I wanted to be useful so I wrote a poem–
It was about Orpheus and his birds
So every bird was in it
All the birds in the world
And every bird that has ever been
And you know
It was not beautiful but terribly alive
Like a god who assumes a single shape
In sudden wind.
Here in my neighborhood we have potters and poets. There are librarians too. And elephants that have been rescued from circuses. And there are no political prisoners; no one is held without trial or force fed. There are no drones for killing civilians; spies are encouraged to adopt an interest in horticulture. We are wholly naive over here. We don’t care if you say so. We can live with ourselves.
Living with ourselves means we understand human beings are each a multiple geography–inside we are many people. More confusing is our capacity for capricious and manifold states of mind. We know this. Sometimes when we wish to be brave we make cowardly choices and other times we’re surprisingly tough and daring. We can be dashing and lazy in the same hour. We keep our eyes on the general good which makes us honest but assures disappointment. The self is a problem, like a hanging bell.
We know the newspaper is fit only for wrapping fish. (Mallarme) We know our best thoughts are smooth as birds’ eggs.
A political life is brave if you’re an advocate for people without access to language. A political life is cowardly when lived in the service of those who control discourse. This is what came to mind for me when I heard David Gregory’s question to Glenn Greenwald on yesterday’s “Meet the Press”.
Mr. Gregory held the putative and prosecutorial stance of DC insiders when he asked Greenwald why he shouldn’t be prosecuted for aiding and abetting Edward Snowden who is on the run, having disclosed the true enormity of America’s domestic spying complex. Gregory defended his question as journalistic faites de affaires–an inadequate response given the circumstances. A translation of David Gregory’s question in vernacular would be: “isn’t telling the truth about government secrecy now a crime?”
I grew up as a provisional person–unwelcome in public schools, isolated, often demeaned by teachers and administrators. My point is that if you’ve been objectified and encouraged by rhetoric to feel abjection you learn to talk back. You also learn to view obfuscation as cowardice. Self-justifying to be sure. Up on its hind legs. But cowardice just the same. Putative and hostile questions are invariably the preferred vehicles for those whose legitimacy is in some doubt. In my case I remember a high school principal who had determined my blindness should prevent me from running with the track team. “You know you don’t belong, don’t you?” he said. (It was, I think, revealing that he had a large color photograph of Richard Nixon on the wall behind his desk.)
Disability teaches you to be suspicious of pejorative and accusatory rhetoric. When I heard Gregory’s question I heard the old voice of a minor league high school principal who was threatened by a blind runner.
“Hey all you people, listen to me,
Don’t you ever try to build a home in Washington, DC:
It’s a bourgeois town…”
Mr.Huddie Ledbetter
I once got a phone call from a professor of engineering at a famous school who said he was assigning a problem to his students–they were to build a robotic guide dog. “What?” he wanted to know, “does a guide dog do?”
“Well,” I said, “the dogs are trained to guide blind people along the sidewalk and then stop at the curb–both the down curb and the up curb.”
“Check,” he said.
“They’re also trained to stop for stairs.”
“Check.”
“In addition,” I said, “they must account for the combined width of their dog-human team–they won’t try to squeeze through a narrow passage just because they might navigate it if they were on their own. They stop and search for another way.”
“Check,” he said. I could tell he was feeling pretty good about his chances. He probably had some experience with the Mars rover program.
“But here’s the kicker,” I said. “Guide dogs are trained in a thing called ‘intelligent disobedience’. When a blind person thinks its safe to cross the street he or she issues the ‘forward’ command. And if the dog thinks its unsafe it won’t move. It may even back up.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.” He was silent for a moment then he said: “I guess we’ll have to come up with something else.”
How do you hardwire a dog’s imagination? Or her remarkable intuition and judgment?
Wind in the trees brother. Only a few birds sing. Time is slow and the dogs lie down. I’m half in love with careful fences and an apple tree.
Worked all day. Built a church in mind. Passing neighbors on the street I could afford to smile.
Words don’t really get you places but their intentions do. In this way, words are sails.
I don’t know how to explain it, but shortly after my first walk with Corky I developed a dog muse. The voice wasn’t a cartoonish broadcast from the mind of my dog; not a stylized and sentimental thing. The dog muse was more compelling. As we walked through slippery valleys in the East Village I picked up radio sparks from the DM.
“You’re doing alright, you’re really doing alright.” Or: “See how we’re moving wide here? There’s something ahead we can avert with full on gracefulness.”
Having been a blind kid in rural New Hampshire who grew up on half-assed contempt I felt lifted, vivified. Corky and I had a combinative voice. The dog muse didn’t care about my spindly depressions and sullen retreats in dark rooms.
