Author: stevekuusisto

To sit in public writing while blind
Is an art project—“look at him
What’s he doing? Why, he’s
Writing! What a miracle!
A blind man pens a note!
Who’s he writing to?
Another blind person of course…”

Meanwhile he scribbles
Recalling Amichai’s line
About building a ship
And a harbor
In the same instant
Yes and he drops some tears
Which will dry slowly

Poetry gets out of hand
climbs the maple out back
chatters like a squirrel

who knows some jokes 

or soon will freeze to death.
“He’s my friend” I say—

but I’m a fool—
poetry squirrel
is not

(productive)

leaps over branches
without reason

but as my wife says:

“He really has beautiful
eyelashes.”

When the Old Times Call

Walking this morning
I thought of my
Great grandfather
Who sawed boards
For coffins
In the far north…

He looked at trees
In varied ways…

**

A Short Story

Night confession is hard and long
Watching the exhaust
From the car in front of you
Mile after mile…

**

For the simple reason
That many may think otherwise
I listen to my blind eyeballs

**

Hawks get rowdy with each other in the woods
But misery has a shrewder voice

Moon setting
in the autumn morning, dips
like a vessel
Glides like a sail through heaven

**

Immanence and impermanence–my brothers
I think hard about you
Two crickets outside Water falls on my wrist
When I wash a cup

**

In short: every ritual should astonish human arrangements

* 

Dear Blue: I wasn’t really a blind child at all, but one of the ghosts who rang Strindberg’s doorbell

**

I like Beethoven’s last string quartets
I like broken windows in abandoned country houses
I like crows on telephone wires
And Boolean Algebra and rain in winter

Disability has meant for me a life of painful encounters. From childhood right up until yesterday (today will have to wait) people in authority have told me that my blindness is a problem—my efforts to get a Ph.D. in literature were crushed by faculty at the University of Iowa who didn’t like my requests for additional time to read books; my presence in public school pre-ADA was a relentless horror show; life as a faculty member in American universities has meant a nearly continuous struggle for the most basic accommodations as if groveling and beseeching administrators and fellow faculty to help me gain access is appropriate and to be expected. If you’re disabled in the world of higher education and you want dignity you should go somewhere else. And of course there is nowhere else. There’s no utopian place for disability in this society.

Like a farmer who looks for signs that autumn seeds are coming up in spring I look for progress. Corporations and businesses in these United States are starting to imagine disability as not only important, but lucrative, which is to say there’s some hope. Hope is essential of we’re ever going to reduce the shameful unemployment rates of disabled people in this country and abroad. Joblessness in the disability community still hovers around 70%. I suspect the figure might be microscopically lower when we consider the disabled workers who hide their disabilities in the workplace. I know of a professor right now who is hiding her disability so she can get tenure. Ableism is ugly, monolithic, cruel, and yes, soul crushing. But there’s hope.

The Disability Employment First Planning Tool created by a consortium of advocacy organizations and which is designed to help businesses take active steps toward hiring employees with disabilities is one such sign of hope. Organizations like OurAbility in New York are using AI to help applicants and employers connect.

But much more needs to be done. In particular colleges and universities need to take up disability employment as a focus area. Let’s “lose” the 1970’s model of grudging accommodations for disabled students and promote disability “maker’s spaces” entrepreneurship, and yes, the advantages of our rapidly changing technologies.

I for one would like to see the university where I currently teach (Syracuse) develop a disability and entrepreneurship program. It would be lead by the disabled following the model of “nothing about us without us”—that wonderful slogan for the disability rights movement; the disabled should be in charge. There is currently no program in the US at any college or university that supports and promotes disability leadership and entrepreneurship.

Hope. Spring seeds perhaps?

I love the idea—the truth—of “crip time”—that cripples work differently and the time in which they work is largely in contradistinction to normal people’s 9-5 clocks. It’s a truly utopian insistence.

And walking blind, getting places early or late I think of just how many historical figures have ruined utopian thinking. Vladimir Lenin took a good blueprint and turned it into a prescription for murder.

So I want crip time to change how we work, especially in these malodorous United States where almost everyone suffers from brutal exhaustion feeding the monster.

That’s it for now.

Off to get a haircut.

A nice Utopian cut.

Time to throw away the wool cap.

