Author: stevekuusisto

Yesterday I wrote on this blog about a conference in Washington which, perhaps innocently, failed to make its conference schedule accessible for the blind. My problem is I don’t think 1970’s style blamelessness is appropriate in 2014—its no longer acceptable to me to hear that accessibility obstacles (architectural, digital, attitudinal) are just an oversight. As Freud famously said: “there are no accidents”. I quoted from Deleuze yesterday: “We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.” (Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Disability is an appropriated thing, an exploited and possessed phenomenon. There are no accidents: we didn’t think about disability very much when organizing our conference. Its too hard. Doesn’t some other entity “handle this”? Some sub-rosa office of accommodation and hand holding? Isn’t that how it works at our university? Why should we have to see to it that our conference materials can be read by the blind? This is how the appropriating force takes possession of disability. Its a seamless process. 

What’s got my goat? My little tragedy goat? Well, for one thing, I’m haunted by old conversations. I’ve had unpleasant chats with people at the Associated Writing Programs, the hosts of the biggest academic creative writing conference in the US. Ten years ago I told (name withheld here) that their website was inaccessible. His answer was “we’ll get to that.” Translation: doesn’t some other entity handle this? He didn’t like talking with me. I have other academic friends who use wheelchairs, need sign language interpreting, need a personal attendant—all of whom have had problems with academic conferences—continue to have problems. My tragedy goat indeed. He’s a group goat. 

I’ve decided not to attend the “Split This Rock” poetry festival in DC. I’m now deciding whether to go to the AWP. I’m the organizer of a panel honoring the poet Sam Hamill. I will likely go because Sam is a culture hero of mine. But I will hold my nose. The AWP so dislikes “the disabled” that their website contains the following: 

 All rooms at the conference are wheelchair accessible. The first row of seating in meeting rooms is reserved for individuals with special needs. Special services, equipment, or accommodations should be requested in advance of the conference. Please submit your request to conference@awpwriter.org by midnight Eastern Time on Friday, December 20, 2013. Attendees who require special onsite assistance during the conference should request it from personnel at AWP’s Help Desk.

Isn’t that great? All rooms in the Hilton are accessible. I love the term “special needs”. Who the fuck wrote this? As for a two month advance notice for accommodations? Ridiculous, demeaning, and altogether appropriating. And BTW, if I can’t read the conference pdf how can I know what sessions I’d like to receive accessible materials for?

I’m a well known American poet, essayist, teacher, blogger, and yes, public advisor. I’ve worked with the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, the Kennedy Center; the Mayor’s Office of the City of New York; the State Department. Its a long list. I teach in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies at Syracuse University. I’ve taught at Iowa where I had a full professorship in creative writing. And yet, and yet, I’m an outsider, because after all, the appropriation of disability reconsigns it to the Victorian basement, the “other”. 

Last week my undergraduate alma mater, Hobart and William Smith Colleges announced a visit to campus by a noted African disability rights advocate. They sent out an inaccessible pdf, and they’d scheduled the event in an inaccessible room. 

A friend wrote me on Facebook yesterday. She’s blind and a guide dog user like me. She’s also an academic. I like her. She told me that she has to go to meetings all the time with inaccessible materials and she just makes do and I ought to just make do. 

But the larger question—the one I’ve posed in a renga of rhetoric in the voice of conference organizers is the crucial one:    Doesn’t some other entity “handle this”? Some sub-rosa office of accommodation and hand holding? Isn’t that how it works at our university? Why should we have to see to it that our conference materials can be read by the blind?

People on Facebook or Twitter or in journals argue all the time about the efficacy of academic creative writing—either praising the study of literary work or damning the process. My own take is that creative writing culture is essentially without sincerity. Its a “me first” podium from which singular stories of abjection and resilience are emoted but without any awareness of class warfare. I remember at an AWP conference in Chicago, trying to get into a room with my guide dog and I tripped. I fell down. And a gaggle of poets actually walked over me. They wanted to get to the good seats. One of them was very famous. 

My wife who is a nuanced and thoughtful soul worries that bringing these issues to light will lead to my being labeled a malcontent. This is the risk. This is why Bill Peace calls his blog “Bad Cripple”  The creative writing community can label me if they like, though I have sufficient faith there are smart and independent minds aplenty—and moreover, some may even support better disability access at academic conferences and, if they teach, on their own campuses. 

I have decided today that I’m done with inaccessible events—conferences, academic symposia, public lectures, poetry festivals, arts jamborees—you name it—I’ve been to hundreds of gatherings that really don’t care if people with disabilities are at the table. 

The latest is “Split This Rock” a Washington poetry festival that’s designed to oppose our nation’s militarism, and our egregious and widely articulated assaults on human rights. Today I found that their conference materials are inaccessible for screen reading software. 

