfully new to me. The slow pace also helped me drink in Young-Chan's world.

     I found Planet of Snail to be a fun, dramatic and captivating experience… it is not  just internationally appealing to me, being a Korean film, but it is interculturally appealing too. I mean, I related my experiences with disability with Young-Chan They didn’t always match up. For example, in my dreams, I'm able-bodied, though it by no means is a reflection of de-valuing my life with a disability...I can simply do more in my dreams. Also, Young-Chan says sometimes he knows he’s being stared at. I would tend not to focus on it…nonetheless, I do know it probably is happening.

Anyway, this is a great film that explores many themes about disability and relationships, and the role of art as a tool for life. Highly recommended…I’d say 4/5 stars: the slow pace might be off-putting to some, but in my case, it helped me catch details like the finger tapping as communication. A wonderful film! Go see it!

I AM NOT MY DISABILITY: THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF DISABILITY

                I AM NOT MY DISABILITY:  THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF DISABILITY

What is a disability? Is it a severe mental or physical limitation? If this is so, are obese people or drug addicts disabled? Both can be either severely physically and/or mentally limiting. Is it a blessing, granting people a different and positive viewpoint on life?  Or is it a curse, confining and restrictive to otherwise able human beings? It seems that no matter how one looks at the issue, both disability and the disabled community are increasingly difficult terms to define. It is incommunicable.

 This flies in the face of the old axiom that  “You cannot not communicate.” I take communicability to mean understandability of experience. While the ADA and other laws have defined (dialogically) some terms that make disability rights understandable, disability itself is incommunicable. What I argue is that disability and the disability community are relative terms that can actually be harmful to a person if they are rigidly defined to medical diagnosis or reliance on assistive devices. To understand why I am against such definitions (i.e. wheelchair user or cerebral palsy sufferer) it necessary to relate how such ambiguous terms have been communicated through history.

Dialogue is described by John Durham Peters as sharing the same time and space.1 Its uses include the clarification of terms and the creation of dyadic relationships (where we talk to each other.) and creating a sense of shared understanding and meaning. Dialogical contexts include role-playing, philosophy, and drama, where time and space are shared. Because dialogue is fundamentally a dyadic sensation, where the meaning or truth of a statement is typically evaluated by agreement on common meanings for terms, I maintain that any set dialogical definition of “disability” or “disability community” will ultimately be more restricting to a person with a disability than would no definition at all. While it is true that a dialogical definition reached by a common meaning and sharing of inner experience on which laws have been established to protect disability rights, this dialogic search for clarity of terms forces on the disabled an illusionary collective mindset that focuses on common limitations, not abilities.

Dissemination however, would provide a much more personal definition of “disability”, thus allowing for interpretation and the personal development to the notion that I am not my disability. Dissemination seeks no definition: it is open for all to hear.    Dissemination is broadcasted to an open-ended destination; it is a feature of all speech, according to Peters.2 (Shepard, et al., 212) I argue that it allows for autonomy in speech and thought, throughout what we might call the “disability community”. Recently, it has become popular to say that there ought to be one word to characterize the disabled experience, and that this definition should point in effect to the notion that we are all handicapped.

Though I am sympathetic to such efforts, I see the search for dialogical definitions of disability “community” as limiting to the concept of community, although such definitions based on assistive devices or medical diagnosis as helpful to the individual in gaining autonomy, not the community. (“deaf community”, quadriplegics, “wheelchair-users”, etc.) It is up to the individual to interpret what his/her disability actually means through self-discovery. This is why an outlook of dissemination and interpretation is helpful, and why I argue that the community of disabled people cannot be defined by the limitations of its members, but instead by its individual overcomings.  This notion that “we are all handicapped.” is not new.

As far back as 1894, Charles Horton Cooley developed the concept that “Transportation is physical, communication is psychical.” (Peters,  184). He saw all men and women as being sensorily handicapped, but by means of new media transportation like trains, radio, and telegraph (he did not include wheelchairs and speech aids.) they could more easily bridge distances of communication between distant people. This is an attempt to squeeze dialogic thinking into media of dissemination; the sharing of two mutually held ideas and the forming of one psychic understanding.

It was Franz Kafka who challenged the idea that media could transport our souls. Humanity knows that “written kisses never reach their destination. Rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts.” (Peters, Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenkà.) So, they have created trains, telegraphs, and aeroplanes. But, it is no good. In other words, the new communicative media could not cure Cooley’s handicap, being blind and deaf to a larger social world. It is not that “the new communication has spread like morning light over the world,” (Peters, 187-188) as Cooley would have it, but rather, that like the privileged page gifted with the emperor’s last message in Eine kaiserliche Botschaft (1919), the message is never read nor delivered: “The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun.” 3 (Kafka trans. Appelbaum, 49) This is a challenge to Marshall McLuhan and his school of thought. The medium may be the message, but it might not be the soul, by which I mean handicaps cannot be reasoned dialogically. As Peters’ noted, Kafka’s Verfremdung [estrangement] explodes the dialogical concept of sharing which is inherent in independent living, but not to disability.

