Storm from the north. Those were provincial days, local kids grabbed the bumpers of cars in snow and sailed down the streets. Lights in the houses glittered like the eyes of lions. There was a house, utterly dark, where we said the enemy lived. Of course there were no enemies, save for high school teachers. We read the handwriting stretched out on all sides. It was a small city, mind you. We were the bookish kids.
Late day, my dog walks to the north window, ears up, has a bee in her bonnet.
Late day, my soul builds a boat, sails up, swans on a dream lake.
Even if your eyes are precarious,
even if they don’t work,
dogs have always been inside us.
She and I look into each other.
An elderly man in dress shirt and pants, brown dress shoes with Velcro closures. His hands shake as he holds a short story collection, turns each page. Between his knees, a black cane and tote bag filled with books.
Two women from Eastern Europe—Romania maybe?—dark hair and eyes, slender bodies. Both wear fur vests, carry beautifully tailored leather bags. Their language lilts in the space between them, unfamiliar (to my ear) consonants.
A man wearing a gray flat cap and black-framed glasses works on his laptop. Leans around the white stone wall separating his table from the table next to him, asks the woman sitting there to explain how to use the words ‘to’ and ‘too.’ ‘English is my second language,’ he says. The woman leans around to read his laptop screen.
A tourist couple wearing heavy winter coats share a pot of tea, the turquoise china set between their hands, their unfolded maps. New mothers push plastic covered strollers in from the rain. Three women with white hair tie bright scarves around their necks, fasten them with gold broaches.
And suddenly, my father. Through plate glass windows, my father in a boxy suit, black briefcase in each hand. He walks quickly, slightly limping from his bad knee, and is out of my sightline before I can wave my hand. But a wave would have been ridiculous: my father is dead. And the man didn’t look my way, that ghost of my father didn’t see me. Another woman’s father, maybe.
London. Bath. Café after café: I watch a woman eat chocolate cake for breakfast, a business-looking man reading a folded paper, a man who worked the night shift—red plaid shirt, dirty knit cap—sleeping on a corner sofa. Listen to a couple discuss William and Kate’s expected baby—a girl, the woman claims.
Café as meeting place, resting place. Pause in the middle of the day. Time to be anonymous, alone in thought. Time to eavesdrop on others’ lives, imagine their lives as my own for a moment: if I wore that fur vest, who would I be? If I met that girlfriend with two-year old twins? If I came here to write, ask help of those around me? I sit and watch and listen. I ask myself again and again: who of these myriad variations do I want to be?
Dreamt last night I visited a large hospital. Row upon row of kids with disabilities…
It was the 1950’s, three or four iron lungs in the back of the ward.
A bird got in, its wings startling, and dipped and soared around the light fixtures.
A doctor appeared and drew an X on the forehead of a boy.
All you could hear was air in the hoses.
Someone aims to steal your shirt though he lacks talent.
Neighborhoods sink in a gravel of loose ideas–
befouled nostalgias about dim sleep and militias.
A pal says all lingering romanticism is under our fingernails.
As Transtrømer said, “A helmet with nothing inside has taken over.”
I’ve been designated the “Featured Poet” for today at Poetry Daily. Needless to say I’m delighted. I’m grateful, too.
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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“ has just been released. Listen to Steve read “Letter to Borges in His Parlor” in this fireside reading via YouTube. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled What a Dog Can Do. Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
I woke this morning to the cries of birds in snow.
Out here in the cold I start to fly.
I was a boy not long ago.
A single note of an oboe comes–
its a friend’s voice after years.
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
I woke this morning to the cries of birds in snow.
So many I’ve lost. Many haven’t returned.
A single note of an oboe comes–
its a friend’s voice after years.
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Out here in the cold I start to fly.
I was a boy not long ago.
Under the surface most stories have some relation to disability. Moby Dick is a disability narrative as much as anything else and we know that Abraham Lincoln suffered so keenly from bi-polar depression he frequently went without sleep for days at a time and that one such episode preceded his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Accordingly it comes as no surprise to discover a thread about life with a hidden disability in the story of Adam Swartz, the information visionary who committed suicide last January.