I wrote to someone well placed at STR who appropriately vows to fix the matter. But what bothers me isn’t the architecture of the problem—its the problem itself. No one asked. No one said: “Are we ADA compliant with our web site?” 

The conference, like so many I’ve been to, celebrates diversity. But its idea of diversity only extends to disability insofar as no one says: “don’t bother showing up.” Look at the website. There’s no information on disability or accessibility anywhere. 

I mean it. I’m done. I’m sick of tricked out diversity gurus talking about single issue politics and leaving out women with disabilities, children with disabilities, veterans with disabilities, the elderly with disabilities, and the poor with disabilities. 

We’re not sexy enough for diversity hipsters. Can you tell I’m angry? I’m really angry. And a passel of poets I know and like will go to Split This Rock and read their heartfelt anti-war, anti-racism, anti-misogyny poems and shrug about the cripples. 

How is this shrugging possible?

The engineering of normalcy is (was) (remains) real. From Frances Galton to Antonin Scalia the reflexive and reactionary assignment of physical and social value per bodies is the Lingua Franca of deterministic economies. No one has written more persuasively about that history than Lennard J. Davis. The economic construction of normalcy is indisputable. Once upon a time I took a group of disability studies students to London–not to look at the queen, but to see Charles Babbage’s model of “the difference engine” (has anything before or since been so perfectly named?) and then we toured the vestiges of Victorian asylums. Normalcy, the proper ‘mean’ was an economic necessity of industrial empire by 1830. The work of constructing it was astonishingly quick. The plasticity of social acquiescence was also quick: there are social lies and statistics and people will accept both once they’ve given themselves over to industrial economies. 

“We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.” (Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Presses universitaires de France Vendôme. 1962. Paperback, 233 pages, Language French, ASIN: B0014XAK6Q. Deleuze, Gilles and Hugh Tomlinson (Translator) and Michael Hardt (Forward). Nietzsche and Philosophy. Columbia University Press. June 1, 2006. Paperback, 256 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0231138776.)

When Dog-man thinks about the afterlife he becomes irascible. He’s more Mark Twain than Augustine. He thinks of Twain’s vision in  “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” where the good Captain discovers an insipid, bland Italianate city filled with angels who can’t play their harps. 

Its Sunday school all over again and Stormfield decides he’d rather go to Hell. Like Stormfield, DM isn’t sophisticated. And what about our dogs? He worries about the dogs. He wants an afterlife with them but then he’s forced to consider whether he wants to spend eternity with people. “You know, people,” he says to his dog, “the gold standard of Christianity.” His dog looks unconvinced. “Could he have,” he wonders, “a heaven with his favorite dogs and just a few people?” Then he feels shallow. He feels inadequate in the company of his dog who would welcome anyone. In this way his dog is more like Jesus. When he thinks of this he feels even more shallow. To cheer himself up he imagines an afterlife for dogs where they’re freed from all engagements with human stuff. They get to be dogs. They can see us and smell us but we’re in Hell. And Hell is mostly re-incarnation. This makes DM feel better. But not much. 

He loves his dogs so much. They’ve kept him from harm with a selflessness people simply don’t have, or they only have in extremis—in battles or blazing buildings. HIs guide dogs have been with him, in him, beside him, over him, hour by hour, and for years now. He can’t fully remember what it was like being without them.  

If I tell you I love you dear dog you’ll not theorize the matter. You know the difference between words and deeds. Feel it beneath your fur. And you have another advantage. You see what’s in my eyes. 

You forgive me my moonless absences, seeing how lonely a man can be. 

Then you put your head on my knee. 

“I’ve a chin for your theories,” you say.

Once on a trip to Mississippi you got fire ants on your paws. I lay down with you in the grass and swept them off though I was stung. And we walked to a fountain where we soaked your feet. And I sat down with you and cried for your lovingkindness. For you just wanted to walk me back to our hotel. 

If I tell you I love you dear dog you’ll say “I already know.”

**

Do you remember the time we went to the amusement park? I tried to coax you inside a huge, plastic “Jaws” shark’s head where we could be photographed standing behind the monster’s teeth. A gimmick. And you refused. I cajoled, called, tried my best to show you it was safe. But you wouldn’t do it. The photo shows you sitting outside the shark, looking disapprovingly at me for climbing inside the thing. I wrote below the photo: “Intelligent disobedience in action” and mailed it to Guiding Eyes. 

I tell you I love you dear dog and you say “I know, but you’ve got to improve your act, brother.” 

**

How many times dear dog have I been in meetings where your very presence beside me has kept me from despair? Amid faculty types, some of them so pathological they couldn’t achieve even a pyrrhic victory. Unctuous, but without the desire to ingratiate, the professors, all slick and smarmy cutting the heart out of a young scholar, denying her tenure. The academy which prides itself on being better than big business but is all too often just as greasy and soulless. Dear dog I’ve reached down to scratch your ears. Together we leave the meeting early, go outside, just go out. 