“Look how good you are now, crossing Brooklyn Bridge on a whim, going where you’ve always wanted to go.”
Corky and I would turn our shoulders moving rightward, crossing MacDougal Street and the DM would say: “Feel the pavement, its like old boards left out in summer in a marshy place, just for walking.”
Quiet late afternoon first day of summer, blond half-life of the mind decaying in the soft minutes, smooth electrolysis of easy thoughts. My twin brother died at birth and sometimes I swear he’s with me, breathing perhaps inside me. We are alive like no one who’s lived before. “If you are afraid you’re not living,” he tells me. Solstice, bees at our trellis, and the house so quiet now.
When food is poetry : vegetables carefully grown, prepared, pickled in glass jars. Sauces whisked from impossible ingredients. Flavors paired perfectly. Textures carefully matched : some crunch, some soft, some tender yield.
Poetry : The French Laundry with Zac and our dear friend Courtney. Even food as simple as carrots and peas—the carrots sliced exactly the same size as the peas, all cooked perfectly, all dressed in the perfect lush sauce. Even the butter perfectly churned, salted, served at the perfect temperature in perfectly chosen small bowls. Even the salt—a different salt for different courses.
And beet essence : a swirl of red on a crisp white plate. Its luxury.
And wine pairings, a carefully chosen compliment to each bite of food.
We sat and ate and talked about the food and shared bites from each of our plates. Hours and hours, we sat and ate. We each cried at some point in the night, the tastes so wonderful, the meal so thoughtfully prepared. The care in each knife cut. The care our servers showed us.
The French Laundry : three years ago, now, and still, I feel like I can remember every course, every sip of wine. The best that food has to offer. The best of art on the plate.
Last weekend, Zac and I visited Courtney in Ann Arbor. Each meal we shared, a kind of poetry, each bite discussed, savored, shared. No bite wasted. Our conversation frequently halted to fully appreciate a taste. Frequently, my hand moved to my chest in awe. Tables around us filled and emptied, turned over quickly. And still we sat. Ordered another course.
The first question Courtney’s sister asked us when we met her one afternoon: ‘What have you eaten so far?’ Courtney’s response when a server suggested we order less than we planned, ‘She has no idea what we’re capable of.’
At its best, poetry means deep attention to words, sounds, rhythms, to the movement of a story across the page. To image. To seeing the world in new and unexpected ways.
Food, too, can be unexpected, wonder-filled—if we prepare it with care, if we value it, give it an important place in our lives. If we slow down, pay attention, really taste, savor : a new world opens up.
When the GOP torpedoed ratification of the UN Charter on the rights of people with disabilities last spring it was easy to evince disgust for their arguments as they were tricked out with the paranoia of Rick Santorum. Briefly (incredibly) Santorum argued that by affirming the rights of people with disabilities around the world, rights which include access to public education, the United States would relinquish the rights of parents to home school their disabled children. Forget for a moment there’s nothing about a UN treaty that in any way affects the rights of Americans to home school children or to twirl spaghetti counter-clockwise. Santorum knows his people: they’re the ones who believe if a butterfly wiggles its wings in (insert foreign place name here) then without delay black helicopters will arrive and troops will leap out and take their automatic weapons. Weapons are the controlling signifiers behind all right wing suspicions about the UN and it was rather quaint, nay cunning, to see Santorum substitute books in the parlor for Uzis. But semiotic subterfuge ruled the day. All of this is old news to people with disabilities and their supporters but its worth noting that in right wing circles imperialism is internalization–ignorance and want are acceptable everywhere in the world as long as we can hide in our homes or domestic compounds. The great folk singer Christine Lavin has a song about people who are “prisoners of their hairdos” and we might easily write a similar ditty about prisoners of ingrown imperialism though it won’t be catchy.
Ingrown imperialism (the paranoiac backwash of human rights violations as a matter of American foreign policy) has always flourished in the US. The poet Allen Ginsburg brilliantly parodied its stream of consciousness in his poem “America”:
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
Of course Ginsburg’s rhetorical question is metonymic–almost helpless with its squeak of common sense. Ingrown imperialism always demands the suborning of rationality because there are terrifying foreigners in the hedges.
From a disability rights perspective my poor brothers and sisters around the globe who are blind, deaf, paralyzed, disfigured, learning impaired, or who have HIV–just to name the most common conditions–are denied access to public spaces, books, homes, medicines, and prosthetics. Against this worldwide calamity stands the rightward bench of the GOP saying (with apologies to Ginsburg):
America the cripples are coming in their special cripple spaceships,
The cripples them want to steal our Fox News, steal our bullets and bibles,
Ruin our high school proms…
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Planet of the Blind 