But the creativemind faces a complicating problem: in the act of its consciousprocesses, it may be turning to metaphoric devices that in them-selves offer many-layered paths to emotional desolation. If Miltonmust minimize his active, physical life in order to attain emotionalsecurity, the task is made more difficult through the very offering ofself as image against a series of metaphoric landscapes. Figuresmust, after all, both exist and move

the celestiallight that the Christian and blind epic poet calls upon, is the light forwhich all men must reach. The unseeing man's landscape, sad andfilled with loss, thus becomes by adumbration in the text the worldthat lies before Adam and Eve at the end of the epic, the world thatmust be the testing-place of us al

When the poet-figure has passed through this area of thought,his darkness becomes the lovely darkness of night (36-40), a scenenot of terror or of groping, but one of inspiration and creativity. In asense, he, too, achieves a paradise within him, just as the firsthumans had done (XII, 587)

He is,however, using his very weakness as a finite human being to reflectthe various morality figures and settings that have taken part and willtake part in his narrativ

The revelation of truth is dependent upon his own successful jour-ney among the levels of moral and physical being

s. God wishes John Milton, like Adam and Eve, to bedismissed "not disconsolate" (XI, 113), and the mental-spiritual polecompensates for what is lacking in the material. Simultaneously, onthe level of Milton's private emotional demands, the same system ofelements shields his awareness of blindness from the exacerbatingfocus brought by personal activity in the real, physical sphere. As thepassage develops, Milton arrives at a nexus in which act becomespossible because it has been divested of associations with an actualmaterial world that is so much a sign of his incapacitating blindness.In the realm of physical being, personal action brings pain andhumiliation; in the emotional context of the spiritual, that action isdelightful and holy. The unconscious torment threatened by physi-cal confrontation is absen

he blind artist unconsciously forces the poet andthe blind man to become separate personages

Inharmony with these processes, on the conscious theological level ofthe poet's narrative, Adam's and Eve's individual, finite acts, dis-tinctly circumscribed by time and space, will lead to infinite conse-quences

Deprivation and suffering thus become thestarting points for understanding the system of God's recompenses.They are part of a universal vision in which sin, productive ofpunishment, leads also to man's fruitful striving to achieve virtuethrough knowledge.

A blind poet imagines a morally flawed—because devoid of inner light—intellectual being, and what this flawed intellectual being s

If on one hand Satan is born—at the moment when the heavenly Lucifer ceases to be—ofblindness, God, on the other hand, is sight.

. Both ways, God needs justification, perhaps evenaccommodation in human terms. 247 That is the task Milton now sets himself, blindly assertingtogether the need for such justification on his maker’s behalf, and his own capacity to deliver it.

Forinstance, it was a “mortal” taste, that of the fruit of the forbidden tree—no wonder, then, that itbrought death into the world.

his continued meditations on visual debility even as he claims his position in the world as maker andauthor; presents Milton’s audacious and successful patterning of metrical language outside theconventions of rhyme (the better to set off deeper reverberations throughout this massive verseundertaking); and finally, offers a sense of Milton’s fraught yet essential accommodation andownership of visual disability through his poetic languag

od, Patience appears to say tothe anxious poet, does not need from man. An intense quiet and reassurance now attempts the placeof the agitation that had opened the poem. But repose, if such it is, must not be confused with rest.At the close of the sonnet, the talent so far claimed to have been lodged useless within the poet isused with stunning power. The end of the sonnet confronts readers with surprise and inevitability inequal measure: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” J

Interms of Milton’s acknowledgment of his present and wakeful absence of sight, this is an odd andaudacious near-prophecy of attaining such vision in heaven as no one alive can muster, except indreams (or, perhaps, prayer). In terms of poetic harvesting of powerful images, this is profoundlyconsidered resonance with the creative potential that Milton will later afford Adam’s dream, wherethe first man in the world sees his companion in his own “fancy my internal sight” (Paradise LostVIII.461)—and wakes to find her beside hi

his reflections on his place in the world as a poet, a maker, even amaker of worlds

us, the sheerestelimination of reason is made possible by annihilating it in the primary and originary place ofintellection and perception: the eye.I begin with this passage for two reasons. First, for its acute indication of the equationbetween the eye—and by association, the function of the eye, sight—and intellectual ability. E

Locke uses thesame rationale – that a blind man can know the color of pansies – to attack scholastic attempts todetermine species’ real essences (4.6.5). Locke also argues that blindness is analogous to impairedor inattentive senses within nondisabled bodies.

