stevekuusisto

Morning Notebook

Life was left sitting alone like a custodian.

School kids were herded past and told to ignore what they didn’t understand.

“We have the most commodified kids in the world here,” said Dr. Tiptoe.

When I die I hope I can really taste the birch leaves.

My clothes traveled far. I didn’t always appreciate their faithfulness.

Tolstoy: “I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one’s wife’s lover in one’s socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”

If you want to be terrible you have to practice by sitting still.

A dog month, is a pomegranate split, thirty days of seeds.

Only in New Hampshire can you vote for a Nazi by mistake.

Edith Sodergran: “Every poem shall be the tearing up of a poem…”

Oh my feet, you moth eaten grand seigneurs, keep talking. It’s OK.

Early Morning Walk in April

I walked in the still bitter wind. My dog scented things far off, one of the skills all dogs have.

I think dogs can scent the past as well as things in the distance—they nose out old men in bearskin coats who traded in furs, women in hats with peacock feathers.

Particles of time flow around us.

I’m OK living without proof, don’t need to know what occurs in the heavens of stones.

A polyphonic hermit thrush was out there someplace. I heard him and thought, “he’s early this year.”

On Being a Finn: Thumbnail Sketch

I wake and laugh. Unborn trees in the yard. Laugh and laugh. Gallop through my nervous system. Certain stars were in my dream. When I talk, words like coffee are automatic, but after-dreams are dancing still. They’ll rise, quietly into the shadow sky. The coffee is good. “Time,” I think, “to open a window.”

There are so many minutes for which no proper names exist. Deep in the night I carved my name on a seed. Now I’ve awakened outside the broken temple.

The Versinator: the Perfect Thing for National Poetry Month

A friend has given me a homely gift. Because he’s a poet he likes to tinker, sometimes with words, but he also fools with cast off things. My gift is “The Versinator”—a glass instrument, formerly a piece of lab equipment. It’s delicate, finch sized, a bird that sits in your palm. It has wings, though one could easily confuse them for two delicate glass straws. Picture a pipette twisted, forming a u shaped elastic retort at the bend. It’s the damndest thing, at once indescribable and floaty. I joked: “It’s some kind of smoking device.” “Almost,” he said, but since he’s a poet he wasn’t done. He raised it like a cruet and pushed two thinly folded papers into its ear straws. Then he handed it back to me. “It’s The Versinator,” he said. “It works like this: breathe in one ear and like the poet Wallace Stevens you chase tigers in red weather. Breathe out, and the ugly world and sad people escape from the Versinator’s other ear.” “It’s also a “Re-Versinator,” he said. “Breathe in and it converts sad air into poetry.”

Already “The Versinator” has given me hours of joy. I blow in some lines by the Finnish poet Edith Sodergran: “How everything dead is marvelous and unspeakable” and out the other side comes, “everyone’s eyes are a little asymmetrical” and voila I’m an anti-laureate, the sage of my shabby hallway, and a Jungian wizard, all in the comfort of my own living room. I can’t put it down. I inhale the static, empty oxygen of suburbia and a pulmonary trick occurs. With furious speed my tears become copper and I stand in my big Papa rubber boots and sway under verdigris clouds. You can’t beat The Versinator.

I picture a late night TV infommercial starring Bobcat Goldthwait dressed as Bela Lugosi, but not the Lugosi of Dracula, but from his last film “Plan 9 From Outer Space” (Lugosi died while making it).

“Hey,” says Bobcat Lugosi, “there’s a door to the darkness; you get used to it, you know? You’re driving through a small town at dusk, still feeling hope, when it hits you! The violet evening just doesn’t care!”

He’s wearing welder’s goggles and a smoking jacket. (Outer space motif circa 1959)

“But with the amazing Versinator, you can turn your angst right around!”

“You just blow in this grass thin tube, and out comes a whole new vision!”

“Now I know what you’re going to ask! Bogosi, how can something so small be a vehicle of immanence?”

“The secret is this: you can’t reach the world, you can only let the world find you.”

He blows in, listens to the second tube, looks at the camera and says:

“Human consciousness is much like pouring water over a peacock.”