**

I raise a song for you dear dog. I mean, I really sing it. We danced around the house. George Carlin: “Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.” But we hear it! Man! In the kitchen we’re altogether elsewhere! 

If I tell you I love you dear dog you’ll not theorize the matter. You know the difference between longing and weather. Feel it beneath your fur. And you have another advantage. You see what’s in my eyes. 

You forgive me my moonless absences, seeing how lonely a man can be. 

Then you put your head on my knee. 

“I’ve a chin for your theories,” you say.

The blind child sits quite still beneath a hornet nest. He hears them unzip the air. Black and white and fast—oh so fast. He loves them. He knows that once inside they’ll fold their wings. He loves knowing this. And he knows that so long as he doesn’t move they’ll pursue their errands, emitting radio static.  

He already knows, at five, there’s an excellence to what later he will come to call the mind. 

I never underestimate that kid. In turn, I refuse to underestimate anyone’s child. 

Paolo Freire: “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

Funny to think of hornets as my little professors. 

Good Morning Father, how’s the next life—or are you already three lives ahead of us? We measure fates like children playing with pots and pans. Maybe you’ve been minced in a five story brain, a neuro-imp? Good morning Dad, wherever you may be. 

**

No nostalgia please, I have to drive…

**

I met a faculty type, a nonentity, a mound of zeros. He was pleased with himself. He was talking about Nietzsche. No one speaking of Nietzsche should ever be pleased. 

**

Pre-historic dogs are with me. This shall be a fine day. 

**

Hilary Clinton on forgiveness: “In the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said 70 times 7. Well, I want you all to know that I’m keeping a chart.”

Hilary: its possible we’re living in the age of forgiveness inflation. 

**

In the aging present, dark, early, I’m putting on my guerdon-hope garment. And into the day…

One writes poems because of bruises in the heart

Though its a bird makes us see–sorry 

To watch it go, we are sorry–

a child’s lament, for children are poets.

Who welcomes old, bruised hearts?

Do you remember when they force fed Dr. Johnson with that fish? Sam’s senses were not coarse enough—he spit it out—though Boswell importuned, Dear friend, eat or you will die. Death is better than Scottish ludefisk though it spites real love.This is the ambiguity of taste. Some say you can’t get away with your mind intact. Others say you can. I’m with Johnson: first refuse dried fish no matter the promise. 

**

I’m filled with tangled string. 

**

A look contains the history of man. (Auden) Some days I’m grateful I can’t see your faces.

**

America: this rock is Eden, go away, we’ve already found it.

**

Mutual need. Mutual aid. Simple. But even the Anarchists are specious. I once introduced myself to Utah Philips, the protest singer, said, in the manner of all young enthusiasts: “Its a thrill to meet another anarchist.” He glared at me. Said nothing. But of course I couldn’t see his face. And he’d said all he needed to say. His anarchy has a small “a”.

**

Each lover has a theory of his own about love and loss and love again. Mine is easy: be equally kind to all. OK, not so easy. But honest. As for the scurrilous (like that professor of writing in Ohio who spreads lurid stories about her students and colleagues, just so she can pretend to be their emotive midwife) you just set the soul dial from “love” to Scottish ludefisk. I’d save you if I had to. 

**

In grief, the glimpse of a face, my own? Is that how I will die?

**

I shall go out today and write an epic in a language of dogs. 

There’s this hulking, lumbering garbage dump—“normative culture”—a golem with fish heads and rotten fruit.  Buried in its moist gut is Augusto Pinochet’s collection of severed heads. In America we fail to name it properly. But its King Kong Normate, alright. 

He believes in stolen flesh and self-slaughter. He’ll trade in human slavery, insist the poor terminate their lives without welfare, food, or medicine. 

King Kong Normate is human. 

George Orwell: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.” 

KKN is the perfect imperfect—he’s the wisdom tooth of history.

He’s incestuous with whiteness, believing its more equal than the other equal colors. (Orwell again). 

The junctions of his roads and architectures are designed to facilitate sudden arrests.

He’s so afraid of the trans-gendered, the disabled, the feminists, the queer, the readers…

He says: “I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.” (Orwell)

He loves orthodoxy: “Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”  (Orwell)

It bothers him that sanity is not statistical. (Orwell)

He dislikes disfigured hands. 

When he sees a satisfied blind man hugging his dog he says: “My dog looked just like that, but he died last week—“

“Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor. Actually, dismantling the organism is no more difficult than dismantling the other two strata, signifiance and subjectification.”

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie

Let’s pull an apple out of the Normate. (Kafka: Metamorphosis)

Note: it won’t be as easy as Deleuze thinks. 

Or it will.