The first, and more analyzed, occursbetween thieves and innocents as the aftermath of crime threatens to blur the boundary of crimi-nality. Enraged by their victimization, innocent men become bloodthirsty, vindictive, and blind totheir own bias (Dilts 2012)

Finally, when Locke describes men living in a “fleeting state of Actionand Blindness,” he means to capture all men, not just the blind, in relationship to God’s perfectintelligence (4.16.4; 2.21.50). In this way, Locke uses blindness to symbolize men’s sharedvulnerability

Locke exploits corporeal defects such as blindness, deafness,madness, paralysis, and idiocy to help characterize common defects in human understanding.For Locke, corporeality makes all men defective in relation to God, but when these defects areso severe as to annihilate faculties of perception, men resemble lower forms of life on thegreat chain of being

human understandingderives from experience. He divides human faculties into two categories – sensation and reflection– and he uses different corporeal defects to signify human limits in both

"Who best/bear his mild yoke,they serve him best" (p. 86) attentively listens to the passage in the gospel. Jesus speaks to his followers that a blindperson did not become blind for the reason that he has committed turpitudes; however, the work of God must be madeevident in him. Patience recommends and guides against putting an issue put to God. Man's obligation to God is not tooffer Him whatever thing. God does not need anything from humans; anything people have is 'his own gifts.' Miltonagrees to take his share in life as a portion of a larger plan

According to our poet Milton, the real service is responsibility goes in accordance with the will of God, even ifit indicates that the person must 'stand and wait.' The idea is similar to Eliot's, who in his dramatic and poetic piece TheRock, states that “there is the consciousness that such a condition can be cured through involving people in the realchoice to serve the will of God rather than their own"

Line nine is the apportioning point betweenchallenge and response; this line is usually called volta or the 'turn.' In this poem or sonnet, Milton uses volta cleverlyto highlight and accentuate his personal impatience. It is his own patience he exemplifies as talking out to ‘prevent’ hisparticular impatience.

urthermore, God "gives human beings theauthority of creation, and as a result, a man should employ his creation to serve God" (

However, Milton's blindness has put out his poetic light.Milton presents two connotations of talent or aptitude as a God-given talent and skill in the normal sense and a form ofmoney in the religious story

Light is defined as the agent by whichvision becomes possible. However, light can also denote something spiritual emanating from the Heavens. The lightin heaven which God creates is certainly different from candle light. Light can mean the illumination of the soul withdivine truth or it can mean purity and holiness. Thus, light can be physical, spiritual, or both

Why this struggle, and why must Milton struggle with such awkward metaphysical categories in order simply to address properly the power of light?

Milton asks to be enlightened by a light that might be as old as the Father. This runs utterly counter to the creation account in Genesis. Could this light be one of the Father's rivals? There's a fear here that the ambition of this bid for paternal light is presumptuous, perhaps it's even satanic.

it's almost as if Milton's flight through darkness had been responsible for the literal, visual darkness that is the condition of his blindness, which he is describing now to us for the first time. It's this possibility, I think, the idea that Milton has brought his blindness on himself over the course of [laughs] the composition of the poem, which of course isn't the case -- it's this possibility that, I think, accounts for the delay in Milton's mention of his loss of sight, t

e blind prophets of the Western tradition, asking the muse of light to repay him for his fate, the fate of blindness, with fame and renown: the renown or fame enjoyed by blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides -- Maeonides is Homer -- and Tiresias and Phineus. Milton knows perfectly well that each of these figures had been blinded as some sort of punishment for a crime, at least according to most of the legends surrounding them. Each of these seers was thought to have been blinded for aspiring to an intimate knowledge of the godhead. Even as Milton is asking God to elevate him to the status of their equal and an equal to Homer, sharing an equal renown and an equal fame, he's implicitly acknowledging that terrifying possibility, and it really is terrifying, that his blindness, like theirs, is the result of his own transgression: his punishment for trespassing on divinity.But this acknowledgment -- if it is, and I think it is -- this acknowledgment of guilt