I Am a Disabled Person

I am a disabled person and not a “bitter tree” or a “leaden bird of death” or any other imprecise, darkling metaphor one might devise. It’s still astonishing how often I must write this. Many able bodied people continue to believe (no matter how educated) that disability pushes against the windowpanes like night; that even hiring the disabled might let loose something akin to darkness in the workplace. They’re awfully complicated—those disabled—wanting special bathrooms or breathing apparatuses or Braille. Of course we oughtn’t take their opinions too much to heart. We’ll get around to them some day.

Let’s bitterize them with metaphors. Note: they were bitter from a prior time—a Karmic thing—that man with the dark glasses who says we should hire disabled people is truly a bitter tree. You see, he was born that way.

Metonymy in metaphor helps too. If he’s a sad tree he’s not quite a man.

Let’s move on.

Safe to say we won’t be hiring disabled persons here at the Widget Designer Birthday Candle Co. —not if we can help it.

And even though the job (as advertised) has the word “disability” featured prominently, we’ll argue that disabled persons are less appropriate.

The better candidates will not have disabilities but will know about disability because they’re good persons—see?

They’re clean. Not dark at all.

If you don’t believe the able bodied screen disability by means of metaphor conisder this: one of the most popular rackets in the world of event planning, often called motivational speaking, depends entirely on transformative metaphors. The blind man overcomes blindness by climbing a mountain; the wheelchair girl becomes a fashion plate.

Disability is just a state of mind.

In this way, disabled people are understood to be dark (troubled) or light (squeaky clean).

There just aren’t enough clean disabled to go around.

And you wonder why the 80% unemployment rate for people with disbilities continues unabated?

In Defense of the College Campus

When I was a college student and reading John Locke’s “Essay on Humane Understanding” I saw in my adolescent way how knowledge leads to ideas through critical inquiry and imagination. Nowhere does Locke use the latter term but I recognized “idea” was to the 18th century what imagination would become in the 20th—it meant going forward. I was lucky, not merely because Locke had proved the dignity of inquiry, but also because I was privileged to attend a liberal arts college where students could talk about such things. I sat in the shabby student union with classmates and we argued about Locke and Galileo, and Lordy, the dignity of engagement was suddenly ours.

Lately there's been pervasive talk about the approaching end times of the college campus. According to soothsayers, we shall have no more colleges, substituting on-line courses and big servers. When I read or hear this I’m not instantly dismissive for the proposition is as fair as many and residential colleges are expensive and nowadays one scarcely needs a physical library to acquire information, and why couldn’t we have video lectures in cyber-space and save dollars dollars dollars. I too think higher education should be less expensive and believe it should be available to anyone who seeks it. But then I remember how we argued about John Locke over milk shakes all those years ago—how we sat up nights and discussed Jefferson or Crick and Watson. A genuine college education isn't merely about the gathering of information.

Complicating matters further is the fact that learning space isn't simply classroom space. A basic analysis of teaching holds that there are four primary dynamics of pedagogy: the lecture with audio-visual material (linear learning); class discussion (horizontal learning); clusters (small group activities) and network instruction (decentralized teaching). Any of these things can be performed without a physical classroom. And yet, in my forty years of studying and teaching, much of what has proved supremely valuable in intellectual terms has happened in corridors, cafeterias, walking up hill or down, or when I've invited students to accompany me across campus while I pursue some errand. Not one of the descriptors above can match what happens in extramural space or what the Greeks called the agora.

Something additional happens on a campus, a serendipitous thing–the overheard phrase, an argument in passing. True learning and its associated breakthroughs often happen “against method” as the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend once put it. This is undeniable and it's a serious mistake to image the attainments of higher education are merely functions of linear or horizontal delivery systems.

One should not be rooting hastily for the end of the college campus as its laboratories, it's funny gardens, it's very elevators are creative spaces. This is one reason Thomas Jefferson designed the center of the University of Virginia as he did, that people might meet, and by accident.

Posted with Blogsy

The Mozart Shoes

I went to the shoe store and placed my feet in the measuring pans. My feet transmitted a sudden and stark message—“we feel shy down here; we’re under examination. Please get us back inside our shoes.” I wondered about this. The tragedy of it. “When,” I wondered, “had my feet learned to be timid?” “It’s the whole damn system” I told them. “Capitalism has taught you to feel incomplete.” But when your feet are farouche the whole body jumps that way. The temporal lobe said: “I too don’t wish to be known.”

