Author: stevekuusisto

You can’t go home again. Home is where they have to take you in. Home is sentimental. Home is where they stab you in the bath. It’s where you make the best of it.

“Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.” (John Le Carre)

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” (James Baldwin)

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” (Maya Angelou)

“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.” (Margaret Atwood)

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.” (Wallace Stegner)

Here: this morning I think of the globalization of homelessness.

“We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.” (Edwidge Danticat)

As a disabled person I think of home as receptivity. Home can be public or private so long as it lets me and people like me in.

Refugees with disabilities are being turned away across the globe. The current American president has made immigration a dynamic of health. Do I smell eugenics?

As the Nazis used to say, the disabled are useless eaters.

The homeless are bound up in the rhetorics of uselessness.

Some mornings snow comes to the trees like an illness. Or is this my blindness playing tricks? It hardly matters. Look: here comes a white eel across the snow. And childhood dread is in its attached sleigh, tricked out as a wind up monkey with cymbals. He asks himself will the day get better? He wants to call Carl Jung on the phone. And if he could call Jung why not his dead parents? Why not Steven Biko? He’d like to talk to the great, dead human rights activists. Instead he has a toy monkey of the imagination.

Tietääkseni en ollut syntyessäni yksin. (Pentti Saarikoski)

“As far as I know I was not alone when I was born.”

No Pentti, your mother was there. And who knows, a doctor, a midwife?

Occasionally poetic lines sound so good one writes them in fealty to the half mystical and you leave out your mother. Even women writers can do this. The imagination is like one of those old time radio magnets that eliminates plurality.

Of the dark present day I admit my mother. She was a sufferer who had a sense of humor.

You can’t go home again says the rainbow which is how it breaks your heart. No way back to Alpha Centauri or the mustard blossom planet your spirit sailed from. No way back. And that ratty little clock in the corner sneering all the time. And your damned neighbors laughing drunkenly at their open windows. And the racist sheriff; the dog whistler; the pick-pocket high school principal; the priests with cold semen; the high tech robber who preys on the old; that man who kicks crutches—peel away their bandages and they’re lonely, nauseous, frightened by their own hands. As the bard said: don’t have any kids yourself.

**

It’s a gloomy morning and I don’t want to shave. I made a mistake, woke early, read the news.

**

Once, in China, among eight sighted people, I alone threw the coin that hit the sacred bell. You know, the blind advantage.

**

It’s a gloomy morning. My father once taught me Morse code. Rain at the window just sent a message: “small boats should lie down on the sand.”

**

Have me you winter birds.

**

“One of the best attested miracles in all profane history, is that which Tacitus reports of Vespasian, who cured a blind man in Alexandria, by means of his spittle, and a lame man by the mere touch of his foot; in obedience to a vision of the god Serapis, who had enjoined them to have recourse to the Emperor, for these miraculous cures.”

Excerpt From

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

David Hume

https://books.apple.com/us/book/an-enquiry-concerning-human-understanding/id506317433

**

I love the word spittle. I adore David Hume. Of the god Serapis I know almost nothing. He was eaten by the rainbow.

ABOUT: Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger 

It’s axiomatic that the disabled are not recognized when people talk of diversity and inclusion even on progressive college campuses. The disabled are just a medical problem. They failed to get cured. This assumes disabling conditions don’t affect every group. Disability is thought of as a medical abstraction and not as a human rights and cultural issue. This extends ableism and promotes injustice.

The materiality of the disabled body is its universality since all bodies are subject to liberal narratives of value or the lack thereof. The connections between animal studies and disability studies highlight the taxonomic reductions of living creatures and the perils they highlight. Do all living creatures matter? Or do only some matter more?

Lennard Davis writes:

“Because disability is tied to this medical paradigm, it is seen as a form of the abnormal, or what I might call the “undiverse.” I say undiverse because diversity implies celebration and choice. To be disabled, you don’t get to choose.15 You have to be diagnosed, and in many cases you will have an ongoing and very defining relationship with the medical profession. In such a context, disability will not be seen as a lifestyle or an identity, but as a fixed category.”

Excerpt From: Lennard Davis. “The End of Normal.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-end-of-normal/id1230144861

A fixed category like something out of Linnaeus. A fixed category like a pinned insect.

