Month: March 2015

The Mozart Shoes

I went to the shoe store and placed my feet in the measuring pans. My feet transmitted a sudden and stark message—“we feel shy down here; we’re under examination. Please get us back inside our shoes.” I wondered about this. The tragedy of it. “When,” I wondered, “had my feet learned to be timid?” “It’s the whole damn system” I told them. “Capitalism has taught you to feel incomplete.” But when your feet are farouche the whole body jumps that way. The temporal lobe said: “I too don’t wish to be known.”

I really wanted Mozart just then. Anything other than the grey flock of avian neural distress that emanated from my feet and circled outward to the farthest rings of my flesh. “Jesus,” I said, “you’re just buying some shoes.” But the temporal lobe said: “There’s no such thing as just. Would you just saw off your hand?” So I was forced to conclude, encouraged to conclude, the body’s anguish is like intense moonlight.

The shoe moment helps me recognize what my autistic friends already know. There is no “me”—there are only the eager, bristling, dancing, component parts. Now ask yourself how you get through the day?

Oh my feet, you moth eaten grand seigneurs, keep talking. It’s OK.

Fake Cripples Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

In her superb book Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race, Ellen Samuels describes, among other things, the long history of impostor narratives in America. Samuels and Martin Norden (author of the Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies) have both revealed a quintessentially American fascination with ersatz or manque cripples—the former is a pretender and the latter isn’t crippled enough. In either case the role of popular film in deceiving the public about disability is ubiquitous and a matter of long standing. By this I mean to say, perhaps inelegantly, that disability is seldom an either/or circumstance. In the case of blindness one may “see” rather poorly but still see well enough to read a sign from a distance of 8 inches. A wheelchair user may be able to walk five feet. In America where people are either rich or poor; black or white; anything that troubles this hardened exclusivity is (and has always been) considered cheating.

Samuels’ book is properly analytical about what is fake and what is real and one should be mindful always that America loves, truly loves, some kinds of fake but not where the human body is concerned. Trans people, and partially sighted people, and light skinned black people all know the drill. They walk through the long dusk with rudely scrawled signs proclaiming they’re not fakers. “Fake” means, among other things, thievery. Years ago when I was a visiting writer at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, I took a walk with my guide dog. I walked her on a dirt road with just her leash and I didn’t use the harness. There were no cars. I wanted my dog to have the opportunity to dawdle in the ferns and smell the wild turkeys. Would’t you know? A fellow artist in residence—a rather angry older woman—told the MacDowell administration I was a “faker”; I was faking blindness, just to have a dog at the arts center. Disability is always seen as something devious, performative, and dishonest. Always.

People who are not disabled do not generally understand this. And in my view, this is why it’s so important for colleges and universities to hire actually disabled people to serve in offices of disability support or as ADA Coordinators. Unless you’ve felt the shifting sands of social acceptance under your own feet or wheels, you probably don’t understand the hourly struggle to achieve citizenship that disabled people endure.

Fake also means malevolent. I’m going to steal something from you. Perhaps I’ll steal your good health. The fake blind man, grabbing your good fortune and stuffing it into his little bag.

 

For Tomas Transtromer

Happy the man or woman who owns a few books, who drinks tea. We rehearse a few words in case there really is a God. And others in case there isn’t. Years ago an old man stopped me on the street in Helsinki and wagged his forefinger. “Why do you say you see? You don’t see! You understand!” He was a ghost of a certain kind. He was conveying his rehearsal. Giving me words.

Before that day I didn’t know people could rise from books and appear before you on the street. That night, with a few books and a cup of tea I knew I’d met Strindberg. 

“I dream, therefore I exist,” he wrote. And I copied this into my notebook with a leaky fountain pen.    

Farewell Tomas Transtromer, and Thank You

I lost a poet this morning for that’s how it feels: the death of the writer is personal. In this case the poet is Tomas Transtromer. I feel the loss of a friend. Perhaps I don’t experience this with every poet. But when a lyric writer crosses over there’s a stitch in my ribcage. With Tomas Transtromer I always felt I had a secret friend. Those of us who love poetry, who in small or large ways have endeavored to live through it—that transitive and delicate approach to phenomena we call “the imagination”—are heartened when a writer suddenly says the world is still being born as Transtromer does in his poem “The Half-Finished Heaven”: 

Despondency breaks off its course.