These days, a popular phenomena within disability culture if I may call it such, is the independent living movement. The aims of the movement are to provide persons with disabilities the least restrictive environment in which to live. Which is to say, handicaps are removed through nurse aides and/or assistive devices, or whatever is needed. These aims are fine and noble. But, it raises a question: is the notion of independent living defined? Who has defined it? Under what terms? (Note that here there is a dialogical tint.)

As I have stated, any drive towards freedom should come from the disabled person himself/herself, not as part of a medical examination. I am purposing that it is when the disabled are independent themselves that they really begin to uncover their true handicaps and develop methods to overcome them. Those methods and true disabilities will be individual and as such not open to clear dialogue, but dissemination.

Is independent living harmful to this end? No. One should realize that when one says “independent” we are disseminating. It can mean different things, and levels of independence, just as Wittgenstein claimed that “Water!” could be anything not referring to water itself when used in isolation as a word.4 (Wittgenstein trans. Anscombe, 10) In just that way, one can learn to laugh at one’s own handicap. It is a language-game, and I must play with it in different ways. In effect, the disabled must depend on others as must depend on others. It is wrong to say we don’t need others. We are all handicapped, I believe, robs the individual of his or her own uniqueness.

In summation, is the drive for dialogical clarification of terms and truth misplaced? Perhaps so, but not without benefits. Laws and media have furthered the rights of people with disabilities. However, the community cannot risk finding the one true definition. The aim should be not the dialogical we are all handicapped, but rather a product of dissemination. I am not my disability. As Goethe’s Faust put it: “Name is but sound and smoke, befogging heaven’s blazes.”5 (Goethe trans. Kaufmann, 327)

CONSTRUCTING JAMES CASTLE AT THE URBAN ARTS SPACE OSU:

CONSTRUCTING JAMES CASTLE AT THE URBAN ARTS SPACE OSU:

Yesterday, I went to the Constructing James Castle Exhibit. James Castle was a deaf artist (1899-1977) who did most of his work with found materials. (Soot, packaging, paper, matchboxes etc.) most of his work reflects his life as a deaf man in rural Idaho and his experience at the Gooding School for the Deaf. (1910-1915.) Even though in his day he was labeled “uneducable”; if you look at his work, you know that’s not true.

The first pictures I saw were of his house in Idaho, drawn on matchboxes with soot. The attention to detail was so realistic, from texture to depth, to lighting, that I felt as if I had entered a turn of the century house. Things like drawers, and stoves, old grammophones, were drawn on the notches of the matchboxes so they appear to be open. Also, he paid great attention to doors; (either an as idea, or a physical concept.) so that you could really enter the room and take note of the textures. Here was a man who was really inviting you in: and on the top of the back he’s written “Jim”.

Keep in mind this was mostly done on soot. I have trouble even drawing with a pencil! Yet, a few of his later “Dream House” paintings appear to be in watercolor. Perhaps he had a stroke of luck and found some, and the painting shows his happiness. His work was all done with what he found. There are sections of paper dolls with different expressions, held together by string and molded into human figures with often squared heads. It made me think at first of the Lego exhibit, only more expressive, because it was carefully made out of scraps.

His depiction of the school was most affecting to me. He made booklets out of matchboxes and cigarette packages, paper scraps, that show his daily life there. What struck me was that the depictions of the deaf students were often those short expressionless or sad squared figures, while the faculty was drawn tall, straighter, and with more vivid expressions; smiling faces, glasses, school uniforms etc. Was this how the administrators saw the deaf students? It seems so.

The students in the classrooms (again drawn with soot!) always sat in a semicircle, wooden rough chair vividly depicted. The drawing showed a deaf girl struggling to learn. (she did not look happy.) I marveled at how someone could draw a chalkboard and the classroom with such clarity in soot! Also, again, many of the students were faceless blockheaded figures. One could say that this was coincidental, but in another work called “Knucklehead”, there is a man who’s head is represented by a fist in the shape of the word “dumb” (as in “deaf and dumb.") in sign language. Clearly, this was the “uneducable” and “illiterate” artist trying to demonstrate his frustration with able-bodied faculty through his grasp of colloquialisms.

