Author: stevekuusisto

I watched today as you defended domestic spying on average Americans, imagining that enemies of the United States can only be identified by the broadest possible invasion of domestic privacy. You tried to assuage the public’s emerging outrage (misapplied and outdated as it may be) by arguing domestic surveillance has oversight–a matter that is scarcely credible given the secrecy of the FISA court–and that the NSA’s monitoring of phone calls involves no listening to actual conversations. You sir missed the larger point, a matter I know you know given the quality of your education. Secret courts, secret surveillance, the power to arrest citizens and hold them in indefinite detention without a right to a speedy trial, the argument that you sir, possess the authority to kill American citizens at will–these dynamics, taken together, are the definition of tyranny. You did not campaign on these things but you have adopted them as a matter of “realpolitik” and have shown insufficient will to fight them. This will be your legacy. I see it now. You sir, are no Jack Kennedy. Enemies we shall always have with us, but freedoms are entirely ours to cherish and protect.   

o butterfly wings–fluttering 

under the spell

of every life that is born 

–Jarkko Laine

translated from the Finnish by SK

When I was in college I read a book about Egyptian temples which argued the holy architecture of the ancients was designed to be the machinery of astrology. A temple could explain the past and the future by magnifying the present. I loved that idea, loved the mythic notion that the very furniture of a room can reveal mysteries. There I was, walking late at night with Corky and feeling smiles of glee from dark houses and twinkling automobiles. What was happening to me? An old severance was breaking apart. I was becoming my blindness with the help of a dog girl.

I was racing across the watery plain of my blindness under a sky that suddenly felt like a luminous home. This was Corky’s doing. Whole parts of my psyche were cracking open.  I was certain I’d read something about this back in the college library–maybe it was Carl Jung–I was both bright and tranquil and Corky was shaking her harness and she sounded a bit like a reindeer from Lapland and I was splitting the currents of the strange night streets. My dog girl. My vasty dog! 

In the coming months and years I would have this experience over and over. Corky brought poetry back into my life–but in the way of dogs, asking me to stop, or leading me places I might not have imagined going. Simple places and elegant ones. I saw right away she was drawing me into the quest for life itself. Only later would I see how dogs reveal experience for its own sake, revealing life freed of ideas about life, which is of course life itself. In the park we walked through mounds of dried leaves and I thought of an immense body lying stretched out–the body of blindness rising. I was walking with the moon and dog and new emotions. 

My first night alone with Corky. Full moon. We walked in the late March cold and the ground was frozen. As she sniffed at the frozen earth I pressed my face against an oak tree in the park. The bark was rough and alive and I realized it had been years since I’d put my eyes against something so simple and true. What a dog can do, I saw, is give you back the joy of what the poet Robert Bly calls lightfooted empty places.  

Yesterday I wrote on Facebook that real literary memoir is less concerned with the self–with habits of irony and metallurgical self-awareness, and more interested in the lives of readers. I believe this is absolutely true and if you’re sufficiently awake you’ll say: “But doesn’t that mean there are very few real memoirs?” And I, should you say such a thing, shall agree. There are very few real memoirs. 

Agnes DeMille famously said that when modern dance doesn’t work it becomes “narcisstic jiggling” and this transfers to a lot of what often passes for memoir writing. When I use the phrase “literary memoir” I mean literary consciousness which necessarily is a matter of self-transcendence. That most writers undertaking memoir writing don’t achieve this isn’t surprising–most poets don’t achieve it either, and certainly the world is full of execrable novels. But the memoir is especially vulnerable to DeMille’s jiggling because, like a tree with something sick inside, a singular life, no matter how artfully expressed, isn’t enough to make a tall thing. As Mark Twain would put it, you need to feel when reading that you’ve met these people before, “met them on the river.” We don’t care about your sad childhood, your sense of injustice, or the brave way you overcame your eating problem–we want to see the sweet, unbidden, living faces of people who haunt us when we’re half awake. The opening of Winesburg Ohio should come to mind here.  

As you can imagine I like very few memoirs. Even famous ones. But here are a few I appreciate:

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov

The Liars‘ Club, Mary Karr

The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Waist High in the World, Nancy Mairs

**

“They f*** you up your mum and dad…” But they are more interesting than that. If you can’t say more about them, you’re not writing memoir. Your just jiggling on the couch. 

Many people say that memoir is concerned with elaborations of self awareness or personal irony. But to say this is to misunderstand the literary transcendence of the genre, for memoir should not be about its writer but its readers. This is why there are so few real literary memoirs.

Posted with Blogsy

And so I cross Seventh Avenue in a whirlwind, all possible dooms in mind, and the guide dog is immune to all histrionics–stares a cab driver down as he attempts to cut the crosswalk, and I see, in just a short street crossing how easy it is to sail on the big ocean.

Posted with Blogsy

There are many things I can’t explain and so I look to my dog for help. As a boy I felt so ashamed of my disability I often hid from people. The world was bruising. Children were mean. I once spent a summer in my grandmother’s attic, amusing myself amid the incense of sour wood and mothballs. And now here I am, walking on Fifth Avenue in New York, my guide dog so noble and expert that strangers call out. A doorman who is watering the sidewalk says, “Man, that’s a great dog, a great dog!” I feel a leap in my chest. Like an invisible bell is lifting and ringing. 

I asked my first dog Corky what to do about the blues. Honestly. She looked me in the eye. Dogs watch us. They take us in. And she said we should get moving. Really moving.