"Thee I revisit safe" -- but thou revisit'st not these eyes: it's impossible to read these lines and not feel that Milton is in some way accusing the deity of injustice. It's as if Milton were challenging the holy light to revisit Milton, just as Milton is revisiting the holy light. He structures this challenge -- it's the logic of a quid pro quo here. He's seeking compensation for his loss but the compensation that he's looking for isn't forthcoming.

its much desired, much fantasized metamorphosis into the body of an angel

This is the faithless questioning of the justice of God's creation

He projects his image of the inspired composition of the poem onto the enormous screen of the entire cosmos.

And maybe Milton here in Book Three is imagining himself the glorious recipient of this remarkable act of divine impregnation. He's no longer the vulnerable male poet whose poetic potency, just like his sight, can be cut off at whim, "from the cheerful ways of men / cut off". He's a body impregnated by God.

, the miracle by which the blind poet is compensated for his blindness with the vision of things invisible to mortal sight

?" Milton's pushing here toward a fantasy of physical invulnerability, imagining an alternative -- this is science fiction -- an alternative model of bodily configuration that would render impossible the all-too-easy quenching of the tender eyeballs.

this wish to be absolutely infused with divinity, to be so divine that he would be invulnerable to punishment or to be so divine that he would be invulnerable to the physical humiliation of blindness.

Having filled himself up with a stock of verses the night before, Milton could imagine himself as a source of spiritual and poetic nourishment. Milton could imagine himself the distinctly feminine source of this nourishing poem, as if by a process of identification so complete Milton could imagine himself in the role of the maternal muse who feeds the poet as she inspires the thoughts that move harmonious numbers. It's not the muse only but the poet, too, who can be milked

Milton has sacrificed his sight. He has lost almost everything, and so much the rather lets God repay him for that loss, what is once again his noble self-sacrifice. You have Milton reworking here the rhetoric of guilt. His blindness becomes important not because it's a sign of punishment or of blame or of spot or of blemish, but it's a guarantee of the inspirational success of the poem. This is like a promissory note, his blindness is, for his poetic reward -- the fact that this poem will have been inspired by the heavenly muse.

vulnerability Milton has everything to lose here, and for exposing himself in all of his vulnerability Milton asks for something in return. He asks to be recompensed for these extraordinary losses.

he's implicitly acknowledging that terrifying possibility, and it really is terrifying, that his blindness, like theirs, is the result of his own transgression: his punishment for trespassing on divinity

It's as if the guilt for his blindness in some impossible way lay in the composition of this very poem, as if the transgression that called down the wrath of the heavenly Father had been Milton's glorious and heroic treatment of Satan; as if it were Milton's ambitious attempt to supply the angelic prehistory to the Book of Genesis, to the creation account that we get in the Book of Genesis, that had brought this wrath upon him.

There's a remarkable identification that Milton is bringing himself very close to: an identification between Milton and Satan.

It's possible that what you have in a letter like the letter to Leonard Philaras is something like a submerged expression of guilt. Maybe Milton's enemies were right; maybe Milton was to blame with his transgressive challenges to every conceivable form of authority. Maybe Milton was to blame for his blindness, the affliction that God visited upon him for his crimes.

The physical deterioration that visits human beings after the Fall comes as a direct consequence, of course, of their transgression of divine law. It's possible that we have buried in this narrative of Milton's own physical deterioration a related narrative of a kind of transgression and punishment.

