September 2014 – Page 3 – Planet of the Blind

When I was a boy I found an abandoned stove in the woods and I sat beside it to hear the crickets singing inside. That was my first opera. Those crickets sang of unearthly latitudes and I sat listening for hours. I must be honest—sometimes I’d cry beside them. I was just a little kid and already I knew the varnished life of blindness for I was not allowed to play with others. I was in turn studying the masters, the tiny bodhisatvas who sang with their legs. How could I have expected such a provincial beauty would fill me? I did. I knew, listening with everything I had, crickets would materialize within me. They were my first talking books. My first Caruso. Later I’d discover Lorca, his line: the little boy went looking for his voice/the king of the crickets had it…

Yes. The cricket king. The little boy with his thick spectacles. The proscenium arch of that old stove among the birches.

—Only this table is certain. Heavy. Of massive wood.

Czeslaw Milosz

Sighted or blind the table is inarguable and so we must think of it is a fact.

“Its time to set the fact,” says mother and children place smaller facts on its smooth surface.

E.M. Forster (who should have known better) wrote: “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”

Forster forgot tables. The poor sleep at tables. If they’re lucky they eat at tables, give birth on tables, even die on them among the forks.

The Disabled. Tabled. Never at the right one. The culture table. Heavy. Of massive wood.

If they’re lucky the table fits wheelchairs; provides ample space beneath for guide dogs; there’s a place for your assistant or interpreter.

Mostly never the right one. Infelicitous. Crabbed. (The blind know those tables poorly set.)

Frank Lloyd Wright: “The truth is more important than the facts.”

The table can be a diminished fact. The truth is more important than the table.

And yet sometimes it is all I can do to stand or sit before a table. Merely arriving almost kills me.

The table—the first reasonable accommodation. We had to get the food higher than the snouts of dogs. We had to learn the word “sit” both for the dogs and ourselves.

A deaf man sits at a table. Beside him is his interpreter. Opposite: two job interviewers.

Job interviewer #1: “If we hire you, what accommodations will you need?”

Deaf man: “It depends on the job you offer me.”

Job interviewer #2: “We’ll get back to you.”

This is the table as portcullis. The table standing on its side.

This is the table I always wanted: antithetical meal—no dominant cuisine.

Disability is a tableaux, a tabula, a treatment of tables, since it undermines the furnishings. Here is my Platonic table: shifty but of original form which is to say shifty. The gods are always changing shapes.

After meals the Greeks slid their tables under beds.