Month: August 2014

If you walk for your health I hope you have a dog. Generally a cat won’t make it no matter what feline lovers might say. Let me admit my prejudice: I’m a guide dog man, blind, fast, and adventurous. No cat will do for me. Take truth serum my friends—would you trust your life to a cat?

My guide walks so fast my jogger friends are often amazed. “That’s some pace you guys have,” they say. There’s no doubt we’re speedy. We have great cardio. This can be a problem when we’re out with friends—my dog and I are suddenly half a block ahead and vanishing over the urban horizon. Often we must stop and wait for our able bodied, sighted, doddering pals. We don’t mind. We understand the deficiencies of visual people.

Whether you’re sighted or blind, walking a dog has numerous benefits. Some days I can’t decide if the bigger payoff lies with endorphins or with a quasi spiritual sensation of being allied with a generous but independent creature who has decided I’m okay. I might even be more than okay—I sing for both of us, sing the silliest songs. Show me a cat who cares when you do this. My guide dog thinks its a good bit of fun.

When I was a kid I loved a song by Pete Seeger, the title of which I can’t recall, but it had the refrain: “All around the kitchen, cock-a-doodle-doodle-do”. I played the record until my phonograph needle was a nub. The song was a kind of “call and response”—Seeger would sing: “You put your right foot out, cock-a-doodle-doodle-do”; “you put your left foot out” etc. That song was irresistible! Nowadays though I’m in my late fifties and my kids are grown I still sing it. And all I can say is my dog loves me for it. She gets me, my Labrador girl. She dances right along.

Her name is “Nira” my Labrador. She’s comes from Guiding Eyes for the Blind in New York. She’s a light yellow Lab with honey colored ears and she tilts her head from side to side when I sing. She loves Pete Seeger but she’s okay with almost anything. I could sing “The Volga Boatman” and she’d think it was a good development. This isn’t because she’s naïve or smitten. Her good cheer is a function of the canine genome. Dogs are happy in the morning. They are happy in ways your spouse or your children or cats are not. They’re happy in the morning because dogs are predators. They know that because they’ve lived through another night they will have the chance to eat again. Don’t underestimate the joys of breakfast; the happiness of walking and singing about the kitchen; what I like to call “the thrill of morsel and dance”.

Yes, if you walk for your health I hope you have a dog. Here I shall conclude with a bit of canine philosophy. In ancient times when the wind spoke to men and women it also spoke to dogs. When an ancient dog heard wind he heard everything. I believe this is not customarily understood. Anthropologists say dogs came to the human realm because we were throwing out the bones. But you can’t understand a creature just by its appetites. Dogs have always understood the air is enchanted all around us. They have always understood the telegraphy of swallows crossing the sunbeams between trees. Like an arrow they came just to tell us the good news. And dogs know the darkening tunnel inside the wind. I tell you they know who lives there. That is what you hear when a dog is dreaming. I tell you, dogs pour out in choirs their dreamy souls.

And then they go for walks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For eight years on this blog I have tried to describe disability as a way of knowing. To that end I’ve been ardent, philosophical, poetic, and often nuanced, for the provenance of this idea owes a great deal to the late Enlightenment rather than the early, and accordingly degrees of doubt are the correspondent self-questioning rhetoric one requires. I know as a blind person my intuitions and doubts are the friends of my psyche and whatever it is I call my personality. In turn doubts are more interesting to me than precepts. I’m in mind of this because I find as this century unfolds I no longer have intellectual affection for one of the tenets of disability studies, the nearly ubiquitous claim that culture has produced and continues to produce compulsory able-bodied-ness. My take is that culture is poorly understood by rhetoricians and cultural theorists and all too often what’s meant by compulsory able-bodied-ness is what Bobby Seale used to call “the Man”—all fine and well, but Seale knew he was using a metaphor and I’m not convinced many in disability studies know the same.

 

Culture is so elastic its nearly impossible to describe. The Victorians, understanding this, entered into a century long taxonomic mania, cataloguing, classifying, photographing, measuring, statisizing everything from mollusks to milk maids. But in the end history outlasted them, and if not history, women, people of color, the colonized. Culture cannot create compulsory hetero-normativity, able-bodied-ness. It can only insist on these things and then fail.

 

Disability studies isn’t sufficiently interested in how the “compulsory” fails. In fact many theorists have a vested interest in arguing that it continues. I understand. It pays for sabbaticals and conferences. It props up academic journals. The “it” an affection for a neo-Victorian ideal that has long since died.