The story of Milton's blindness as he represents it brings us so perilously close to the story of the Fall, which is, of course, another narrative that imagines the inalterable and terrible effects of something eaten. One critic, William Kerrigan, in his brilliant analysis in the book The Sacred Complex has called Paradise Lost the story of an evil meal. It's important in the poem that Adam and Eve fall at noon. The forbidden fruit is their noontime meal, and it's possible that Kerrigan is right in aligning the dynamics of the loss of paradise with the logic that Milton employs in describing the loss of his sight. When Adam falls in Book Nine of Paradise Lost -- and these are the lines that are behind me on the board here -- we have a description of the almost physiological response of the earth to the sinful transgression of Adam: "Earth trembl'd from her entrails, as again / in pangs, and Nature gave a second groan." It's as if Milton has transposed on to the entire earth the digestive pains that were the consequence of his own noontime meal, as if the flatulent earth were responding sympathetically somehow to the violent shaking of Milton's own entrails.

He even goes so far in the Second Defense of the English People to claim that his blindness is actually a sign of God's election; God has chosen him, and it's an incredibly beautiful image, the image of Milton's eyes being covered by heavenly wings, by angel wings, almost as a favor. He's continually asserting publicly that his blindness is a sign of strength.

He ruined his eyesight with the tireless labor that he devoted to writing that first defense of the English people. Milton sacrificed his eyes for the freedom of his countrymen, the noble task for which he was compensated. He was compensated with the talk of all of Europe, he was a celebrity. According to this formulation, Milton has knowingly and willingly bought fame as a political liberator with the noble, sacrificial payment of his eyes.

So far from being robbed of light by God, his eyes have simply -- and isn't this a lovely metaphor -- his eyes have simply forgotten how to see. You'll remember how important, how redemptive actually, the idea of forgetting had become to Milton in Paradise Lost.

It was widely thought -- not only on the continent but also by a lot of Milton's fellow Englishmen -- it was widely thought that God himself had blinded Milton specifically for his writing against the king. Milton was the subject of a number of sermons that were delivered from the pulpits by conservative Anglican churches, and the sermons pointed to Milton as an example. Milton was an example: "Look what happens to those who lift their hand against God's anointed king. Look what happened to Milton. He was punished with blindness for writing his defense of the regicide."

I am convinced that one of the most powerful determinants in Milton's late writings is Milton's drive to ascertain and then also to justify the cause of his loss of sight.

‘We are creatures that fear difference. The fact that the other is not as we aremeans that there may be something wrong with us. The only solution is to make them asmuch like us as possible or to make them live apart’

As a god, the disabled subject is incapable of being viewedas a part of human society, and will inevitably fail to live up to the extraordinarily highexpectations set -- due to the fact that they are not actually a god. As a beast, the disabledsubject is still incapable of being a full member of human society, but has no autonomyto create the world in which they want to liv

But Milton will not allow disbelief to go unchallenged: his structures and narratives are not rooted in individual faith but in universal belief. The question of revealed truth raises its head as in no other poet in the language.

. In its progress on the level of deliberate, consciousliterary purpose, the poet-figure has provided the final unconsciousdenial of autobiographical fact in order to make emotional lifesupportabl

asons and time ofday, floral beauty, darkness and human loneliness - all become, inMilton's evocation of them, an implicit diminution of the figure asfigure, a fusing of the autobiographical details of the landscape ofdeprivation with the unconscious need to avoid facing the relation-ship between the suffering figure and the suffered loss. Substitutionmust be found, and it is discovered by making the blindness take onthe role, not of bodily impairm

he deepest need of man to feelintact is satisfied: the realms of both classical and Hebraeo-Christianlearning; the pinpointing in nocturnal time and beauty of the figure'sprobings and labors; the delicate, increasingly dance-like, ritualisti-cally distracting gestures contained in the responsive motions ofboth figure and its landscape ("wander" and "haunt,">"wash"-"flow" and "I visit"); the relief-filled loss of self as focalpoint in the figures of th

Milton seems to wish the eyes to become another character, incapa-ble of hurting the poet because unconsciously they have been madeto be no part of him as he is contained in the poet-figure. Thematerial of the stripped, horrible image, included artistically be-cause it is needed to give a fusing concreteness to the envelopingimage of light, is thus rendered weaker as an enemy to emotionalpeac

uncon-scious journey of Milton himself must be kept away from the ulti-mate, psychologically real confrontation of that figure as not intact,as impaired in the full role of man. T

the act of its consciousprocesses, it may be turning to metaphoric devices that in them-selves offer many-layered paths to emotional desolation. If

Earlier we saw the pattern of substitutions evolving from thenecessity for protecting the mind from the anguish that might result,were the concepts of blindness joined clearly to the poet's active,physically undeniable being. T

For whatever the individual factors in individual lives,whatever the place of one's particular confrontation, the celestiallight that the Christian and blind epic poet calls upon, is the light forwhich all men must reach. The unseeing man's landscape, sad andfilled with loss, thus becomes by adumbration in the text the worldthat lies before Adam and Eve at the end of the epic, the world thatmust be the testing-place of us a

has progressed to thispoint from the hell- and chaos-like darkness of his blindness, ofcourse. In this way we are led to grasp the answering relationshipsMilton is bringing to bear on our perceptions: it is in the Edenicscene of learning, especially that of direct revelation, that the poet-figure must move in order to find the answer to his needs, just asancient figures had used the interior life for high purpose - and, byextension, just as Adam and Eve were intended to understand andcope with evil attacks by being part of a justly, hierarchically createdscene. When the poet-figure has passed through this area of thought,his darkness becomes the lovely darkness of night (36-40), a scenenot of terror or of groping, but one of inspiration and creativity. In asense, he, too, achieves a paradise within him, just as the firsthumans had done (XII

We glimpse this artistic use of the poet as figure when we observethat he shares with Adam and Eve, not only the deprivation and painconsequent upon original sin, but also their mutability of spirit andpoint of view. It is a quality that differentiates the first human pairand their poetic father from the suprahuman agencies of good andevil, the latter groups being figures who tend to be relatively static intheir moral coloration.

The revelation of truth is dependent upon his own successful jour-ney among the levels of moral and physical being. F

The examples are legion, but one may mention the almostetching focus on Abdiel, as his purity is given life by his solitary,motion-filled rejection of Satan (VI, 903-07), and of Satan, as hiscrippling evil is emphasized by the way in which Milton takes painsto keep him isolated, as figure, from the joyously good surroundingsof Paradise and even the morally neutral frame of chaos

n the level of conscious literary andintellectual purpose, the images are made to serve the greater imageof God's system of justice tempered by mercy, with Milton himselfbeing proof both of the loss of bliss and the attainment of otherhappiness. God wishes John Milton, like Adam and Eve, to bedismissed "not disconsolate" (XI, 113), and the mental-spiritual polecompensates for what is lacking in the material. Simultaneously, onthe level of Milton's private emotional demands, the same system ofelements shields his awareness of blindness from the exacerbatingfocus brought by personal activity in the real, physical sphere. As thepassage develops, Milton arrives at a nexus in which act becomespossible because it has been divested of associations with an actualmaterial world that is so much a sign of his incapacitating blindness.In the realm of physical being, personal action brings pain andhumiliation; in the emotional context of the spiritual, that action isdelightful and holy. The unconscious torment threatened by physi-cal confrontation is absent

. He becomes a fact of nature that isacted upon or ignored by the movement of physical time andseasons. Evening and morning, light and dark, sight and blindness,isolation and companionship - the great structure of polarities thatoperates so vitally on the conscious level of epic creation, is thus alsopart of the urgent quest for separation of the emotional self from sadautobiographical fact

The passage thus intensifies the thematic patterns of the poem byreflecting them in its careful ordering of emotional responses.Milton's personal suffering and the areas of compensation interact.In doing so, they figure forth the ultimate generosity and mercy ofGod

Deprivation and suffering thus become thestarting points for understanding the system of God's recompenses.They are part of a universal vision in which sin, productive ofpunishment, leads also to man's fruitful striving to achieve virtuethrough knowledge.

