I walked around the barn without words—
no nouns or memories
a long clean glimmering silence in mind
as I circled horses.
When I was a child I wrote my name with a finger
on icy glass, saw how the letters
were evanescent—
innocence in training
for eternity, but truly
today I was for twenty minutes
moving in the shadows of late summer
without guilt or whisper.
If you imagine the tree of the world you’re doing the proper work of the mind.
Sometimes, late at night, I see the twisted branches of the world rising toward the Milky Way.
Now what does “proper” mean? The imagination has no manners. The tree is pure growth in its dark inheritance. The mind is jealous and wants to rise. If someone asks me what I’m thinking I say I’m seeing treasures for which there are no nouns.
**
Now I’m tired. I forget about the tree o’ earth. I read a cheap detective novel and fall asleep. In my dream someone has given me a pair of farmers overalls to wear. I discover I’m walking on water lilies.
**
Explain your disinterested self, I tell myself. You know, the self when you’re not apparent. I dip my writing hand into a well formed by two tree trunks and wiggle my fingers in the murky rain water.
**
Heraclitus:
It would not be better if things happened to people just as they wish.
This is why I love the tree of the world. It grows or doesn’t, always without hope.
**
It rains in the apple trees
Where a crow settles
In a dome of blossoms—
I watch him
With my clear head
The way blind people do,
Feathers, wet leaves,
Bird’s feet
Scratching the boughs…
**
Proper work of the mind. Leaves falling in rain…
In the valley of dreams you find wandering men who bury spoons in the snow.
If you’re a Freudian you think of spoons as the instruments of motherhood.
If you’re a Jungian, spoons are solidified long tears of the gods.
But really, why should dream men bury spoons when all portable instruments
are useful to travelers?
In dreams you must walk light as you can.
In dreams food arrives in rare forms.
Last night I saw my father (long dead)—he was playing a grand piano
beside a window.
Snow fell outside and he leaned into the notes
though in life he hadn’t been a musician.
I knew he was feasting.
Czeslaw Milosz: A decent man cannot believe that a good God wanted such a world.”
Always the god outside the man. A failing of so many. Milosz god is extracorporeal and masculine. A gyne-corporeal god is on the inside. The god on the inside wants peace, drinking water, medicine, food, and shelter and in that order. A decent woman cannot believe in a god outside the body.
When I was a boy I found an abandoned stove in the woods and I sat beside it to hear the crickets singing inside. That was my first opera. Those crickets sang of unearthly latitudes and I sat listening for hours. I must be honest—sometimes I’d cry beside them. I was just a little kid and already I knew the varnished life of blindness for I was not allowed to play with others. I was in turn studying the masters, the tiny bodhisatvas who sang with their legs. How could I have expected such a provincial beauty would fill me? I did. I knew, listening with everything I had, crickets would materialize within me. They were my first talking books. My first Caruso. Later I’d discover Lorca, his line: the little boy went looking for his voice/the king of the crickets had it…
Yes. The cricket king. The little boy with his thick spectacles. The proscenium arch of that old stove among the birches.
—Only this table is certain. Heavy. Of massive wood.
Czeslaw Milosz
Sighted or blind the table is inarguable and so we must think of it is a fact.
“Its time to set the fact,” says mother and children place smaller facts on its smooth surface.
E.M. Forster (who should have known better) wrote: “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
Forster forgot tables. The poor sleep at tables. If they’re lucky they eat at tables, give birth on tables, even die on them among the forks.
**
The Disabled. Tabled. Never at the right one. The culture table. Heavy. Of massive wood.
If they’re lucky the table fits wheelchairs; provides ample space beneath for guide dogs; there’s a place for your assistant or interpreter.
Mostly never the right one. Infelicitous. Crabbed. (The blind know those tables poorly set.)
**
Frank Lloyd Wright: “The truth is more important than the facts.”
**
The table can be a diminished fact. The truth is more important than the table.
**
And yet sometimes it is all I can do to stand or sit before a table. Merely arriving almost kills me.
**
The table—the first reasonable accommodation. We had to get the food higher than the snouts of dogs. We had to learn the word “sit” both for the dogs and ourselves.
**
A deaf man sits at a table. Beside him is his interpreter. Opposite: two job interviewers.
Job interviewer #1: “If we hire you, what accommodations will you need?”
Deaf man: “It depends on the job you offer me.”