Castle’s grasp of language went beyond signing, and I also saw that his notes included sophisticated linguistic notation which he may well have learned at the school. Perhaps he was not so uneducable as his teachers once thought! I saw for example in his notes he would phonetically sound out words. Such as: “Ie Zi AI SED” (possibly sounding out “I said.) or “P!D”  (Differentiating breaths in “p and d” sounds.)

Other pieces from the school period of his art include booklets made out of cigarette cartons, matchboxes, and different packages, where he would draw in things like the dormitories; a single bed with an enormous window; again, an amazing understanding of light and depth, and again his obsession with doors. In various matchbox pictures, such as a depiction of a country road, I even saw the scribbling of long-division: Was this so he could get the dimensions right, something he had been learning, or both?

That must’ve been because his supplies demanded it, and because he was illustrating his own deaf worldview, and fascination with doors.   Several other happier pictures include depictions of his teachers in kaleidoscopic formations. According to the exhibit, one of his teachers had once shown him kaleidoscopes and he became fascinated. Some of these were even on paper! One of them was lined, which probably means it came from the school. Also, James Castle was enthralled by black and white contrast, owing to his medium, soot; particularly in the school uniforms. One depiction shows a student in uniform raising his hand, with headphones nearby. I recognized this as an old hearing test, and Castle had drawn the student in black and white uniform, behind a black gate. I didn’t know if the students were actually separated for the tests, in those days, or if it reflected his fascination or frustration. Perhaps both.

One of the distinguishing factors in Castle’s work is the ability to make art out of whatever he found, and throw his emotion onto his re-creations. Several of his later works from the 60s reveal a much more colorful selection as he began using magazine covers and cereal boxes, and re-created a Valentine’s Day ad with a toy soldier in it. Probably, he could imagine the vibrations of the toy flute, just as he could feel the vibrations in the comings and goings of open and closed doors. I was vaguely reminded, in his later period, of Andy Warhol, though the resemblances probably stop in that they are reflective of the cultural media of the ‘60s. Castle’s from the Deaf perspective.  Because of the magazine paper, his re-creations and art probably were allowed to be more colorful; and were certainly more in abundance by the 1960s, and color was no problem. Suddenly, an artist who drew in soot was in full color.

Though much of his work in the exhibit was in that school period, the color productions later on were some of my favorite. The others from the school period show a counter-narrative as well as a deaf life world. (I.e. “Knucklehead” and the hearing test; showing he was only “uneducable” because had a different worldview.) Perhaps once his teachers’ agendas were gone he constructed for himself through his art, a Deaf Culture, and was happier. One sees the counter-narrative disappear and become more representative of (as always.) deaf life experiences.

I’m extremely happy that I got to see all these pieces. It is proof that both a Disability Culture and life experience can be recorded by art. Too often, I think as it is represented in media, we must chose one or the other. Yet, here was a man, who had the ingenuity to both create and represent his world, with only his environment as his palette, and hence is probably not widely recognized in mainstream art today. The idea of Deaf Culture was probably not even recognized in Castle’s time, and he made it himself!  There’s no doubt in my mind that he understood that he simply had a different sensory experience. Yet, his linguistic knowledge represents an attempt at understanding the alien speaking world; similar to how I try to understand the walking world through rhetoric and linguistics.

Lastly, if there’s anything that art does, it is to create something beyond oneself, and beyond one’s mortal existence. I felt as if James Castle was keenly aware that his perception was unique. Just as I feel my cerebral palsy is a unique sensory experience. But, to have that awareness of deafness as a social problem rather than a strict medical one, at the turn of the century, is amazing as technology is ultimately the driving force behind increased accessibility and mainstreaming. I can’t speak for James Castle, but think that maybe we can glimpse so of that idea in his obsession with doors. Coming and going: pictures of things like grammophones, or things that he could hear vibrations of, might also have glimpsed the idea that he could adapt to the world.

REMEMBER: Nobody gave him a pencil or paper. He didn’t expect to be famous. He did most his drawings with soot. James Castle found all those things, he adapted the world around him into his art. He made the world see his voice, even if he couldn’t hear. He wasn’t “uneducable”; He wanted people to see. I saw: I was moved by his creativity and brilliance. He constructed his own world. From paper dolls, to scraps of junk molded into soot sketches, James is the Unheard Master of Disability Culture in the 20th century. The exhibit is open until Feb. 24. See it if you can! (PS: Google images couldn’t find “Knucklehead”, although it is a fascinating piece!)

 (Paper doll.)

                                                   (School period matchbox booklets.)

                                                                (Inside of House.)

                                        (Self-portrait, year unknown; source of color unknown.)

(On matchbox, Side of House.)