Author: stevekuusisto

I watched Joe Scarborough this morning for about five minutes. He was carrying on about how the muslim world hates us, reprising the conditioned American sophistry that “they” hate us because of our freedoms, our values, etc. etc. He got no opposition from his co-anchors, who indeed seemed comfortable with the opinion that America is somehow facing an unreasoned and implacable religious foe. In this version of the world the United States is presented as a nation bleached of a history–and in particular of a foreign policy that has repressed people across the globe. Scarborough doesn’t remember or view as relevant the overthrow of the Iranian government by the CIA and its subsequent backing of the Shah. Why would Iranians hate us? Because we love Jesus? Because we have a two party system? Hardly. 

Absent from the TV pundits’ assessments of chaos in the middle east is any recognition of recent war crimes in Iraq. We have killed over 1 million civilians in that nation but to hear Scarborough and Co, this is of no matter. We have pursued a policy of violence and destabilization in the middle east for 60 plus years and we now have the results. How convenient it is to blame religious fundamentalism. And how wrong. Fundamentalism is one aspect of a region’s outrage, but it’s not the driving force. The murder, indeed mass murder of innocent people stands at our doorstep. The sooner our nation faces this fact the better. The odds of this are slim to none. 

If boys be beaten with an elder stick it inhibits their growth. The boys in my dream were victims of old superstitions. Nowadays we call them Dickensian but that’s too easy. They were twisted, mal-formed, prematurely set on a course without hope. All this in a dream last night. And behind them, the spooling machines of the industrial age. 

I used to believe that political lying was a matter of historical relativity–that in effect lying had always been central to democratic elections, and accordingly we shouldn’t’ be surprised by its prevalence. During the terrible Bush-Dukakis campaign, when Willie Horton was used by George H.W. Bush’s campaign advisor Lee Atwater as a semiotic fire alarm for white terror, I told myself this was in no way different from the caustic and ugly campaigning during the time of Thomas Jefferson. That was a good argument, and sufficiently contrarian to bother my liberal friends who felt the end of civil engagement was upon the land.

I was wrong of course, because I was willfully ignoring the big dog in the hunt: paraphrased from from Zappa, the big dog says, “politics is the entertainment side of the military industrial complex.”

This means that the lying is now more sinister than ever before. A thing to be remembered during this campaign.

Also to be remembered: a million dead Iraqi civilians. They are left out of the televised American political discourse about the unrest spreading around the middle east and north Africa. 1 million dead civilians. That they are not mentioned in our public media is shameful, particularly as these victims of in Iraq are never far from the minds of people across the middle east. The entertainment side of the military industrial complex wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Selva oscura–dark wood, but it’s on the inside. Woke in the night, strange hotel, knew I had been dreaming of my dead brother, heard wind in the trees, though I was in a high rise building in a strange city.

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” . . . The awful thing about growing older is that you begin to notice how every day consists of more and more subtracted from less and less.” Christopher Hitchens

[“On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part III,” Vanity Fair, September 2008]

I am in a hotel in Chicago, liminal with dyspepsia, American travel food being what it is, and I’m contemplating my own aging with alarm on the 26th floor of the Hyatt. My bad back won’t let me tie my shoes and the day has been more and more subtracted from less and less. I did manage to read an essay by George Orwell on the flight from Syracuse–his early remembrances of boarding school brought back vividly my own stumbling in the world of adult cruelty, for it warn’t no picnic being the blind kid in public school back in the day. Orwell saw early the preternatural sadism of his teachers. And so, reading him on the plane I felt that shy, unanticipated connection with another soul who managed to endure, even as the nature and meaning of that endurance was inapparent.

I’m in agreement with Christopher Hitchens’ observation. But I also see, via Orwell, that if your childhood was charged with conditional panic, “more and more, subtracted from less and less” was always the essential quality of being. From boyhood on, with a disability, one feels the electrolysis, the buzz of alarm at the core of the very minutes.

I still feel this. And now I have a backache to go with it. Less and less, but the soaring and anticipatory “more and more” was always the case.

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What did it cost me to wake this morning?

My nation’s history is a dark river.

If I am one of the saved, still swimming,

Who can I reach out to?

I do not want to be ashamed of the shore.

A glass of milk and winter rain,

I think this is how we return 

from the sea–or dreams of it,

the circumspect dead 

settling in the trees

to watch us all season. 

Of the ordinary life 

we don’t know much,

work with grief and pepper,

cook at dusk,

bristling blue stones of the brain

conducting the whole affair.

Submitted by Connie Kuusisto:

Friends and poetry lovers!

We are now counting down to the release next month of Steve’s new
book! Amazon is offering a special pre-order price (details below!) and
Steve would like to sweeten the deal.  Take advantage of Amazon’s
offer,  email a copy of your receipt to
authorsvirtualsolutions@gmail.com and you will automatically be entered
into a drawing to win an autographed copy of  “Only
Bread, Only Light”, Steve’s first book of poems  (Copper Canyon Press). 
(If you already have a copy, it would make a great gift for another
poetry lover!)

Unless notified otherwise, the scheduled publication date of “Letters
to Borges” is October 15th.  Steve will hold one random drawing a week
between now and then, and the final drawing will be held on the actual
date his new book is released.

For more details visit: http://www.stephenkuusisto.com – Letters to Borges: Pre-order and save!

What else do the pictures say? There is no such thing as an ordinary life. The blind soldiers are in a single file parade. Each holds his memories of heartbreak, of shattering violence, of the betrayal of history. Each man is blind in a new world without rational answers. The photographs remind me that I shouldn’t forget that devastating time. Just thinking about it I find I have to walk around my study, pick up small objects, a doll from Lapland, a small piece of votive comfort. The violence of the first world war is beyond comprehension, even now, almost a hundred years later. Imagine trying to find your way ahead, blind, after the battle of the Somme? Imagine having to resketch your own heart.

From What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir of Life with Guide Dogs

by Stephen Kuusisto, forthcoming from Simon and Schuster, 2014

Looking at pictures of the early guide dog schools and their first students is a powerful experience. The blind men all wear trench coats and high peaked caps and you see they are feeling their way with canes, detecting stone curbs, their dogs sitting obediently beside them. They have that military posture of another century, an impossible uprightness. The photo says we’re seeing an experiment. These are the wounded warriors of the first world war, attempting to return to the land of the living with their animal escorts.

From “What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir of Guide Dogs” by Stephen Kuusisto, forthcoming from Simon and Schuster in 2014

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