Month: September 2014

So like a fool I trusted Apple to assure its screen reader known as Voiceover would be functional with the release of the new IOS 8 operating system for the iPad and iPhone. Lo and behold IOS 8 has more VoiceOver bugs than a prairie cat house. When using iBooks the program stops reading or causes the iBook to collapse. This, just as I’m leaving for ten days in China. How I wish I hadn’t updated my devices. Thanks for nothing Tim Cook.

I think about Paul Eluard as the political season turns dark and darker. Resistance fighter, poet, surrealist, humanitarian—Eluard who never gave up on love. What kind of man do I want to be?

I wish to be tender in the darkest times. Strong also. I pledge to stand in the godforsaken places and laugh. What kind of laugh? The premise of all life, surprise without evident mercy.

In a few moments I will go to the campus of Syracuse University where I’m a professor and administrator. I pledge before I leave my home not to confuse the university with my life and lest you misunderstand me, I’m not speaking of freedom—either of thought or deed—for freedom of speech and inquiry are ineluctable and never disposable—but the persistent and easy illusion that Syracuse is “my” university. The ease of identification with a college or university is guaranteed. If you’re at The Ohio State University you want to bleed scarlet and gray; here at Syracuse everyone wears orange. I think these are innocent pastimes until you fall prey to imagining your version of the institution, believing your vision for it is of greater value than the ideas of others. Academics are susceptible to weak super-egos. Some don’t know it. Those who do are often the wisest. Collaboration and rejection both depend on the awareness that your life, the “inner life” does not depend on strict affinity with institutions.

 

I say this as I ready myself. I admire my colleagues. I like some more than others. I enjoy the give and take of earnest and clear thinking. I take some ideas to heart, leave others aside. I believe I have some valuable things to share. When my ideas are rejected I will walk my life into another forest. I’m not talking about academic freedom. I believe academic freedom is non-negotiable. The recent developments at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana are a disgrace to the principles of free inquiry. I give no ground on that score. Instead I’m recognizing how institutions rise and fall in worlds of trouble or good fortune. In turn you must know your heart and savor the best that you know. Today I will share my best thinking. Tomorrow no one will remember. We are all both larger and smaller than our names.

 

 

Poetry gets out of hand

climbs the maple out back

chatters like a man

 

who knows jokes

or soon will freeze to death.

“He’s my friend” I say—

 

but perhaps I’m a fool—

poetry monkey

is not

 

in any way (productive)

gallops over branches

without reason

 

but as my wife would say:

“He has beautiful

eyelashes.”

 

 

 

There’s a story in the New York Daily News about a grade school girl who has been denied the right to bring her service dog to school. The Rush-Henrietta school district announced that the dog would be a distraction to students and might disturb people with allergies. Amazingly the district’s attorneys announced that the denial of a service dog was ok.

 

As a long time guide dog user I know all about this ableist argument. “Your dog might trigger allergies in other people” is my favorite ableist argument. The reason? Because it reveals instantaneously an overt failure to understand that the ADA is a civil-rights act. The allergic in this world don’t get to trump my right to be somewhere.

 

I’m not shocked that the Rush-Henrietta school district has violated the law. The ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of able bodied people goes on. Disability whether its invisible or visible does not consign a child or adult to marginal citizenship. And service dogs are the law.

 

Last night I dreamt of my father who was sad in a squinty room of the subconscious. In life he was like the rest of us—by turns funny, somber, witty, and occasionally distant.  In America nowadays its requisite to blame your problems on your parents and Lord knows I might get away with this but honesty is tougher than cartoon Freud and I know most of my difficulties are my own.

My mother was a drunk and a prescription pill abuser. One night, clutching a knife, she stalked my sister through our house. She threw glassware, dishes, or on a good day she simply passed out in the living room. My father ignored everything, stuck to his job. At times he’d open up and relate how his life was unbearable. I was the disabled kid, the one whose problems were unspoken but always in the room and I grew up thinking the family’s unhappiness stemmed from my blindness. My parents have been gone now for fourteen years.  They turn up in my dreams but never together.

