Author: stevekuusisto

Have you ever considered the flamboyant machinery of disability? Not the machine of desire like Deleuze, but of insistence. The Dis-machine is about insistency and each of us who’s claimed disability must be rendered robotic by our demands. Not the cyborg of Judith Butler the Dis-machine: it’s a childish contraption, irritatingly repetitive, always whiny and whinnying. So it’s loud, gets attention, and the human soul boils inside it.

**

Wasn’t that enough for you? Didn’t we give you a radio and some Braille playing cards? Oh yes, and didn’t we give you Social Security Disability payments? Isn’t it enough we didn’t tumble you into the sea?

What? You want to be of the earth like your neighbor?

**

Flamboyant: mid 19th century: from French, literally ‘flaming, blazing,’ present participle of flamboyer, from flambe ‘a flame.’

Disability, advocated for, is a repetitive life-long enslavement, stiff, mechanical. Vocalized it becomes hot, a conflagration.

The disabled, considered children by those without disabilities, are, effectively steam engines, wholly constructed; hot to the touch.

**

Now I don’t know you. You, my fellow passenger. We’re flying Iodine Air. The commuter plane is filthy and smells like gym socks. I don’t know a thing about you, Man Across the Aisle—you who imagine because I have a guide dog I can’t tell you’re sizing me up with the face of a reproving minister. Perhaps you don’t like dogs; maybe blindness upsets you. In extremis, I remind you of death, which is wonderfully ironic because I see you as a specialized proto-cadaver. That is, you’re biggest contribution to humanity will come when you’re dead and on a table. I’m on fire alright.

**

Desire’s basic function according to Deleuze and Guattari is to assemble and render itself mechanical.

All disabled are “Le machine hot” and you really shouldn’t touch me.

What is the constructive thing the disabled form?

**

This is the problem: the bio-political conditions of disability are stripped of effectual desiring-production and must, therefore, be voiced relentlessly, like the notes of a calliope.

Meanwhile the journalists trained their lenses on the crippled child who was allowed to meet the great basketball player. Normal people wept and considered the little boy “brave” for wanting to walk in the world.

**

This is the problem: there are no workshops for disablement mastery.

Cripples descend to the streets with their horrendous habits and torn tickets.

The desiring machines of crippledness are fueled by the chrysanthemums of healing.

These are not the true machines.

You see I feel as well as my body tells me I do. I throw flames from my wide mouth.

So it worked this way, a fresh face was my face every hour, because that’s what dogs can give us.

So it worked this way, I was lighter but not so light I couldn’t get down on my knees.

So it worked this way, Corky fit perfectly under my desk.

It worked, Corky beside me in precise, parallel patterns.

She was the dog who woke me each day and made me think more clearly.

She made me take a break, sit the emotional curve of slow.

One morning she walked me down a path among hedges in light rain and I felt just perfect. The Buddha said: “Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”

So it worked this way.

If some mornings I had dark dreams on my mind, she would place shoes in my hands and drive out ghostly rhetoric.

If I was at a meeting with unkind souls, she’d put a paw on my foot, feeling my distress from her spot under the table.

Dogs do these things for free, without expectations. They don’t say: “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

Don’t say: “you’ve been with another dog, I hate you now.” (Though this is what most people believe—i.e. petting my dog, they say, “Oh my dog will be jealous when I get home…”

Dogs are never jealous. They never dance with tears in their eyes. But they dance alright.

One night I told a friend I’d like to make a short film in which the Buddha dances alone.

“That’s the way dogs dance,” I said. “Every motion is the mild morning turning.”

“Don’t call Hollywood,” my friend said.

“A dog’s entire day is without regret,” I said.

“We who live in the freighted world where lovers disappear and our children are unfriendly, we’re the anti-dancers,” I said. “Regrets in motion do not make a dance,” I said.

My friend said I was drunk but he thought I was onto something.

“Dogs teach us life is a dance and that mindfulness is being that dance, and only the dance,” I said.

So Corky had taught me a thing or two.

Be safe. Love every single gesture.

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Everyone is tired at the local university. A middle aged professor of English stands at her office window and sees down-clad students shuffling in snow, their backpacks like outer space life support systems, and she recalls a line from a novel by Anita Brookner, something to the effect that “Rachel at forty stood at her window and considered how literature had ruined her life”–that was nearly it…

Everyone is tired.

A graduate student in philosophy, still half a boy reads Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance:

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

He underlines it.

Across campus the STEM building is nearing completion. It has yellow glazed tiles on its outer walls, which causes it to resemble a pottery kiln turned inside out. Despite its barbarous skin the humanities faculty envy it.

Fatigue and discontentment in the humanities. Stop. Old fashioned telegram. Stop.

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.” (Oscar Wilde)

Less and less funding for the fine arts. Stop.

**

The Dean of Liberal Arts reads the website of a conservative think tank on higher education which argues the humanities have lost relevance (butts in seats) because they no longer teach good, time honored verities, as, for instance, they did when it’s authors were young. “No student reads Shakespeare any more,” they complain. “Students don’t read Plato anymore,” the report says. Instead they take courses with titles like “Post-Colonial Queerness in Anglophone Africa” or “Crippled Ecologies of Post-Capitalism”–the subtexts of which are about what’s wrong with culture and never what’s right.

