Month: January 2016

In his essay “Of Cripples” Montaigne wrote of gullibility, a curious word and I’ll return to it in a moment. Here is the master:

Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye. I find that we are not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as a thing conformable to our being.

How I love the phrase “to be gulled”! Gull comes from Middle English “to swallow” or, and this is  more interesting, to pretend to swallow—one imagines its first usage—“he gulled me with the proffered poisoned pill for I swear he’d swallowed it…”  Gull is from “gole” which means throat. Some lies will stick in your gullet.

Truth and lies are faced alike so long as they appear or sound profitable. Gull capitalizes on wish. Desire is conformable with our being—is our being—and Montaigne, like Shakespeare, understood the dread implication of modernity: we’d rather be lied to than question our yearnings.

Montaigne never uses the word cripple in his essay. It appears only in his title—and so implicitly his readers are the cripples, all of them. All pretend to be someone or something they are not— soldiers, prelates, merchants, scholars…everyone is alike in his falseness so long as his vanity is conformable with being.

Cripples were everywhere in Montainge’s time. The blind were still thought to be uneducable and were turned out to beg. While the juridical blinding of criminals had largely ceased in Europe by the 17th century blindness in particular, but crippled-ness generally still carried the symbolism of thievery. Moreover, there were false cripples, a story as old as humanity itself.

“Crippled America” is the title of Donald Trump’s prevaricating book—his prose launcher, a festschrift to deceit. Trump uses the word crippled without irony. He means of course that America is helpless. He’s gulling on every page, challenging the credulous to swallow vanity as a port or taste in conformity with their unhappiness. Perhaps his motto should be “let them eat fake.”

You will find no real cripples in Trump’s book, save for those Montaigne saw, so very long ago.

I talk often with my friend Bill Peace “Bad Cripple” about living through childhood and adolescence before the Americans with Disabilities Act. Bill was a paralyzed kid. I was blind. In those days (the 60’s and 70’s) if you had a disability, you really had to invent yourself. One may argue as performance theorists do that all social life requires invention, or as Richard Schechner said: “Performance’s subject [is] transformation: the startling ability of human beings to create themselves, to change, to become—for worse or better—what they ordinarily are not.”

Disability is no different, save that living one’s most impressionable years in a strictly “normative” culture created tremendous pressures for the disabled. One could say we had to invent ourselves quickly and while our inventions could be good or bad, they were always vitally necessary.

Because my parents could only imagine me living on normative terms they taught me to parade wildly in the streets. In 1962 I joined the Cub Scouts and received a uniform and a flag. I marched without seeing in a small town parade, stepping in time with the older Boy Scouts and their drums. I held the flag straight out in unseeable mist. I was surely living and walking by the world’s terms! Although the Cub Scouts adopted a platform to include boys with disabilities in 1957 the word hadn’t trickled down to our little New Hampshire town. Without irony, the Cub Scouts motto back then was “be square”.

What a phrase, “the world’s terms”—as if the planet might be some wild Olympian god. “I like you now,” says the God. “Now I don’t like you.” This is the capricious difficulty, the dance of rejection and occasional reception all disabled people know. We aim to avoid it. This is inherently a performance of failure.

Ironies proliferate where physical differences are concerned. If you think too much about them you’re impeded, or worse, you’ll stop all momentum. If you don’t think about them you’ll fail to grow. “Who am I?” should always be answered by acknowledging our physical lives as much as say, knowing one’s ancestry. But in 1962 the Boy Scout parade wasn’t the place to learn about dignity and pedigree. There wasn’t a chapter in the scout’s handbook about successful blind people—an acknowledgment of Claude Monet’s lily murals or Horatio Nelson. Who am I? I’m a blind painter, a one eyed admiral. I own this place, this Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris or a 104 gun ship named Victory. As a boy what did I have? I had “Mister McGoo” that doddering cartoon blind man who walked off cliffs. A fool. The inspiration for school yard taunting. I was McGoo. “How many fingers am I holding up?” Never never think about your ruined sight, your faintly cross-eyed little face—think of what a preeminent able bodied person you will become some day.

That’s how it was. But the greatest irony of all was that the 60’s, a decade when the youthful president exhorted everyone to ask what they can do for their country became instead a time of individual vigor.  JFK loved the word “vigor” and even the Cub Scouts got the message. And so children born long before the Americans with Disabilities Act were encouraged to get in the game, by sheer will, with toughness, but not necessarily with self-regard. It was possible back then, as it is today, to be spirited but not to like yourself.

