If I tell you I love you dear dog you’ll not theorize the matter. You know the difference between longing and weather. Feel it beneath your fur. And you have another advantage. You see what’s in my eyes.
You forgive me my moonless absences, seeing how lonely a man can be.
Then you put your head on my knee.
“I’ve a chin for your theories,” you say.
The blind child sits quite still beneath a hornet nest. He hears them unzip the air. Black and white and fast—oh so fast. He loves them. He knows that once inside they’ll fold their wings. He loves knowing this. And he knows that so long as he doesn’t move they’ll pursue their errands, emitting radio static.
He already knows, at five, there’s an excellence to what later he will come to call the mind.
I never underestimate that kid. In turn, I refuse to underestimate anyone’s child.
Paolo Freire: “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
Funny to think of hornets as my little professors.
Good Morning Father, how’s the next life—or are you already three lives ahead of us? We measure fates like children playing with pots and pans. Maybe you’ve been minced in a five story brain, a neuro-imp? Good morning Dad, wherever you may be.
**
No nostalgia please, I have to drive…
**
I met a faculty type, a nonentity, a mound of zeros. He was pleased with himself. He was talking about Nietzsche. No one speaking of Nietzsche should ever be pleased.
**
Pre-historic dogs are with me. This shall be a fine day.
**
Hilary Clinton on forgiveness: “In the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said 70 times 7. Well, I want you all to know that I’m keeping a chart.”
Hilary: its possible we’re living in the age of forgiveness inflation.
**
In the aging present, dark, early, I’m putting on my guerdon-hope garment. And into the day…
One writes poems because of bruises in the heart
Though its a bird makes us see–sorry
To watch it go, we are sorry–
a child’s lament, for children are poets.
Who welcomes old, bruised hearts?
Do you remember when they force fed Dr. Johnson with that fish? Sam’s senses were not coarse enough—he spit it out—though Boswell importuned, Dear friend, eat or you will die. Death is better than Scottish ludefisk though it spites real love.This is the ambiguity of taste. Some say you can’t get away with your mind intact. Others say you can. I’m with Johnson: first refuse dried fish no matter the promise.
**
I’m filled with tangled string.
**
A look contains the history of man. (Auden) Some days I’m grateful I can’t see your faces.
**
America: this rock is Eden, go away, we’ve already found it.
**
Mutual need. Mutual aid. Simple. But even the Anarchists are specious. I once introduced myself to Utah Philips, the protest singer, said, in the manner of all young enthusiasts: “Its a thrill to meet another anarchist.” He glared at me. Said nothing. But of course I couldn’t see his face. And he’d said all he needed to say. His anarchy has a small “a”.
**
Each lover has a theory of his own about love and loss and love again. Mine is easy: be equally kind to all. OK, not so easy. But honest. As for the scurrilous (like that professor of writing in Ohio who spreads lurid stories about her students and colleagues, just so she can pretend to be their emotive midwife) you just set the soul dial from “love” to Scottish ludefisk. I’d save you if I had to.
**
In grief, the glimpse of a face, my own? Is that how I will die?
**
I shall go out today and write an epic in a language of dogs.
There’s this hulking, lumbering garbage dump—“normative culture”—a golem with fish heads and rotten fruit. Buried in its moist gut is Augusto Pinochet’s collection of severed heads. In America we fail to name it properly. But its King Kong Normate, alright.
He believes in stolen flesh and self-slaughter. He’ll trade in human slavery, insist the poor terminate their lives without welfare, food, or medicine.
King Kong Normate is human.
George Orwell: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
KKN is the perfect imperfect—he’s the wisdom tooth of history.
He’s incestuous with whiteness, believing its more equal than the other equal colors. (Orwell again).
The junctions of his roads and architectures are designed to facilitate sudden arrests.
He’s so afraid of the trans-gendered, the disabled, the feminists, the queer, the readers…
He says: “I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.” (Orwell)
He loves orthodoxy: “Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” (Orwell)
It bothers him that sanity is not statistical. (Orwell)
He dislikes disfigured hands.
When he sees a satisfied blind man hugging his dog he says: “My dog looked just like that, but he died last week—“
“Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor. Actually, dismantling the organism is no more difficult than dismantling the other two strata, signifiance and subjectification.”
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie
Let’s pull an apple out of the Normate. (Kafka: Metamorphosis)
Note: it won’t be as easy as Deleuze thinks.
Or it will.
We children hid among trees and watched the old woman who we’d been told “had a lobotomy”and we saw her as a witch. We dug into our foxhole. She came out of her trailer home and swept her garden path with a broom. We were speechless, separate, ambiguous little creatures in the presence of nameless adult suffering. This is why pastoral verse is hopeless.
