Many Blind Rivers

“Many Blind Rivers”

When I think of the blind, the historical blind, those people who lived before the 20th century, I often recall a famous poem by Langston Hughes. The connection might not seem obvious but there are centuries of blind ancestors just as the famous poet, watching a river flow, understood there are countless black ancestors revealed by flowing waters. Hughes poem, entitled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” begins:

I’ve known rivers: 

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins. 

With this opening Langston Hughes tells us we’re talking about the human spirit which is always ebbing and flowing, is steady, primordial, and ever present. Looking in a river we can see ourselves and thousands of others. 

It’s a trick poets play reading the poems of others—we insert words—testing whether a brilliant line or stanza might somehow become our own. (I’m risking my poetic license by giving away a poetry trick.) Several years ago I stole Langston Hughes title and wrote: “A Blind Man Speaks of Rivers” for I was feeling a connection with the nameless blind who’ve gone before me. Back to Hughes’ poem:

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

Poetry descends from mythology and mythological thinking. In a myth the past, present, and future are connected intimately and occur simultaneously. Langston Hughes’ narrator is a tutelary spirit guide who lives outside of customary time. Both the poet and his readers fly above the world looking down at the mural of history; not an abstract history, but an intensely human sequence of events. We’re alive with the ancestors. We bathe with them; look at the ancient Nile with them; work with them, raise Pyramids; travel to Louisiana beside Lincoln; we watch as the Mississippi’s mud turns maternal at sun down. 

When Langston Hughes says he can see the many worlds of his ancestors he’s declaring that everyone is still alive and everything is sacred. Walt Whitman comes to mind, anther poet of waters who calls to the past and future in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

I tossed aside my poem “A Blind Man Speaks of Rivers” but it served as a starting point because I wanted to create mythic space where our unnamed blind ancestors could live again, but more importantly where I could connect with them in human terms, delicately, intimately. 

My poem morphed into “Learning Braille at 39” which goes like this:

The dry universe 

gives up its fruit,

Black seeds are raining,

Pascal dreams of a wristwatch,

And heaven help me

The metempsychosis of book

Is upon me. I hunch over it,

The boy in the asylum

Whose fingers leapt for words.

(In the dark books are living things,

Quiescent as cats.)

Each time we lift them

We feel again 

The ache of amazement 

Under summer stars.

It’s a dread thing 

To be lonely

Without reason.

My window stays open

And I study late

As quick, musical laughter

Rises from the street

And I rub grains of the moon

In my hands.

Like Langston Hughes I aim in this poem to connect the living and the dead. I think of the blind who lived their lives shut away from society; of the peculiar energies of the Enlightenment, (Pascal Pascal dreams of clarity in the form of a time piece) and I imagine a blind child receiving the gift of literacy with the introduction of Braille, a marvel that comes to the blind both from its eponymous inventor and by way of the philosopher Denis Diderot who was the first to write that the blind could be taught to read–imagine! Think of the long sequence of bitter centuries in which the blind are thought to be no more sentient than infants, children thrown to the streets with fiddles and begging bowls. 

The invention of a tactile alphabet produced the promise of literacy for the blind, which sounds significant enough, but I think it’s also useful to think of literacy as Peter McClaren describes it: “an animated common trust in the power of love, a belief in the reciprocal power of dialogue, and a commitment to ‘conscientization’ and political praxis.” The blind appear in a communitarian sense when at last they’re given books and the means to read them. Books represent a common faith in the power of community. The blind child in an institution, given a book for the first time, holds the key to his future, and in a very real sense we are the descendants of that moment. We can read what we can’t see. (This is a matter that’s true for all readers and not just those with vision problems.) In a book you can touch the moon. 

Sometimes I read with my hands.  I am strong then. And my hands, so often clenched, fly open like a kildeer’s wings. Touch. Thrill. Memory. Forebears: those who existed before us but come alive when we’re again astonished by the potency and wonder of art.