Month: March 2015

How do you say “knuckles of the sky?” 
Old woman with equally old dog— 

the two of them 

hunched in a boxing wind. 

He was openly blind and therefore bothersome. He bothered all sorts: the taxi drivers who didn’t like his dog; the school administrators who never really “got him”.  He was openly blind and insisted in high school that he should be on the track team. They said no. He would be an insurance risk. He supposed that meant if he was on a team he’d make everyone else blind too. 

He bothered all sorts. Once he was followed by a store detective in Macy’s. Confronted, the shamus said: “well you might not be blind, we get all kinds in here.” As if the guide dog was a ruse. What a cunning plan! 

He was openly blind and there wasn’t much to be done about it. He spent inordinate time trying to make others feel comfy in his presence. A foolish pursuit, bootless, but he kept at it.
 
“You can’t control your fate among able bodied people,” he said, “but you can choose to be more beacon than target.” 

He did however take to saying things to sighted people that they’d said to him. 

“You might not really be sighted,” he said. 
“You might need help crossing this street,” he said.
“I think your vision makes you angry,” he said.
“Isn’t that nice! You’re out in the world!” he said.

He didn’t really say these things. He had too much dignity. But thinking them helped. 

Inside my shirt and under my skin you’ll find the crap the world put in:
“You’re blind you know—you don’t belong—you stay right here
Til mom comes along. Don’t mind the kids who taunt you so,
It’s just good sport, don’t you know?”
Worse: the teachers, feckless sorts
Dont want a kid who can’t play sports—
Can’t read chalkboards, do the math
Without some help to find his path—
How tireseome, the child who’s blind 
Taking space inside their minds. 
O but wait until he’s grown
And wants a job of his very own. 
“You’re a burden with your demands
for access to things like any man
or woman working at Normal Inc—
you’re very presence makes us sink.
You’re a downer, bub, 
Wanting the web,
Accessible notes and signs,
Or colleagues who are kind.
Go back to the the place where you belong,
Wherever that is, maybe Hong Kong—
Just don’t stay here and ask for stuff
We take for granted, enough’s enough.  

Thank you for submitting “Paradise Lost” to the Old Yorker. We regret we cannot publish your poem. We appreciate your sanguinary devotion to hoary sinners. You certainly have a way with snakes.
If you have anything short ending with an “ah” moment of lyric transport we’d love to see it. 

Yours, 

Cuthbert Quiller
Sub-sub-Cartesian Proof Reader and Mail Clerk
Who Knows the Most about Microsoft Exchange
and Cleans the Coffee Maker to the Standards of
His Nibbs.  

Thank you for submitting “Paradise Lost” to the Old Yorker. We regret we cannot publish your poem. We appreciate your sanguinary devotion to hoary sinners. You certainly have a way with snakes.
If you have anything short ending with an “ah” moment of lyric transport we’d love to see it. 

Yours, 

Cuthbert Quiller
Sub-sub-Cartesian Proof Reader and Mail Clerk
Who Knows the Most about Microsoft Exchange
and Cleans the Coffee Maker to the Standards of
His Nibbs.  

In 1711 the great English essayist Joseph Addison wrote: 

“There cannot a greater judgment befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another, than if they were actually two different nations. The effects of such a division are pernicious to the last degree …, fatal both to men’s morals and their understandings; it sinks the virtue of a nation, and not only so, but destroys even common sense.

A furious party-spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints, naturally breaks out in falsehood, detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancour, and extinguishes all the seeds of good-nature, compassion and humanity.”

Observing the GOP’s conduct on Capitol Hill one fair imagines old Addison walking the halls, his facial veins blue in the manner of the dead who are forced to see history morph from tragedy to farce to tragedy again. We are now two different nations and the division is pernicious to the last degree…fatal to both morals and understandings; our virtue sinking; common sense all but embalmed.

Addison wrote: “A man should not allow himself to hate even his enemies.” There’s an allowance industry at play—calumny and acrimonious party spirit depend now on nearly universal detestation. 
Is it reassuring to know it was always “thus”? Yes. I say yes. Democracy has thankfully always represented the ugliest form of government. It eagerly supports invective and blame. George Washington would easily recognize our current hideous politics. 