This is why memories in the middle of the night can’t be assuaged by TV shows. The sadness of others carries us. Caesar knew. Whitman also. From moment to moment I get down on my knees and touch the ground with my hands. If forgiveness isn’t possible at least I can tap some Morse Code. Dear defenseless dead, do your teeth still chatter?
The sight of a blind man and his dog standing in front of paintings causes people to stare. I hold my attention still, absorbing agglutinated browns and pinks. Sometimes I like moving among art objects I can’t see. Its the Dada-ist in me. I pick up associations and feelings without the burden of facts. Most people probably wouldn’t understand this. Sometimes I rent an audio tour. Sometimes I get a docent to accompany me. I’m not static when it comes to my choices. Meditating among inexact colors and shapes is however a contemplative relief for me.
Once I went to the Chicago Art Institute with Vidal who decided to lick his balls in front of the Mater Dolorosa or “Sorrowing Virgin” from the Workshop of Dieric Bouts (Netherlandish, c. 1410–1475)
I yanked gently on his leash but he was hard at work in his own Netherlandish place and short of strangling him there was nothing I could do.
Then, predictably, a woman walked up. “That’s unseemly,” she said. “Yes,” I said, “but our job is to outwit Hell with our bodies.” She went away.
When Vidal was done we went to the modern art section. I figured it would be safer there.
“To everyone, I think, there is always something particularly pathetic about a blind man. Shorn of his strength and his independence, he is a prey to all the sensitiveness of his position and he is at the mercy of all with whom he comes in contact. The sensitiveness, above all, is an almost insuperable obstacle to cope with in his fight for a new life, for life goes on willy-nilly and the new conditions must be reckoned with. In darkness and uncertainty he must start again, wholly dependent on outside help for every move. His other senses may rally to his aid, but they cannot replace his eyesight. To man’s never failing friend has been accorded this special privilege. Gentlemen, I give you the German shepherd dog.”
—Dorothy Eustis founder of “The Seeing-Eye” in Morristown, New Jersey
Well Dorothy, its raining in sympathy land. Tiny Tim leans on his crutch and weeps. Shorn of his strength and independence he’s at the mercy of weather. It should be noted, he meets no one. You see, Dorothy, no one sees the cripples. They’re just facts of rain, humanoid extensions of cruel nature.
It is worse to be blind—eh Dorothy? The blind were shorn of free will, weren’t they? Until dogs came to save them. Gentlemen!
“In darkness and uncertainty he must start again, wholly dependent on outside help for every move.”
Oh the intoxication! The flapping of wings!
Dorothy, admit it, even in your day one could scarcely find anyone—and I mean anyone—who was “wholly dependent on outside help for every move”.
Dorothy metaphorized the blind as paralytics. And the dog, heroic, pulling the sled of sightlessness…
Sure, she wrote the words in 1928. But consider the narrative legacy of the blind, shorn of free will. Pilot Dogs, a guide dog school in Columbus, Ohio features prominently on its website: “Open your heart for closed eyes.”
Oh Lord! Dorothy ain’t dead, she’s only sleeping.
Blindness, a paralytic space, heartless, shorn of lovingkindness. Zoot Alors!
Not all guide dog schools wrap themselves in pathos. I’m fond of the mission statement from Guide Dogs for the Blind in California:
Guide Dogs for the Blind envisions a world with greater inclusion, opportunity and independence by optimizing the unique capabilities of people and dogs.
Nice.
But pejorative cultural memories linger. The blind are still in a wind tunnel of figurative piteousness.
And in the popular press every guide dog story is about dogs saving us.
The blind are not damsels in distress. We’re not tied to the railroad tracks of abjection.
Do dogs help some of us? You bet. But they help us because we’re trained to work in tandem. Dogs and blind people save six legged creatures. Gentlemen, I give you the canine-humanoid-dog-man.
Can poets (can men in television)
Be saved? It is not easy
To believe in unknowable justice…
—Auden
All the poets I know despair of poetry. I know a television man, he despairs of TV land. I take this as a good sign. Unknowable justice requires humility. Before humility is an itch. Augustine had it. Siddhartha had it. The justice itch. And justice means loving your fellow kind.
Auden says later in the same poem: “that we too may come to the picnic with nothing to hide”.
Well, I’m on the “back 9” as a friend says. I’m working as I lumber, throwing away my itchy clothes. It’s hard practice, taking them off. Harder perhaps when you have a disability. The disabled are always being poked like badgers. Yesterday a man accused me of abusing my guide dog because we were walking in the cold. I said: “See? The dog is wagging her tail.” But stranger-man was stuck with his broken record. “You are abusive.” I walked away. I was angry. Anger is sometimes vanity dressed up. I will throw away these itchy shirts and pantaloons.
The anger-vanity-complex. Like shrapnel in the soft tissues of the mind.
Planet of the Blind 