In college on a whim I read Boolean Algebra for a semester. After meeting Bill and Reba, my first guide dog’s puppy raisers, I began working on a personal equation—man “plus” “minus” blindness, multiplied by dog “over” associated love (bracket) puppy raisers, dog trainers, multiple volunteers) equals optimism plus the unknown world before him.
Or maybe my new “dog and man take on the world” sensation of connectedness was akin to the expressive sweep and intuition of the two violins in Bach’s “Double Concerto” —stereotactic intelligence was surely overcoming me. It was more than just the trust in a guide dog—it was a wider trust—wider by far.
There’s an enigmatic grammar to growing: poets try to outline it, dancers bend space so we may feel it. Dog growth and the unique temptation to explore had been choreographed for me not by a single artist but many.
Then I began daydreaming about dogs in history. Corky and I, Reba and Bill—we were just links in a long chain, for dogs had always lead human beings into light. There’s the story of Abraham Lincoln who as a boy fell into a deep cave. This was when he was around 14. In those days Kentucky was still a wilderness and rescue was not very likely. Lincoln had fallen a long way and though he hadn’t broken any bones he was weak from the blow. He tried to scale the walls but slick rocks made climbing out impossible. This is not a guide dog story—and then again, it is—Lincoln suffered from life long bi-polar depression, a condition inherited from his father. Young Abe and old Abe thought about suicide many times and in many respects it was his love of dogs that brought him solace. At 14 he’d bonded with a stray who he quickly named “Honey” and as he lay at the bottom of the cave Honey ran in widening circles barking furiously. She was like the television dog “Lassie”. She caught the attention of a traveling farmer who came to Lincoln’s rescue. Faith in a dog is faith in the unknown world before us. Accordingly during his years as a circuit riding attorney Lincoln was always accompanied by dogs.
**
I try to express my thanks most days—not with the easy gratitude of school rhymes but by means of a harder thing. As a person with a disability I’ve spent years cultivating articulate despair. The harder thing is not gratitude, not precisely, but understanding indebtedness to others and acknowledging that sometimes you’re lucky. Dogs are luck. Ah, but people are luck, a more difficult stance. Hardly anyone wants to say it. People are luck.
Luck in America is its own capacious subject, fit for a variorum edition, fit for top floor of a major research library. One night, early in my relationship with Corky, alone in my lonesome apartment, I found myself watching rather inexplicably “Larry King Live” because while channel surfing I discovered he was interviewing Paul Newman. I was always fond of Newman. I was fond of him long before his charitable work (which became legendary)—I liked him outside his movies, liked him for being a real human being. In the puke-carnival of celebrity Paul Newman had always seemed to me both thoughtful and decent. Newman was talking about luck. And so I put down the remote.
He explained that in the years just after World War II when he was getting his start in the theater and working in New York, there were lots of actors who were far more talented than he was. But on one unforeseeable night he was called on to take the leading role in a Tennessee Williams play when the primary actor was ill. In turn, that was the night the New York Times reviewer was there. Maybe I’ve got the story just a little “off”—it might have been a reviewer from “Variety” and the play might have been by Chekov. I could probably look up the transcript but I don’t want to. What matters now, and mattered to me then, was Paul Newman’s exceptional clarity and humility—his career was shaped by and impelled by chance, a thing he understood perfectly well. And damned if that wasn’t why he was working so ardently to develop charities.
“Hell,” I thought, “in America if you talk about Luck you’re some kind of Communist.” All that “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps; independent cowboy; titanium spine BS”—the creed of neo-liberalism. And there was a great actor, smiling gently, telling the truth—that something one can’t influence must happen for your door to open.
In the year before I went to get a guide dog I was both unemployed and deeply depressed. Formerly a college professor (albeit an adjunct one, hired year to year) I was living on food stamps, disability Social Security and section 8 housing relief. What was luck? And what, if any role, did talent play in a life? Of course I got up every day, brushed my teeth, went to the gym, visited a therapist, wrote poetry, and endeavored to keep glum dispositions out of my hair. Don’t get me wrong—good luck or bad you have to keep working. Its that or die.
But hearing Newman with my guide dog on my lap I realized that something ineffable, something unknowable, even wildly improbable had been occurring during my year of solitary struggle. Bill and Reba Burkett and their children, Bill Jr. and Anne—they were raising a puppy for me—though they did not know me—though they lived four states away. Luck is bigger than any one of us.
**
I’ve been thinking about luck ever since. Today on the first day of snow in Syracuse, New York, I’m “lucking out” because of my new friendship with James Wolcott who last week visited my class on public intellectuals and the digital commons—then yesterday he wrote about the experience on his blog at Vanity Fair.
Luck. Wolcott also understands it. His probative and sharply nuanced memoir “Lucking Out” is top shelf reading, especially if you’re interested in the early days of contrarian journalism in New York during the early 1970’s. I cut my teeth reading literary journalism in just that period, though as I said to Jim—he was in the city, living the life of a writer, I was tippy-toeing around the known streets of my small town, unsure how to live in the world as a blind person. I lived vicariously through his work. Felt I was “there” at CBGB. And many other places.
Luck. Its body half undressed, beckoning, half of the imagination, met by chance in the real world. Who can say what it is? One senses talking about luck is like dissecting a joke.
Luck. I want to set it against the shrill, spiritual disorder of our time. Reckon it.
Something’s happening here…what it is isn’t terribly clear…
Planet of the Blind 