Anguish breaks off its course.

The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,

even the ghosts take a draft.

And our paintings see daylight,

our red beasts of the Ice Age studios.

Everything begins to look around.

We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door

leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

Excerpt From: Tomas Tranströmer. “The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/WAORD.l   

**

In these times we must be reminded of the mysteries of consciousness and water shining. Tomas Transtromer was a good friend, a fellow introvert who learned to live in the big world, who endeavored to do some decent work with damaged children, who came home at night in the Baltic dark and played Haydn on his piano, who whispered in our ears, each of us is still half open. 

Imagine that.   

Dog and Notebook, They Never Let You Down

Australian man button holes me, explains collective unconscious in airport. 

Once on subway in New York I saw a man talking angrily to God. 

As poet Charles Simic would say, “he had dark ages on his brain.”

Easy to be confused by strangers and even friends. Easy to want bubble bath.

Trust notebook. It will never let you down. 

When young, ate an onion like an apple, just to impress girl friend.

Old now, cleans ashes from fireplace, impresses no one.

How it goes. Time stretches him, but he’s only elastic in noggin. 

Sometimes notebook’s pages get stuck together.

Dog owns all the money. Yellow canine money. Lucky, dog spends it with you. 

Walked around the down on luck neighborhoods of Ithaca, New York. 

Shabby houses looked like places where people were either sleeping or sick. 

Old frame structures no longer loved. 

But my dog and I—we were some kind of two headed flying fish. 

Happiness was in the facing wind. 

Poets Ken Weisner and Andrea Scarpino in Syracuse

Y Areas of Focus Blue all bold
A Reading by Poets
KEN WEISNER
and ANDREA SCARPINO

 
WEDNESDAY, 3/25, 7:00 PM
Free and open to the public 

Ken Weisner lives in Santa Cruz and teaches writing at De Anza Community College in Cupertino where he edits Red Wheelbarrow. His most recent collection of poems is Anything on Earth (2010, Hummingbird Press). His work has been featured on Sam Hamill’s “Poets Against the War” website and on The Writer’s Almanac (2010).

Andrea Scarpino is the author of the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press) and the poetry collection Once, Then (Red Hen Press). She contributes weekly to the blog Planet of the Blind. This reading is presented by the Syracuse University Honors Program.

This reading presented by the Honors Program at Syracuse University.

The YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center

340 Montgomery St.
Syracuse, NY 13202

High School Days

When I was in high school an average week went like this:

Skip gym class, go to local college, read Voltaire–but not Candide, instead, his Philosophical Dictionary–liking especially:

“A big library has this in it of good, that it dismays those who look at it. Two hundred thousand volumes discourage a man tempted to print; but unfortunately he at once says to himself: “People do not read all those books, and they may read mine.” He compares himself to a drop of water who complains of being lost in the ocean and ignored: a genius had pity on it; he caused it to be swallowed by an oyster; it became the most beautiful pearl in the Orient…”

2. Skip gym class, go to draft board, show blind letter from doctor. Declare to hedge hog corporal blind people might conceivably work in tunnels. Corporal tells him to go screw himself.

3. Skip gym class, drink stolen bottle of champagne. Take nap in abandoned bath tub in woods.

4. Skip gym class, go to local college, read Ed Sanders, liking especially “Poems From Jail”.

5. Skip entire school day. Stay sober but still take nap in abandoned bath tub.

Ah Wordsworth:

“Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be…”

Starbucks and the “Racing Together” Dilemma

When Trayvon Martin was murdered (and I’ve no compunction saying so) I published a blog post saying race and disability are linked by stigmatizing architectures. I wrote from an outlier’s position as I’m a blind man whose presence in public is nearly always conditional. One thing my friends of color and my pals with disabilities (and yes, sometimes they’re the same) know is that nowadays there are more gated spaces in the US than ever. Some places have patrolled fences while others offer no signs of implicit exception. All outliers understand that when you transgress—when you expect to enter closed spaces you’ll be sized up. I said:

As a person who travels everywhere accompanied by a guide dog I know something about the architectures and the cultural languages of “the gate” –doormen, security officers, functionaries of all kinds have sized me up in the new “quasi public” spaces that constitute our contemporary town square. I too have been observed, followed, pointed at, and ultimately told I don’t belong by people who are ill informed and marginally empowered. Like Trayvon I am seldom in the right place. Where precisely would that place be? Would it be back in the institution for the blind, circa 1900? Would it be staying at home always?