Cripples have hearts inside their hearts
Think of the worm inside the thistle
Think of old prayers stuck on the walls
Prayers seen by the rarest of children
Think of memories holding out
Against the sluiced days
Of cruelties and shattered glass
There “were” good afternoons
Often they were spent alone
As it was with me—
Blind in the attic
With a Victrola
You’ve everything you’ll need.
I held a picture book
An inch from my face
To see Caruso with Helen Keller
The tenor gently guiding her fingers
Across his throat as he sang
Deep in the heart
Inside the heart
Rain now passes over
The cripple rain
Which will produce
Hearts and hearts
But always with
Smaller hidden ones
As with so many things
The fierce beauties…

It was a bad day
Birds were sick
The river stood on its legs
A wickedness roiled us
Between pages—
A short pause
While goodness reassembles—
That’s what we told ourselves
No wonder children
Looked at us
As if we were cruel to animals
“We’re innocent,” we said,
“We didn’t make this world”
But it was a bad day
Grief was in every detail
We never caught a glimpse
Of God’s hands

Let’s celebrate what for lack of a better term one might call the optimistic imagination as practiced by wretches. I’m in mind of G.K. Chesterton’s assessment of Dickens, that he was: “delighted at the same moment that he was desperate. The two opposite things existed in him simultaneously, and each in its full strength. His soul was not a mixed colour like grey and purple, caused by no component colour being quite itself. His soul was like a shot silk of black and crimson, a shot silk of misery and joy.”

Yes optimism for the wretch is a dyer’s art but it must be farcical in its hope. (Think Shakespeare’s Bottom.) One must be ridiculous in the boot black factory. (Dickens-Chaplin.) This is the thing, likely a tee shirt slogan: we hope in misery. As for the literary imagination printed ideas are invariably sad even when they propose optimism and no honest writer can ignore it. What did J.P. Morgan’s library smell like in 1902? Short answer? The vapors of sorrow.

A game I play, more often than I should admit, is a dramatic transference for which there may be a name but I’ve never found one. Perhaps there’s something in German. In short, I employ the characters of Shakespeare and Moliere as standard bearers for people I meet and especially for  public figures. The literary term for this is “comparison” but what I’m describing is better than that—“kayfab” is what they call it in professional wrestling, where everyone, both wrestlers and fans collectively pretend a false drama is real. Essentially I live and have always lived since my late teens in Tartuffe and The Taming of the Shrew and at this stage of life there’s no help for it. This is comedy as it’s lived but not necessarily admired. Moliere:

“The comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.”

Both Moliere and Shakespeare grew up watching morality plays, fables whose stock characters were invariably named God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. Because they lived during the first flowering of public literacy they understood the indispensable healthiness of word flipping. Talk about nature’s bounty! Words were no longer merely to be received and absorbed. Can you imagine the joy of a 17th century adolescent forced to watch Everyman or The Second Shepherd’s Play, as he substituted Satan, Life, Neighbor, Sin, Second Rate Demons, Ignorance, Ugliness, Gossip, and Basic Human Weakness for the stock characters of religious drama? Of course you can. Almost no one who’s lived through a high school production of The Man of La Mancha has not done this.

Comic irony is when you recognize the impostors beyond their appearances on stage. The characters in Tartuffe are at every holiday party. They creep through the workplace. Confidence men, hypocrites, exceptionally vain head cases, the credulous, and all who make their living feigning virtue. Ah, nature’s bounty indeed!

By living Moliere I reside in kayfab—I know the world may be better or worse than this adoption, but I can bear my illusions for not to live in Tartuffe would be, at least for me, unsupportable. Comedic representation is healthier than plodding credulity and more philosophical since incongruity is the mainspring for understanding the irrational. If you’re following me, you’ll say my proscenium of custom if it’s all Moliere, all Shakespeare, all the time, is a matter that must by necessity make me unreasonable. I prefer this to any conversation with the human resources crowd or political canvasers or god help me, professors at a conference. I’d gladly sip the milk of custom and spit it in a potted plant than talk to Orgon or Tartuffe. Contradiction isn’t a customary beverage. It’s milk and iodine and it’s healthier for you than any drink Madame Pernelle will offer.

Shakespeare was the first comic writer to dramatize reverse psychology as Petruchio, a wandering nobleman, undertakes the wooing of Kate who’s notoriously short tempered and cruel:

“Say she rail; why, I’ll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.
Say that she frown; I’ll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly wash’d with dew.
Say she be mute and will not speak a word;
Then I’ll commend her volubility,
and say she uttereth piercing eloquence.”

We are the ones invited to say she rail; we’re instructed to become as devious as Petruchio. Taken into his confidence we’re delighted by his promissory book of lies.

That’s optimism as comedy. Not as a vehicle for pratfalls or put downs, but discernment and the vanity of hope.

Hope is comedy. The sadness of the world is irrational. This is how I live. I think of Auden’s line: “All we are not stares back at what we are.” If an empowered disability identity is “out” and on the street it’s ironies are inherently complicated by the acculturated language of normalcy. This is both a signature subject for performance theory and disability studies. It is also the seed bed of literary consciousness. Watch out! The crip writers are comics.

Have you ever considered the flamboyant machinery of disability? Not the machine of desire like Deleuze, but of insistence. The Dis-machine is about insistency and each of us who’s claimed disability must be rendered robotic by our demands. Not the cyborg of Judith Butler the Dis-machine: it’s a childish contraption, irritatingly repetitive, always whiny and whinnying. So it’s loud, gets attention, and the human soul boils inside it.