I used to do wild stuff. I ran across the steel railing of a suspension bridge. You think I’m Mr. Fucking Magoo? Watch this! No one else tried it. On the plus side: I didn’t think blindness would lead to my demise. On the down side: I had to be reckless as I dragged a long shadow of self loathing.

Richard Schechner once listed the essential purposes of performance:

• To entertain

• To make something that is beautiful

• To mark or change identity

• To make or foster community

• To heal

• To teach, persuade or convince

• To deal with the sacred and/or the demonic

In the tough years before the ADA these functions were different for kids or adults with disabilities—but especially for kids. To entertain meant walking the bridge. Very few of us knew how to make something that was beautiful though we sure thought about it. To mark or change identity? What was that? The disabled kid was too busy being seasick, blindly walking in the parade. Community? “Healing?”

Teaching, persuading, or convincing was pre-ordained for crippled kids—were were inspirational. We were the ones who knew Tiny Tim personally. We were precious but inexactly and contextually so—poster kids come to mind, “Jerry’s Kids”.  We were frozen in the culture’s pity amber.

As for the sacred and demonic, my sense of the world was always marked by receptive or hostile locations. In an actual church I was “pity boy”.

If the past has been transformed by law and art, and certainly in some ways it has, then we must decide as a society to say it’s so. We are not living in the 60’s anymore. Let’s all say it. Let Bernie Sanders or Hillary say it. Let’s declare all public space is now and henceforward inclusive. Is this any more reckless than running a high railing? Oddly, it often feels the same, at least on the inside.

Reading Bill Peace’s blog yesterday entitled “Cripple Radar and Ableism” I came across the following list of ableist “teachings” or “doings” that still routinely afflict the disabled:

The mother who pulls their kid’s hand in the supermarket and says “watch out for that wheelchair”.

The secondary school that transports every child with a disability via one short bus.

Handicapped seating that is substandard and located in one less than ideal place.

The restaurant cripple table. One table is always used to seat a person using a wheelchair. If occupied I am forced to wait despite the fact other tables are available.

Locked accessible changing rooms in clothing stores.

Anything and everything associated with being deemed “special”.

 Paratransit systems that invariably provide inferior and unreliable service.

Side, rear, or locked entrances to buildings.

Inaccessible poling stations and voting machines.

The framing of disability as “other” is still a dominant social dynamic and in a society that’s increasingly penurious—in an age of non-investment in infrastructure, one senses how the disabled are all too often framed as beseechers, pests if you will, for this is a tight economy we’re running, we can’t afford accessible polling stations or accessible bathrooms. Don’t you understand? We can’t afford you. Lingua franca, taken as metaphor, taken as idiom, taken as prevalence says: “you’ve ruined the meeting.”

I’ve gone many places with Bill Peace. He has his wheelchair, I’ve got my guide dog. We enter a restaurant. There’s always the quick glance of the hostess, that funny sidelong prey animal eyeball roll that says, “we’ve got a problem…two cripples…God! Will they drive away our other customers? Do they have something catching?”

It’s rare when we don’t get this reception.

And so it’s not the 60’s exactly. But oddly, fractiously, maddeningly, we’re still forced to perform like the kids we once were.

How do you like my pity amber?

 

 

 

Why the compulsion to write? Misieracordia. Stiff words upright nursing wounds. When a word sings surely it inhales some of God. The first word singing was tsuris: gnats, lice, flies, locusts, hail, chummy death moving in next door. That man or woman who invented tsuris is always beside me on a carved, tall, wooden bench where we raise a doubtful hymn.

Write so you can sing what the words sing. The tsuris notes will not be light. In his poem “Memorial Day” Yehuda Amichai wrote:

Memorial day.  Bitter salt is dressed up

as a little girl with flowers.

The streets are cordoned off with ropes,

for the marching together of the living and the dead.

Children with a grief not their own march slowly,

like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.

A dead soldier swims above little heads

with the swimming movements of the dead,

with the ancient error the dead have

about the place of the living water.

 

Tsuris will not grace me with affection. It will not march me to the living water. It will nonetheless fill my throat and keep me upright. It fills my little head with appreciations I can scarcely name.