I really wanted Mozart just then. Anything other than the grey flock of avian neural distress that emanated from my feet and circled outward to the farthest rings of my flesh. “Jesus,” I said, “you’re just buying some shoes.” But the temporal lobe said: “There’s no such thing as just. Would you just saw off your hand?” So I was forced to conclude, encouraged to conclude, the body’s anguish is like intense moonlight.

The shoe moment helps me recognize what my autistic friends already know. There is no “me”—there are only the eager, bristling, dancing, component parts. Now ask yourself how you get through the day?

Oh my feet, you moth eaten grand seigneurs, keep talking. It’s OK.

Fake Cripples Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

In her superb book Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race, Ellen Samuels describes, among other things, the long history of impostor narratives in America. Samuels and Martin Norden (author of the Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies) have both revealed a quintessentially American fascination with ersatz or manque cripples—the former is a pretender and the latter isn’t crippled enough. In either case the role of popular film in deceiving the public about disability is ubiquitous and a matter of long standing. By this I mean to say, perhaps inelegantly, that disability is seldom an either/or circumstance. In the case of blindness one may “see” rather poorly but still see well enough to read a sign from a distance of 8 inches. A wheelchair user may be able to walk five feet. In America where people are either rich or poor; black or white; anything that troubles this hardened exclusivity is (and has always been) considered cheating.

Samuels’ book is properly analytical about what is fake and what is real and one should be mindful always that America loves, truly loves, some kinds of fake but not where the human body is concerned. Trans people, and partially sighted people, and light skinned black people all know the drill. They walk through the long dusk with rudely scrawled signs proclaiming they’re not fakers. “Fake” means, among other things, thievery. Years ago when I was a visiting writer at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, I took a walk with my guide dog. I walked her on a dirt road with just her leash and I didn’t use the harness. There were no cars. I wanted my dog to have the opportunity to dawdle in the ferns and smell the wild turkeys. Would’t you know? A fellow artist in residence—a rather angry older woman—told the MacDowell administration I was a “faker”; I was faking blindness, just to have a dog at the arts center. Disability is always seen as something devious, performative, and dishonest. Always.

People who are not disabled do not generally understand this. And in my view, this is why it’s so important for colleges and universities to hire actually disabled people to serve in offices of disability support or as ADA Coordinators. Unless you’ve felt the shifting sands of social acceptance under your own feet or wheels, you probably don’t understand the hourly struggle to achieve citizenship that disabled people endure.

Fake also means malevolent. I’m going to steal something from you. Perhaps I’ll steal your good health. The fake blind man, grabbing your good fortune and stuffing it into his little bag.

For Tomas Transtromer

Happy the man or woman who owns a few books, who drinks tea. We rehearse a few words in case there really is a God. And others in case there isn’t. Years ago an old man stopped me on the street in Helsinki and wagged his forefinger. “Why do you say you see? You don’t see! You understand!” He was a ghost of a certain kind. He was conveying his rehearsal. Giving me words.

Before that day I didn’t know people could rise from books and appear before you on the street. That night, with a few books and a cup of tea I knew I’d met Strindberg.

“I dream, therefore I exist,” he wrote. And I copied this into my notebook with a leaky fountain pen.

Farewell Tomas Transtromer, and Thank You

I lost a poet this morning for that’s how it feels: the death of the writer is personal. In this case the poet is Tomas Transtromer. I feel the loss of a friend. Perhaps I don’t experience this with every poet. But when a lyric writer crosses over there’s a stitch in my ribcage. With Tomas Transtromer I always felt I had a secret friend. Those of us who love poetry, who in small or large ways have endeavored to live through it—that transitive and delicate approach to phenomena we call “the imagination”—are heartened when a writer suddenly says the world is still being born as Transtromer does in his poem “The Half-Finished Heaven”:

Despondency breaks off its course.

Anguish breaks off its course.

The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,

even the ghosts take a draft.

And our paintings see daylight,

our red beasts of the Ice Age studios.

Everything begins to look around.

We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door

leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

Excerpt From: Tomas Tranströmer. “The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/WAORD.l 

In these times we must be reminded of the mysteries of consciousness and water shining. Tomas Transtromer was a good friend, a fellow introvert who learned to live in the big world, who endeavored to do some decent work with damaged children, who came home at night in the Baltic dark and played Haydn on his piano, who whispered in our ears, each of us is still half open.

Imagine that.