**

Wasn’t that enough for you? Didn’t we give you a radio and some Braille playing cards? Oh yes, and didn’t we give you Social Security Disability payments? Isn’t it enough we didn’t tumble you into the sea?

What? You want to be of the earth like your neighbor?

**

Flamboyant: mid 19th century: from French, literally ‘flaming, blazing,’ present participle of flamboyer, from flambe ‘a flame.’

Disability, advocated for, is a repetitive life-long enslavement, stiff, mechanical. Vocalized it becomes hot, a conflagration.

The disabled, considered children by those without disabilities, are, effectively steam engines, wholly constructed; hot to the touch.

**

Now I don’t know you. You, my fellow passenger. We’re flying Iodine Air. The commuter plane is filthy and smells like gym socks. I don’t know a thing about you, Man Across the Aisle—you who imagine because I have a guide dog I can’t tell you’re sizing me up with the face of a reproving minister. Perhaps you don’t like dogs; maybe blindness upsets you. In extremis, I remind you of death, which is wonderfully ironic because I see you as a specialized proto-cadaver. That is, you’re biggest contribution to humanity will come when you’re dead and on a table. I’m on fire alright.

**

Desire’s basic function according to Deleuze and Guattari is to assemble and render itself mechanical.

All disabled are “Le machine hot” and you really shouldn’t touch me.

What is the constructive thing the disabled form?

**

This is the problem: the bio-political conditions of disability are stripped of effectual desiring-production and must, therefore, be voiced relentlessly, like the notes of a calliope.

Meanwhile the journalists trained their lenses on the crippled child who was allowed to meet the great basketball player. Normal people wept and considered the little boy “brave” for wanting to walk in the world.

**

This is the problem: there are no workshops for disablement mastery.

Cripples descend to the streets with their horrendous habits and torn tickets.

The desiring machines of crippledness are fueled by the chrysanthemums of healing.

These are not the true machines.

You see I feel as well as my body tells me I do. I throw flames from my wide mouth.

    --for Naomi Ortiz

Just a local stroll—
Dead fountain, snow, light,
Blind, starting always…

A crippled friend writes
About a gasoline attendant
Who was addicted to meth
How meeting the guy
Intersected
With his own disability

How many times
Have I been in the company
Of drunks and broken wanderers?

**

Traveling blind differs from sighted walking in only one respect: strangers are more likely to approach when you can’t see. They’re generally not malevolent—my sense is they’re lost. Yes it’s ironic they should gravitate to a blind person.

Over the years I’ve come to see this gravitation as something spiritual. I don’t mean it in a churchly sense, but more like Carl Jung’s analysis of UFOs. A blind person going confidently about his or her business means something obscure to hapless wanderers.

**

Once in New York City I was grabbed by a man who dragged me across the street. On the far side he actually bowed and ran away. He never said a thing. My guide dog was as stumped as I was. They didn’t teach us about this at the guide dog school. The man was working something out.

What’s clear is that disability always represents something—its like the mirrored ball in a disco. You may be—no, likely are—minding your own business. You’re pumping gas like Bill was doing, or you’re standing on a corner thinking about tartar sauce, why do they call it “tartar sauce”—did the Tartars actually make sauce—when a man disguised as a man appears. He says he has headaches. He says he lost his job. Says inside his clenched fist he has a ruby that once belonged to Agnes Moorehead. These things happen all the time when you have a disability. There is no such thing as neutral weather. Not if you are a cripple abroad in America.

**

Today they are burning the world
They do it in a kind of reverie
They love their occulted ash
They look forward to the death of all atmospheres…
How can I be a poet
How do I think this mask of tragedy
Will “mean” anything tomorrow?
There will be no books tomorrow
There will be no wind swept crows wings

**

When I was fourteen years old and struggling with vision loss, my mother, who was by then a heavy drinker met me at the door of our house. I was returning from junior high school, hoping desperately to find safety after seven hours of bullying. All I wanted was my own room. I could picture in my mind’s eye my cave with its short wave radio. Nowadays I know the mind’s eye is the work of the soul but I didn’t know it then. I only knew retreat.

My mother clutched a burning sofa cushion. “I don’t know how I did it,” she said. “get out of my way!”

She ran across our suburban lawn with the blazing thing held at arm’s length, and for some reason she wouldn’t drop it. She staggered from place to place until flames singed her hair and then she flung the cushion into a neighbor’s hedge where it extinguished itself but continued smoldering, sending up smoke signals.

As a disabled teen I was learning there were no safe places. We find, by necessity, locations where our souls can retreat, and after practice, we learn to take these guarded, hermetic spaces wherever we go.

Back then my job was to endure by stamina. Be blind, but don’t be blind, be something sort of blind, but not really blind blind. Be some kind of defective sighted person, but not really defective, just moderately less broken. Or whatever.

Blindness became a tortoise like affair. My blind soul held its breath in a shell.

They are burning the world down
I’m still holding my breath
I’m pleading before a mirror and ringing a bell