I can choose to be disabled through acknowledgment or embrace; I can celebrate the shit out of it; but I can’t get others to believe I’m not living in a sub-par category.

In the public square or agora where diversity and inclusion are discussed the abnormal body is still considered something for the laboratory or clinic.

Gore Vidal once remarked that “politics is knowing who’s paying for your lunch” a sentiment I’ve valued for years though I now understand it’s also knowing who picked the lettuce. Nuance is hard to achieve when you’re young. In my late twenties and early thirties I was the exclusive product of academic English Departments which if you don’t know, are still to this day built from Victorian blueprints. Things are right or wrong; black or white; single issue analyses are derigeur even in the age of postmodernism and postcoloniality. Politics is knowing who’s grabbing the check and hating them for it. At thirty I hated everyone who voted for Reagan. I also hated K-Mart. As a blind person I hated most white men who were the deans and professors discriminating against me in graduate school. You must hate the people who oppress you and also resent everyone who looks like them, even the relatively innocent man or woman paying for your caesar salad.

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” (Cornel West)

There’s seldom love in the political. Try to find “love studies” in the English Departments. Like it or not we live in the era of oppression studies which has some merit but not enough to achieve West’s kind of justice which is a celebratory coalition. It is hard to celebrate if you’re enraged all the time. And it’s impossible if you’re convinced by single issue politics. Cornel West:

“The country is in deep trouble. We’ve forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that’s the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.”

I find the phrase “stepping out on nothing” to be particularly meaningful because as a blind person I cross streets with a guide dog and take a leap of faith dozens of times a day. My sighted companions talk at street corners about bowling and I’m concentrating on the life or death situation before me.

The English Department won’t teach you about serving others. I learned something about how to do it by leaving the academy for five years and working at one of the nation’s premier guide dog schools. Each month blind folks come to the school from around the nation to train with a guide dog. The students are straight out of the pages of “Leaves of Grass” for they’re trans-gendered and black, old and Asian, young and Latino, white and largely poor though not exclusively so, and being among hundreds of blind people I learned that no one experiences disability in the same way, that no one is a symbol, no one is without the need for understanding and friendship, that everyone is hoping to land on something. I learned you have to be impatient with evil and patient with people.

American universities scarcely know how to teach such a thing. In fact, at least in the humanities, students are taught to be impatient with evil but also to categorize people as representationally evil without nuance and reflection. The country is in deep trouble in no small measure because the expansive and spiritual practice of voluntary selflessness are out of fashion when all we’re doing is thinking like Gore Vidal. BTW Vidal ended up a bitter man.

There are many poems now—
Think of carousel horses
Carved with love, hand painted,
The child inside us thrills.
Yesterday my wife said:
See how they have their mouths open?
Those horses are in pain.

Turi, Turi, Turi

Caruso, the boy, eats a blood orange sorbet outside the café Risorgimento. They call this dessert the “frozen sunset” –a dish of scarlet juice and ice, misted with lemon. All morning he’s been singing love songs to the fiancée of a very rotund man from Caserta. “Only a boy can carry my heart,” says the fat man to his beloved. “Boys are still sweet as the baby Jesus!” Then he clapped his hands the way impresarios do: a fleshy sound of exaggeration. 

The girl seemed embarrassed. This was a street urchin, a boy in a dirty shirt. A child hired to sing love songs! This thing is a joke! But there on the via Carraciola in the din of carts and boats and street hustlers the boy sang Bellini’s Ma rendi pur contento his black eyes shining with joy and concentration so that passersby stood still. Two men, twin brothers from Rome stopped eating their sugared almonds. There in the heat of the day in that unforeseen place was a prodigy. What could surpass the unassuming purity of such a child’s voice?

The boy sings as if the edge of his heart is catching flame. 

The fat man from Caserta is delighted and bobs his head like a pheasant, struts, ruffles his feathers. His fiancée,

Elena  Bianchini-Cappelli tips her head in wonder, her features softening, a portrait reversing to a sketch. Her enormous hat with its absurd ribbons cannot hide the smile. 

Now the boy sings Bella Nice, che d’amore, his hands stretched out, palms up, without irony. Could anything be this sweet again? Vin santo and peaches? Cloves in the boiled sugar?

The boy and the hot Neapolitan day are working together, visioning ice, ice on the fat lip of a hungry lover. There are these oddities to Naples, street boys and libidinous passions and simple coins.