Year: 2011

Pamphleteering

By Angel Lemke
The week after she was sexually assaulted, my best friend tried to hand me a pamphlet for friends and family of survivors.
“Do you want this?”
“Why?”
I’m really not that big of an asshole. But she knew I’d been through survivor advocacy training a couple years before that, and we’d just been discussing friends and family who were seemingly less prepared than me. I meant, “Why? You should give it to so-and-so who doesn’t have a notebook full of sexual violence information at home” or “Why? I already know we’re both about to go through hell.” I meant, “Why? I already know what secondary trauma is.”
Sure I did. That’s why I was so busy sinking into my I-can-handle-everything act that I didn’t hear how that “Why?” must have sounded to her.
“Why? This is your problem.”
I call her my best friend, but that was the public face of it…I was in love with her…or sometimes I thought I was…my other friends all thought I was, certainly…my ex-girlfriend…I was “love addicted” to her, to use an awful if too-accurate phrase from therapy. We were certainly deeply co-dependent in ways that had already strained our connection to the almost-breaking point before the rape. I’ve blogged a lot about her over the years, and I’m still not sure how best to describe it. We were intensely connected intellectually and emotionally in ways that for a time were good for us both and at times were totally fucked up.
Would accepting that pamphlet graciously have kept us from the spiral of miscommunication and hurt feelings that erased us from each other’s present day lives within months of that moment?
Probably not.
Would reading it have kept me from a full-scale breakdown, complete with lost jobs and failing to leave the house in daylight for weeks?
Maybe, but not by much, and at the cost of much-needed clarity. I was headed that direction before she was raped. In fact, I’d had a little mini-breakdown the week before the assault, shut off my phone and hid from everyone for three days. Was it secondary trauma, after all? Maybe my failure to treat my own chronic depression and anxiety just hit the fan at an incredibly inconvenient moment in my loved one’s life.
Either way, I wasn’t ready to deal responsibly with any of it; I didn’t end up in therapy for another year and a half after that, and let’s just say it’s been slow-going.
Still, the four-year anniversary of that pamphlet moment is this month, and I can’t help wondering how differently things might have gone. The four-year anniversary of that pamphlet moment is this month, and I see so much of the last four years as a twisted path back toward the things that were right in my life in 2007.
We used to say, “It takes thirty seconds to change your whole life,” as a way of motivating each other to get moving on a task. Thirty seconds to change direction, change your mind, change your behavior. Thirty seconds to say yes instead of no. Thirty seconds to say, “You know what? Maybe I should take a look at that, after all.”
What we didn’t realize is that once those thirty seconds are gone, it takes a whole lot longer to change back.
Angel Lemke has contributed previously to POTB. She is a friend of Andrea Scarpino which is all the recommendation you will ever need.
S.K.

Testing

This might work? Trying out new blog platform. Not to waste the effort, here are some words of wisdom by my late father:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, please take my advice,
Pull down your panties and slide on the ice.”
What can I say? My father was a Finn with a Ph.D.

There is a day and time
For all this foolishness Ezra
Goll Darn Lotus eaters dangled by bankers’ strings
–those are the newsmen—for God’s sake—
Don’t ask about the poets
Our days—
As in a closed garden
Statues all broken…

S.K.

Profound thunderstorms and hail last night in Iowa City. I kept thinking the tornado sirens would go off but they didn't. Then I lay there imagining a stealth tornado. No joke. Not in Iowa. The hail was ferocious. It reminded me of that thrillingly mathematical music by Xenakis. The universe may not have intelligent design but we know it has math.

Why I Write

The photograph posted above tells its story: a man whose eyes are inchoate, splayed, "of or pertaining to" an argument. The eyes are imperfectly positioned. The man is visually impaired as they say in contemporary circles. In turn, his smile, the raised brows, attempt to remediate the primate's instinct–both the apes and the human being hold the crooked gaze in some contempt. Some days the man imagines himself at a border crossing–Ellis Island comes to mind–where he sees how he is pulled from the line and sent away from his family. He would not have been permitted to enter America. The border guard would have detested the failing eyes. Out you go!

I took this self portrait with a BlackBerry phone. I knew it would come out this way: the man who can't look you in the eye. As a writer I like to think of a lineage: Kafka had a wandering eye; Joyce was legally blind. Everyone knew those guys were fishy. Bad eyes are fishy fish eyes–incompatible with social honesty. And this matter is made worse if you also wear thick glasses. In Cambodia, under the tyranny of Pol Pot, men, women, and children with glasses were routinely exterminated–you were especially likely to die if your glasses were severely corrective. My lineage, the literary one, can't help me any more than history can. At best the literary canon suggests I'm a malcontent and a victim.

