I try to believe I’m not afraid of anything, I’m making peace
with
ghosts all the time
—Sanni Purhonen
schoolteacher ghost
you didn’t like me
that is, the school room was a box
of hot indignities
a kind of pornography, really
making the blind child recite
handwriting on walls
I suppose you thought it was fun
we all know intelligence
provides the exact names of things
today I can tell you
there’s an exact moment
when everyone goes ahead
without sight
I agree with Lorca, two has never been a number
But merely anguish and sorrow
**
Let the mathematicians eat in darkened rooms
Weeping into their soup
Yes I think that’s right
**
If I go on in this way I’ll birth a goddess from my forehead
And she’ll be a real bitch
**
I agree also with Lorca that the dead spend their time
Gobbling up their own hands
**
Yes that was me—picking mushrooms
Singing songs by Blake
**
“How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.”
Excerpt From
Kabir
Robert Bly
**
I like my mistakes more than my triumphs
They’re loyal
**
Right down to DNA
Ice is my country
**
I love it when Lorca says
This is not death, it is a fruit stand
I’ve been blind all my life and have traveled with guide dogs at my side for the past thirty years. Since guide dogs are trained to watch for traffic and take evasive maneuvers to avoid danger, my dogs have opened up limitless horizons for me, enabling me to travel across the globe. And I have: from Helsinki to Milan; San Francisco to Miami. But there are places I can’t go despite laws which say I can—for even though service dogs are permitted everywhere the public goes, taxi cabs and ride share services often discriminate against me.
There are very few service dogs in the United States. The number is likely somewhere around 30,000 when one includes dogs trained to assist with all kinds of disabilities and not just blindness. The odds of meeting a service dog team are not high. I like to say we’re the few, the proud, the canine-human equivalent of the Marines. We’re exceptionally trained. How many times have I been in a restaurant with my dog lying still under the table only to have other customers remark with pleasure and admiration when we get up to leave. They say: “I didn’t know there was a dog under there! That’s amazing!” A service dog is not just polite, it knows how to be an ambassador for the distinction of working dogs everywhere.
So wha’t with the cabs and ride shares? The drivers pull up, see the guide dog and drive away. Or they roll down their windows and complain loudly that they won’t take a dog. When I say its a guide dog and its allowed in their vehicle by law, well, you guessed it, they drive away. This has happened to me dozens of times over the years. Sometimes I ask a stranger on the sidewalk to flag me a cab and open the door and then I jump in. Sometimes I report the ride share driver to the head office. But nothing stops the discrimination.
Wheelchair users also face ride refusals. This has lead me to understand that the problem isn’t the dog at all. It’s the stigma associated with disability. In his famous book “Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity” Erving Goffman reminds us that deviant physicality has a long history: “The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor—a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term: the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it.”
People like me represent signs of physical disorder and even though our dogs are cute we’re to be avoided. I’ve come to realize its not the dog that’s the problem its my own physical presence. Yes, I now believe the drivers who refuse me would happily take the dog and leave me behind.
So we came down from the mountain
And it was spring withal
No one left in the old village
Grandmama had vanished
But we had her favorite thistles
In a basket
We stood in the warm and mild haze
Our hearts racing
In the flowering rough meadow
The rose is always searching for something else
Juan Ramon Jimenez saw it
Forget sunrise
Call Spinoza
A tiny thing in nature
Distracts the flowers
What was it she wanted
Casida of forgetfulness
Here, this morning, early, opening
I’ve eaten all the catbirds and taken their seat
The horses of the king have run away
If there’s a cloud in the sky I don’t know
I’m waving the roses of Romeo
It’s a grand reunion I’m after
This song is a northern thing
The light and dark
Of the dream forest
Little boy in a hospital
Bandages on his face
When they let him out
Old ladies said “tsk tsk”
The moon was alright
Indifferent and far
Now you can’t live this way—
Pressing your face
Into plants of anguish
Like a lonely alchemist
The leaden life and the gold
Seeking better flowers
Afraid of the light
Chanting such swift
Meaningless words
I read philosophers at night
Poets in the morning
A river never found
Concerns both
Bread floats on the waters
An old woman drinks from her hands
Call me when you arrive home safely
I’m sitting alone among the spice plants
Yes I make promises
I stand on a horse’s back
Waving pages at the wind
The small tin box holding keys and dried flowers,
A grayness kept for thirty years—
Freedom to grieve, a stain in the attic.
There must have been a world before this.
Mother…
These lines by Emily Dickinson have long puzzled me:
“That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.”
The first two lines are an assertion and express a sentiment older than Plato. The second two lines create a problem as while we dimly understand love and accept this condition, now there’s a simile dressed as a metaphor, we carry our inexact knowledge of love like freight (which we assume is heavy) and further, that freight is proportioned to the groove by which she means a furrow—so there’s a plough in this figure, we press down with our limited knowledge of love into the field of life. But what about “proportioned”? She means, I think, that our thinking of love should be in accordance to the lives we’re “in” and not according to the lives of others. In the end the effect is lonely. Love confounds. Keep ploughing according to your own understanding.
**
In his excellent book “Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief” Robert Lundin writes: “Dickinson realized that belief is an art that demands trial and practice. A product of the romantic age and a prophet of modernity, she comprehended more fully than most people in her day how much the human mind contributes to the process of belief. Art, after all, is about the making of things; and in matters of belief, the history of the modern world is the story of our increasing awareness of the extent to which we participate in the making of truth as well as in the finding of it.”
Are making and finding connected to “proportionate”? Are truth and faith? One has to conclude that faith has material effects much as Spinoza told us—God is in the gravity and answers no prayers. God in the Spinozan sense is not concerned with you but is nature alone. Proportoniate means in this sense a man or woman corresponds exactly to something else. We are each responsible for the proportioned making of our places in the world. Faith, as Dickinson understood it, is material.
Planet of the Blind 