Month: October 2016

“What does being a better person actually mean?” I thought.  Did I believe “better” was something spiritual? Probably. After just two weeks training with Corky I was thinking about humility. If you’ve spent much of your life feeling shame you don’t have room for a modest view of your own importance. That would of course be a step up from all encompassing misery. In my case I’d even had some contempt for humility—I’d made fun of St. Augustine when I was forced to read his Confessions in college. Augustine’s humility was out of control. He regretted stealing pears! If that was the gateway to meekness who needed it?

I needed it. Shame had been my ego, a necklace of depressions and self-enforced isolations. The disabled learn to wear this. Or some do. My lot had been whatever wasn’t self aware but angry, wounded; or desperate for acceptance which I started seeing as an extravagance. There’s not an ounce of modesty in anger or embarrassment. They offer a fight or flee world of tears and shouting.

Walking around Guiding Eyes with jangling Corky by my side I wondered if humility might also be nobility; if I might climb above my boyishness, my inheritance of sadnesses, with something like self-effacement and thankfulness. It wasn’t a question of healing myself or of “giving away” my disappointments, but wanting to find ways to think of myself less. This is one of the things a dog can do. I saw it.

That dog lay on her back with all four feet in the air and did a horizontal dance, a kind of hula and I saw it was unwise to be too sure of my own wisdom.

Disability could afford a potent life. One could be graceful. That was something new for me. Something new.

 

 

When I was approximately 9 years old, though maybe 10, I fell in love with Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” and couldn’t put it down. That’s a figure of course especially since I “read” Kipling by way of long playing records from the Library for the Blind—big scratchy slow disks that required a bulky oversized government issue record player, but let’s say I couldn’t put the book down.

I loved so many things about the “Jungle Book” I can still call them to mind. Kipling praised curiosity, a thing all children need to hear.

“It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is “Run and find out,” and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose.”

And I loved Kipling’s recondite, arcane Victorian prose:

“Now Rann the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free— The herds are shut in byre and hut For loosed till dawn are we. This is the hour of pride and power, Talon and tush and claw. Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all That keep the Jungle Law!”

I marched around reciting those lines in my Superman costume.

Little Superman knew nothing of colonialism. He liked animals, magic, and abstruse lingo. He liked a thick alternate reality to days of being bullied in the schoolyard. Who wouldn’t’ want to live with real wolves like Mowgli?

By the age of 10 I knew I’d never be bored. Books. Fantasies. Living nose to tail with curiosity.

Oh don’t give up on curiosity. Please. I love you, you stranger, don’t let them take this precious gift from you.

Read some Kipling. Kipling:

“No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

 

I am a blind person. Notice I’m using people last language since in public I’m blind “first” and a person only in the most conditional sense. It’s not fashionable to say this. What’s popular in “the idioms” is arguing blindness is nothing more than an inconvenience, why it’s nothing really. I wish this was true. But in my experience I’m always a problem whenever I leave my house. I’ve written about this on my blog for close to nine years. Many disability themed bloggers also discuss the subject—this problematized life we endure when we venture out.

As a poet I tend to think about disadvantaging spaces in gestural ways which is to say I think being on the playing field is important. If the Americans with Disabilities Act gave us the opportunity to be out in public then by God we should be everywhere. You can’t count on your rights unless you use them. Poets believe in community or most good ones do. We want people to gather and hear words, share emotions. Just so I think all the disabled turn environments into something new when they arrive where formerly they were strictly absent. I’m a blind man at the movies with my guide dog. Blind at the ball game. A few people will think. They’ll say: “well, yes, of course the blind can enjoy things…” Silly to have to say so? Silly yes, but necessary every day. 25 years after the ADA John Q. Public still thinks in a moist  way the cripples probably belong in asylums. Or worse: they think we should be eliminated.

So anyway I leave my house. Because I can’t drive it takes a long time to get to work. (You’re lucky if you have work or you’re going to school…) And when I get to work I discover they’ve changed the computer system overnight. No one took blindness into account when they jumped to “Leverage 2.0” and now I can’t use the damned PC. I call the IT people and learn they’ve no idea what to do next. Blindness (nothing more than an inconvenience) now becomes an “impossibility” in the workplace. Complain about it and lo and behold, one becomes a crank in the eyes of administrators at the Widget Company or Widget College. Your very presence is inconvenient.