In 1961 my mother built a bomb shelter in the cellar of our house and filled it with canned goods and jars of water. One afternoon I went in there after being abused by a neighbor kid who flat out hated me because the world gave him permission—who after all wanted a disabled child next door? And so it was the bomb shelter for me. I lay on cool cement and whispered stories to no one. That’s how storying unfolded, talking in the dark, breathing the odor of Army blankets. Who loves you, who doesn’t, where’s a lucky window, how high the sun, my lips moving. To this day I talk to myself. My wife sees me, says, “what are you saying?” I shrug. How can I say? I’m reciting fragments the way some boys skip pebbles. It might be someone else’s words. Maybe Ezra Pound: “And the days are not full enough/And the nights are not full enough/And life slips by like a field mouse/Not shaking the grass”… Or sometimes it’s just me: “Trace the veins of a barberry leaf, that’s Braille enough…” Talking in sidelong darknesses of broken manners, when the day is insufficient, the minutes not feeding me… Up river go the words, the lonely words. Oh anything will do. Kropotkin I love you. I have small hands. How the kings of France loved tennis.

Have me you birds. Sit for a time in the Agora thinking of Aristotle’s wrists. I believe he looked at them before he spoke. My favorite bird is the Phoebe. I like Miss Dickinson. I’m fond of the late Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski. He imagined snakes cleaning his ears. Some poets love the snake properly. I like to spread my ten fingers across my face. “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” (Werner Heisenberg) Don’t give up. Keep moving. Even in a small dark room.

 

The master surrenders his beliefs.

He sees beyond the end and the beginning.

He cuts all ties.

He gives up all his desires.

He resists all temptations.

And he rises.

“The Dhammapada.”

1.

In the old days I didn’t know how to be with people. Sure there was blindness—all that “not fitting in” known by the poor and cripples—but now, these days I see biographical detail has nothing to do with it. I am deliciously lonely. I’ve wept in foreign churches, swum in the Aegean in winter when only fishermen can be seen; stood on my hands where Finland meets Sweden and Russia, touching three lonesome places at once. Yes, I’ve walked in a monastery, was found by a priest with a candle in my hand and fully asleep. The blind carry candles, did you know? We too need to be seen.

2.

All of the children 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. 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 song.

 

3.

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

When he was grown he imagined other adults once held themselves perfectly still in the green unspoken.

When he was grown he orbited poetry.

When he was 17 and suffering from anorexia–a factor of disability and depression, he was given the gift of Kenneth Rexroth’s poems. He read poetry in the suicide ward.

This poem may have saved his life:

Wind Tossed Dragons

The shadows of the cypresses

On the moonlit avenue

To the abandoned palace

Weave in tangles on the road

Like great kelp in the depths of the sea.

When the palace was full of people

I used to see this all the time

And never noticed how beautiful it was.

Mid-Autumn full moon, the luminous night

Is like a boundless ocean. A wild

Wind blows down the empty birds’ nests

And makes a sound like the waves of the sea

In the branches of the lonely trees.

 

That was the year he understood all things were lonely—all hearts give themselves up to the moonlit avenues.

4.

Sartre said: “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” That was the thing!

I understood early and often I was never in bad company when I was by myself. That was the damed thing!

I would never tire of the milk and iodine taste of water that comes when strictly alone.

5.

As a graduate student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop I took a 16 hour bus trip to visit the poet Robert Bly who lived in Minnesota. I rode for two days aboard several Greyhound buses.

When I got to Bly’s house in the tiny town of Moose Lake Minnesota, I asked a stranger if he knew where the poet lived. “Everyone knows where Robert lives,” said the man. “We have a real poet in our town!”

Bly hosted me some hours of joy, reciting poems, talking about Scandinavia, Pablo Neruda, the military industrial complex, a hundred things. But the best part of the day was a small poem. “Have you ever heard this little poem by David Ignatow?” he asked me.

“I should be content

to look at a mountain

for what it is

and not as a comment on my life.”

 

Maybe blindness—my socialized understanding of blindness was my mountain.

Then I saw it was loneliness.

And I did not perform a little dance.

I took it inside me.

The oak turns its pockets out because it’s Sunday and late, and trees and fences merge and I turn on the radio pre-tuned to Shostakovich.

I will live a long time yet in the hard world watching for ships returning with news. If they don’t return that’s another verse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Arthur Schlesinger’s “The Crisis of the Old Order” one finds the following passage rather near the book’s beginning:

“And so, as the third summer of the depression began to move into the fourth winter, the time of patience was running out. Virgil Jordan, the conservative economist of McGraw-Hill and the National Industrial Conference Board, reported after the 1931 meeting of the United States Chamber of Commerce that businessmen had lost faith in their leaders; they were ready to shoot the works. “An economic Mussolini, before many months have passed,” said Jordan, “could have them parading in red, white and blue shirts, and saluting some new symbol.”

An economic Mussolini! Well ahem, yes, that’s always been the fantasy of the Chamber of Commerce. Donald J Trump has a long cape.

“The time of patience” is an interesting phrase. It’s understandable contextually. By the third summer of the great depression America was a country of homeless wanderers and beggars.