Of course literature suggests no such thing, the bad eye and a contrarian's nature in no way form a singularity. But the bad eye is a marker of loneliness, particularly in childhood, and of lonely children who become writers there are perhaps too many to count. George Orwell's essay Why I Write contains this useful assessment:

"I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life."

Isolated, undervalued, and a power of facing unpleasant facts. I've always admired Orwell's candor and precision. (His bravery also.) I too began writing as a solitary child. I continue to write as a man who can't look you in the eye. That is my compensatory practice given my physiological failure in everyday life, for make no mistake about it, strangers are troubled by the face you see above–sometimes very troubled for this is an age of globalization and the wandering eye is, as Carl Jung would say, a problem of the collective unconscious.
The bad eye is still, in the 21st century a mark of stigma. As I write these words it's still the case that rural women in Kenya who have cataracts are thought to be witches and are shunned or treated with violence. Unpleasant facts, the broken eyes…

The structural preconditions for stigma are carefully and famously articulated in Erving Goffman's classic book. It's enough to say that a damaged identity is, in relation to physical abnormality, entirely a matter of social construction. A simpler way to say this is that physical perfection frames the rules. And an even easier way to say it is that perception is, when linked with perfectionism, an easily teachable language. We have all seen Nazi comic books–or ought still to see them.

I have to say that I do not write an easily teachable language. Some years ago when my first memoir Planet of the Blind was published, a man who was serving on the board of directors of the guide dog school where I was then an administrator said to me: "I read your book. You've got a lot of verbal pyrotechnics in there." Then he walked away. The setting was a country club. We were at a fund raiser in Westchester County, New York. His message was clear. He didn't like the book! It's not an easy read. It's loaded with poetry, allusions, fragments of philosophy, and sometimes it is unflinchingly truthful about the abjection of disability, particularly in childhood. Old Bob (I'll call him Bob) didn't like my book because it made him feel dumb. The damned book has words like "heliographic" and "hypnogogic" in it. It also has the "F bomb" and a rather fine description of an LSD trip. The contemporary Hollywood game would say it's: "Tom Wolfe meets Wallace Stevens meets Ved Mehta". And that would be about right.

Old Bob didn't like me very much. He saw that I was in favor of Trotsky; knew a boat load about Sojourner Truth; probably wasn't a Yankees fan. More to the point: I was a blind man with a can full of tennis balls and a strong serve. What Bob did not wish to hear is that the world of physical difference is a place of uncivil twilight, to borrow Auden's phrase. Auden was of course referring to the moment when, as darkness falls, the homosexuals of his generation could be themselves–in the uncivil twilight each can wear his own face. Others, can, if they wish, look away. Yes, even those with crooked eyes do better at twilight. That's the way it is.

I want to be understood because I can't see you. I want to be misunderstood because I can't see you. The world has already complicated my station for me. I agree with Italo Calvino who said that literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and thought.

Blindness is not what it seems. It's not the man or woman entire. It is like having a left hand that's heavier than the right hand. It's an interesting fact. And stigma is another fact. Stigma is dated. The fact of the left hand is not. The latter is a form of intelligence.

"What matters finally is not the world's judgement of oneself but one's judgement of the world. Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America". (Gore Vidal)

One writes not to be entertaining but to put things right. And if you can be entertaining along the way, then you've put spin on your English.

This is why literature is an adult's art and not that of the lonesome child. The child gets the first taste of literary escapism. It's the man or woman who decides overtly to make judgement of the world. The adult writer decides that it's sometimes preferable, perhaps often preferable, to not be liked, at least in some circles.

I write so that you will walk in my shoes. I write because my eyes make the shop keeper nervous. I write because nervous shop keepers are funny, like those professors and ministers who don't belong in public but still must attempt it daily. I write because like George Bernard Shaw my way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.

Once, in London, in a jewelry shop, the proprietor couldn't look me in the eye–he was supremely bothered by my fractured gaze and by the sight of my white cane. I was lookin
g for a wedding ring. But in
stead asked if he had one of those nice, Italian "evil eyes" since I'd lost my own.

Be vengeful but only just so. I'd stand up for that shop owner under other circumstances. The adult's art is to know when and how you will not be liked and not to flinch.

Likening the art of the poet to that of the composer, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote:

"A language of angels! Before you mention Grace
Mind that you do not deceive yourself and others.
What comes from my evil–that only is true."

