Disability and Russian Tea

 If you’ve ever had tea in Russia, or even in the Baltic states, you know the beauty of sunlight streaming through a tall glass of amber liquid, the color itself therapeutic. It’s the color of the fortune teller’s dreamscape, the color of love under layers of winter clothing; the color of “if”. 

Long ago (at least 35 years ago) I heard the poet Robert Bly tell a room full of people in Rochester, NY, that Americans don’t understand grief. He recited the dark poems of Emily Dickinson and read aloud Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” –all as a means of suggesting that fidelity to the awareness of death was the true index of a poet’s success. There were murmured assents from the audience. 

I was only 22 that year but I knew that Bly’s observation was as old as poetry itself. Hell, I’d read “Leviathan”: life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” I thought that Bly was telling us the obvious. Even at that stage of my life I knew that owing to having a disability there were many elements of grief and of fear. As a child who was told not to speak of his disability I knew a thing or two about enforced reticence coupled with public rejection. I knew a good deal about humiliation. My adolescence had been solitary, brutish and nasty. I had been in and out of the psychiatric hospital. I had tried starving myself to death.  Had tried recreational drugs. I felt that I belonged almost nowhere. 

Bly was having us on. He thought we were all suburban TV watching children. He said something about The Beatles being too cheerful. He was saying we were all easily amused commodity fetishists. 

I wanted to say, “You have no idea about grief!” in those days I thought anyone who could see well, who could drive a car, read an ordinary book, have some kind of job–I thought anyone fitting that description had to be on easy street. Who was this poet who was telling me I was too happy? 

If you have a disability you also, very often, experience depression. I struggle, even now, as much from the latter as I do from vision loss. And accordingly, when I discovered poetry (around the very time I was in the psychiatric hospital) I found the declivities and ligaments of sorrow. I read lines by W.S. Merwin and saw how grief and gratitude work quietly and gracefully together like the parts of a bird’s wing. I read Merwin in those days as much as I could:

“back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging 
after funerals we are saying thank you 
after the news of the dead 
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you 
in a culture up to its chin in shame 
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you”

The tea in the tall glass and the dying light at the end of day are as vivid to me now as they were in my early childhood sitting with my father in a Helsinki cafe. I am the boy who puts his ruined eyes right against the cup, looking for answers there. 

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto