There is perhaps a moral law within us, but nothing like the wind out there
and I mean nothing. I stood in a shadow at sunrise
a darkness on my wrist joints, knuckles, open palms
the evening’s chill all around. There is not much
between a person and the wind. We walk with a song on our lips
and one sound overtakes another what with the breeze.
For a helpless moment I thought I was the world.
“Poetry is an artful plagiarism sometimes, where odd combinations of words influence our language and heightens our experience.” – Stephen Kuusisto
Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com
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July. The houses shrug into themselves
Getting ready. Light and haze in the morning.
The roads are pure and simple.
I find a box of screws, something
From my father, now a factor of language.
He could not mend things, my father.
Along with coffee and the newspaper
I find Mahler on the radio.
Mahler who said: “I beat and pound for the dead.”
I have been trying to think of a way to express a thing both delicate and oddly idealistic. Maybe the sleeper in me would say there’s a dark star in my wrist. And what’s so idealistic about that? Oh I don’t know, something of the universal occurs inside our most fragile spots. There’s a little spark of immanence behind your left ear. I need something both to discover and love about the most customary things. Take a key and turn it in the lock of the green leaf and enter the old city of the trees.
So that’s my state today. I bent down on the lawn this morning and a gray winged grasshopper walked like a stately old man between the roots of the catalpa tree. I entered my house feeling a kind of vertiginous loneliness for which there is no solution. And that’s the way this day has been. And as the Swedish poet Lars Forssell would say: Tend it/guard it/The life-flame, the fire of hope.
“Poetry is an artful plagiarism sometimes, where odd combinations of words influence our language and heightens our experience.” – Stephen Kuusisto
Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com
Stop-and-go traffic: smoke rose from the hood of the car, pouring into the open windows every time the car moved forward a few feet, then gathering again under the hood when the car stood still. The occupants must have known the car was on fire—the passenger fanned herself with a magazine when the smoke overwhelmed, and the smoke was thickly white, impossible to ignore—but they drove on stoically, enveloped in smoke, intermittently shooing it out the window.
So American, I thought, to continue driving even as our vehicle burns, to pretend not to notice the smell of smoke and engine and burning oil. Maybe also, so human, to try to make the best of even the most terrible situation—or if the best can’t be made, to at least pretend like nothing is going wrong, whistling over the sputtering engine, fanning smoke from our face.
After my father died, a dear friend said of his bedroom, filled with breathing machine and tracheotomy cleaning equipment, rehabilitation devices, medication, “This looks like the room of someone who’s been sick for a long time.” And in the obituary, my step-mother chose the words, “after a long illness.” I was utterly surprised by both statements. I understood my father wasn’t as strong as he once was, I had made a plethora of hospital visits at all hours of the day and night, had driven the two hour stretch between Columbus and Cincinnati dozens of times because of new health crises. But I still didn’t truly understand my father as ill, as dying. Living with disability, yes, growing older, yes. Not dying. I fanned myself with a magazine when the smoke got into my eyes.
And that’s just one example—I’ve averted my attention as relationships clearly deteriorated, breathed great billows of smoke in ill-fitting work environments, refused to admit even to myself how badly I’ve felt physically. It can be healthy, of course, to carry on, to focus, not on the smoke, but on the sunny day, on the way the sun illuminates the smokiness. But there’s a limit, too—isn’t there?—on how much we should stay the course when it’s clear the course is actively combusting all around us. And I’ve also been on the other end, becoming consumed by things over which I have very little control, screaming bloody murder about the smoke all around us, ridiculously stressed over political elections, global warming, people I’ll never even meet.
So what I’m trying to figure out these days is how to live clearly attuned to the smoke—not in ignorance or avoidance—but also well, also happily. To acknowledge that the car is on fire, to actively work to put out the flames, but not to let that knowledge consume my every waking thought—and my every sleeping dream. To be fully aware—and to live the best life I can anyway.