The earlier, persisting model ‘in which deformity reflects inner vice or divine judgment’ was beginning to coexist alongside a new one ‘in which disability is seen as moral virtue’ (69). ‘In effect, disfigurement and disability become a positive virtue, particularly in women, children, the elderly, that signals spiritual and moral dignity achieved through suffering’ (69). This, Davis posits, is the beginning of what will become ‘the familiar narrative trope of disability – the triumph over adversity’ (64).

the long eighteenth century occupies a position between the early modern period in which ‘miracles and prodigies were imagined to be at once part of the natural order and divine signs from God’ and the subsequent one in which miraculous event underwent redefinition as natural fact (6)

r God to exact day-Labor from man were He todeny the necessary light would be unjust under any definition

The moral realist can claim,contra Street, that we have the ability for rational, autonomous moral evaluations that arenot merely the brute consequences of evolutionary impulses.

reet’s argumentis simply that our basic powers of reasoning are likewise influenced by evolution, and so,since these powers and faculties are the basis of our moral beliefs, then the evolutionarycontamination is present in our moral beliefs too.11

We are disturbed if and to theextent that we are led to believe that our values depend fundamentally oncontingencies of our evolutionary history: other evolved moral systems woulddisagree with our own if applied to the same question and this disagreement wouldnot be traceable to differences in relevant beliefs about non-moral questions and/orfailures of epistemic rationality

truein an absolute and universal sense

It is true to the extent that it is useful

Nature432-itself will force mankind back to particularities as the only true ve-hicles of unity

of whatmendoproceedsby wayof an accountofwhatmovesthemto do what they do

he full and consciousintention to follow the wrong direc-tion. The superior force of truth-of Nature, as it were-is at workmysteriouslybehind his consciousness,guiding his pen, without car-ing in the least whether the happy artist himself wanted to do theright thing or not.

For Schopenhauer, the highest function of art wasas a means of escaping the turbulence of the will and attaining a calm,contemplative awareness of the unchanging world of ideas

"thetheory of harmony presents itself to me as a purely spiritual universe,a system of ideally moving forces, born of Nature or of art"

elt by every experienced ear, and the organiccompleteness and logic, or the absurdity and unnaturalness of agroup of sounds, are intuitivelyknown

self-locatingrelativism is overly egocentric, while retaining the link that desire provided to motivation(via the affective component of approval).

So when I judge that keeping promisesis morally right, I am saying that I approve of keeping promises.

Darwall writes:“Ethical thought and feeling have ‘objective purport.’ From the inside, they apparentlyaspire to truth or correctness and presuppose that there is something of which they can betrue or false... something objective and independent of the perceiver (e.g., someobjective fact or an objective property of some substance)” (1998: 25, 239).

expressions of emotion, I would be inclined to suggest that these statements still have meaning, as they are part of our daily lives,

‘meaning’ is completely made up by society and tradition

Yet this tremendous resilience of the aged bodies envisioned throughoutserves provocatively to foreground the physical, psychological, and (aboveall) social apprehensions that cluster around the figure of the elder.

Queen Margaret, for example, anatomizes Richard's body in distinctly bestial terms, suggesting both an affinity between his monstrous body and non-human creatures and a symptomatic reading of his bodily inferiority. S

"Withal, I did infer your lineaments, / Being the right idea of your father, / Both in your form and nobleness of mind' (3.7.12-14).

By the third act of the play, Richard has so successfully shifted the focus of political sovereignty that Buckingham is able to plead his cause to the people of the realm without a single reference to the body Richard so displayed in the first act.

Richard again draws attention to his body, telling his audience what to see and, crucially, what the sight should mean: "Then be your eyes the witness of their evil / Look how I am bewitched! Behold mine arm / Is like a blasted sapling withered up" (3.4.67-69). Using his arm as proof, Richard marshals the visible resources of his body for his pursuit of power. The shift of focus from Richard's body as somatic index of anomaly to proof of victimization in political service externalizes the destructive power of the rhetoric of deformity.10 The moment that relies on signification of the most explicitly revealed body is also the moment in which Richard's power is revealed most starkly. By this point in the play, it hardly matters whether Richard's arm is "withered" in exactly the way he has described or whether it has been deformed from the beginning. Richard has been telling his audience what to see in his body throughout, and he possesses such political power that they have no recourse but to accept his description of reality.

