A crow eats something dead in a magnolia tree’s shadow. He’s doing his crow work. If you think like Darwin you say he’s surviving. If you’re a particularly religious person you say he’s surviving but additionally imagine a creator who drove sir crow to the magnolia. If you’re especially spiritual it’s terrifying to imagine appetites, devoid of mind may have driven the crow.
Death is the ultimate figure of essentialism, the arbiter of identity, for he arrives in our gardens dressed like a terrorist or priest and voila! you gain your long sought identity as he takes your hand. “But wait,” says our man, “I’ve just now understood my identity! This is unfair!” “Shut up,” says Death. And that’s if Death likes you. If he doesn’t like you he says nothing. It takes someone else to confirm a man’s self-awareness. Essentialism.
Standing in the magnolia’s shadow is difficult. Essentialism makes it harder. My personhood requires conscious opposition–I’m not me without a spiritual North Korea as Christopher HItchens used to say. I need an imperial god who “made me” and cast me into life like bread on the waters; who sits back and watches as I float among reeds like baby Moses, who looks forward to seeing me fight opponents in his name–for gods, whether monotheistic or gaggling in pantheons, love a good cock fight.
Human beings are perpetual adolescents, struggling for languages and postures of self-determination and independence, largely by telling stories, and hoping they will be better stories than those they were given at birth.
I remember someone gave me a book of poems when I was in a psychiatric hospital at 17. I was busy trying to kill myself but doing it “slant” as my method was self-starvation. The doctors thought something was wrong with my digestive system and put meat on a string down my throat to test my digestive enzymes. All I wanted to do was die. I wanted the old arbiter of identity to appear at my bed side. I didn’t want to be a blind teenager anymore.
The book of poems was an anthology of some sort–there were lots of poems–but I keyed on this particular selection by Donald Justice:
“Counting the Mad”
This one was put in a jacket,
This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat
But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.
This one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there,
This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.
This one thought himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man,
An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.
**
How much can you know at 17? Well of course you can know a lot for potentiality is available at any age and if you are curious you can get somewhere. Reading Justice’s poem I saw getting somewhere might have to do with the mind itself. Teenagers are good with irony. Of course I saw myself–I looked at the window and there was nothing–though this was literally true with marginal sight; I would eat no meat; I cried at being a man-child. I was plenty smart alright.
The key word in the poem is “ordinary”–the darkest word of all. Used as an adjective it means “normal” and of course this is where darkness comes from. Who wants to be normal? Day to day, usual, common?
Medicine strives for just this outcome–it offers a delegation of usualists–utility driven ordinary-ist mechanics. The man has been cured and now knows he is a man. No No! It would be better to be a bird or a dog. Better to peck under magnolias. Now that he’s turned loose as a man he’s free to be average, nondescript, conventional, mundane, undistinguished, standard, run of the mill, uninteresting, bland, suburban.
Can it be true? Do doctors in their white coats make you well and send you back into the world as a hackneyed, garden variety existential stick figure?
As I say, how much can you know at 17?
At night I used to sneak out of my hospital room and wander the halls in my white gown.
Sometimes when I met people I talked and sometimes I didn’t.
I didn’t like people and I certainly didn’t like conventional people. I didn’t like the doctors. I especially didn’t like the psychiatrist who asked me if the leather lanyard I wore around my neck was a fetish. It was in fact just a lanyard to which I attached a house key. In the hospital they’d taken away my key. Talk about figurative, run of the mill, undistinguished thinking. Fetish indeed! I saw he was a nondescript mummified nebbish. I refused to talk to him. I wasn’t Holden Caulfield. I was smarter than that. I was starving my way right off the stage.
I suppose poetry saved me but I can’t prove it. Maybe it was the autonomic nervous system which drove me to eat entire half gallons of ice cream spooning frozen clots straight from the package into my mouth. Maybe it was impatience. It was taking too long to die in Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. And all those men in white coats were ghastly. Perhaps I’d pretend to be well and kill myself later. One thing’s for sure: when you’re back in the world things, simple things, yes even the ordinary things can appear interesting again. Later I’d read Marianne Moore’s famous poem entitled “Poetry” where she says that the life of the mind is laden with contempt, especially for art, but then you discover the genuine in spite of aesthetic weariness:
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician–
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”–above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
**
When you are not longer trapped by essentialist ideas you begin to see how the ordinary and the imagined, the cooked and the raw, the healthy and abnormal are all genuine. There is poetry without half poets. Essentialism argues–insists–that your singularity exists only as it stands in opposition to colonizers, imperialists, hetero-normative-istas, able-ists, patriarchs, racists–jesus small j its a long list. I say essentialism is half poetry for like Moore I can’t discriminate against business documents and school books, not if I believe in rising above insolence and triviality.
**
I know this is getting thick. I started under a magnolia tree. But picture me walking the dark halls of a hospital, my white gown drifting about me. I never tied the thing properly.
What is a hospital but a place of insolence and triviality? What can you know at 17? I saw early that I didn’t want to spend my life in opposition to doctors, nor did I want to declare my worth by means of compensatory strategies–becoming the best mountain climber with thick glasses or a poetry all star. I believe in the UN charter on human rights but not in academic and neo-Aristotelian taxonomies as products or vehicles of resistance. I saw early I was tired of products. Essentialism demands nearly endless productions. It insists you have value insofar as you are not normal, not objectified, not disabled in a medical or social way–instead you are outre, wicked, glowingly abnormal. What a prison! Really. I feel I’m right back in spiritual North Korea. I can’t present you with an imaginary garden with real toads”–Moore’s idea of poetry equivalent to god–nor can I say with any certainty that art will help you live. Worse, I can’t tell you how to live or what to do. I remember Kurt Vonnegut telling the graduating class at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (my alma mater) way back in 1974 that no responsible adult can answer questions about how to live and what to do. But my real toads say that culture is more complicated and interesting than essentialism proposes. Disability Studies which I care a good deal about, argues disability is a social construction–that physical difference is valued or devalued, given utility or denied it, in accord with architectures and ideas. This is entirely true. But in North America we’ve come to believe that cultural forces magnify or direct this social construction process–that culture is intolerant of difference, antithetical to it, hostile to cripples, queers, people of color, all who “present” as abnormal. Maybe this idea will help you live. But I think culture is more variegated, flexible, inclusive, and magical than simply a mechanism or muscle. I know too many “normal” people who would find the cultural devaluation principle of disability studies to be incomprehensible to believe in the idea without irony. If I’d believed Donald Justice’s poem I’d have imagined that being a man who did not think himself a dog was a dreadful fate. How silly. And foolish too to believe your only value lies in your blindness.
Culture as Victor Turner knew has many ceremonies.
My crow under his magnolia has no interest in me. Maybe you will achieve the same wisdom. But don’t call me by my disability name. Its not a real toad.
Planet of the Blind 