If I had grown up in Poland in the 20th century I too might have risked those lines. It is more quintessentially American to say "What comes from my goodness–that only is true." And obviously neither is true.

My crooked gaze is just a footnote to bad history if I say so.
I agree with Milosz: "What is poetry if it does not save nations or people?"

Perhaps the ars poetica is simply: Don't deceive yourself with the words on the common street.

S.K.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Moose

By Andrea Scarpino

There are many things that won’t be cured by seeing a moose by the side of the road, by sharing delicious food with friends, going to the ballet, spending hours wandering through a museum. But loneliness will definitely be eased, as will sadness, as will disappointment.

Days before Zac and I were supposed to leave for Italy, his cousin was killed in a motorcycle accident. We cancelled the trip so Zac could attend the funeral, be present with his family. A hard decision, all things considered. We had both been looking forward to the trip for months. I was going to meet Italian members of my family, was looking forward to cobblestone streets, gelato, ancient ruins and art. Was looking forward to feeling some connection with my father, who I still miss every day. Who I still dream about often. We were going to connect with dear friends in Sicily.

Instead, I watched hours of TV on Netflix and Hulu, read stupid entertainment magazines. I thought ceaselessly about loss, how it can encompass everything, can work its way into every thought, every moment. I felt more lonely than I’d felt all winter.

And then we decided we needed to try to salvage something of our planned time away, so packed our car and headed to Ann Arbor to see our dear friend Courtney. Courtney is an amazing chef and foodie, and fed us crazy delicious meals, paired our food with crazy delicious wines. We did real hot sweaty yoga in a real hot sweaty yoga class. We walked in the sunshine, bought fancy vinegars and olive oils to bring back to Marquette. My stomach hurt from laughing, hour after hour. I basked in Courtney’s presence. I began to feel my loneliness subside.

Zac and I continued to Chicago, saw the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, ate in vegetarian and Mexican restaurants, spent an entire day in the Field Museum. I didn’t pay attention to the news, barely checked my email from my phone (and for the first time in years, I hadn’t even brought my laptop with me). For a week, I felt free from the world’s constraints. I began to feel restored, piece by piece.

Then driving back to Marquette, only an hour away from home, we saw a moose eating by the side of the road. We had been listening to music, alternating choosing songs, when Zac stopped the car suddenly. As tall, at least, as our car, the moose stood quietly, seemingly unfazed by our presence. I gasped, rolled down the window. Zac turned off the radio. As it walked away into the woods, the trees made rustling sounds around it, twigs snapped under its weight. It was beautiful.

We drove the rest of the way in silence. I thought about how much better I felt than when we left. I thought about the necessity of unplugging the internet, of being outside, of connecting with friends. Of feeling disappointment, regret, sadness, but not letting it linger indefinitely. Of feeling alive in the world, feeling the joy of breaking bread with friends, of a good yoga class, summer rain. Feeling grateful for a moose, a mythical creature to a city kid like me. A moose, just standing by the side of the road eating. And we stopped a minute to admire it. And it let us. Then walked away slowly.

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

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Kuusisto Castle

The following prose is from the Finnish Board of Antiquities:

The medieval Bishop’s Castle in Kuusisto was built by Piikkiönlahti Cove as a refuge for Finnish Catholic bishops. It served as their shelter until the reformation. The castle was built, repaired, extended, and it was in use for a couple of centuries. It is a unique building in Finland and was demolished under Gustav Vasa’s order in 1528.

The National Board of Antiquities has studied and renovated the castle for over a hundred years. The research work is ongoing.

Nearby, in the Kuusisto Manor are three exhibitions which tell about the events in Bishop’s Castle, the restoration of the ruins, the history of the colonel’s residence and Kuusisto’s rich countryside.

I’ve been in mind of the old Kuusisto Castle as I go about the business of trying to sell my house in Iowa City and by turns acquire a new one in Syracuse, NY. Yesterday, in a note to a friend I joked that I could actually just live in a yurt. But of course my wife Connie would likely not want to live in a yurt and I’m not sure about my dog–she’s an optimistic dog, but she might balk at a yurt.

I swear I saw a house in Syracuse that looked like the photo above.

S.K.

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Disabled Boy's Death Not Inexplicable

From The New York Times:

ABUSED AND USED: A Disabled Boy’s Death, and a System in Disarray

A seemingly inexplicable willingness by supervisors to tolerate abuse seems to pervade institutions that house residents with developmental disabilities, a New York Times investigation shows.

http://nyti.ms/jdcj5j

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