Poor Dean! He’d like to respond but hardly knows where to begin.

He writes a small note for later use. Says: “after a century of industrial warfare and genocide the critique of dominant narratives becomes the work of conscience”–but he doesn’t send this anywhere. Doesn’t want to offend certain trustees.

I didn’t want to inspire anyone. I said it aloud to Corky. “Let’s avoid Tiny Tim,” I said. A dog is a dog and doesn’t see the need to be anything else. I had to laugh. A dog is so happy in her skin. How many people can you say this about? “Hello, pleased to meet you, I’m merry in my skin.” If only our days played out this way. “Hey, Joe, I’m cheery in my flesh, how about you?” Poor us. Poor upright boys and girls, all of us damaged by physical education classes and the assorted bad ideas of churches, Freud, and broadcasting houses. “Let’s skip Tiny Tim,” I said to Corky because it was clear after just a few months of guide dog travel that we, the two of us as a unit, were unconditionally stirring to strangers and casual acquaintances. It became obvious when we were approached by doe eyed holy roller types—who’d grown up watching Jerry Lewis telethons, who’d absorbed a thousand sermons about the blind, all of whom need the grace of God—wanting to touch us, pray for us, or at the very least, tell us how uplifting we were. Riding the subway in Manhattan, the 4 train from Grand Central to Union Square, and feeling good, feeling really good, Corky tucked safely under the seat, oh feeling good, a woman seated across from us said: “You and your dog just gave me some Jesus!” There we were! Corky was Bob Cratchet, and I was crippled Tim, riding his father’s shoulders, a vision of Christ’s mercy. And I wanted to say, “I’m cheery in my flesh, how about you?”

These interruptions occurred so often I began to worry about it. When would it happen? Did it always manifest when I was uncommonly happy? Did it only happen when my mind was occasionally blank?  These I saw were the wrong questions. Culture ain’t what you think it is, it’s just what it is. Corky and I stood for nothing other than brokenness to loose cannon Christians. On a bus one day a woman said loudly: “Can I pray for you?” I couldn’t help myself and said very loudly: “Yes, Madam, you may pray for me, but only if together we raise our prayers for all the good people on this bus who have trouble brewing in their DNA, whose cancers are aborning even as we speak, whose children have gone astray through substance abuse, who are even now feeling lost in a sea of troubles, let us pray, all of us together for our universal salvation.” I clutched the woman’s arm with feverish intensity. The bus pulled to a routine stop and she jumped out the door. Passengers applauded. “Don’t take it personally,” a woman said to me then. I smiled. But how else to take it? The blind man either needs salvation or he’s a sign of grace. Can’t a fellow simply say: “I’m cheery in my flesh, how about you?”

I asked Edward, an Episcopal priest, what he thought of the Tiny Tim-Jesus complex as I’d come to call it. We sat together on a park bench in Ithaca, soaking up the first real warmth of spring. The bees had come out. Corky was chewing on a bone at our feet.

“Many Christians don’t like the body,” he said. “That’s how they understand the crucifixion. They think the human body is the throw away part of Christ. And of course that’s utterly wrong: the body of Jesus is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: the living temple of God and of the new humanity.”

“In effect,” he said, “every body is the body of Jesus. Which means each body, whether its broken or not is a true body, imbued with spirit, and not a sign of want. There’s a beauty to the diversity in the body of Christ.”

“So why are there so many predatory prayer slingers who want to mumble over me?” I asked.

“The insecure ye will always have with ye…” Edward said.

I remember reading an essay by Christopher Hitchens where he mentioned that Edmund Wilson understood why Alexander Woollcott’s personality didn’t appeal to everyone. It’s a British observation, one few Americans recognize, at least not immediately. Americans say: “Like me, like my dog.” The English are less encumbered.

As a blind man I want to be liked. I had a rough go as a boy. That this desire is wholly unreasonable is often difficult for me to grasp. If I say I’m appealing then this must be so.

But of course it isn’t so. My disability is pre-defined by ableist metaphors and practices. I arrive, as it were, pre-disliked, like pre-stressed furniture. Accordingly I’m refreshed by the toughness and determinacy of others. I’ve always loved this quote from William S. Burroughs:

“I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.”

Sulky, worthless shits. Nice. Today I’m rather clear. My personality doesn’t appeal to everyone.

I am not entirely American.

It intrigues me of course just how many people in the United States will cheer for a man who is a worthless shit. And this is not a British “thing” but rather something Kurt Vonnegut Jr. put his finger on some forty years ago. I’ll have to paraphrase him, but the gist of his observation is that Americans are fond of saying: “If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich.” A vile man with deep pockets is invariably held as a wise fellow by your average downtrodden American prole.

It’s possible in the US to be a toxic toad and still be widely admired. We’re not the only nation where this is the case, but as far as I know we’re the only country where people will say, “Have a nice day,” while burying their despair, holding their noses, and voting for a mobile bag of vomit.

What do we think of ourselves? Not much apparently. Thoreau put it this way:

“See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”

—after Pablo Neruda

They spoke so often of the dead

in my family, so routinely—like weather

or a request for milk—

that a strange thing happened.

One night my father

recalling men

who’d flown with him

in the war—pilots

who’d vanished—

wept, as one must,

and a bee lifted drowsily

from the fire.