Foregrounding his body as proof of his inability to lie, he proceeds to disentangle himself from the web of familial and social obligations for political expediency. Richard re-directs the focus to his misshapen body, which is to signify congruence between his person and his appearance; his deformity here "speaks" truth since it prevents him from fashioning himself. This unity of self is linked to a denial of kingship and a xenophobic character: his truth-telling body displays a lack of affinity for both the court ("apish courtesy") and its un-English associations ("French nods"). Although the audience of the play is well aware of Richard's plans and his ability to perform, his speech to the nobles here calls attention to his body as an explicit claim about both his bodily distinctiveness and the resulting integrity he wants to imply.

Richard describes himself as corporeally motivated to break the bounds of decorum in order to speak the truth. In direct opposition to his initial boast about his ability to dissemble, Richard claims that his body prevents him from mustering social graces

Richard's successful wooing only increases his confidence that he can employ his body to distract from the logic of his actions; in fact, he imagines his capacity to adorn himself and fit the social image of the "proper man" that he previously denied. Turning to accoutrements to emphasize the now-"marv'lous" body whose only descant was deformity, Richard enacts the possibilities of clothing to accent his fitness for public view.

he has used his "foul" form to overcome her, for she consents to marry him: "And I no friends to back my suit withal / But the plain devil and dissembling looks — / And yet to win her, all the world to nothing? Ha!" (1.2.223-5). His glee here at her acquiescence emphasizes how his capacity to perform makes up for his social lack and past actions. The soliloquy that follows turns again to his body to relish how his rhetorical skill can compensate for his form to the extent that Anne would accept him:

Richard has already been politically active by the play's beginning, working on his own time.

Because he cannot alter his physical state, he has no alternative but to play out the moral logic of his body and because of his deformity, he must reject his social community. His rhetoric of time creates the impression of lack of agency over political power, historical turbulence, and his own body, and directs attention to his limitations and impotence.

He casts his physical body too as a result of time, arguing that nature has been too brief in forming him and suggesting the inevitability of his bodily lack. In fact, this bodily difference seems to exclude him from joining the present social time:

His rhetoric emphasizes or diminishes his physical distinctiveness according to how usefully his body can be displayed.

Although Richard's body appears singularly deficient among the other characters in the play, he relies upon the multiple significations of his deformities as a technology of performance to aid his bid for power, not impede i

By paying attention to the embodiedness that staging disability requires, interpretations of Lear can move beyond explicating the ableist metaphor of Gloucester's blindness or the specist metaphor of madness to privileging disability as the vehicle for the play's exploration of embodied knowledge and empathy

The ultimate sign of this empathic positioning comes at the play's proper end when the audience finally howls back. With the help of their good hands and gentle breath, audiences will make their own vocables, in the form of shouts and applause. No longer men of stones, these nonsensical utterances, like Lear's howling, will reverberate through the Globe and make "the heaven's vault … crack." Tellingly, too, the last sounds audiences hear are themselves, sounds that once again tether theatrical bodies together

Lear's maddening uncertainty over Cordelia's vital state is also the audience's.

Stony silence—not his bestial utterance—is the irrational, inhuman(e) response to death. Crucially, the audience passively shares in the stony silence that Lear hears and rebukes, and his casting of them as inhuman—"men of stones"—demonstrates that he can lear back.

diences are called upon to "fix" characters in the category of disabled and "mad" by looking with their ears.

If the cliff scene replicates an experience of blindness in the audience by positioning them as not "seeing" what is "there," the scene equally replicates an experience of deafness, as the audience also cannot hear the cliff scene. Each of Edgar's descriptions pair visual and aural components: the murmuring surge and the shrill-gorged lark "[c]annot be seen or heard" (4.6.73, emphasis added).

When we look with our ears, what do we hear?

When a hearer hears these differences and dominatingly "'fixes a person in gender, race, disability, class, or sexuality systems [a]s an attempt to control the other" (Garland-Thomson Staring 43), they objectify and marginalize the hearees. 46 It is in these moments that hearers do audible leering, or what I call "learing."

