“Lancashire Police apologised to Farmer for the “traumatic experience” but confirmed last night that the officer who fired the Taser has not been suspended and remains on duty.”
http://m.guardiannews.com/ms/p/gnm/us/sDKy1pwv7ncWCN7UW24NA7A/view.m?id=43
There are people who make a living by threading their ways through dark places, and we know this. As a boy I was fascinated by sewer workers, by the idea that men and women can descend beneath the streets and work. I imagined them making their ways in the pitch black like undersea divers in heavy suits with enormous helmets. I was a blind kid. I liked the darkened undersea, stories of Captain Nemo and the television character Mike Nelson, played by Lloyd Bridges on a show called “Sea Hunt”–I used to pretend I was scuba diving in the dark woods behind my house. I was a lonesome and circumspect boy.
The first time I met a guide dog trainer I saw my natural neighbor. He was someone who understood me. Someone who knew what its like to be Mike Nelson with a fogged mask.
Blind since childhood I’d never met a sighted person who “got it” until I met Dave See. I also loved that his name was “See”–what a Dickensian trick! He rang my doorbell, Dave See did, and he announced himself: “I’m Dave See from Guiding Eyes for the Blind.” And so I told him my name was X-Ray Vision from Blinkyville. Why not?
If you work with dogs and people in equal measure, striving to make a team that’s safe in traffic, you must have an empathetic and compound mind. Later I’d see that it’s a bi-cameral mind–as Julian Jaynes would say–with a capacity to problem solve in two worlds.
Guide dog trainers know how to become six legged creatures, creatures with two minds and one purpose, which is surviving. But don’t kid yourself, this is a profession that takes years of preparation.
–from What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir of Life with Guide Dogs
by Stephen Kuusisto
forthcoming from Simon and Schuster
Recently on this blog I said that vanity concerns itself with survival but it won’t take you very far. I was thinking of heightened self regard as a tool, one of the many tools a person with a disability needs. Physical difference requires emotional intensity–whatever we might call the opposite of retreat.
But vanity, less emotional intelligence won’t open the road before you. Politicians who live solely for vanity learn this the hard way–Joseph McCarthy, Newt Gingrich, Gary Hart, all come to mind. The landscape is littered with wounded vanity-slingers, and yes, they occupy every profession. One can see plenty of them at the university, but just so, check out your local Chamber of Commerce. There’s a Becky Sharp or Uriah Heep in every workplace. These are people who look at the rest of us with indifference, with a contempt born of wounded pride and of having lost their way.
If you have a disability you might call yourself a “wounded warrior” or a “crip” but the vanity noose will strangle you if you think that heightened self-awareness is its own singularity. Among other things vanity means being simultaneously wise and contemptuous, and the road for people in this condition is thin.
I am angry. I experience discrimination. And yet I’m also a Jungian, which means I see every instance of difficulty as alchemy, and yes, sometimes this is dime store alchemy, to borrow Charles Simic’s phrase–meaning the tools of transformation are available to us even in the dollar store. What I believe in is the spirit’s heat, the soul’s capacity for expansion, the amplification of interior space–the place where the meanings are. What I mean is that the inner life can evade the dialectical battle between the world and human worth. I am misunderstood and I am best so. And all the monsters in the mind, all the spiritually shattered people who surround us, these too are parts of the mind. Here: in the Woolworth’s of the imagination I have placed a plastic cattle skull on the head of a Human Resources functionary. And now she is part of me, a bit of inspired containment, part of the kaleidoscopic soul. Yes, this is an interminable task. But it’s a thing of beauty.
Once, at a Greek monastery I saw intricate tin cut-outs of body parts hanging from the altar. These were the votive implications of magic. Prayers made visible. But these body bits, as one might call them, were also metaphorical fragments of the human soul.
I was young when I saw this. But I wrote in my notebook: “You forget this at your peril.”
Here’s to every guide dog in all the airports, for whom the world’s suitcases are thrilling! The man with the Green Bay Packers jersey holds a duffle, and hidden among his socks is a true German sausage, smuggled all the way from Wiesbaden. And the tall woman with the “Gibson Girl” hat, who owns a vintage clothing store in upstate, New York, she has a sachet of lavender in her tiny alligator handbag. There are too many smells! The baby with ears moistened by kisses! The nourishing smell of shoes!
