Year: 2014

Corky and I once met a blind chess master from Russia. We were in Milan being photographed for an advertising campaign. The chess master was also being photographed. There were three blind people altogether—blind writer, blind chess master, blind concert pianist. The gimmick was that we’d appear in magazine spreads extolling the graceful design of Artemide lighting. Even the blind love art. 

 

None of the other blind guys were friendly. 

 

Hell, even the photographer wasn’t friendly. And he was famous for his dog photos. 

 

I wondered if it was possible to photograph dogs without really liking them. I’d never thought about this before but being in the presence of Eliot Erwitt made me think about it. Yes I think you can photograph dogs without liking them at all. Erwitt’s dog photos are oddly lifeless while William Wegman’s photos are full of joy. Even the blind love photos. 

I dreamt I was in Russia. Something had happened—a foreign exchange program “gone bad” as I was not permitted to leave. Worse, they took my guide dog. In dreams when you cry the floodgates open. I wept and wept. 

 

They put me in a building, gave me a little apartment. There was a piano in the lobby. There were a dozen blind people all playing chess. 

 

Dear Lord Byron, may I stay home in my imagination—

I’m not as stoic as you, if they took away your dog 

you’d swim the Bosporus, endure conflagrations

all to get him back. I sat before a tuneless piano

and blindly played “Stormy Weather”

with tears running down my face.

The blind chess masters moved their pieces and said nothing. 

 

   

I try to be good. My dog deserves my attention to respectability, or at least the pursuit of it. I imagine I should be Siddhartha of the guide dog world. I tell myself I must be as good as my dog. But I fail. I feed Corky a strawberry while sitting in a Manhattan hotel lobby. I say ungentlemanly things to people I don’t like, much in the manner of Groucho Marx. “I’d horsewhip you if I had a horse,” I say to a pompous academic at a conference. I’m certain Corky would not approve. This is a problem. I mustn’t let her canine decency represent my own sad, Lutheran conscience. Nor should she be an impossible “master” in a Buddhist temple. “No projections, please,” she says, looking me over as we ride the subway to Grand Central Station. “You be you,” she says, “and I’ll be me.” “In this way we’re perfect.” 

 

But I’m a rascal—I’ve always been a rascal. Perhaps not in a hysterical way, but with a steady irreverence. As a boy I used to feed caramels to the squirrels just to see them chew with developing terror. That was the extent of my animal cruelty. But I should be clear, I’ve had trouble holding things sacred. I once stole a bishop’s mitre from a church and wore it to a party.

  

Oh yes my dog is good. She’s probably too good for me. But the great thing is she doesn’t think so. She doesn’t think so at all. 

 

At the MacDowell Colony for the Arts in New Hampshire, Corky climbs on my bed and licks my ear just when I’m feeling like a failure. Most writers will tell you they feel like failures at least once a day. There you are, in the unlighted alley of your depressive imagination, and voila, a canine tongue enters your ear. “To hell with Siddhartha,” she says. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Corky and I went to Jackson, Mississippi for a conference on blindness. We exited our hotel and two African-American men jumped aside as they saw us. Around a corner we went. We met a black woman who ran away. I commented on this to a blind man later that day. He was a white blind man. He said, “Oh yeah, black people don’t like dogs.” But I thought, “Black people don’t like dogs in the hands of white people, even blind white people.” I was sad all day. I felt the old distressed garments of American racism falling down like scarves. 

 

The schismatic inheritances America offers are enough to make a grown man and his dog weep. How does a dog weep? She stops wagging her tail. It was not long before I noticed Corky wasn’t wagging in Jackson. Maybe she was picking up on my mood. Maybe. But a dog who loves people must also sense their fear and feel a compensatory sadness. 

 

Wallace Stevens wrote: “The world is ugly and the people are sad.” He could have added dogs.  

 

Photo: Easter Island Statues

Vidal is stoic. He likes to sit and stare at distances. In Port Townsend, Washington, he sits beside me in the strange, weak sunlight of the American northwest and he sits so still I think he’s turned into a statue. He’s having a rendezvous with Chinese ghosts. But then, as my imagination starts working on his general state, he turns back into Vidal and eats a slow moving bee. I’m talking to a poet when it happens. “That was artful,” says Sam. “He just plucked it out of the air.” So Vidal is part guide dog and part something else. The something else eludes me.

 

This is the wonderful thing about dogs. We know them but only just so. Their pulses differ from ours. 

 

Vidal’s pulse reinforces his hunger which is tuned to allotments and rubbish. His hunger upon which he concentrates completely until it becomes a third party in our life together. 

 

 

At the home of friends he sneaks away from me and eats five pounds of Chinchilla food. Later that night as I’m sleeping in a guest room I hear him in the dark. He stands up and lets out a single moan, then proceeds to vomit wildly with long hacking coughs and convulsions. I stagger to my feet and cry for help. 

 

Chinchilla food is alfalfa and inside a dog it expands—Vidal has turned into a field, a farm, he’s a staggering barfing alfalfa ranch. 

 

As he stumbles around the room he produces whole statues of alfalfa, monuments sculpted by his digestion. They look like the Easter Island stele. And they’re strangely dry as I lift them. “Ready mades,” I say to David, whose house has been defiled. “He’s a regular Marcel Duchamp.” 

 

Groucho Marx famously said: “Outside of a book, a dog is man’s best friend. Inside a dog its too dark to read.” 

 

But Groucho was wrong. Inside a dog is a room with votive alfalfa demi-gods; where moonlight shines down on green and knobby figures of pure appetite. 