Job interviewer #2: “We’ll get back to you.”
This is the table as portcullis. The table standing on its side.
**
This is the table I always wanted: antithetical meal—no dominant cuisine.
**
Disability is a tableaux, a tabula, a treatment of tables, since it undermines the furnishings. Here is my Platonic table: shifty but of original form which is to say shifty. The gods are always changing shapes.
**
After meals the Greeks slid their tables under beds.
It is hardly a surprise to those of us with disabilities when we hear of staged events inviting participatory empathy—moist occasions when the sighted pretend they’re blind and the bi-pedaled imagine themselves living with wheelchairs. There are other variants: men wearing high heels walking college campuses in support of abstract women has been a recent fad. One may shiver at these meretricious and tawdry events but they represent something big and Disney-esque about neo-liberalism, mainly that all identity is essentially exchangeable with the right accoutrements—the citizen as consumer.
In disability land the worst offenders are the non-disabled who earnestly wish to share the idea that “disability is neat”. That disability is essentially value neuter like coconuts doesn’t matter to the Disney-non-disabled because assigning value is what the citizen as consumer does. Its a “dress up” world.
Dining in the dark is popular because the sighted get to imagine they’re in the half-sinister land of the blind—AND—they are consumers. It is an erotic economic pursuit with a hint of medieval alum.
A friend on Facebook has written to say her university is planning a dining in the dark event, sponsored by the disability student services office. That real blind people would find this understandably offensive is immaterial because, as I’ve said already, “its a dress up world” and moreover, no actual blind people were harmed in the making of this film.
Ableism exists without easily identifiable flags—a guide dog school hosts a dining in the dark event for its sighted donors because its all in fun; a university does the same.
But I don’t believe citizens are consumers first.
If I am here, entire, it does not matter how I cut my meat.
The half-sinister, erotic land of the blind can’t be put on a credit card—because it doesn’t exist.
I write with my wings and my heart hops in the grass.
I can be any age I wish. Today I’m 100 years old.
I met a monk in the sauna of a Finnish monastery—
his sweat smelled like strawberries.
This is who I am, you see.
When I’m very old it will always be summer.
In 1959 when I was four and Nikita Kruschev was sixty five I heard a neighbor in Helsinki explain to my mother the Russians wanted to make everyone old. She was reacting to the Soviet navy’s war games in the Baltic. The comment stuck. I’ve spent my meagre years believing the purpose of colonialism is to age the colonized.
Of course colonial aging differs from hermetic aging. The Chinese poet Han Shan (Cold Mountain) left the world of busyness and devoted his mature years to ardent contemplation. The poetic trope of aging is often one of acquisition and spiritual immanence. It should be obvious and hardly worth saying but old men and women seldom experience fruitful and meditative lives living in occupied territories. This denial of soulful life is the core of occupation. You may substitute for soulful life “free inquiry” if you like but I’m concerned with something that spiritual language best reveals—the wisdoms and satisfactions that come with a dignified and free old age. At its core colonialism robs people spiritually and financially. But you can rob people of their money and natural resources repeatedly if you’ve looted their brains and hearts first.
“The older I grow,” wrote H.L. Mencken, “the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.” Mencken lived in the bloodiest century yet recorded though the 21st is jockeying for apparent calamities.
Each day I wonder afresh how to keep my dignity. Blind, walking, the stares of generally everyone I meet are omnipresent. Every disabled person knows this story. Sometimes I can repress my feelings about the “display” and other times I feel weary and let my emotions arise. Yesterday I said hello to a new student in the honors program I direct at Syracuse University. I am blind, and don’t make good eye contact. I looked right at her, said “hello” and she looked past me. I said “hello” again. She looked past me. Then I said: “I’m the director of the honors program, I’m blind, and I’m saying hello to you.” “Oh,” she said, and stuck out her hand.
One can say as Eleanor Roosevelt once said—no one can make you feel bad about yourself without your permission. I think that’s what she said. But disability is a social signifier larger than the self—you belong to a caste when you present with a wheelchair or weak, googley eyes. People will look past you. They’ve made a judgement. And so one does have to wonder afresh how to keep one’s dignity. I think of this as my daily chewing.
I often think of the moon as searching for its lost possessions, its silver spoons and icicles. Disability is, in social spaces, more than a little like the life of the moon.
Planet of the Blind 