Author: stevekuusisto

“A strange instrument, the brain. You never really know what sound you’ll get when you press one key or another. Of course, if you stimulate the occipital lobe with a mild electric shock, the man sitting in front of you will most likely report that he sees colors, just as pressing on neurons in the temporal lobe will probably lead to the illusion of sounds. But, while science is extremely partial to general, uniform rules, people are partial to being distinguished from one another. Two patients with damage to their orbitofrontal cortex will never have the courtesy to coordinate their side effects. One will behave crudely, and the other will become obsessively cheerful. One will make tasteless sexual remarks, and the other will feel an uncontrollable need to pick up every object in his path. Randomness, that seductive little whore, dances among the ward’s beds, spits on the doctors’ lab coats, and tickles the exclamation marks of science until they bow their heads and become rounded into question marks.”

Excerpt From: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. “Waking Lions.” iBooks.

It has always seemed to me that the thing people who do not identify as disabled fear the most about disability is its infinite variability. No two blind people are alike; no two paraplegics or quads. Certainly deaf individuals are alike through language but they are unique as citizens. This frightens the ableist majority for whom a crippled sameness matters, and matters terribly, since with sameness they can imagine that normalcy is also real. It is terrifying to consider how flimsy “normal” ideas of static embodiment are, for the normal body is just a few flickering falsehoods. In this way disablement is truthful like the random brain itself.

BTW, Ayelet Gunder-Goshen’s novel “Waking Lions” is a marvelous book. A narrative of haunting instabilities. It is the best novel I’ve read this year.

**

The nights are bigger this time of year

And the moon is in accord

I dream of my father

Whose sorrow

Was Finnish:

The hymn in mind

What to say?

A song he learned early

Standing in darkness

**

So what of me? A second generation Scandinavian-American who can’t sing away his father’s hymns. In dreams I’m dead on my back. Last night I scared my wife when I moaned at 2 AM.

Ghosts were after me. They didn’t have the home character of America. These were serious fucking ghosts from Lapland.

**

I ask every morning of the birds how it all was…

The morning is vast

The sun is my beckoning—

Sends the animals

And the green ocean which

The mind calls promise

Then music—

Ordinary bird calls

Joy is so often powerlessness…

How can the river continue

Without Heraclitus?

Meanwhile:

Note to self—

Build a nest

With pages from libraries

Splintered by war

**

I don’t know what I’m about

Mornings are cruel this way

“If I could tell you I would let you know…”

**

There are moments of clarity.

When I was 21 & first read Derrida

I thought: “nihilism is the only available academic future.”

**

I like some elements of who I used to be.

**

I want my students to be under the spell of books all their days. I want them to pause on a street corner in New York ages hence and think of Maya Angelou’s lines:

Curtains forcing their will

against the wind,

children sleep,

exchanging dreams with

seraphim. The city

drags itself awake on

subway straps; and

I, an alarm, awake as a

rumor of war,

lie stretching into dawn,

unasked and unheeded.

**

History is a Child Building a Sandcastle by the Sea…

There are weeks, whole months, when I read only the ancients.

There’s a cut off: Paracelsus is modern—he believes in the future.

I mean the dark one, the river compulsive,

A man who made clocks from string…

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

Lately this is all I can think of.

When I was very small I lived by the sea.

Nobody loved me and I wasn’t confused.

**

The morning is brightening steadily

But I typed “stepidly”

Which on balance is much better…

I have today, in my hot little cyber hands, a copy of Jay Dolmage’s new book, “Academic Ableism” which is an important new book in the fields of Disability Studies and Rhetorical Studies. I’m looking forward to diving into this. The deterministic, Neo-Victorian architectures of university campuses and pedagogies remain almost insurmountable obstacles to students and faculty with disabilities who dare to enter the ivory tower.

Meanwhile, ahem, I’m also itching to read Gareth Dale’s “Karl Polyani: A Life on the Left” which has received excellent reviews and in turn beckons. Yes. Beckons I say.

You never swim out into the same ocean. That’s how I feel about books. My Heraclitan library…

Aside, without context, save the elegance of Polyani, can someone get Susan Saradon to shut up?

Please, in the half dead grey forest of America can we agree that “intersections” are to be promoted if we’re to have something like a progressive future?

Jazz. Rain. Winter blooming cactus. Say something hopeful. Otherwise I won’t believe you.

Up early, dead father in mind, walking my dog

Thinking: “don’t moan, keep going”

Last summer’s plantings under snow

How many seasons remain?

Challenge, inventing hopeful names

Along the road—Locust Dharma

Branch to branch Bodhisatva….

Oh I could kiss you Transtromer—

Darkness against my cheek

Your Haydn, not mine, playing

Under my feet… Piano

For native country

How does it go?

It was a long day, blazoned with hints from cumulous,

Forebodings—blackness in my wrists,

A fancy concerning self-harm—

As if customary sky may purchase

Or sell a life, in this case mine.

I’ve questions and no one to ask,

This static American business,

Bleaching yourself clear in public,

Being silent, a green chill

For a tongue. I was powerless

Today, strung across

My thirst with no one

To tell—correction—

The sun as strong as always.