 

Photo of Agnes Moorehead from “Bewitched”

When my friend Bill Peace wrote yesterday about meeting a gas station attendant who was clearly addicted to meth amphetamine, and the intersection of that encounter with his own disability, I was reminded of the dozens of times I’ve been in the company of drunks, addicts, and broken wanderers. Traveling blind differs from sighted travel in only one respect: strangers are more likely to approach when you can’t see. They’re generally not malevolent, though I can’t prove it—my impression is they’re lost. Its ironic they should gravitate to a blind person. Over the years I’ve come to see this gravitation as something spiritual. I don’t mean this in a churchly sense, but more like Carl Jung’s analysis of UFOs. A blind person going confidently about his or her business means something to hapless wanderers. Once in New York City I was grabbed by an Asian man who dragged me across the street. On the far side he actually bowed and then ran away. He never said a thing. My guide dog was as stumped as I was. They didn’t teach us about this at guide dog school. The man was working something out. Doing some penance. 

 

What’s clear is that disability always represents something—its like the mirrored ball in a disco. You may be—no, likely are—minding your own business. You’re pumping gas like Bill Peace was doing, or you’re standing on a corner thinking about tartar sauce, why do they call it “tartar sauce”—did the Tartars actually make sauce—when a man disguised as a man appears. He says he has headaches. He says he lost his job. Says inside his clenched fist he has a ruby that once belonged to Agnes Moorehead. These things happen all the time when you have a visible disability. There is no such thing as shining, neutral weather. Not if you are a cripple abroad in America.

Photo of Stephen Kuusisto and his second guide dog “Vidal” 

I joke about Vidal, saying things like, “well he’s got a “complex”. “Back when he was a wolf he never knew when his next meal was coming.” In Graz, Austria he eats a bird’s wing while I sit up late under the moon in a garden with poets. The poets drink beer. Vidal snacks on raven feathers. For once he doesn’t cough them up. Does a dog who eats feathers fly in his sleep? Is he self medicating? What reckless medicines does he require and for what conditions?

 

The term for strange canine eating is “pica” and no one knows what causes it. Some say its a quest for missing nutrients. Others argue its just a form of attention seeking. With Vidal I sense its neither of these things—he’s the owner, the possessor really, of a very fast mind. He’s bored and the world is filed with wild promises. 

 

I come to see his eating as pure curiosity. What’s inside the rose? 

 

In Vidal’s view, both shade and silence are edible. 

 

The fact is, he’s really smart. 

 

Of course he is. But in his case something’s systematically deranged about the thing. I keep saying he’s good in traffic. He’s exceptional. Walking in downtown Graz he figures out how bike paths work—sees they’re potentially lethal—and moreover, sees I don’t understand them. 

He pushes his body against my legs, prevents me from colliding with a cyclist who flaps like a banner. 

 

Then, as I praise him, he eats some eggshells. 

 

 

 

Always the doctor leaning close, saying you’re alive. You raise your hands, open your eyes. The doctor is shabby. He’s asymmetrical like a Roman Emperor. There’s something wrong with the doctor. And even though you’re the monster—hence, proprioceptive, fast, clear, you know you’ll never get the doc to admit his shortcomings.

The Dog-man is different from the man he used to be. He knows we can only love the things we can conceive. He loves the moon, wind, old friends met by chance. He forgets his enemies though their smell reminds him to be cautious when necessary. You can count on the nose.  

 

Another way to say it: dogs don’t worry about the sensible soul. 

 

 

 

 

By Andrea Scarpino

 

My coach played the video: speed work on the heavy bag. My uppercuts looked good: my balance good, legs strong, chin down. 

 

Then my hooks. I started to laugh. What was I doing, slapping my arms limply at the bag like that? Distracting my opponent with how ridiculous I looked? 

 

Next day, another round of speed work. My coach told me to step closer to the bag, to put my weight into it. I thought about the video. And something clicked: hook after hook, the bag made a deep and satisfying sound. I punched harder than I’ve ever punched anything. I heard my coach cheer. I heard Zac cheer. My hands in my boxing gloves were light and solid and free from fear. 

 

And that may be the key: fearful. Fearless. 

 

I have lived so much of my life in fear. Fear of physical pain (it always returns eventually). Fear of losing people I love (I have, I will). Fear of never being smart enough (for what?) or good enough (for what?) or the best in something (what?).  In college, I wore my glasses to bed because I was afraid of not being able to see if someone broke in. For years, I slept with a knife under my mattress. 

 

Doing mitt work one night in the ring, my coach said I was “flinch-y.” Hitting her red mitts, I could feel my eyes flinch, I could feel my body flinch. I just couldn’t stop it from happening. And I couldn’t name fear’s object: I knew she wouldn’t hit me back with her mitts. I knew we were only training. She kept telling me to hit harder. I kept flinching. 

 

But that moment with the hooks, I felt no fear. I punched and punched and I heard the sound of my body hitting the bag and I heard cheering and I felt no fear. Body in action. Body in the moment. 

 

“Very few of us live with perfectly intact bodies,” one of my mentors says. 

 

I’m writing a book-length poem about the body in pain. My body in pain, the bodies of others in pain: football players, Frida Kahlo, young cancer patients. I’m writing a book-length poem about the ash tree: ashes to ash tree. I’m writing a book-length poem about how medicine failed me. Continues to fail me. 

 

“We write what we need to understand,” another mentor says. 

 

That night with the hooks—maybe it only lasted 20 seconds, but for those seconds, I understood my body. It did what I wanted it to do. I didn’t feel pain or fear. I didn’t flinch.