Trump’s advantage this election cycle is his canny understanding that Chamber of Commerce types and long disadvantaged Red State whites have never had a time of patience. While that’s not a coalition that can carry him to the White House it gets him half way there. It will certainly get him the GOP presidential nomination.

In the general election he will talk about the dark predators and terrorists and shout that only he can fix the American economy. That will be enough to get elected. He knows it.

Democrats should fear him. Moreover, Dems who say, “I’m not going to vote for anyone if I can’t have my candidate…” will most certainly put Trump in office. Feel the Trump.

The Donald knows it.

He also knows he has the media in his back pocket. There’s nothing NBC would like more than a reality show where average Americans parade in red, white and blue shirts, saluting outside the newly decorated Trump White House.

“What about Bernie Sanders?” you say. “Isn’t he the second coming of FDR?”

FDR had charm my friends. And enough backers from the financial world to get over the transom.

Bernie, not so much.

As Irene Colthurst writes over at Quora:

“He (Sanders) needs to acknowledge that coalition-building is the way forward, and that that’s hard.   It was hard to assemble the New Deal coalition. But the way forward is to square the circle and build its 21st century equivalent, which means young black activists sharing space and being in solidarity with working class white men on an agenda that calls for both wholesale reworking of American law enforcement and greater social democracy.   He needs to quit calling for general movements and say that.”

If Hillary Clinton falls to Bernie Sanders there’s an outside shot Bernie can take Trump in the Fall.

If Hillary Clinton beats Sanders, and his supporters sulk, stay home and give up, then Trump’s Chamber of Commerce coalition with its disaffected white anger will likely be enough to carry the day.

Sanders needs to square the circle, as Colthurts puts it. He needs to do so now.

 

 

One hot summer afternoon when I was maybe six years old, I lay in a ditch filled with dry leaves because it offered a world for me. The ditch was in the woods. The place was quiet. It was one of those summer days when everything was silent. I fell asleep in my Rip Van Winkle nest. When I woke I heard a crinkling in the leaves and I felt a toad timidly placing his feet on my outstretched arm. He walked along my wrist and disappeared into the further recesses of the ditch. I was sorry he was gone. Funny how I can remember that. At six I felt the departure of a toad as a personal loss. Ridiculous!

All emotional responses to the things of this world are laughable. If you’re lucky you grow sufficiently to know it.

When I think about the poems I like, I generally find there’s a commonality to them–not a sameness, not a generalized theme or subject–but a discordance or disconnect between primary emotion and whatever we may call something wiser. By this I mean sensibility. And also a hint of the absurd that must come with strong emotion. Here are lines by Yeats that I’ve always admired:

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

If you evade disability by refusing to accept it, you’re a failure both inside and out. While you’re living this evasion the whole thing feels complicated. But it’s not complex. My childhood neighbors and my parents and teachers didn’t like disability. They hated it. They’d grown up watching newsreels at the movies. The March of Dimes. In one famous short from the 1940’s called “The Crippler” unsuspecting children were attacked by polio, who appeared as a menacing shadow—a pervert at the playground’s edge. My parents believed disabled children were victims of untoward darkness.

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? I wasn’t a victim of the Crippler, my parents views were immaterial… thoughts while shaving…guide dog Corky at my feet in our dormitory room… shaving at a mirror though I couldn’t see my face. One shaves before a mirror because that’s where it’s done, right? There I was, in my thirties, understanding blindness was an inconvenience and not a comment on my life.

So I’d been slow, who cares, I thought. And fuck the Crippler, I thought. And who cuts his nose with an electric razor, I thought. And I lay on the floor with Corky. It was cold linoleum, solid and good. My thoughts went everywhere. Is this how it is when you feel good with a dog, I thought. Thoughts going everyplace like wine on cobblestones. I remembered desperately trying to fit in in high school. At the suggestion of a boy who had a good heart, I tried out for the track team. I ran for a week with a group of boys who outpaced me, following them on country roads, plunging through green mist. I was proud not to be the slowest. There were at least three kids behind me. I ran my lungs out. Then I was summoned to the principal’s office.

The principal was unkind. “You may not run track,” he said. “You’re an insurance liability.”

I was simply too blind for sports. “That’s just the way it is,” he said. “Can I keep the track suit?” I asked. “No,” he said. I resolved to keep them. And after that some kids called me “blindo” in the hallways, which wasn’t as vexing as the body slams I frequently received. And the shoves on stairs.

So of course in fevered adolescence I learned to distance myself not merely from blindness—I’d already learned that—but from any hope I might become part of something. If early childhood was difficult, it had been possible to befriend a few kids—Grimes and the like, just by being a daredevil. But the teen years were more grueling, tinged by social Darwinism, Primatology and tears.