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
Carl Jung
I remember the day like it was yesterday. I’m talking forty years ago when I was 17. My parents put me in a psychiatric hospital in Rochester, New York because I was literally wasting away. Our family’s good natured doctor, a general practitioner, had no idea what was wrong with me. He was a good guy whose name happened to be James Taylor which I thought was rather amusing, like your family physician could be named Frank Zappa or Duke Ellington.
I had given up eating that year. It turned out I was good at this. If I was blind in school and the target of pranks by kids or even some cruelty from teachers, well hell, I could demonstrate complete proficiency at my own disappearance. I was into the “ars moriendi”–the holy art of dying and it’s no accident I knew the term, for George Harrison had released a song called the “Art of Dying” and I listened to it repeatedly. I was drinking one up of milk a day.
Outside my head the world went on being insistent and tangled, a place of blood and feathers. My mother was a serious alcoholic who also took a myriad of pain killers, a combo that often produced violent and psychotic effects. She would break furniture, fall down flights of stairs, throw dishes and glassware at my sister and I, or lash out with her feet, kicking like a horse. In such circumstances there is no domestic life, no evening dinner with the family, no conversation to speak of. My father, a college president, lived in his own world of denial. He had plenty of work to do. The war in Viet Nam was still happening, there were protests, Kent State was in the news. Life in the house and life outside the house balanced in a seething electrolysis of panic. None of the adults in my circle appeared happy. And as a teenager with a disability I had no kinship except pot smoking with the other unaffiliated and sad kids who would let me into their circus tent. Those were the years when everyone felt like the world left to a free thinker was just a carnival sideshow tent. We smoked pot under an elevated highway: monkey boy, banana girl, bearded lady, stilt man, dog face.
After getting stoned under a bridge or behind a tomb in the cemetery I’d go home, hoping my parents were in bed. My mother was a night drinker and there was never any guarantee she’d be asleep. I had a system: I’d enter the house through a door in the basement, creep up the stairs, and listen for any signs of activity. Sometimes I’d be “outed” by our Siamese cat who heard me despite my efforts to achieve total silence. If my mother was awake she’d have those crazy eyes and the staggers. She would also be projectively paranoid, imagining that I’d been doing something demoniacal. Her rages weren’t reality based and could be dangerous. One night she stalked my younger sister with a knife. My sister and the cat hid in a locked bathroom while my mother, still holding the knife, begged her to come out.
I’ve written about this time in my life once before in my memoir “Planet of the Blind” and still, today, on the 4th of July, I’m flooded with a remembrance. Outside the window of my hospital room at the psychiatric facility was a flagpole. Boy scouts would come and raise and lower the flag.
I could just make them out with my dim vision: perfect lads, Norman Rockwell boys folding the flag like the honor guard at President Kennedy’s grave. And there I was on the nut house, all of 98 pounds, my spectacles thick as dishes, my body so cold I had to sleep under an electric blanket set to the highest temperature. I was the final thing in the sideshow: a blind, stick boy, fit only to be locked away. Not a boy scout.
I have to tell you: to this very day the 4th of July gives me the creeps. As Charles Bukowski might say: it’s a day for amateur drunks. But it’s also a day of excessive boy scouting, a role playing exercise wherein everyone salutes and marches up and down secure that the collective hubris of dressed up jingoism will demonstrate both loyalty to American values and also belonging to those values.
But what if the country is violent, intolerant, with undefended public education and impoverished social services? You see my problem? I survived my starvation period through multiple factors of luck and personal growth. But America is still trying to create more kids like my 17 year old self. I get the shivers just thinking about it.
Here are the things I had to learn:
How to stop hating myself.
How to forgive my parents.
How to eat.
4. How to believe in social progress.
Here are some of the things that have helped along the way, offered in no particular order:
Archetypal psychology and the work of Carl Jung, Marie Louise von Franz, and James Hillman. Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass’. Poetry by a vast number of writers: Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Robert Bly, Tomas Transtromer, Harry Martinson, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sodergran, Pentti Saarikoski, W.H. Auden, Gregory Orr. I suppose the list is too long to go on. I think Gregory Orr’s book “Poetry as Survival” is important reading even if you’re not a student of poetry.
