Month: July 2009

By Andrea Scarpino

West Coast Bureau Chief POTB

 

The hills. Dear god. Hill after hill, steep and long. Head down. Forward lean.

Water stations. My stomach starts to cramp. I try the carbohydrate water, swish the sweet yellow drink around my mouth, hope for the best.

David Paterson, a runner, the first African American Governor of New York, and legally blind. My stomach on fire and the hills burning my legs, I think about Paterson running with a guide, as well as guiding others as they run. Sometimes we follow. Sometimes we lead.

The tattoo I will get after the race. My dad, how he always told me to “run like hell” if anything bad happened. How I’m taking his advice literally. The sky. Ocean mist clearing from the streets as the sun rises. The ocean visible when we finally reach the top of a hill, start running to the sea.

Lunch, all the food I’m going to eat, cheesecake, ice cream. Barack Obama. Health care. My stride. My breath. My feet. Zac running next to me. The man banging a tinny drum on the sidelines. Answers to trivia questions posted along the route. The sun. Sunscreen. I count backwards from ten. Three miles left. The sun is beginning to break through the mist. A man passes me talking on the phone to his friend. I count backwards in French.

One mile left. We’re walking, Zac and I, my stomach cramps slowing us both down. A woman on the sidelines makes eye contact. “You can do it,” she says. “Finish strong.” What cheesy advice. And yet, I begin to run again. The Finish Line. I count each breath, count as each foot strikes the ground. I pick up my pace, run over the sensors on the ground. Relief. I can feel my legs shake. Water. Water, now.

 

Andrea Scarpino lives in Los Angeles and is a poet and activist running for a better world. You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

Does the line above “mean” anything? What could John Lennon have been trying to say? Is that a real cornflake? Is the van a reference to the loony bin? If so, then are we to presume that sitting on bits of breakfast cereal will help ease the time you must wait in order to be incarcerated?

This is the kind of nonsense that today’s middle aged Baby Boomers were contemplating when they were 14. No one can tell me that compulsive cell phone texting is any worse. I just can’t buy the “end of civilization” crowd’s endless disparagement of the young. Gibberish can’t hurt you. God knows it might even be good for the limbic systems. Let us have more gibberish. It beats listening to propaganda from the insurance industry or the military industrial fetishists.

Meanwhile the dead, my own personal dead, are waiting for their bread to rise on the blue plates of the afterlife. They wave their remnant jewelry in the broken light of heaven. Nothing has to mean anything out there. There beyond where the sky does its notational work.      

 

S.K.

He was the old Oscar Wilde, exophthalmic, looking too thin. He told me that a conspiracy of gentlemen pedarists  had ruined him. “The trick,” he said, “is to reshape the shield of irony into a plough–Whitman told me this.”  

It is marvelous to have the unconscious as a field.

Day comes. The sublime notations of sleep are half erased. I can’t remember what else Mr. Wilde had to say. I remember there was a small house beside a ruined orchard.

I assume the dream continues outside the waking man. Small, black, 19th century sheep are eating the windfall apples. Wilde stares at the fast moving clouds.

 

S.K. 

Duende and Banzai go out on a spree.

Plum brandy for everyone!

Lorca’s ghost falls from its horse.

& here comes Basho disguised as a thousand crickets…

 

S.K.

The toilet pictured below is made by Gerber and its identical to the mysterious toilet I wrote about earlier this morning. The toilet boys came twice today and after installing a new tank they discovered that indeed my toilet looks pink in our upstairs bathroom because of the lighting . Yep. We hauled the various parts into the adjacent room where amazingly enough the toilet parts looked nice and white. But when they are installed in our guest bathroom they turn pinkish like the nightgowns in a Wallace Stevens poem. The toilet boys were quite surprised. They have installed billions and billions of crappers and never before have they encountered this kind of optical anomaly. Meanwhile, in the spirit of fairness I must opine that the toilet boys are blameless. They did not in fact install a pink toity as a means of cutting corners with a blind customer. The damned thing is white in any other room but the bathroom. I have read countless essays on aesthetics. This is clearly a neo-Platonic puzzle. Does the “ideal” toilet change its color in accordance with the light or does it always look the same? Is a pink toilet lighter to carry than a white one? I forgot to ask the toilet boys about this. And of course the moral of this tale is don’t buy a house.  

 

S.K.

 

In the swimming pool I see my city with my arms out, head to the side…

Friend, you can’t confound me with your architectures.

When I’m under water Proteus swims just behind…

All our lives we had to imagine what was before us:

Borges once saw in Buenos Aries cuneiform doors; houses of onyx with slim windows…

This city is festive as a prayer drum; clean as a votive dish.

Lap 10 I see retractile fingers of light.

I kid you not: cities are opaque as illuminated pages.

& some days there are no true cities on dry land. 

 

S.K.

The poet Gary Snyder is fond of a Zen Buddhist axiom: “When chopping wood for an axe handle, the model is not far off.” I’ve probably misquoted this slightly. I’m typing from a hotel room in Washington, DC and my connection is going to run out soon and I don’t have time to look this up. When we do anything that proposes the future the perfect model is there before us if we really look. As a person with a disability this is a hard principle to keep in mind. Where is the perfect model that I might see “before me” as I cut my wood for the still abstract axe handle?