 

It takes the oppressed a long time to know they’re free.

 

I suppose I’m reflecting Jameson’s notion of superficiality. In this instance I’m rejecting a much older signifier and signified.

 

Thoughts on a Sunday night. Our age is decentralized and infinitely plastic. Let us hope for sharper class consciousness. The issue is still labor.

 

Where’s my TV remote?

 

This is a test of the emergency disability system.

In the event of an emergency you will be abandoned.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programing.

 

When I was younger and green under my shirt I went alone to Scandinavia to study poetry. I learned many things in solitude—things superfluous and sometimes divine. One night walking on a bridge in Helsinki with sleet driving into my face I met an intoxicated woman who said she was a vampire. She asked for a cigarette. I gave her the whole pack. “It is a privilege,” I said, “to give a pack of cigarettes to the queen of blood.” Then I went my own way. “If there’s anything sorrier than a vampire, its one who smokes,” I said half aloud. I knew, even in my early twenties, that “half aloud” was my vocal register for depression—more than writing, more than shared words. Half aloud was where my depression lived. Sometimes I spent whole weeks alone. I whispered often. One night I discovered a poem that perfectly captured my brand of depression by the Swedish-Finnish poet Edith Sodergran who lived and wrote in the early years of the 20th century. Here’s her poem:

Vierge Moderne

 

I am not a woman, I am neuter.

I am a child, a tomboy, and a rash decision,

I am a laughing streak of scarlet sunlight—

I am a net for all ravenous fish,

I am a toast in honor of all women,

I am a step toward chance and ruin,

I am a leap into freedom and the self—

I am the blood’s whisper in men’s ears,

I am the soul’s fever chill, the desire and denial of the flesh,

I am an entrance sign to a new paradise,

I am a flame, searching and bold,

I am a body of water, deep but daring up to the knees,

I am fire and water in an earnest union on free terms…

 

—translated from the Swedish by Malena Morling and Jonas Ellerstrom

Its safe to say that poetry has always been the place of rash decisions, ravenous fish, chance and ruin. Lyric smarts are fast, “daring up to the knees”; pushed by desire and denial. Doors open and close; branches sway; sunlight is something more than half mad. 

The year I discovered Sodergran I knew I was a person who would live his life with depression. I understood only a small portion of the depression would have to do with my blindness. I was sad in the way of anyone who steps toward chance and ruin and who leaps into freedom and the self—for all such impulses must be sad; for they are the stuff of the child, a tomboy, the maker of rash decisions. And they are the stuff adulthood abjures and you may read anything you like for adulthood—capitalism, Sunday School, post-analytic philosophy. It hardly matters the name…

People who live with depression know about free terms—Sodergran’s line suggests an ecstatic electrolysis of transcendent and elemental joy. People with depression know this vision. You can again call it anything you want—but you can’t call it depression itself—for the vision is what depression knows.

Half aloud. I am a child, a tomboy, and a rash decision…

Depression says I am the blood’s whisper in men’s ears…

 

Only this: once when I was very young I saw the morning star. I didn’t really see it the way visual people see. I was with a friend.

 

Sighted people forget the blind have friends.

 

They think if they went blind they’d be alone in a closet.

 

Sighted people have a terrible insufficiency of imagination.

 

Only this: when I was very young I had an imaginary friend. I called him “Matti” and he would sit beside me on the trams in Helsinki. I talked to him.

 

Sighted people need more imaginary friends.

 

Sometimes a guide dog is both your watcher of stars and your pal on the tram.

 

This: outside of town, a full moon, laughing all night with friends.

 

Hey sighted people: the blind laugh. So do their dogs.

 

**

 

It comes down to this. I feel sorry for the sighted.

 

Most of them have the imaginations of meat cutters.

 

In our brittle time its important to say there’s nothing wrong with meat cutters.

 

But you understand, the ocean…

 

 

 

 

WHEN I consider how my light is spent

E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide

Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

  My true account, least he returning chide,

Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,

I fondly ask; But patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best

  Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and waite.

