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.
Planet of the Blind 