Preparing for Changes; My Inner Voice

It appears that I might finally have a date for one of the most significant moments of my life thus far. Two months from now, on May 7th, if all goes, well, I will be having cochlear implant surgery. This is something I've been wrestling over for the last six months, ever since the hearing in my left ear began to get progressively worse. I've wrestled whatever demons and angels have lived with me all this time, those little stick figures that take on added dimensions in moments of great clarity or sadness. And I've realized it's time. It's time to shift my frame of thoughts from the possible or probable to the inevitable.

In a way, I control my destiny. I've always lived in fear of an unknown date, the day on which I would completely and permanently lose the rest of my hearing. Even as I remained in denial about it, somewhere in the back of my mind it was only a matter of time. And if I have surgery on May 7th, I have taken upon myself the exact date on which I will become completely deaf. The surgery will destroy any remaining residual hearing I have.

I will be trading one illusion for another, a hearing aid for a cochlear implant. And yet there is something beyond that illusion which I will also lose, and I am both mourning and accepting that. In a quite literal sense, I will be losing my inner voice.

Without my hearing aid, you could shout in my ear and I wouldn't hear what you're saying. An ambulance could pass by and I wouldn't know it. There is only one thing I still hear with some clarity, and that is my own voice.

It is snowing today, a lovely surprise for early March in Baltimore. I walk the short distance from my rowhome in Hampden to the Hopkins campus, my breath misting in the cold, the world bouncing ever so subtly up and down. (A result of my vestibular system, which is still in the process of recalibrating itself-- when I move, the world moves with me.) I cross over a bridge on Remington Street. Below me lies a park with bare, snow-covered trees and a brown stream. For the duration of my time here, this is my wilderness. I am humming to myself. I am singing in my own tuneless voice. I am in the process of saying good-bye.

The metaphorical implications are not lost on me. I am trading in my inner voice for an outer voice which should be louder, clearer, and stronger. I hope this can also be a metaphor for my work, which for now is contained in my own mind and a small circle of friends, family and classmates. Getting an MFA is, ideally, the time when a writer hopes to trade the inner voice for the outer, when his or her work is moving towards being published and more widely disseminated. But those are wilder dreams for now. As I walk through the snow to my office and Gilman Hall (and later, Alice McDermott's short novel workshop), I am struggling with metaphors that will help me cope with losing a visceral and deeply-engrained part of myself.

I decide on the metaphor of relationships. My ears in their natural state have served me well enough for 27 years, but now it's time to move on. Much as I love them and the relationship I've formed with them, there's a new and shiny ear out there waiting to be romanced. These old ears are tired of dancing; like in a relationship that just isn't working out, they cease to listen. What is worn and familiar and comforting has become limiting and static. There's a shiny ear out there that wants to go to India and hear songs in a fresh way, and have a new dialogue with the world. There's a shiny ear out there that likes to dress up and even looks kind of sexy in that futuristic bondage kind of way. I can put clip-on accents on her so that the headpiece and hearing aid that make up the external part of the implant are downright colorful. This shiny ear is not afraid of being seen, not afraid to admit deafness, and yet she also refuses to accept the limitations and loneliness that being deaf inevitably impose. Break-ups are always hard, but this shiny new ear promises a future that is both exciting and terrifying. I've always liked change and adventure, and my task right now is to accept and look forward to the great unknown that will last from May 7th until quite likely my dying day.

Back By Popular Demand

Enough people have asked me where the blog has gone that I've decided to resurrect it. Honestly, I was surprised that anybody cared, but really, I am flattered. I had some requests to encapsulate the weekend I spent in New York, so here it is. A pulp story in the making.

On a low rise above a T & A gas station, which always makes him think of Tits and Ass, not gas, he waits in a long overcoat that is not warm enough for the weather and a gray scarf that his mom made for him. This low hill has the dubious distinction of being part of the Baltimore Travel Plaza, a godforsaken land with a lovely view of I-95, which rises on concrete girders above the city as if it might ascend to some heavenly plane. I-95 leads to New York, and here the heavenly references must end. Heaven, though free of strip malls and cul-de-sacs, is tangential, merely a suburb of that great heathen city which waits to be submerged, once again, in a great biblical flood as the polar ice caps gush forth.

Let us return to our hero, who is out of place here. He looks like one of those pretentious Hopkins students who are always writing dissertations about the participal form as elucidated in Ulysses or the life cycles of squid. In fact, he is one of those fucking students, removed from his ivory tower only to go to that great heathen city in the hopes of meeting with other writers to pretend that his existence is not a mere gaudy bubble upon the surface of this beseiged planet.

He is taking the $20 Chinatown bus because he has better things to spend money on than Greyhound or Amtrak. For example, wine, drugs in abundance, overpriced avant-garde performance art, perhaps even a brief parlay with god at 3.99 a minute.

He arrives in Chinatown an hour late, and, because he is not good at reading maps and does not want to ask anybody for directions, wanders aimlessly in the vast reaches of the Lower East Side. He makes his way around bags of trash and porno shops and storefronts that are little more than garage doors pulled over faceless brick buildings. He finds a refrigerator box and gets to work, carving a small window on one side and then spreading the clothing he has brought for the weekend over the cardboard floor beneath him. This will be his bedding. Through his little window, he watches the great heathen city beyond him. At this point, the reader is wondering what nefarious gases might have been piped through him on the Chinatown bus or at the Tits & Ass gas station. In reality, his behavior can be quite clearly delineated.

He is a writer and he has recently read the first novel in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, "City of Glass," a metaphysical pseudo-murder mystery in which the main character becomes homeless and crazed in his inadvertent search for the original language of god. And so our writer watches the world go by through his little window, and he waits for a sign.

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My weekend began with congee in the Lower East Side, an authentic Chinese rice porridge with fresh ginger and mushrooms, and ended with cream puffs in the Village. I had a great time with Meredith, a good friend of mine and a first year fiction student in Cornell's MFA program. We had a good time philosophizing, talking about fiction and literature, being crude and ridiculous, and talking shit. I met a lot of great people, including a brilliant pianist and composer, a dancer from Montana who is also an environmentalist, a guy who designs bondage jewelry, and one of the first year poets from Cornell. I went to the galleries in Chelsea and tried to figure out how the hell some of this art could sell for ten grand. We ate delicious food, we spent hours on the subway, we walked until our legs were tired stumps. We lay on the ground in Grand Central Station in the middle of the night, and I pointed out the artifiicial constellations to Meredith, who is blind, until a security guard shooed us away. We ate a half-eaten, abandoned bagel at a coffeeshop in Williamsburg. We had brunch in the Village. We met up with an old friend of mine from a writing circle in Portland who is now an editor at Picador. I watched people with insatiable hunger, whether they were beautiful women or madmen, artists or bricklayers. I should buy one of those tacky tee shirts that says I heart New York, but no amount of hipster irony can really summon that cliche turned hip turned cliche back from the dead. I wish I had remembered to bring along the shirt that Meredith got for me, which says: Nobody Knows I'm a Deaf Lesbian. That explains everything I'm feeling in a nutshell.