Another way to strike this note is that cutting the raw wood is so much more complicated for people with disabilities. I have spent the past two and a half days at the Kennedy Center for the Arts at the invitation of the National Endowment for the Arts as part of a large working group of artists with disabilities from across the U.S. Our goal was to think about how to help promote careers in the arts for people with disabilities–how can we richly include pwds in our nation’s cultural life? What will the next ten years bring? What are the obstacles to disability inclusion? What are the creative solutions? How can government agencies help?

I felt graced to be among so many talented artists with disabilities. And yes, I felt graced to be among so many folks from federal agencies who might or might not have disabilities but who clearly understand the cultural importance and the economic goals that are behind this creative wood chopping.

We listened and talked and held working groups. We worked hard. We talked about young people and older people.

And then I went outside.

“Outside” is still a complex and ominous affair.

A cab driver pulled up in front of the Kennedy Center and he didn’t want my guide dog in his taxi.

Outside my hotel there’s a patch of grass. I was relieving my dog there when a security guard told me to get lost–that this was federal grass and I couldn’t have my dog there.

Of course I told him to identify himself; told him to get his supervisor; etc. And ultimately the supervisor apologized.

The point is that my woodpile is harder to chop than the non-disabled person’s pile. And as I chop like hell, sweat beading on my forehead, my veins standing out, muttering an old Finnish folk song to myself (as I often do) its easy to forget or lose sight of the perfect thing you are trying to make. Arguing with a security  guard about the federal grass I could be distracted from the perfect things we are trying to make. Prior to the grass man’s appearance I was having a thought about young people and poetry. 

The Finnish poet Jarkko Laine once wrote:

How sad! Everything!

And how cheap to say it out loud!

 

I like those lines for their wit. I carry Gary Snyder’s lines for their evident long range wisdom.

Meantime I’m dedicating this little blog post to the federal grass man because I think he might have an invisible disability. I can’t prove it. But I’ll bet he hasn’t been encouraged much. Encouragement is the big D issue in Democracy.

 

S.K.  

 

I have read and reread the stories concerning the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University. By now surely everyone in the United States who gives a tinker’s damn about civil rights is aware that Professor Gates was arrested by a Boston police officer after being interrogated inside his own home, and solely because a neighbor saw Professor Gates struggling to get into his house. The neighbor reported a potential break in. What’s clear about the matter is that Dr. Gates answered the cop’s basic questions: he had identification and could prove that he lived in the house. The police officer arrested Dr. Gates because frankly Gates was angry and because he accused the cop of engaging in racist tactics.

I’ve grown to feel that the story suggests something about the state of civil rights in contemporary America that is seldom overtly described but which I think is clearly at the root of this matter. You may call my perspective a “disability studies” view if you like. My sense is that this is not a 1960’s classic African-American civil rights matter–a bald and dreadful story of racial intolerance and bigotry–instead this incident is essentially “post-racial” and by turns it has everything to do with a new kind of American hostility to erratic public emotion. You see I think its a mistake to call this a story that’s solely about race. Dr. Gates lost his temper because he was being accosted in his own house and that was indeed a form of racial profiling. He was justified in losing his cool. But what got him arrested was his evident emotional state–that fight or flee condition that Daniel Goleman has called “a neurological highjacking”. In short, Dr. Gates was arrested because he was demonstrating human emotion.

I said above that this is a disability studies perspective. We read nowadays over and over again of teens with developmental disabilities being tasered by police; of elementary school children being restrained by teachers; of orderlies in group homes watching and even abetting fights between developmentally disabled men. The tales are legion and they speak to a broad and ungoverned intolerance and disdain for the excited and turbulent emotions of human beings who have been treated poorly by authority figures.

I think the same cop who wrongly arrested Henry Gates would also wrongly arrest a developmentally disabled kid who was having trouble processing too much information at the local 7-11.

The problem is with our police forces which have very limited training in how to employ emotional intelligence. This matters because a diverse society is a more complex and surprising society than your average American cop is willing or able to suppose.

 

S.K.

 

We at Planet of the Blind just received the following excerpt from Fox News.

 

Franken Looks to Increase Number of Service Dogs for Veterans in First Legislation

Franken wrote in an opinion published Monday in the Star Tribune that his proposed pilot program will train “a statistically significant number of dogs” for veterans living with devastating injuries sustained on the battlefield.

FOXNews.com

Monday, July 20, 2009

In his first piece of legislation as Minnesota’s junior senator, Al Franken is looking to expand the number of service dogs available to wounded veterans.

Franken wrote in an opinion published Monday in the Star Tribune that his proposed pilot program will train “a statistically significant number of dogs” to measure the benefits to veterans living with devastating injuries sustained on the battlefield. 

The dogs’ companionship, Franken said, provides invaluable health benefits — both physical and emotional — to veterans suffering from debilitating injuries and psychological disorders. The service dogs will help “reduce the suicide rate among veterans, decrease the number of hospitalizations, and lower the cost of medications and human care,” he said.

Franken’s legislation was inspired by a meeting he had last January with a wounded former Iraqi intelligence officer and his golden retriever, “Tuesday.”

“Service dogs like Tuesday can be of immense benefit to vets suffering from physical and emotional wounds,” wrote Franken.

Franken said service dogs typically cost about $20,000 to train and another $5,000 to place with a veteran — a cost that is well worth the investment, he said.

“It is my strong belief that a service dog will more than pay for itself over its life, and my bill is designed to determine the return on investment with a pilot program that provides service dogs to hundreds of veterans,” said Franken.

Click here to read more on this story from the Star Tribune.