In an excellent piece for the New Yorker by Larissa MacFarguhar on Swartz’s struggles we read of his private pain from colitis, his bouts of frequent depression, and his struggle to make sense of his life by means of blogging. The latter was, it seems, not so much a method of overt connection in the manner of the best disability blogs but more a cris de coeur posted in public space. MacFarguhar writes:
He didn’t think of his blog as published writing, exactly, nor was it a private journal, since it was accessible to anyone. It was something in between. He wrote about things in his blog that he didn’t tell his friends—about his depressions, about his ulcerative colitis. It was not clear who he imagined his readers to be.
It is not clear to any blogger who his or her readers might be, but disability activists tend, in general, to speak both for themselves and others, a line of public discourse that demands emotional candor and a probative style. In Swartz’s case, blogging was neither confessional nor communitarian but something in-between. I think his indeterminacy is tragic and his story underscores why disability studies matters. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Brenda Brueggemann have written, disability studies demands the integration of embodiment and identity into a discourse on human rights:
The study of disability in both literary criticism and the humanities in general is a grass-roots scholarly movement that has emerged from the academic turn toward identity studies, an awareness of the need for diversity in scholarly topics, and the recognition that disability is a political rights and integration issue. Disability studies in the humanities seeks to overturn the medicalized understanding of disability and to replace it with a social model of disability. This view defines “disability,” not as a physical defect inherent in bodies (just as gender is not simply a matter of genitals, nor race a matter of skin pigmentation), but rather as a way of interpreting human differences. In other words, this critical perspective considers “disability” as a way of thinking about bodies rather than as something that is wrong with bodies. Within such a critical frame, disability becomes a representational system more than a medical problem, a social construction rather than a personal misfortune or a bodily flaw, and a subject appropriate for wide-ranging intellectual inquiry instead of a specialized field within medicine, rehabilitation, or social work. Such a critical perspective extends the constructivist analysis that informs gender and race studies. This approach to disability looks at such issues as changes in the way disability is interpreted over time and within varying cultural contexts; the development of the disabled as a community and a social identity; the political and material circumstances resulting from this system of assigning value to bodies; the history of how disability influences and is influenced by the distribution of resources, power, and status; and how disability affects artistic production. It also insists on the materiality of the body–its embeddedness in the world–by focusing on issues such as equal access for all, integration of institutions, and the historical exclusion of people with disabilities from the public sphere.
Swartz, for all his genius with the digital commons couldn’t conceive of blogging about pain and the representational oppressions of embodiment as a larger struggle. The development of disability as a social identity is not a trivial matter for each time a man or woman with hidden illnesses claims political language he or she will not be defined by others.
10. Blindness must be a ticket to utter existential misery and though I may not know any blind people, I know misery. In fact, I’m such a wretch already, if I lost mysight I’d have to kill myself.
9. Therefore blindness equals death. Since no one knows what real death is like, blindness will have to do. This is easy because I don’t know any real blind people anyway.
8. I saw a blind person once and he was begging outside of Bloomingdales. Ergo, all blind people are in extraordinary existential misery. I will call them “the blind” without comic irony.
Again, I don’t know any real blind people.
7. God made blind people as exemplary models of spiritual longing. Clunk clunk, here comes Jesus with some gooey mud.
6. Blind people may have compensatory powers like Tiresias. That’s because although God punishes them, sometimes he takes an almost inexplicable liking to one or two of them.
5. This is easy because I don’t know any real blind people anyway. Art for art’s sake.
4. Blind people in particular and disabled people in general are not part of the true diversity. Don’t compare crippled people (defective, lame, retarded, deaf, whatever you want to call yourselves…)
with my able bodied sisters and brothers.
3. If you’re that way, well, you probably deserve it.
2. I don’t know any real blind people but I’ll bet they’re defective in all kinds of ways, hence, perfect for protean cliches about angst.
1. I think the blind tune pianos? But they’re not real artists, or Ph.Ds, or professors, or opera singers. I mean, I’ve never met one, have you?
Planet of the Blind 