February 22, 2024 : Wondercab Mini (61A)
THIS AND THAT
THIS: Susan Barry on a deaf student’s acquisition of hearing
Following on from last week’s entry on Sue Barry, the neuroscientist at Mt Holyoke who had been born with a bad case of strabismus (crossed eyes) and despite three childhood operations never attained stereopsis (the ability to see in three-dimensions) and was constantly being told she now never would, except that at age 48 she undertook a radical regime of visual therapy and thereupon suddenly did, which in turn led to a remarkable correspondence, recently collected in her new book, Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks. As I said last week, the real revelation of the book is not so much Sacks’s prose, with whose deeply empathic sagacity we are all already familiar, as Barry’s own, which is its own continuous beneficence. As in this passage, further on in the book, where Barry recounts for Oliver her recent interactions with Zohra, a student who had been born deaf but acquired hearing by way a cochlear implant around the time of puberty. Barry was typically fascinated by the young woman’s subsequent experience, a sort of aural version of her own visual transformation, and questioned her carefully on the transitions involved, reporting the results of those conversations in a letter to Sacks, dated April 19, 2010 (pp. 178-9), as follows:
I asked her what sounds surprised her, and she mentioned that she didn’t expect that soft or compliant things, including paper, skin, and water, would make sounds. She was very surprised by the following:
the sound of crinkling paper
the sound of cutting paper with scissors
the swishing sound of her clothes when she moves (initially very disturbing to her)
the sound of her own, small body as she shifts her weight on a chair
the sound of brushing her teeth
the sound of a broom sweeping the floor
the sound of water boiling
the squeaking sound when she rubs her hand on a mirror
the sound of chalk on a blackboard
the sound of putting a key in a lock
the sound of a pencil or pen when she writes on paper
the helpful fact that you can learn that you’ve dropped something because it makes a sound when it hits the floor
the sound of scratching her own skin
the sound of a bowling ball rolling toward the pins in a bowling alley
the sound of water coming out of a faucet
Zohra often had to ask what these new sounds were and is still delighted by new auditory discoveries. Since she can’t wear her implant while bathing, I asked her if she had heard the sound of water going down a drain. She said she had not, so, twice, we filled up my office sink with water and listened as the water drained out. Zohra was intrigued and I was thrilled—I had introduced her to a new sound!
*
THAT: Ralph Leonard on Israel/Palestine
I have lately been happening, here and there, upon occasional pieces by a preternaturally sane and thoughtful young scrivener named Ralph Leonard who identifies himself as a “Nigerian British Secular Humanist and Unaffiliated Radical Internationalist,” as in the case of this excerpt from a piece first published a few years back on the occasion of the seventy-third birthday of the state of Israel, entitled “Can Israel Survive for 100 Years?” which I myself first encountered by way of an extended excerpt published in a recent issue of my Australian cousin Nic Gruen’s own reliably fascinating aggregator Substack “Things I Found on the Net This Week,” which Nic introduced in his typically laconic manner: “Interesting piece by Ralph Leonard — from 2021. I don’t know enough to endorse his views or otherwise. But I was interested to read the piece.”
It may be, among other things, extremely banal and trivial to observe— or in the case of the Palestinians mourn — the supposed ‘immaculate conception’ of Der Judenstaat on its 73rd year. Nonetheless, there is enough perspective to contemplate on some questions that may be worn out but are still pressing for us in our present. Is Zionism a national liberation movement for Jews or a settler colonial project (or both)? Has it made Jews more or less safe? Has the ancient scourge of anti-Semitism been cured by it? Have Jews been ‘normalised’ in the world by it? Is Israel a ‘light unto the nations’, or is it just another rotten nation state in a long line built on and maintained by violence?
Jewish people, as is par for the course, occupy all sides of this argument. There are Zionists who earnestly believe Israel is the closest thing in history to a man-made miracle. Other Zionists pander to Western prejudices on the ‘Muslim question’ in Europe by portraying Israel, the “villa in the jungle,” as on the front line in the ‘clash of civilisations’ against the Muslim hordes. There are Hasidic sects who regard Israel as an obscene blasphemy and insist that only with the arrival of the Messiah can a truly ‘authentic’ Jewish state come into existence. There are leftist and progressive Jews who feel guilt and shame that in the name of the Jewish people a settler state was erected on the ruins of so many Palestinian Arab towns and villages. Conversely, there are some Jews who don’t have a guilty conscience at all. Indeed, they wish to evict more Palestinians with a divine mandate and collaborate with fanatical evangelical Christians to expedite the End of Days. And let’s not forget the disillusioned liberal Zionist for whom Israel was paradoxically a means for them to comfortably assimilate into the liberal democratic West: They blame Netanyahu and his cronies for being the gravedigger of the Zionist dream and making Israel resemble more and more a shtetl with an air force.
As is always the case with Israel, one has to live with multiple contradictions pulsating in one’s head. In fact, to echo Flaubert, contradiction is what keeps one’s sanity in place. Do I sometimes wish that Theodore Herzl, Max Nordau, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion had never convinced Jews and Gentiles that the answer to the ‘Jewish Question’ was to create an irredentist Jewish state on Arab land in West Asia? Yes. Does that then mean I desire the ‘obliteration’ of the Israeli nation and society? Of course not. Was there something fundamentally absurd in bourgeois and petit-bourgeois European Jews being intoxicated by the mad rhythms of messianic blood and soil mysticism? Yes. Do I wish the German revolution of 1918–19 had succeeded, thus averting the rise of fascism, preventing the Shoah, and hopefully charting out a better course for the Jewish question? Absolutely. Am I angered, horrified and disgusted at seeing a whole new generation of Palestinians being born into the dispossession and/or occupation and exile already suffered by their grand-parents, great-grand parents, and soon to be great-great-grand parents? Damn right I am! …
Moreover, the Jewish state rules over millions of non-Jews, treating them as dependents and subjects, not citizens, and continuing to dispossess and humiliate them, intensifying their already impassioned enmity towards it: They don’t see the justice of being gracious recipients of ‘Jewish sovereignty’. Because of this, Israel’s ‘international legitimacy’ is always fragile. How long until even America’s wall-to-wall blind support for Israel whatever it does begins to crack? To put it simply, to talk of Israel as the ‘solution’ to the alienation of galut {the centuries of exile and dispossession} is mistaken. As Christopher Hitchens once observed, Israel is not “the alternative to the diaspora. It is part of the diaspora.” The global Jewish diaspora is around 18 million, scattered across many nations and continents. Only in Israel do Jews live as dangerously as they do, the bloodshed of the recent past fresh in their minds, quietly fearing when the next round will kick off. Only in Israel do Jews live in range of rockets fired by Judeophobes. Only in Israel do Jews have to live with barbed-wire fences, bomb shelters, iron walls, machine guns, iron domes, and specially designed bomb-proof buses underwritten by diaspora and Gentile generosity. Only in Israel is there talk of a second Shoah befalling Jews if Iran acquires nukes. What is that old cliché about Jews and irony?
You can find the entirety of that essay here, and further pieces by Leonard here and here, including an especially trenchant piece on how “Hamas apologists have misunderstood Fanon” here. Here’s what the guy looks like:
I’d love to know more about him.
See you next week!