Year: 2014

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.

 

I am distressed. Blindness isn’t merely a lack of vision–its a fight or flee carnival, sequential, unpredictable, sometimes rather frightening. And even the small things, paying cash in the market, become tangled as my cash falls to the floor and I fumble publicly down where all the shoes have trod, the impatient shoppers behind me, no one offering to help, and my skin undergoes electrolysis and groping I feel I could weep. I know I’m not supposed to say this. The core of speech is reserved for nuanced politics. One is supposed to say disability is merely a nuisance. That’s the politically correct thing. I’m just like everyone else but with a few added musical notes. But this is of course ridiculous when you’re down on the public floor scrambling after two dropped quarters. I escape with my groceries. Walk in the sunshine. “The day will get better,” I say to no one in particular.

 

But its fight or flee–all day; a fairground of anxieties. Crossing streets. Getting to the other side safely. Getting there with your dignity. The dog helps. Squaring your shoulders helps. But then the next place you go has a revolving door. You can’t get in. When you tell the management they need a “disability friendly” door they tell you with their Rococo eye rolling, they don’t care. “Go away,” they say, though they don’t really say it; but they do. You continue on the street of public life. You shamble among the rags and masks of the ordinary people. Everyone looks at you. You’re a half vagrant out in public blind person. You’re wearing your good suit with the purple tie. You’re walking around with rain in your heart.

 

Strangers ask how much you can see. You make jokes. “You look like Ingrid Bergman; Cary Grant.” Young people don’t know who they are. It doesn’t matter.

The books I downloaded this morning from Amazon aren’t accessible. I wasted my money.

After many languages I’m still an orphan.

I live in an American city without good public transportation. I must rely on taxicabs more than I wish. The drivers are desperate people. They talk about desperate matters with broken words. Most of them listen to “hate radio” and I smile from the back seat under my big sunglasses.

Do you see? What do you see? I’m waiting for happiness to slowly crawl in…

 

 

 

The joy of early. Grass and sun.

Anonymous current passing through.

 

Its true: in our village

no one talks much of spirit.

 

But we are legends, myths—

and thank you for walking up to my name

 

and touching it.

 

 

 

 

Perhaps as a poet said, there really is a tale lit by the soft light of sleep. “Perhaps” grows around the house like birches. Perhaps there’s a meadow where the dead dogs frolic. I’ll never give away perhaps. A fritillary lands on the unpainted porch, having returned just now to earth through a black sieve.

 

**

 

 

It rains in the apple trees

Where a crow settles

In a dome of blossoms—

 

I watch him

With my clear head

The way blind people do…

 

**

 

But the music. Nobility. Dignified growth of the man. No more hunched shoulders.

And Mahler, always an intruder, never welcomed, little Bohemian, as a boy, conducting the birch trees…

 

 

 

The dog who loves you doesn’t ask you to be stupendous. You’re okay in dog book.

You’re okay because really, in the last analysis, you’re companionable. Even if you don’t talk much. Even if you’re having a bad day. Your dog knows you like the phases of the moon. Yes, you’re okay in dog book. Not a fumbling, half forgetful, regret-machine. Not a jealous athlete or poet. Not a tired mother; a broken teacher; a strict and addicted capitalist. Your dog knows you like the tides; like all the decent, kind, lucky confederacies of chance—even if you’re not presently much of a man or woman, you will be again. Your dog knows.

 

When you live long enough with a dog, and a smart one at that, your dreams are less panicked and more lyrical.

 

After Milan Corky, Connie and I went to Venice. By day, in our waking lives we floated in a gondola and heard caged birds call from windows. I heard a cuckoo singing from a building where Mozart once lived. Corky sat tall and looked regally in all directions.

 

By night, asleep in our hotel beside the grand canal we dreamt richly—all three of us.

Corky sighed and puffed and moved her feet. Connie said something in her sleep. I dreamt I was in the middle of a field at night, lights from a far town in the distance. I understood friendships were on the horizon. I felt light and strangely cultivated. Sometimes in sleep you realize you’re in a kindly dream. Walking by day along the canals of Venice with a strong dog had offered pleasing trajectories, and dreams replayed them. A good dream makes a home inside of you. There are people and animals who love you sincerely. In a lucky life you wake and find its true.

 

 

I remember those Scandinavian houses with the tall white tile ovens—they stood in the corners of rooms like spies. Adults of course think these things give a home character. This is the difference. Old people give away thoughts that are neither hunger or thirst. Some days the horror of adult life is enough to drive one under the bed. My little boy, the one who became me, knew those stoves stood in the crack between wakefulness and dream. And years later, when I was in college and reading Edgar Poe, I felt the hypnogogia as he called it, and saw that disability was in fact the tell tale heart—the life that goes on under the floor; the life that’s been operated on; the one on the tip of your tongue but never uttered.

 

Here’s the thing: there are days when you don’t want to go outside. The adult world is filled with stove makers. You stay home and drink tea. You think about all the creepy doctors. The spies.

 

You think about all kinds of things. You promise to get strong presently. By the afternoon you’re ready to go outside. You take your indignant, nail studded wheelchair, guide dog, hobby horse and go to the grocery. And though all the customers and employees stare at you, stare as if you’re the skeleton in a morality play, you roll or walk a most strange course straight for the olives with pimentos. Lord knows, sometimes happiness slowly crawls into you.