I’m just trying to find my departure gate. But my dog knows everything. The security man smells like fragments of a meteor; the backpack on the conveyer says its owner just slept with a perfect stranger. My dog may, or may not know that I can’t see, but she surely understands that I’m immune to the wonders around us.
–from What a Dog Can Do
forthcoming from Simon and Schuster
Stephen Kuusisto
This morning I’ve returned from the ocean without news, save that the cold eyes of the shark are the electrolysis of blood and it is an endless song.
The soul has three goblets. One holds the drink of hope; the second, forgetfulness; the third, all the sadnesses.
Jesus promised forgiveness but his cup has been stolen.
My heart beats too rapidly to live in my nation.
Here is a humble discovery: winged joys can be kissed.
I always thought Blake was being figurative.
O quixotic bird poem-thing, no one knows what in the hell we are!
Archival footage of Malcolm X being interviewed by hostile white pundits. The grave negligence of history by mainstream America still reverberates, especially in this election season. Malcolm, is, of course, superb.
Yesterday while flying United Airlines Flight 882 from Portland, OR to Chicago, I was given an inaccessible seat. It was the middle seat in a three seat row, where, under the seats in front of me I discovered a set of metal stanchions, which, in turn made it impossible for me to get my guide dog safely underneath the seat–hence, out of the foot space shared with other passengers. Then, the airline stuck two people on either side of me.They asked me to get up so a non-English speaking passenger could get all the way in to the window seat. I complained and said they should reseat me where I could actually sit. They in turn looked at me as if I might be some kind of half human cockroach. The airplane was a Boeing 757 which has bulkhead seats in an exit row. People with disabilities are barred from sitting in an exit row. First class was full. Under the Air Carrier Access Act, my right to fly safely and in comfort is not up for grabs. But what really bothers me, even a day later was the easy dismissal of my situation by the United flight attendants. I learned from a fellow passenger that the crew even managed to gossip about me–was I some kind of cranky man? United, your record in this area has not been good for a long time. You embarrassed yourselves yesterday. But you had a full flight, didn’t you?
Mango in a dream is a dream, mango is mango. Woke up this morning with this in mind. Traveling three days, cross country, speaking about disability to college students at Pacific University, reading some prose and poetry, meeting new people, making new friends. Mango is mango. Trees are swaying around this airport hotel, moss covers the slates by the swimming pool out back where I take my guide dog early in the morning. Soon we will get on an airplane and fly all day back to New York. Mango. People with disabilities are in trouble. Mango. The nation wants to roll back every triumph of social service to feed the war machine and the greed index, all for nothing save a watered down brand of social darwinism. Hitler, calling the disabled “useless eaters”–is there really much difference between that idea and Romney’s 47%? Mango is mango. Sweet and impoverished land. Sweet fruit on a hard day. Sweet. Woke up this morning wild for the goodness which is ours alone–we demand it, savor it, fight for it, call it up.
Disability in a dream is a mango early, early just about first light, I’d say.
I went to a diner yesterday with my friend, the writer Alison Towle Moore and we ate a local kind of pie made of out berries that are only found here in the Pacific northwest, and now I can’t remember what they’re called though I think the pie lady called them Marion Berries, which of course sounds like the former Mayor of Washington, DC, so that can’t be right.
While Ali and I were talking, rather candidly about our respective parents and the struggle to live in the shadow of family dysfunction, the pie lady picked up on our conversation and decided to join us. She has had a tough life. We wound up, the three of us, talking about how to live and what to do. That’s the way of it. The pie lady needs her antidepressants. I need mine. Without them we’d live under the couch.
I love the assumption of “ableist” types who imagine that invisible disabilities are just a bunch of hooey–you know the types–the ones who opine in a school board meeting or a faculty meeting or what have you, a living room perhaps–that in their day there weren’t all these learning disabilities and “conditions” etc. In “their day” (Jurassic?) no one ever talked about disability–they’d beat you senseless if you tried to explain why you were unable to achieve in school. In fact, they’d just beat you senseless anyway.
I’ll take the local pie and an anti-depressant please. Please.
Planet of the Blind 