I have to reread Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- and I also think I want to find some way of alluding to and integrating the thought expressed in the passage I blogged a couple of years ago from Sarah Manguso's lovely The Two Kinds of Decay:
A woman rides her motorized chair up a ramp and onto a stage. Ten feet away from the podium, she parks her chair, gets up, and walks a few steps, very slowly, to accept her award.
What a sickening prop.
But people forget a woman in a chair is strong enough to walk a few steps each day and has saved this day's steps for the acceptance of her award.
Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.
I saw two young women at a lecture once, one of them in a wheelchair that looked like a piece of expensive Italian furniture. Her girlfriend sat down and said You want to do a transfer? and the girl in the chair said Yeah and maneuvered her chair next to the bank of auditorium seats, placed her hands on the arms of the first seat, and swung herself into it with her ropy upper body. Then she reached over and folded up her hot little wheelchair.
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