By my late thirties I saw that comparative suffering is a loser’s game. I learned never to say, “You don’t know what it’s like to be me” because even if it’s true, the assertion never opens a door. I learned by reading Helen Keller: “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
Through Al Anon I learned to stop trying to fix my mother.
Forgiveness is the hardest thing. I learned to forgive my parents. They were weak and wounded people who were utterly unsuited to parenthood. Their lives are not my destiny.
But I still can’t stand the 4th of July. I still hear that squeaking pulley and see those laughing boy scouts. We still have too many smug, privileged “plastic people” (as Frank Zappa would say) running around and crowing about how good and virtuous we are. I’m still not convinced.
Email Scares: Worse Than Crazy
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/02/email-scares.html
Sent via Flipboard
Subject: Navy to deafen 15,900 whales and dolphins? And kill 1,800 more?
Below is an email from Lyndia Storey, a MoveOn member who created a petition on
SignOn.org that's growing rapidly. If you have concerns or feedback about this petition,
click here.
Dear MoveOn member,
According to the U.S. Navy's own estimates,
the use of high-frequency underwater sound for testing in Hawaii, off the California and Atlantic Coasts, and in the Gulf of Mexico will deafen 15,900 whales and dolphins and kill 1,800 more over the next five years.
Whales and dolphins depend on sound to navigate and live. The Navy is required to include comments from the public on their Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), so your signature and comment on my
SignOn.org petition could help stop this naval program and save the lives of these ocean creatures.
My petition says:
Stop the killing of 1,800 whales and dolphins and the deafening of 15,900 more by ceasing the operation of the Navy's underwater sound system in the Hawaiian Islands, the California and Atlantic Coasts, and the Gulf of Mexico.
Will you sign the petition? Click here to add your name, and then pass it along to your friends:
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=276609&id=45292-23289850-nTD9sxx&t=2
Thanks for your help.
–Lyndia Storey
PS: The comments must be in by July 10, 2012, so please
sign my petition today.
This petition was created on
SignOn.org, the progressive, nonprofit petition site that will never sell your email address and will never promote a petition because someone paid us to.
SignOn.org is sponsored by MoveOn Civic Action, which is not responsible for the contents of this or other petitions posted on the site.
Want to support our work? MoveOn Civic Action is entirely funded by our 7 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way.
Chip in here.
This email was sent to Stephen Kuusisto on July 3, 2012. To change your email address or update your contact info,
click here. To remove yourself from this list,
click here.
Thank you to everyone who came to USICD’s 2012 Annual Meeting! We were thrilled to see such a great turnout out of members, community members and even some international visitors on Tuesday, June 12 at the U.S. Access Board’s conference center. 
Ellis travelled across East Africa in May and June to provide technical support and guidance for installations of USICD’s Global Disability Rights Library in the countries of Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. Below is the second of a series of reflections on his travels and work abroad. 
With the CRPD now being considered in the Senate, we have been spending June and July making sure that the disability community has accurate and thorough information on the disability treaty and the latest news on the ratification process. If you would like to become more involved, please contact our Disability Rights Program Manager 
In June 2012, the United Nations held a conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference, named Rio +20, was attended by heads of state, thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, and NGOs. Participants met to consider how to reduce poverty, advance social equity, and ensure environmental protection. Rio +20 marked the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also held in Rio de Janeiro. This year’s conference resulted in a 49-page outcome document entitled “The Future We Want” that calls for a wide range of actions that include launching a process to establish sustainable development goals and engaging civil society. This document includes five specific references to disability including participation and access to information, a commitment to an integrated approach to planning and building sustainable cities, and an emphasis on ensuring equal access to education for people with disabilities. 
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Planet of the Blind 