At Widget College they regularly adopt inaccessible software and course management tools and try later to retrofit them. This is not uncommon. Widget College is the norm in higher education when it comes to digital access. What’s so demoralizing is that while you’ve complained about it for years they simply hold more committee meetings and voila, continue buying inaccessible software.

You’re tempted over time to throw up your hands and say, “well I don’t belong in the workforce after all.” And when the bus driver won’t call out the stops even though you’ve asked him politely to do so and you get off in the wrong neighborhood and it takes you an hour to solve this and it’s raining and you’re half lost, well, you think, “I don’t belong on the bus or the street.”

Let’s be clear these are nearly daily problems.

My faculty colleagues are not disabled for the most part. They nod when I tell them how inhospitable Widget College is. I’ve found liberal minded faculty are great nodders. They can’t imagine being blind. Why if they were blind, they know they’d never leave their houses.

 

I had to differentiate between my human desires and my dog’s life if was going to make a “go” of service dog existence. A blind friend told me that god gave man dominion over all the animals. The very thought made me shudder. Dominion conjures slavery, imprisonment, entitlement—my life and Corky’s were not in a power relation even though she’d been trained to watch for traffic and encouraged to trust her judgment, even though she guided me and I was supposed to set our course, practice daily obedience, sit, down, come—here’s a treat. Even with all this I knew she was her own being and this gave me a great sense of relief. I believed in the dignity of animals. One large part of this was knowing they are our equals. At the guide dog school I was surprised by the number of trainers who thought this rather silly. One has to be alpha dog. Dogs respect their leaders. But while this is so—working animals, whether horses, dogs, or aquarium dolphins will adhere to our requests and insistences, where does the notion that our domestic leadership makes us better come from? Savages vs. the civilized, the oldest narrative of them all…We label all living beings as beasts because they’re not like us. Well of course. Of course. The taxonomies of inequality are profound. I couldn’t imagine being like my blind friend who thought god had put her in charge of her dog.

Thoughts early in the morning. I walked along Central Park West. Stopped. Took in a light rain. Corky turned her face up to the mist. We were happy.

I thought of William Blake: Mutual forgiveness of each vice/such are the gates of Paradise…  

To this one could add mutual forgiveness of our respective embodiments and our strangely connected but intangible souls. Man and dog. Street corner.

I told myself I was a new man but what did this mean? I was still blind; I still had no job; and irony of ironies, being overtly impaired in the sight of others brought it’s own host of problems. Just because I felt confident didn’t mean others knew it. Strangers sometimes grabbed me, believing they were doing me a favor. While crossing 7th avenue in New York an old man put a bear hug on me and shunted me across the street while Corky tried stoically to keep guiding me. She looked up repeatedly as if to say, “who’s this Bozo?” I let out a shriek, as being manhandled on a busy thoroughfare is frightening. At the far curb the man bowed and ran away.

Post-Corky I was genuinely in the world as a blind man and it meant lots of things. The guide dog schools said I should be an ambassador for the service dog movement. So Lordy! I was now a Homeric standard of excellence, an exemplary hero from a Greek epic. Even while being manhandled I ought to evince decorum. One was expected to be better than the unknowing public. I saw quickly this wasn’t going to work for me. I might want to be a kinder and more thoughtful man but I still had an irascible streak. Maybe it was the poet in me, who knows? But I didn’t want to be kind to everyone. Screw that man who dragged me across 7th avenue. As he ran off I shouted: “Don’t ever grab a blind person you asshole!” I gave him the finger.

Did being a new man require never being angry? Of course I knew I shouldn’t give a stranger the big fuck you but I couldn’t help it. And this was a new circumstance for me. Formerly I’d pretended I could see. Now I was in blind-land and I saw that many sighted people think the blind are as stupid as stumps. Worse they have a kind of boy scout code. And if that’s not bad enough, they imagine talking to the blind is unnecessary. After all we’re just lumber. Do you want to help me Mr. Stranger? Why not ask if I need it? How about introducing yourself?

It doesn’t look good standing on a corner with your dog and shouting invectives. I was a new man alright. Before Corky I’d never had this problem. What did it tell me? At the very least I had to think hard about my impulses, perhaps change what I could and forgive myself for what I couldn’t. Even a New York City curb with its wastebasket and traffic light offered an opportunity for self-reflection.

