2014 – Page 16 – Planet of the Blind

On Claritin and Fiber and Spring

When I was in college, I woke one morning with a lump under my eyebrow and the right side of my face swollen. My doctor prescribed Claritin, an allergy medicine. The lump continued to swell and my face continued to swell, and each day I returned to the doctor, I was sent away. Five days later, my eye completely swollen shut and my face too tender to touch, I brought myself to the emergency room. The ophthalmologist on duty immediately started IV antibiotics, lanced and drained the lump, and packed the wound with gauze. A Staph infection was threatening my optic nerve. I missed my brother’s graduation because the ophthalmologist wouldn’t release me to fly until he was sure I wasn’t going to lose my eyesight.

This week, I went to the emergency room with abdominal pain. After blood work, x-rays, and two ultrasounds, the doctor diagnosed a 4 cm cyst on my ovary. And told me to eat more fiber. I’m a vegetarian who eats so many vegetables my food-tracking app once reported my fiber consumption was inhibiting the absorption of important nutrients. I had a follow-up appointment with my regular doctor, who blamed the cyst on, and I’m quoting her, “this crazy spring.”

I know that patients are poor indicators of what’s happening in their bodies. I know that our medical system is completely broken. I know most doctors do the best they can.

But I worry often that American medicine doesn’t take its patients seriously. I worry often that we’re told all sorts of strange things in order to usher us quickly out the office door. I worry often that in the scramble of hourly billing, medical mistakes happen more often than they should. I worry often that doctors are afraid to tell patients when they just don’t know the answers to our questions and so respond with truth claims that are nowhere near the truth.

Three years ago, I spent a week at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where more than one doctor told me we have only a rudimentary understanding of hormones, how they work in the body, how they interact with one another, what constellation of issues they might cause when they’re imbalanced or interacting in unusual ways. And it was terrifying to hear this admission—some of the best doctors in the country saying simple, “I don’t know”—but it was also amazingly refreshing. Just a simple, “I don’t know.”

“Every human being is a colony,” Picasso said. And sometimes that colony functions seamlessly. And sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes the malfunctions are easy to identify and fix. And sometimes they aren’t. But wouldn’t it be refreshing if more doctors simply sat with us in their offices? Simply listened to our bodily complaints. And when they don’t know what’s making us ill, wouldn’t it be refreshing if they simply said, “The body is mostly mystery” –instead of writing quick prescriptions or blaming the weather. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if patients like me who feel brutalized by medicine’s incompetence could regain some of the faith felt by the generation before us? If we could all just agree, “The body is mostly mystery.” And try to work with that.

April 30, Self-Interview

Last night in my dream, the Gods touched my hair. I dreamt of an odd family, people important in my youth. They became tragic with many deaths in the family, alcoholism, relentless sadnesses. My hair parted as I slept and I saw the House of Atreus. And I woke to the long, reverbatory, mystic sadness that comes from the stars. And so I must go into the day with the tempus of the collective unconscious. As Carl Jung would say: “Better wear your good deodorant.”

Note to self: Carl Jung probably didn’t use deodorant. He was Swiss. The Swiss believe they do not stink.

Off to the baths. Marat are you coming?

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” (Carl Jung)

Posted with Blogsy

Self-Interview, April 30, 2014

Note to self: Carl Jung probably didn’t use deodorant. He was Swiss. The Swiss believe they do not stink.

Off to the baths. Marat are you coming?

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” (Carl Jung)

Posted with Blogsy

Self-Interview, April 30, 2014

Note to self: Carl Jung probably didn’t use deodorant. He was Swiss. The Swiss believe they do not stink.

Off to the baths. Marat are you coming?

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” (Carl Jung)

Selfie: Late April

Photo: author Stephen Kuusisto mimics Marty Feldman's "Igor" in Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein"

Compulsory hetero-normativity; compulsory able-bodiedness; patriarchy; dominant whiteness. So many oppressions. So many astonishing human arrangements. Note: I’ve left out religious intolerance. My mistake. There. Ipse dixit.

Someone always says “it (prejudice) is produced by an insufficiency of language”—you can count on post-structuralists.

I remain wary of those who “abstract” power.

In general sectarian cosmopolitanism isn’t your friend if you hail from a historically marginalized background.

Still, as Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “mythologies of the unlucky conquer nations”.

Beware your mythologies.

The only compulsory principle is late industrial capitalism. “its property, stupid.”

I will not pretend I reason clearly.

Post-normativity is an aesthetic idea but meantime, the bio-industrial-genetics industry is picking your pocket.

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” (Nietzsche)

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” (Jung)

Ratify the Charter, Share Your Stories, Write to Tom Harkin

At Dawn

The birds in my neighborhood, who are beauty in-molded, rise and circle. Their brains are blanked, their brains are dark as minerals. I give thanks and praises there are no Bibles for vireos and phoebes. I’m blind but see light at the tips of wings—gold finches, orioles, bay-breasted warblers.�

Some say beauty will outlast ideas of good and evil.

via www.planet-of-the-blind.com

At Dawn

The birds in my neighborhood, who are beauty in-molded, rise and circle. Their brains are blanked, their brains are dark as minerals. I give thanks and praises there are no Bibles for vireos and phoebes. I’m blind but see light at the tips of wings—gold finches, orioles, bay-breasted warblers.

Some say beauty will outlast ideas of good and evil.

If I am here entire I must push my face into the feathers of the mind. Let others read Revelation.

If I come back I’ll be nothing more than spindrift to the tips of wings.

