stevekuusisto

What does it mean to have not seen, and then see? Put aside the neurology of brain function and think of beauty hidden behind a cloudy screen. Think of the blind man or woman as an ancient Chinese courtesan who sits all day behind a draped terrace. The world outside passes: the silhouettes of birds go by; you see a strange flittering darkness; the sunset comes; you see something like a failing lamp. When the moon rises over the willows you go out walking, feeling your way, and you are navigating by means of remembrance.

But seeing anew you are no longer wandering the planet by memory. When guide dog Vidal and I walked Mannerheim Street in Helsinki we followed the vines of memory. Here is the botanical garden; here’s the city museum with its old copper doors; a path through lilacs. Now, seeing things, I discover the sighted world is more insistent and fast than the reveries of blind dream-walking. Was the world always this fast? My skin quivers, a stray piece of paper blows across the sidewalk at my feet. I want to get down on my hands and knees and grab it. I want to hold it up to the light and read with my one eye the letters that probably signify nothing. The blind self would imagine a written plea from a far island. The sighted man sees it’s just the gibberish of our economy. Up the street he goes. A teenaged boy on a skateboard flips backwards, falls on his ass, his Ipod flies into the air, his arms and legs are busy as a hundred men. His skateboard lands in a fountain. Vision tells me there’s a world unaffected by the self. I can’t tell you how thrilling this discovery is. I feel like Ralph Waldo Emerson, though without his visionary immanence–I’m not crossing the park and seeing something cosmological, instead I’m seeing the frosted leaves in early autumn and a boy flying.

I look out over the forest of maples. The primacy of colors in October is flat out killing me. The red is an arrow that strikes me in the seat of my sentiments. I think heaven must be red. Heaven must be nearer. A red maple leaf has fallen on soil and it is the downward tip end of eternity. God help me! How do seeing people live this way?

I see that the color red is the magnifying lens of god. I have to sit down.

I see that all the colors in the world stand against locality–there can be no “local” because colors take it all away. A girl walks by with the world’s most perfect green hair. She is a citizen of no country.

Now an old man comes down the street, a kind of scrawny angel, pushing a bent bicycle. He’s a war veteran and his medals are flashing in the sun. Compared to him everyone else in the world is motionless.

Truth/truth(s)

By Andrea Scarpino

I went to the tanning salon. I know—skin cancer. I’ve read the pamphlets. But sometimes I need a little sun. Sometimes I need to feel more heat on my skin than the Great White North provides.

And I thought about truth(s), little t, big T. I lay in the tanning bed and thought about Emily Dickinson’s, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—” About how it’s a great party trick to tell a philosopher you don’t believe in Truth (big T)—except then you’re stuck with a philosopher for hours while he tries to argue you into believing. That’s what they do—philosophers—argue a poet to death. The heat of the tanning bed. I thought about truth/Truth. About telling it slanted. About brokenness.

Here is a truth: we’re broken. The stars broke open. The universe broke open. Everything continues to break. The project of poetry and the project of philosophy is the same: make sense of the breaking. But the poetry I love believes in tenuousness: this is true. And this. And this other thing. It tells the truth—a truth, one truth—while understanding a bunch of other truths circle overhead, just outside, clamor to come in.

Sometimes, I watch myself talking with other people. Like I’m watching a movie, I can see myself concentrate to smile at the right time. I can see myself lean forward or back. Into or away. I grew up with an alcoholic parent—I think that teaches you that reality is constructed, that there is no Truth. Because what an alcoholic parent understands and remembers as truth is hardly what anyone else in the family remembers or understands. I think it also teaches you to step outside yourself, to watch what is happening carefully and closely at all times. To watch yourself move through whatever else is happening.

In the tanning bed, I thought of lying on the beach with the sun’s full strength on my skin. I thought about the ocean. I could smell its saltiness. Couldn’t I have been there, on the beach, in that moment? Couldn’t I have written as if I were? Reality, broken. Truth, broken.

And the last two lines of Dickinson’s poem: “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind—” Blindness as metaphor—truth too hard to look at directly, to stare deeply into. Truth that will take your breath away—as well as your sight. A tired trope, disability as metaphor. But I love Dickinson’s sense of breaking—even “dazzle” feels on the verge of collapse.

I watched myself, in that tanning bed. I stood at the door of my locked room and watched the bizarreness of the scene—pretend sun, pretend coffin, woman pretending-to-be-somewhere-else. Thinking about truth/Truth. Breaking. Truth broken open, reassembling itself.

I went to the tanning salon to think about truth, little t, big T. To feel sun on my skin. To get skin cancer. I went to the tanning salon to think about poetry and philosophy, their projects. I went to the tanning salon to remember Dickinson. And the universe broke open. And I watched it.

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Chancellor Katehi: What Happened to the Agora?

Like everyone who lived through the sixties and who has seen the detestable video footage of campus police at UC Davis and Berkeley I find myself wondering how it can be that college administrators seem to have learned next to nothing from the recent past. At Davis, Chancellor Katehi called in the constabulary because students were camping on the quad. Let’s review. No classes were being impacted, buildings weren’t being shut down, no violence was evident, and students were expressing themselves. By calling in the campus police Katehi turned the Greek agora into a site of confrontation without imagining intermediate and educational possibilities for resolving the situation. In this regard I can use my own father’s presidency at the State University of New York at Albany as an interesting example. In 1969, at the height of the Viet Nam war, students occupied the administration building where my father’s office was located. As the day wore on they came up the stairs and took over the president’s office.

Trust me, my father had plenty of advisors who told him to call the State police. He did no such thing and instead drew on his academic background (his Ph.D. from Harvard was in US-Soviet relations) and turned the occupation into a seminar. I think they sent out for coffee. A hostile situation turned into a symposium on militarism, imperial power, the history of nation states, the military industrial complex, and the evident problems of the cold war. The talk lasted all day. Eventually students began leaving. They had been heard, they were treated to a substantive discussion about the issues, my father suggested lots of books they could read. He invited them to come back.

My dad died in 2000 at the age of 80. Shortly before his death he lamented to me that higher education was corporatizing at an alarming rate. What happend to the agora?

The Dickensian Condition of the Mentally Ill in America

Editorial: Neglect Is Abuse
(News & Observer)
November 17, 2011

RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Someone needs to be called to account for the disgraceful way in which the state of North Carolina cares for, or doesn't care for, prisoners with mental illness. An internal review, conducted by two prison system nurses, of Central Prison's mental health unit cited some shocking conditions.

They include some prisoners kept in "therapeutic seclusion" in cells without being allowed to come out for meals or recreation time and in highly unsanitary conditions. Such isolation, or solitary confinement, is considered dangerous for those who suffer from paranoia and other mental disorders. Their conditions can worsen in such circumstances.

An additional problem noted in the report was that in one case, an order to let an inmate into the day room apparently was ignored, meaning he spent 78 days in his cell.

And the living conditions in terms of filth were appalling, with a stench of urine (according to the report) and just generally unsafe conditions.

This is not acceptable.

Entire editorial:
Neglect is abuse
http://tinyurl.com/6lp3eqy

Haiku

I love the poets who can look at a thing & tell you all about it.

I am not that kind of poet. The hornet at the window is just a hornet, even as he fights the spider.

I put an empty cup on the table. I call the sunrise a holiday from dreams.

I am not clever though I know a good deal about remorse.

There are five crows circling in the fallen leaves. They have nothing else to do

but to walk in rhythm with their appetites.

As a friend of mine might say, there’s nothing perfect here that I know of.

A scattering of clouds arrives from the east. I am glad they are clouds & not ideas.

Connie and Luiggi

Sent from my iPhone