I thought: “Can a newly mobile guide dog user be kind to himself while learning the ropes?” The answer had to be yes. “Can I tell people to fuck off once in awhile?” The answer had to be yes.

 

 

As a boy I loved me some H.G. Wells, especially his time machine which, to an isolated blind kid was the best thing possible even with all its prospective dangers and late Victorian caprice for children sense adults are fickle, especially disabled children, and accordingly I saw Wells had created a gizmo much like one’s untrustworthy uncle, the one you liked despite all the evidence. I think I was around eleven when I read it. And I understood it was a book about social psychology, though I didn’t have the words for such a concept. But I understood this:

“I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.”

I had to look up lucid. I got it. Some of the smilingest adults were the most dangerous. Kids too.

Could someone cobble together for me a freedom machine? That’s what I thought.

Now I’m remembering him, that kid. Again I want the freedom machine—want it to lift up refugees and my brothers and sisters, black, disabled, women, men, children, all of them living in perpetual violence. I want them at the victory celebration when humankind looks back with triumph for we saved our people; rescued the planet. Wells again: “when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.” We’re an aging species. Mind and strength are increasingly in short supply. Can we have gratitude? Just a little mutual tenderness?

Silly of course. I should erase everything I’ve just written. Haven’t I read too much to believe what I’m saying? Capital wraps affection; stone blunts scissors…try to be funny. Carry on. Everyone in the academy talking these days like army colonels—interrogating the subject; leveraging the problem; poring over the grid. “Jeezus, old stuffed bear, don’t reveal you’ve a heart, they’ll cut it right out of you.”

“You’re like a witness. You’re the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you’re in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I’m a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you’re in the room but you’re not. You’re looking at the room, you’re not in the room.”

― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

The above lines from Cortazar offer a beautiful description of disability for every cripple who seeks entrance to public space never makes it, never quite, though the tireless mind insists, believes, remonstrates that it’s in the room, salon, gallery, it isn’t and never has been. The cripple is always outside looking in. We are in effect at a party that doesn’t love us. And like Cortazar’s existential figure, we’re near and far at the same time.

Every sensible person must feel this to varying degrees. The “Groucho Effect” holds one shouldn’t join any club that will have you, a fair joke as modernity is all about joining and the membership may be too dear if you’re not paying attention. The disability conundrum is different—you think you’re in the club but you’re not which combine to offer a disappointment both of illusion and agency. It’s a two-fold setback.

Give up, yes? Cortazar:

“Why couldn’t I accept what was happening without trying to explain it, without bringing up ideas of order and disorder, of freedom, as one sets out geranium pots in a courtyard on the Calle Cochabamba? Maybe one had to fall into the depths of stupidity in order to make the key fit the lock to the latrine or to the Garden of Olives.”

Who hasn’t thought about falling into the depths of stupid? Cripple-dom is the unending insistence on belonging, pertaining to rights, hence exhausting.

When you’ve lived a long time under a regime of intolerance and guile, a governance of positioned despairs, all of them explained by businessmen and men like Clint Eastwood, well why not speak in a low gibberish?

Some days I really do believe I’m gibbering in the museum of normalcy.

You’re looking at the room, you’re not in the room.

The consolations of phenomenology….

As Cardinal Newman said: “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.” I know my choices well. I’m of an age when (again quoting Newman): “You must make up your mind to the prospect of sustaining a certain measure of pain and trouble in your passage through life.” I ask myself if I knew what fights were proper? Did I accept the consequences? Admit I couldn’t be liked by many? I accepted the repercussions. There would indeed be a certain measure of pain. We are all answerable for what we choose to believe, whether we’re religious or atheists. We’re also answerable for the choices we make when it comes to speaking up or not speaking at all. In an age of calculated victimization, when universal human rights are besieged on all sides, not speaking is a choice but one I fear.

I’m in the room alright.

The cripple-room always offers invitations to demand the answerable. It’s the classroom of critical pedagogy in practice.

Newman, we’re also answerable for what we choose to disbelieve.

I will sustain my measure of pain and trouble. Accept what I can change and rail against what I can’t.

I’ll still say “peace” without irony.