What all Dogs Know

Image: Steve Kuusisto with "Vidal" (a handsome yellow Labrador)–his second dog from Guiding Eyes for the Blind:

I don’t want to be a celebrity. I just want to be my dog. Ipse dixit.

When we hug dogs and smell their fur we’re fully realized. Then we drift back into reason and dogs see we’ve gone to a far room. Empathy matters then. Dogs know we’ve entered a fearful place in a crystal palace of abstractions. They touch our knees. They live only in amazement.

I don’t know as much about amazement as I should. D.H. Lawrence wrote:

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience

is considered.

So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it

the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth

and the insistence of the sun.

I understand a dog’s amazement in our company is indeed mystic but only insofar as we consider it.

I walked up the pale green avenue—7th avenue in New York—end of day, my great guide dog working to keep us safe, working us toward the postulate of arrival, the grandest of things, a task accomplished, going where we had to go.

I was grieving for my father who had died only a month before. Grief is impossible to maintain so we engage it in small gasps. I saw my father was on an aerial bridge, high in the fading light, the span without end. My father had nowhere to go. And outside a monolithic computer store I began weeping. And my guide dog stopped, turned, saw me stricken, rose up on her hind legs and gently washed my face. I, who could not reason clearly, was being guided in more than one way. My father’s bridge vanished. I heard his laughter. “Beauty,” says the dog, “is very strong.”

We have to let the dogs in. Consider what they know.

Why I'm a Crippled Poet

I am a poet who’s blind—I’m also short, dyspeptic, and addicted to savory treats. I feel better for having said so. This is, after all, national poetry month.

Not long ago I attended a writing conference. A poet who has MS said she didn’t want to be a “wheelchair poet” by which (one presumes) she meant she didn't want her writing to be viewed through the lens of disability. Expanding this, I imagine she wouldn't want to be a black poet, a lesbian poet, or a really tall poet. In her view, poetry should be the product of an ex cathedra pronouncement—with a stroke of the pen we can erase all the nagging identity markers of humanity.

Its possible to have a disability and live your life pretending you don’t have one. Plenty of people have done so. But getting away with this charade in literary terms means the imagination has been suborned—bribed—you’ve tricked yourself into thinking there’s a pot of gold that will be yours but only if there isn’t a hint of physical difference in your work. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor: “All the poets are strong, good looking, and above average.”

Forget that our nation’s greatest poet Emily Dickinson had rod-cone dystrophy and couldn’t see in sunlight; forget Walt Whitman’s stroke; ignore bi-polar depression in the case of Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell; dismiss Alexander Pope’s spinal disease—I’m sorry this is a long list—Sylvia Plath; Hart Crane; Ann Sexton; Allen Ginsberg; William Carlos Williams; forget them all. Disability doesn’t belong in poetry. God help you if you let it in—the critics will dismiss you from the poetry pantheon IN A FLASH since “great” poetry comes from the grandest of all human resources—the dis-embodied mind. (Picture it as a Star Trek arrangement, a brain in a plexiglass case with wires emanating from it.)

When I went to college in the 1970’s English majors were introduced to “New Criticism”—and though this approach to literature was already fading by the time I graduated—poetry world still has a “New Criticism Hangover”. New Criticism argued the study of literature required no knowledge about the writer behind the work. The shaping of words, the wit, the poet’s irony, his literary allusions—these were all you had to know to discern meaning—or as I came to call it—the “soft, chewy center” of a poem.

Back then everyone was still under the sway of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland”. We were instructed to read it as a compendium of allusions and to critique it as an allegory of modern exhaustion. No one (and I mean no one) raised his or her hand and said: “Wasn’t Eliot’s wife in a madhouse when he wrote this; and wasn’t he clinically depressed at the time?” We simply talked about the quest for the Holy Grail and the “objective correlative” and, if we were out to impress the prof, we looked up everything in the original Greek.

The New Criticism Hangover stipulates you mustn’t admit your complaining, belching, limping, loudly breathing, dis-articulated, lumbering body into poems. You may only lampoon or parody “other bodies” but this should be reserved for pathos or other symbolic distancing effects.

Many of America’s leading poets do this—blindness represents profound isolation; deafness is simply a metaphor for lack of knowledge; deformity is nothing more than a Grand Guignol effect. If you write like a poet who has NCH you must never hint you have a body of your own.

Of course there are messy feminist poets with their leaking womanly poems; and black poets with their jazzy outrages; but the New Critics Hangover School is uncomfortable with all that stuff.

The “wheelchair poet” remark is part of this heritage—its a highly conscious position—to sequester the outlier body; to keep it in its sarcophagus; to tighten down all the screws.

Me? I’m a messy “wheelchair poet” in the broadest sense. I’m demanding too. I cause trouble in public spaces. I’ll make you move your stone lions if they block the damned sidewalk. I’ll demand you provide me with a trash can at the Hilton so I can pick up my dog’s shit. If you don’t bring me the can, I’ll leave the shit right here. I’m loud. I’m really loud. I like hip-hop. I like Mahler symphonies and I turn them way up. I’m a poet who not only admits the defective body into literature—I think the imagination is starving for what that damned body knows. I happen to be blind. What do I know? I know things like this:

“Only Bread, Only Light”

At times the blind see light,

And that moment is the Sistine ceiling,

Grace among buildings—no one asks

For it, no one asks.

After all, this is solitude,

Daylight’s finger,

Blake’s angel

Parting willow leaves.

I should know better.

Get with the business

Of walking the lovely, satisfied,