Though I was hot under the collar as my train pulled into King’s Cross when I finally reached the fish and chip shop where we were to meet, as if by the same alchemy that transforms scaly, slimy cod into deep-fried gold, the self-piteous rage I was feeling was replaced by magic. Excellent food and the chance to enjoy a fascinating and transformational dialogue with this mentor of mine who I hold in highest esteem fortified body, mind, and soul. Buoyed by starch and sparkling conversation I was only mildly anxious when I found out we would be walking to the venue several blocks away, at night, no less!

While I much prefer being and living in cities from the perspective of social interaction and engagement, the space and material configuration of every city in the wide array I have come to have an affinity for and even to love in my life, from New York to London, from Boston to DC, from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, had always in its full materiality filled me with a kind of trepidation. There are simply too many streams of sensation and sensory information, too many objects moving too fast, too many characteristics of terrain, topography, and traffic to track for me ever to have been comfortable moving through an urban environment under my own volition. Even as a child with both my parents standing on either side of me, under the aegis of each of their watchful gazes, knowing with unshakeable certainty that they would catch me if I fell, interpose themselves between me and any objects that might present themselves along a collision course, and be there to caution me against and correct any mistakes in my decision making, I never felt free of anxiety, merely as if that anxiety was leashed. As a result of my cortical visual impairment this has always been doubly true at night. Always true that us until this particular night.

I found myself walking through the streets of London, just a little, as if somehow the whole city had taken on the quality of a pool of water though which I could move effortlessly at manageable exertions of effort, going where I chose, when I chose, with no risk of encountering an insurmountable barrier, stumbling block, literal or figurative, or becoming lost, even despite the dark. I never felt I came close to crossing the street at the wrong time, forcing a driver to brake suddenly in order to avoid smashing me to a pulp. I never felt I might lose track of where we were going.

Tom Shakespeare, this expert in understanding the disability experience, knew, even on the basis of the pair of conversations we had had in which I described to him the nature of my spatial reasoning challenges, not to direct me using words like ‘left’ and ‘right’, which lack any stable meaning for me. Instead, all I had to do was follow the figure of his wheelchair and the blinking light of the smart drive motor that provided it power assisted functions rolling inexorably a little bit ahead of me in the distance and occasionally follow an instruction that he gave to move toward or away from some landmark or other. As we walked, he asked me continuously how I was doing, whether the journey was fatiguing me, whether I needed to rest. No doubt sensing through a variety of cues that I was exerting a meaningful amount of effort in traveling with him. I repeatedly and truthfully reassured him that I was fine, and I was.

As we traversed the city the conversation continued to sparkle. We discussed the age old crip question about exerting ourselves, expending energy, the question that some part of our minds is always whispering to us: ‘is this thing that you are doing a worthwhile expenditure of your precious energy? Should you be using it more efficiently, or to reach or achieve a more important end? When you look back at the memory of what you are doing, with hindsight, will you regret that you spent energy on this activity or in performing this activity in this way, because you won’t have that energy later to do things you would have wanted to do more? As Professor Shakespeare repeatedly checked in on me, making sure I wasn’t wasting my precious energy I thought: Toward what more meaningful, more fulfilling activity could I possibly expend energy than to walk through the streets of this most amazing of cities, talking with him, learning from him, on our way to experience an enactment of a profound epitome of beauty.

That’s when things took another unexpected turn. We had reached the venue only to find that the elevator that formed a key part of the accessible route to our seats was out of order. No bother, we would take the backup route yet, when we made our way over to route be we discover that, due to a weeknight build closure it was not viable either. We would miss the start of the performance. Tom was frustrated. I was floored. That this kind of absolutely crazy tangled accessibility logistics nonsense could happen to me even in the company of Tom Shakespeare stirred up the anger I felt on my way to London.

Eventually it became clear that neither of the accessible route to our seats were serviceable. I expected Professor Shakespeare to react emotionally with a sign of immensely frustrated rage or at the very least to hesitate. But he didn’t. He directed me to an accessible path by which we could reach a place where we would be able to speak to security at the venue. When we located it, we found the right person, explained the problem without the fairest hint of rage, rancor, or even annoyance tingeing his voice, and asked them to figure out a way that we could access our seats. As we sat in the foyer of the building waiting for a security guard on duty in the adjoining building to unlock the doors that would provide us access to it, he sighed and said, “We’ll probably miss the beginning and have to crash at intermission. But it’s ok,” he was quick to remind me, “the Emerson String Quartet will be up in Cambridge in a few days, and they’ll perform the same Shostakovich in the program they’re planning, so you’ll be able to hear it.” I couldn’t believe how calm he was.

He wasn’t manifesting any kind of passive, resigned acceptance, just a deep, well-grounded understanding of a certain set of hinges on which the social world was put together. Embodying the lessons he so clearly articulates in his work. His calm was contagious and as I reflected on the situation I told him, “You know, I think I learned more from you more than anyone to recognize that in situations like this, we aren’t being attacked, oppressed, or dehumanized. I think I learned from you the importance of properly recognizing those things in all the contexts and ways where they actually do occur, by recognizing that in situations like this, that’s not what’s happening.”

“Exactly,” he replied, “this isn’t aggression, it’s just complexity that nobody happened to have thought through yet.”

Then I heard an exchange from up the stairs that I was quite certain Tom did not hear for the simple reason that he did not blush. A security guard was speaking in hushed tones to a colleague who was about to come down and meet us. She explained that she had recognized Tom and transmitted to her colleague the absurdity of the situation, especially given this Tom’s position in society. So it was that to Tom’s astonishment, and without his lifting a finger, a guard came down to meet us and assure us both that the venue accepted full responsibility for the accessibility difficulties and that he start of the show would be held up until we had reached our seats to ensure that we would catch every second. Tom thanked the guard for his courtesy, we waited a few minutes more, and eventually arrived at our seats five minutes after the originally declared 7:30 start time of the show to find that the house lights hadn’t even been brought down.

What is there to say about the fact that the capstone of this remarkable experience was the music of Shostakovich? How perfectly fitting, as if a music and sound director with particularly discerning taste and penetrating musical insight had chosen precisely the right soundtrack element for the experience I had just had. Because Shostakovich’s musical corpus as a whole can be viewed as one vast and intricate statement about glowing luminous strings of joy in the midst of howling tumultuous torrents of agony and anguish, and of all the many pieces of that corpus I have so far listened to, I can think of none that articulate that essential idea more than his 10th String Quartet. So many people think of all Shostakovich’s work as an unending nightmare of practically meaningless atonal pretension, not recognizing how he uses techniques of atonal musical composition and structure, which, in the work of so many of his contemporaries, was unjustifiably pretentious and ultimately meaningless. In the service of using the artistic medium of music to prove that pleasure can exist in the midst of pain without any hint of masochism, that joy can erupt from the depths of suffering as naturally and organically as a cloud drifts across a clear night sky. From Tom I learned that more than anything, to be bio-divergent, to be crip, is to know what it is for things, selves, the entirety of the world, the universe, existence, reality, to be broken in wholeness and whole in the brokenness. For an amazing night I ate and talked to and learned from my hero, walking through one of the most amazing cities in the world as I had never walked before, watching him wield a kind of power of knowledge, experience, and dignity which he and I both wish to see characterize every living human being one day. And that journey and the destination of aesthetic meaning at its end taught me that lesson more thoroughly and more perfectly than I ever thought it would have been possible for life to teach it.