With therapy and contemplation I’ve come to see just how much the human imagination can hurt us. If my parents weren’t emotionally supportive so be it. I allowed myself to internalize and narrate their miseries as if they were products of my blindness, a self-destructive fantasy that occupied me for years. I was like the Japanese poet Issa’s “crow with no mouth”—I was unlit and sharply alive but without the necessary and nuanced self-awareness that leads to honest language. I suspect this is why I don’t like much contemporary fiction and why I avoid short stories in particular. The narrators in most American short stories lack awareness that imagination can be debilitating. Story after story unfolds around the misery of divorce and a tragicomic insistence that the put upon narrator has something like a heart. The tenor of the story—its burden if you will—is to convey the injustice of emotional life. Few stories bring readers to a place where the narrator understands his complicity in illusion. There are exceptions. But usually contemporary short stories depend on nascent victimhood—a reader response agreement—we’re all budding victims because as Wallace Stevens once wrote: “the world is ugly and the people are sad.”

Are my difficulties really my own? Doesn’t the culture hold blind people at arm’s length? Is it not true I’ve had to fight for my place in the village square? Yes yes. And yet so much is still the work of the deleterious imagination. When I was 17 years old and in danger of dying from anorexia (my parents, blindness, ugly school administrators, cruelty of teenagers…) a friend gave me a book of poems. I read Walt Whitman:

Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour?

 

Hast never come to thee an hour,

A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles,

fashions, wealth?

These eager business aims—books, politics, art, amours,

To utter nothingness?

 

 

**

These eager business aims—the phrase holds as true for the imagination as it does for fashions or what often feels to me like “victim theory”—the business of abjection. So much work of the imagination is finally utter nothingness. What a relief! Surely its a commonplace of the avant garde to hold bourgeois culture in suspicion and one can read Whitman’s poem that way.

But the key word is “eager”—defined as “keen, enthusiastic, avid, fervent, ardent, motivated, wholehearted, dedicated, committed, earnest”—all central to imagination. “Eager” is also sinister. Its a word of suspension and indeterminacy. Eager also means: anxious, impatient, longing, yearning, wishing, hoping, hopeful; on the edge of one’s seat, on tenterhooks, on pins and needles; (informal) itching, gagging, dying.

As a teenager who was blind I was sure that whatever happiness might befall me would be the product of a miracle. That’s the problem with the eager imagination. It believes in rescue. Its a fairy tale yearning.

I’m in mind of this after a dream of my father. He was gray in my dream, two dimensional, like a figure in the Greek underworld. I think he went to his grave believing in the bubble of rescue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A mallard was in my dream last night—but she wasn’t one of those birds of dream, she was a real bird, swimming on the lake of my unconscious. I knew it. And I knew it this morning, when, early I walked the dogs and the orphic crows spoke up, narrating their private red wind.

 

There are three thousand tiny American flags planted on a hill at Syracuse University and above them a sign says “Never Forget”.

 

I’m predisposed to not forgetting. I lost friends on 9/11.

 

Walking yesterday and finding the flags and sign I wondered what the display and admonition meant.

 

William Gass wrote: “culture has completed its work when everything is a sign”—surely a dark irony as a “completed” culture would likely be wholly propagandistic. Wisdom fares best in  uncompleted cultures, the ones with porous boundaries. Tomas Transtromer the great Swedish poet has a poem called “The Half Finished Heaven” that speaks to this:

 

The Half-Finished Heaven

 

Despondency breaks off its course.

Anguish breaks off its course.

The vulture breaks off its flight.

 

The eager light streams out,

even the ghosts take a draft.

 

And our paintings see daylight,

our red beasts of the Ice Age studios.

 

Everything begins to look around.

We walk in the sun in hundreds.

 

Each man is a half-open door

leading to a room for everyone.

 

The endless ground under us.

 

The water is shining among the trees.

 

The lake is a window into the earth.

 

Excerpt From: Tomas Tranströmer. “The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/WAORD.l