“What if I’m tough?” I said to Corky there on the floor. “What if I somehow forgot about that?”

“What if I kick the Crippler in the nuts?” I said to her.

“What if I make a Voodoo doll of the principal and burn him in a shoebox?” I said.

 

**

As a graduate student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop I took a 16 hour bus trip to visit the poet Robert Bly who lived in Minnesota. I rode for two days aboard several Greyhound buses.

When I got to Bly’s house in the tiny town of Moose Lake Minnesota, I asked a stranger if he knew where the poet lived. “Everyone knows where Robert lives,” said the man. “We have a real poet in our town!”

Bly hosted me some hours of joy, reciting poems, talking about Scandinavia, Pablo Neruda, the military industrial complex, a hundred things. But the best part of the day was a small poem. “Have you ever heard this little poem by David Ignatow?” he asked me.

“I should be content

to look at a mountain

for what it is

and not as a comment on my life.”

Maybe blindness—my socialized understanding of blindness was my mountain.

What if I’m tough?

My dog thought so.

 

 

 

A game I play, more often than I should admit, is a dramatic transference for which there may be a name but I’ve never found one. Perhaps there’s something in German. In short, I employ the characters of Shakespeare and Moliere as standard bearers for people I meet and especially for  public figures. The literary term for this is “comparison” but what I’m describing is better than that—“kayfab” is what they call it in professional wrestling, where everyone, both wrestlers and fans collectively pretend a false drama is real. Essentially I live and have always lived since my late teens in Tartuffe and The Taming of the Shrew and at this stage of life there’s no help for it. This is comedy as it’s lived but not necessarily admired. Moliere:

The comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.

 

Both Moliere and Shakespeare grew up watching morality plays, fables whose stock characters were invariably named God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. Because they lived during the first flowering of public literacy they understood the indispensable healthiness of word flipping. Talk about nature’s bounty! Words were no longer merely to be received and absorbed. Can you imagine the joy of a 17th century adolescent forced to watch Everyman or The Second Shepherd’s Play, as he substituted Satan, Life, Neighbor, Sin, Second Rate Demons, Ignorance, Ugliness, Gossip, and Basic Human Weakness for the stock characters of religious drama? Of course you can. Almost no one who’s lived through a high school production of The Man of La Mancha has not done this.

Comic irony is when you recognize the impostors beyond their appearances on stage. The characters in Tartuffe are at every holiday party. They creep through the workplace. Confidence men, hypocrites, exceptionally vain head cases, the credulous, and all who make their living feigning virtue. Ah, nature’s bounty indeed!

By living Moliere I reside in kayfab—I know the world may be better or worse than this adoption, but I can bear my illusions for not to live in Tartuffe would be, at least for me, unsupportable. Comedic representation is healthier than plodding credulity and more philosophical since incongruity is the mainspring for understanding the irrational. If you’re following me, you’ll say my proscenium of custom if it’s all Moliere, all Shakespeare, all the time, is a matter that must by necessity make me unreasonable. I prefer this to any conversation with the human resources crowd or political canvasers or god help me, professors at a conference. I’d gladly sip the milk of custom and spit it in a potted plant than talk to Orgon or Tartuffe. Contradiction isn’t a customary beverage. It’s milk and iodine and it’s healthier for you than any drink Madame Pernelle will offer.

Shakespeare was the first comic writer to dramatize reverse psychology as Petruchio, a wandering nobleman, undertakes the wooing of Kate who’s notoriously short tempered and cruel:

“Say she rail; why, I’ll tell her plain

She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.

Say that she frown; I’ll say she looks as clear

As morning roses newly wash’d with dew.

Say she be mute and will not speak a word;

Then I’ll commend her volubility,

and say she uttereth piercing eloquence.”

We are the ones invited to say she rail; we’re instructed to become as devious as Petruchio. Taken into his confidence we’re delighted by his promissory book of lies.

That’s comedy. Not as a vehicle for pratfalls or put downs, but discernment where the irrational is concerned.

I am in mind of Donald Trump as Tartuffe as he brags about his religious ardor; talks up his virtues; steadfast in his desire to win, needing to win because he has no inner life. And Orgon, who represents our soggy press corps, infatuated, until he can’t see what’s in front of him. And then, like Petruchio, who plans on subduing angry Kate with persistent, counter-intuitive lies, our press corps tells us how Trump-tuffe is wash’d with dew, clear, eloquent.

You see how it is. Perhaps it is thus with you?