When Lear enters carrying the presumably dead Cordelia at the end of the play, his cry of "Howl howl howl!" (5.3.308)

Edgar's madness, while characters repeatedly reference his nakedness, they refer to his vocality even more.

Lear signals madness is through animality

it does not, to return to Mitchell and Snyder, ignore the impairment's "social and political dimensions" (48). Rather, through dramatic prosthesis, the cliff scene serves as a fulcrum in the play's exploration of empathy through the embodied knowledge characters and audiences receive

A starer who has experienced mental illness may stare at Edgar and Lear differently than one who has not.

Similarly, while a character is, to a large extent, constrained within the narrative it enacts, a live, embodied character certainly has more opportunity to "stare back" on the stage than on the page.

"defined not by bodily authenticity but by bodily knowledge" ("'Known and Feeling Sorrows'" 166), I argue that staging Gloucester's blindness positions the audience to gain embodied knowledge not because they themselves are blind but because they are, to return to the phrase, "with and near disability, thinking through disabled sensations and situations"

her character nonetheless still embodies and displays the physical, material experiences of her impairment every moment she is on stage.

Dearer than eyesight, space space andand liberty liberty,

See better, Lear, and let me still remain169 160The true blankblank of thine eye

There’s no such thing as false hopes, but what I know deep in my heart is that we cannot bring about change unless we are unified, unless we do it together.

That is the effort, the determination that can transform blind optimism into hope.

He led with words, but he also led with deeds.

continue to allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of an attack as a way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together in a common effort.

all of that distracts us from the common challenges that we face, war and poverty, inequality and injustice. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing each other down.

We are told that those who differ from us on a few things, differ from us on all things, that our problems are the fault of those who don’t think like us or look like us or come from where we do. T

l too often, we seek to ignore the profound structural and institutional barriers that stand in the way of insuring opportunity for all of our children, or decent jobs for all of our people, or health care for those who are sick. We offer unity, but we are not willing to pay the price that's required

n this way, a hijackedexperience could be formed by a poor inference that fails to give proper weightto the texture-experience

cannot say that we did not know the consequences

food, water, shelter, education, healthcare – are public goods, that should be provided by the state as part of a basic threshold of decent human existence; then it is the State which we should entrust to provide those goods in the developing world.

while the roots of inequality are complex, they are also the result of choices we have made.  It is not beyond us to reverse those choices.

re-establish a countervailing balance of power in a world where the power of the market has exceeded the power of our political institutions.

The question of political stability is linked to that of resilience to natural disaster. The strength of the social contract between a State and its citizens, has a direct bearing on the severity of the disasters experienced by its inhabitants. In situations of conflict, where the social contract breaks down, the impact of natural disasters - or of pre-existing natural hazards which under normal circumstances may not trigger a disaster - is amplified and that society’s vulnerabilities are exposed

largest part of that global improvement took occurred in a small number of stronger performing countries – notably China, and also Brazil

will be at their best when what is a global, universal challenge is knitted to local wisdom and imagination

there is a real problem when aid agencies and the NGO sector, a sector that often is excessively dependent on funding from foundations, often have to construct their policies and practices under the influence of, or certainly taking into account, the strategic interests of multi-national corporations that are not accountable. Philanthropy has a part to play in achieving food security, but it will not and cannot supplant the role of government.  Philanthropy too must defend its integrity by declaring its mechanisms of accountability and practice.

It is worth repeating that the role of the State must be the lead role.  Ideally this should be in co-operation with regional and now global initiatives.

enri IV’s first building project was the enlargement of the royal palace, the Louvre. It was an expensive undertaking, initiated within months of the king’s entry into Paris at a time when the royal coffers were depleted. Yet the project’s political value was far from negligible. Construction was intended to stimulate the local building economy, putting masons and carpenters, quarriers and woodsellers, bargees and laborers back to work after the impoverishment of war. The project was hard evidence of Henri IV’s intention to live in Paris, promising the city a new era of royal beneficence. It also symbolized monarchical continuity, with the Bourbon king following his Valois predecessors in making the Louvre the royal residence.

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