Addison’s ghost would see other things though. He wrote: “A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.” 

It’s difficult not to hate Lindsey Graham. Tonight I’m breaking out my Ouija board to see what Addison would say about the Senator from South Carolina. Here is what I think he might say:

“Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.”

Or, perhaps more to the point: “select your crew wisely.”

One night I called a cab, put the harness on Corky, and grabbed my old hockey skates. It was late March but still cold. I told the driver to take us to a pond and come back in an hour. “Are you sure  it’s safe?” he asked. “You mean the ice?” I said. “Well yeah, the ice,” he replied—though I knew he was thinking about blindness and skates. “The ice is OK,” I said. People had been skating on it for days. Even so, after the car drove away I tossed stones while Corky sat beside me. We were all alone.

Everyone who’s ever skated on a pond knows the stone test isn’t reliable but you do it anyway. It’s like spitting on your hands before raising a sledge hammer. 

I removed Corky’s harness, pulled on the skates, and we ventured together out onto the ice. 

I wobbled ahead half gliding half lurching. Corky sat down suddenly and stared. I yipped like a cowboy and began making slow circles. I skated while her eyes followed me. I could feel her staring through the center of my back. She knew this wasn’t smart.

I took another slow circle. Corky didn’t budge. I decided not to call her. She was honoring her own wisdom. I came back, sat down, and put my arms around her. 

What a good girl she was. Like a canine mother. “I can’t stop you from doing this,” she seemed to say. “Look at me sitting. Can’t you see I don’t approve?” 

“I’ll try to be smart,” I told her. 

When the cab returned the driver wanted to know how the skating went. I told him it was stupendous. I couldn’t tell him my dog was worried about my well being and we’d spent close to an hour sitting in the snow.  

 

This is a story about place but it’s also about the kids in the grass. All of us played at living and dying in tall grass. We tore our clothes in grass; scraped skin from our arms; slapped at midges and mosquitoes. Sometimes we pressed our mouths into green and sucked moisture–though one of us, an older one–that knowing child found in every group—said the earth was radioactive and we believed her because she said President Kennedy said it. We were clear headed by turns, then knocked flat. There were, we knew, monsters beyond the grass. We played by following it. Following grass. The times were plain. Some of us knew the names of birds. My favorite was the White Throated Sparrow who we called the Peabody Bird. His little song could break your heart. Lots of things could break your heart. The Wood Thrush was also a heart breaker and lying face down in the woods he’d get inside you. He’d get inside us because we were playing dead. This was in the final days before television. We played dead and listened to bird songs.

**

I was the blind kid uncoiling in light, who ran just as fast as he could. That was a job for me. It was “the” job. I’d run a zig-zag staggering lurching tear soaked gambol while others threw pine cones and pebbles at my back and legs. I was the “Kraut”. The crippled kid was always the Kraut or the Indian or the Jap. Once a rock struck me in the back of my skull—not quite errant—there was too much laughter—but not lethal, not enough to run to mommy–but I was thoroughly admonished to be dead and so I lay down. Nice and easy. Beyond the grass stirred uncertainties, especially if you couldn’t see. Be foreign. Notice how the clover smells like hay. Listen to cornstalks beside a rail fence. Think about the darkness and sadness of joy because you’re blind and still. Think though you’re scarcely eight about the coppery gleam of names because you’ve been called too many for such a small boy—blindo, Mr. Magoo, four eyes, froggy, and freak of nature which later you will learn in Latin. Lusus is monster. In high school you’ll think of writing a play called “Lusus-strata” though you won’t. By the time you’re in your teens you’ll have other blue mantles.

But childhood grass was a democracy. Each of us played war and smiled the faintly sardonic smile of outcasts. Perhaps we were all chameleons hoping to be changed. For a time though, for that time, we kept to the grasses and weeds. But I was the only one whose blood red thickened name followed him as he crawled like a soldier. Blind snake.

**

Home again he’d listen to long playing records on a government gramophone for the blind.

It was a hot, lonesome Sunday. He absorbed words read aloud from a long playing record.

