The Deaf House

Angebote / Angebote:

I am an older woman now. For years, I was haunted by a shape shifter who seemed to slyly suggest that I recover the submerged half of a paradox. It promised that in resuscitating the hidden paradox, I would come to know and see every other paradox in life. It argued: Otherwise, why bother follow a shape shifter? To retrieve forgotten pain? To piece together things people said and didn? say? To illuminate a personal and yet esoteric puzzle? The shape shifter promised nothing less than access to the mystery of the universe by leading me to a paradox I had denied in my own life.Being sometimes Deaf and sometimes Hearing, being able to speak well and not hear very well, and being able to sign fluently in American Sign Language yet being unable to live in the Deaf community, tormented me for most of my life. Where could I lay my head? It seemed that I always had to choose between adopting a Hearing identity or a Deaf one. Different life circumstances and periods of my life demanded differing responses that often contradicted each other. The life I lived was schizophrenic in nature. Enter the shape shifter. The shape shifter suggested that my opposite lives did meet, in a dimension that had nothing to do with linear time or physical location but in my imagination, where it took the form of a ?ouse, ?a Deaf House, in which paradox lived and breathed. There, deafness was a sense of personhood, not a hearing loss. Yet in this Deaf House for many years, a language was scorned and dismissed, powerless people were doomed to live in the attic or the basement, and the house itself was threatened with oblivion, mostly through water and neglect. From within the house in the shadows, the shape shifter took on many voices. The Deaf and the Hearing, the living and the dead, the real and the fictitious, a lover and a husband, a mother and a daughter, a teacher and a student, a saint and a sinner.The discovery of the submerged half of a paradox is not a matter of a few deductions, hints, and clues, or even about listening to voices. It is like following a willow o?wisp. Suddenly, the paradox appears beside you, as if it had been your companion all along. It becomes a third eye, a way of seeing that allows two opposites to open into a reality where there are no opposing forces, where all is one and grace is everywhere.