 

**

 

When I consider Dear Milton’s famous sonnet on his blindness I feel the sorrow of another man’s belief. Milton’s Protestantism was based in large part on the idea of Sola fides—the notion that faith alone was necessary for salvation. This is opposed to the Catholic belief in good works as a primary principle of divine forgiveness. I remember vividly the day some thirty years ago when I was in graduate school at the University of Iowa and the true suffering contained in this poem hit me for the first time. The “one Talent” which is death to hide is faith. Against this, the standard language of seeing as a metaphor for belief is impossible. I tried to imagine being that man. A man who was surrounded by political and theocratic enemies; who lived on charity; whose blindness had no ophthalmological explanation and so was fit for a superstitious and Calvinist interpretation. Against all this the poet imagines his sightlessness is a test of Sola fides. Imagine this burden. To me, They also serve who only stand and waite feels like the sensibility of an airline passenger who imagines his faith holds the plane aloft. There is no “milde yoak” here, no matter Milton’s use of wit. The poet believed his blindness was a test and I wish I could go back through time, like some science fiction character, and tell him God doesn’t live in a man or woman’s eyes. Blindness tests nothing. It is a native country without punishments.

Dogs are heroic only insofar as we are heroic. We take journeys together. We refuse to sit still. Canine heroism lies in accompaniment—which is trust. The duality of heroism is inter-species mutual trust. They leave this out of dog stories most of the time. We don’t like ourselves. Maybe the dog will save us. But we save our own kind with fully equal dog friends who have decided they like the challenge.

Few non-disabled dog owners think of their relationship with dogs as a true journey. They want dogs to obey them, as if their own meagre habits are enough to achieve in life. Dog obedience is a good thing, necessary, but if the lessons stop there the owner doesn’t grow. Therefore, no journey. As a blind person who travels with a dog I know that we never swim out into the same water; never travel the same worldly path. Darkness brushes both my own cheek and my dog’s.

Journeys, every hour.

I see newspaper articles, books, even movies where people who’ve suffered trauma are represented as having been miraculously healed by the intervention of dogs. This is powerful. But its a Disney story, incomplete, sentimental. When a dog signs on with us, gives her or his doggish heart to us; when a dog looks you in the eyes, there’s a transmission, subtle as first light seen above the forest—people have no vocabulary for it—but the dog says you are worth my days and nights. I’ve seen blind people experience this moment. Its as large and yet delicate as poetry itself. Poetry. Dogs. Journeys. Mutual forgiveness of each vice. And then you walk.

 

 

The dog who loves you sees the glowing point behind all your movement. Sees the goodness in your purpose. While you worry about the rags and masks of worldly life, your dog sees only the embers of your heart. Moreover, your dog never forgets all the days of your sparking. Never.

I felt calm. It was my dog’s vision of my mountainside sunset heart. That’s what I was feeling.

The leaves were so clear. I was alive in my dog’s beautiful night.

 

 

 

I’m queering and cripping with every step. Every breath. Goodbye Madison Avenue. Oh oh! Here comes Madison Avenue trying to sell me a post-normative lifestyle. Look. There’s Aimee Mullins.

**

There are lots of blind people my age who’ve even less reason to like themselves but I gave that nonsense away like the monk in a miseracordia who one day left his body during a boring sermon.

**

The problem is…too many worship the body in its political and social alterity…imagining, or so it seems, the body is “it”. But that old rag is samsara. And I don’t want to accessorize until the day I die. Goodbye Aimee.

**

Have you ever knitted a failed sweater?

**

When you’re blind, every day, windblown darkness hits your cheek.

**

Peter McLaren:

Citizens can no longer be protected by nation-states and offered any assurance that they will be able to find affordable housing, education for their children, or medical assistance. And it is the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization who oversee regulatory functions outside the purview of democratic decision-making processes. It is these bureaucratic institutions that set the rules and arbitrate between the dominant economic powers, severely diminishing the power of governments to protect their citizens, and crippling the democratic public sphere in the process. We are now in the midst of ‘epidemics of overproduction’, and a massive explosion in the industrial reserve army of the dispossessed that now live in tent cities—or casas de carton—in the heart of many of our metropolitan centers. At this moment we are witnessing a re-feudalisation of capitalism, as it refuels itself with the more barbarous characteristics of its robber baron and McKinley-era past. We are not talking here about lemonade stand capitalism on steroids, but the most vicious form of deregulated exploitation of the poor that history has witnessed during the last century.

 

**

And so we need to “crip” the “democratic public sphere” since it is crippling us.

Able-bodied hegemony needs its cripples but doesn’t know it.

But we the cripples, in turn, don’t need “sound bite Viagraizations” (as Peter McLaren would call it).

We need jobs. Autists need real employment. 80% of the blind remain on government relief.

We need anti-imperial, anti-capital dignity.

Please. No more Ted Talks with Aimee.

 

 

 

 

 

There is something about the dog’s eyelashes

which mean it exists—there’s a door

to the darkness one gets used to

but the dog is real, sleeping

in sunlight.