Hercules fought a nine headed snake. The needle quavered, struck at the paper label. He turned the thing over.

What were a blind child’s eyes worth? The answer: one name of the Hydra.

Snakes were half stone, half grass.

Some lived under the pond. Of course they couldn’t see.

Within her nine heads, all fanged, nine kinds of love.

No wonder he grew to love Hydra.

All she wanted was a lithic solitude.

**

A neighbor—an attorney–went to the meadow with a gun.

He was going to demonstrate heroism by shooting snakes.

When he was out of sight the boys taunted me.

“You can’t come because you’re blind!”

“Yeah, you might get hurt!”

A pine cone struck me in the chest.

“Look! He didn’t even see that coming!”

“A snake might bite him!”

Then they were gone.

**

Hydra I took you under my ribs, my darling who licked the words from stones.

Hydra, innocent, my speechlessness.

**

In the grass he wore fear, a homespun shirt. He raised the emerald spindrift in mind. He saw if you became the green you would not have need of it.

If the grass was democratic it was owing to unspeakable loneliness. Hydra. Long and low and still.

**

When he was grown he imagined other boys and girls had held themselves perfectly still in the green unspoken.

He found it difficult to tell the story of grass and the aspen that shivered and the names inside him.

Hydra was a reconciliation of what was practical.

Now he calls her the 9 X name of children who expect they’ll die. For whom it started as a game.

He supposes he should be more ironic about fealty and Romantic sadness, but finds he cannot.

He’s still there in rain and green, listening.

Even a child knows Hydra is formally incomplete.

 

Every day I rise and wash my face because the sighted people do it. Among the sighted it’s bad form to walk about with a fried egg stuck to your face. Of course these days there’s likely a fetish society devoted to facial egg but that’s not my concern. I’m wholly preoccupied with living among my visual colleagues. 

Now the problem of course (you knew there was a problem, our title contains “only” and only is the fruit of a bitter tree) is that sighted people don’t wash up for me. In this case “wash” is a metaphor but only just so, for the aim of hygiene is to be agreeable. Agreeable is a fine word. It means pleasurable; it portends enjoyment. As a predicate it means coming to terms—arriving at a compromise. 

There are many sighted people who don’t wash up for me—who’ve never washed up—and there are some who have no intention of doing so. I’ve gotten pretty used to it. Getting used to it means, among other things, that I don’t have a constituency among faculty and staff—I’m the “only” blind professor. This is a fact the way a coconut in Iowa is a fact. You should never forget “only” is a taxonomic situation. With no “like” kind a blind professor is kind of “neat” because, after all, as he walks the quadrangle with his seeing-eye dog he suggests diversity—more than suggests it—he’s real diverse; “wicked” diverse as they say in Boston. And his dog is cute. Occasionally he breaks the service dog rules and lets students pet her.         

But with no like kind he’s also easily cut off. When he goes to meetings with sighted people he’s never given accessible materials in advance so he’ll know what’s going on. When he complains the sighted roll their eyes. Some snarl. He always finds it interesting that when he asks for simple accommodations and then asks for them again and again—well, you guessed it—he becomes the “problem”.  

He’s denied all sorts of things. This is because his needs don’t fit into known categories. He has a deaf friend on the faculty who also experiences this. His deaf friend needed an interpreter while teaching abroad. Ye Olde University didn’t like that. They dragged their feet. Eventually they got an interpreter but not without baleful whinging. Agreeable is a fine word but the predicate seldom applies to the transactional experiences of disabled faculty. The blind professor asked for a sighted guide when he was preparing to teach in a foreign country where they don’t allow guide dogs. He was going to be in a very crowded city with heavy traffic. You can guess what happened: there was more whinging. There was no money for such a thing. They asked the blind professor if he might find the money. Around and around it goes. So the blind professor, favoring his health and safety, withdrew from teaching abroad. 

Although the sighted don’t wash up for him the blind professor abides, like “the Dude” and he even has a sense of humor. He likes his sighted colleagues but feels sorry for them. He feels sorry for them the way he feels sorry for embalmers. The sighted have to overlook so much to be so narrowly focused. He reckons its hard for them.