Tippy-toe-racist-ableist-architecture isn’t new. Slavery was always architecture. And the “ugly laws” kept cripples off the streets of America for a century. Yes, we’re living in a time of vicious retrenchment. Enter Starbucks.

By now almost everyone knows the CEO of Starbucks, Howard D.Schultz  launched a campaign called “Racing Together”—baristas were instructed to write the phrase on every coffee cup sold. Starbucks’ aim was to start a national conversation about race. I’m saying the motive was good but I’m also scratching my head, for Mr. Schultz must have imagined his franchises are genuine 18th century coffee houses where informed citizens gather regularly to exchange ideas and conduct solemn conversations. I love the notion. I enjoy picturing Samuel Johnson seated across from me, slumped in a leather chair, hoisting his mocha latte, and cheerily dissecting our manners.

I fear Mr. Schultz had a good idea but oddly, inexplicably, misunderstood what the average Starbucks essentially is. Note: I’m not claiming his coffee shops are gated spaces (though some may be) nor am I saying conversations about tricky subjects shouldn’t happen—for I believe our nation is woefully indisposed to the art of engagement. In fact I care so much about conversing I even wrote a book about it called Do Not Interrupt: A Playful Take on the Art of Conversation.

No. I think Mr. Schultz forgot that for over sixty years, Americans have been schooled by Madison Avenue to think they deserve a break today. Although the slogan was originally coined for MacDonalds, it stands for the advertized appeal of every commercial space. The slogan was also accompanied by the claim: “at MacDonalds it’s clean.” The subtexts are variable but one thing’s for sure: you shouldn’t feel guilt when spending money on junk food (you deserve it) and you have every right to expect the place where this food is sold offers “time out” from your daily troubles. All franchise businesses in the United States sell these presumptions.

In fact, so trouble free are these franchises imagined to be, their managers often run afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are frequent stories about people with service dogs, mothers with crippled children, deaf people trying to sign—all experiencing discrimination in fast food venues.

Some gated communities are entirely created by the advertising industrial complex. (How can the Hamburglar cheer up the tots when there’s a motorized wheelchair user at the next table?)

Where would the right place be for coffee and conversation about outliers when long ago we sold the vision that fast food restaurants are fully sanitized for our protection?

 

Disability and Slow Thought

It was Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing of Gibbon who observed: “We all tend to simplify, perhaps to dramatise, our mental development. In retrospect, the slow processes of the mind are disguised, sometimes even obliterated, by the dramatic moment of discovery, or conversion. St Augustine’s tolle lege, Newton’s apple … intellectual history is full of such episodes which immortalise, though they may not explain, crucial stages in the transformation of thought.”

We talk in disability circles of the “overcoming” narrative– those memoirs and made for TV films where the “aha” moment is both the summit of long striving and a monument to the agonies of an exemplary cripple’s stamina or faith. “Inspiration porn” we call it. What’s most unfortunate is the misleading impression such stories convey. Real disability is not subject to conversion. Nor is it apprehended in a flash.

 

If inspiration porn is bad (and trust me it is) so is theory porn. “Culture has completed its work when everything is a sign” wrote William Gass–a troubled irony certainly–culture endeavors to narrow the signifiers–or failing that, to build recognizable maps with lines you can follow. Theory porn accentuates oppositional rhetorics in order to suggest or extol the preferred status of outlier bodies. Critical disability studies creates its own overcoming narrative by arguing disability or crippled-ness are active verbs until we are “disabling” or “cripping” neo-liberalism, compulsory hetero-normativity, or gym toned bodies. Yes, theory porn has its problems. Once at a conference I heard one theorist of disability attack another because the latter was devoted to physical fitness, and presumably insufficiently infirm to hold a position on the subject of disability. If the outlier body is theorized it best be sufficient unto its marginalization.

One must dare to be slow as the wheel chair on ice. Simplifying or dramatizing bodies is not much different from the overcoming narrative. Theory does quite often superimpose its own Aristotelian template over the broken body. It’s a very very slow business this altogether inexplainable body.