Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

Aunt History once read a story…

Aunt History once read a story
About a man who bought a sketch
By a famous artist—then
Erased it
She loves that plot
She too wants to erase things
Loves the idea of art so clean
It’s still in the imagination
Even if the paper
Is soiled
Even if what’s left
Is imperfect—
It’s still suggestive
A dancer’s finger tip
In the upper right hand corner
She thinks how she’d erase that also å

Who is Andrea Bocelli?

Who is Andrea Bocelli? Does he really love Donald Trump? Is he truly clueless about the devastating policies aimed at disabled people that are in effect because of this White House? I can answer the last two but not the first. As to who Bocelli is I can only speculate. Meanwhile his fan fest with Trump has led, predictably to ableism. Social media trolls are employing blindness as metaphor. The theme? He’s blind to reality. Ah, the old blindness is ignorance trope. How we’ve missed you! Yet another post suggests he’s a “dumb Italian”—another slur I thought we’d finally gotten rid of. My belabored point is that after years of Trump the “left” in these United States feels free to be as objectionable as the GOP. And of course ableism knows no party. The cripples know this.

As for the first question one can only speculate. Bocelli is stage managed. Lives in a bubble. He has no idea about the horrors of blindness in his own country much less in the US. Some years ago I traveled to Italy with my first guide dog and was treated with contempt. It was everywhere. It wasn’t just a lack of knowledge about disability rights. T’was outright disdain. Bocelli must have encountered this, at least in childhood. And I’m guessing his defense mechanism was and is, “I’m not one of you.” I’ve met a few well heeled blind people who have done this. Notably an arch conservative federal judge who had deep pockets and sneered at the blind. I once told him off. He’d characterized the blind clients of a guide dog school as “mooches and leaches…” (And you betcha, he was on the board of directors.) You betcha. Being blind and thinking yourself superior to those other blind people is both not uncommon and a trap. And the only way to avoid that trap is to live a fully protected and curated existence.

And of course maybe Bocelli is just an ass. A vain ass. A chauffeured ass. Yep. I can only guess. But I’ve see such people before.

Aunt History writes a memo

Aunt History writes a memo—
“Our offices are closing”
To: People who Have Read Tom Paine
From: Broken in the Collective Unconscious
Subj: Future Children
“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” ― Thomas Paine
We are letting the children runaway…the woods
Are now the safest place
We are following them

I think of Ludwig Wittgenstein some mornings…

I think of Ludwig Wittgenstein some mornings. He occurs to me very early. Usually it’s this quote that pops into my waking noggin:

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

I like this for lots of reasons. As a blind man I like the temerity of the utterance, insofar as all humans have some kind of visual limitation. Wittgenstein posits the power of imagination to declare anything, and then, with a smear of logic, cements an idea into consciousness. I think this is how he survived the trenches in WW I. And I know for certain its how the disabled survive. Look at the nouns:

Death. Event. Life. Experience. Eternity. Duration.

In my sophomore year of college I was fascinated by Boolean algebra. In mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is the “branch of algebra in which the values of the variables are the truth values true and false, usually denoted 1 and 0 respectively.” (See Wikipedia.)

One may easily draw a Boolean equation for the proposition eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Then there’s a leap—Wittgenstein says our visual field has no limits.

If eternity = timelessness then the present (time) also equals timelessness. Good.
If timelessness is related to mindfulness then the operations of mind become vision. Hence our visual field (anyone’s) has no limit.

You can see where the poet in me would like this. You can see where the blind person in me also admires it.

As logic it is unimpeachable. The trick is to live it.

Early. Wittgenstein for breakfast.

They’re tired of Uncle History in the United States

They’re tired of Uncle History in the United States
Henry Ford’s ghost drops leaflets
No one gets out alive
The coal miners can’t wait
To be fucked some more
Good old Uncle pares his nails
He knows
After the smoke and neglect
They’ll come back for him
But he wonders who he can call
In the meantime
And what is the meantime
To history
And what are the songs one sings
At Anna Karenina’s wake
They’ve forgotten
About love and despair

Uncle History has a goiter…

Uncle History has a goiter
He begs ravens for help
They’re busy eating the nestlings
Of other birds—its not easy
Being history and even when
It is, one has to be goiterless
Which means
Plenty of iodine
As any schoolchild knows
But its early days
Books haven’t yet been written
Words come from the raven zone
They’re eating from a carcass
And clicking their beaks

Uncle History is hungry

Uncle History is hungry
But people give him dust
If they’re especially generous
He gets broken glass
All he wants is a clean, unpolitical snack
The zoo keeper mob tosses him
Hair and fingernails
For 300,000 years
He’s been famished
Thinks: “homo habilis
Never deprived me”
The problem is the “sapiens”
Thought is cruelty
Oh he’s hungry alright
He watches
As they polish off the planet

Aunt History has to remind her husband…

Aunt History has to remind her husband
There are births to be celebrated
He’s so preoccupied with death
She names the big ones
Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus
But that’s just to wake him
Then she gets to the miraculous blastulas
“They’re unborn but on the way” she says
“They will keep us in business”
He’s been reading “Notes from Underground”
(His favorite)
“I say let the world go to hell
But I should always have my tea.”
He’s a needle nosed sourpuss
Births happen anyway
He recites more Dostoevsky:
“It is better to be unhappy
And know the worst
Than to be happy
In a fool’s paradise.”
“You see how it goes” his wife says
“As always,
You leave me to do all the thinking…”