Author: stevekuusisto

My wife Connie and I own a small cabin on Rattlesnake Island in Lake Winnipesaukee in central New Hampshire and each summer I come back here to write and swim and walk in the woods. Connie has now joined me for a weeklong getaway from the midwest and we’re fixing to power wash our deck which is green in several places owing to the effects of winter snow. But somehow relaxing is a prologue to the work and we find that letting go of the worldly cares remains a near impossibility. While swimming I find myself thinking of Ohio’s acid rain which washes over the New England states. While walking in downtown Wolfeboro I wonder about the kids who are following their parents up and down the quaint shopping district–will those kids inherit a nation that guarantees affordable healthcare for all? Will there be a new era of energy friendly jobs and industries for them to work in? I think about these things as I note the incredible wealth of the nouveau rich home owners who have built startlingly spacious and expensive lakeshore places in a landscape where I grew up and where the lakeshore properties were mostly blue collar places. Are these young, wealthy, showy new consumers the last gold diggers from the era of gasoline engines? Will there be new kinds of wealth in America? Will there be a middle class at all?

And so I find that I’m not a relaxer by nature. I slow down. I swim under the full moon. Will the future of this nation be a noble or tragic affair? Will power washing the green innocent stains of last winter’s snow help me out?

I think I’ll go rowing and imagine a warless, free society.

And how about some fried clams?

S.K.

–after Pablo Neruda

1.

I have questions

Like a soldier or a boy

Since each says goodbye

To the land he loves

& it doesn’t matter

Night or day—

My questions

Stitched

From rising hills…

2.

How do you clothe yourself

After so many wars?

How do you stand

In glass and oil?

How do you carry

A rich man’s blade

Inside

Your secret places?

3.

I know

Time

Is running out

In your eyes.

I know

The sun

Cannot save you.

I see you have no share of heaven.

4.

Foolish to talk in this manner…

To say I tremble

In your dense blue air…

To ask things of you…

But tell me again

About the ruthless beauty of your blood?

S.K.

“Perhaps it’s what happens to a blind man

Who from so much not seeing then sees everything

And in a single focusing

Sees

With all the intensity of a diver

Who descends one single well in the whole ocean

And in that place all the fish are gathered.”

–Pablo Neruda

**

After cataract surgery on my left eye I am now nosing over strange objects, moving persistently from place to place like a half-blind surveyor, hungry for the knowings…

**

Two days ago while swimming in the lake I discovered a yellow orb on the bottom. It was down there with the lacerated stones and broken branches. I dove down and retrieved it. A yellow golf ball! I felt as though I had plucked a shrouded apple from a tree!

**

I do not want to write the poetry of eyes. But the mind’s dark channels, briefly illuminated by sparks…

**

The purpose of eyes, of course, is to strip away leaves.

**

My wayward delicate eye, that tiny cup. How it keeps slowly opening!

& so I am diving, like a whale in its course of ocean. Look at those fish swimming without direction.

Every fish shakes its own geometry…

S.K.  

See: http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2009/08/585-free-rider.html

S.K.

There’s an article at Wired Science that details how the new Kepler telescope is sending data to NASA about planets in our galaxy which are outside our solar system. Such planets are numerous and according to NASA, planet Hat-p-7b has a light side and a dark one and its atmosphere contains titanium oxide–oh yeah, and it has a temperature variance of about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit between its coldest and warmest points.

Well, ahem, the more I ponder the matter, I think the headlines should read: NASA Discovers “Original Planet of White Men”.  Let’s review: global warming out of control; dark side; toxic atmosphere. I’d say that Senator Sessions would feel right at home there. Dick Cheney? Scooter?

That titanium oxide atmosphere assures there will be no hippie dippy flower smelling there. The climate? Reliable in its ruined exactness. Just the way the old white men like it.

There will be no troubling Latina wise women there.

Waves of silvery toxins on the planet’s dark side will assure that nothing needs to be said aloud.

**

Meantime, back at the ranch…

Beatnik ghosts rattle the locks in the reformatories (which are now called state schools).

Jack Kerouac writes: Charlie Parker, forgive me–

Forgive me for not answering your eyes…

The unsayable names of America’s suffering classes are too hard to pronounce.

The president is going to pitch health care reform as a consumer protection plan.

How many syllables in that illusion?

**

Whenever I think of the lobbyists in America I remember Jung’s assertion that neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

S.K.

The line is Allen Ginsberg’s of course: “who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan/angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated…” (“Howl”)

In spiritual terms once you’ve bared your brains to Heaven you do not cover them up again.

Once you’ve bared your brains to Heaven the meanings will no longer fit subjective expectations.

A bared brain resists concretistic lingo. It sees an albino peacock where a covered noggin sees merely dirty stairs.

The bared brain is unperturbed by its own uselessness.

It has parallel dreams.

First it runs along the sea line; then it IS the sea line.

Its powered by perpetual current.

Its not concerned with wish fulfillment.

Its equally composed of truth and error.

In the water of dreams it is a school of flitting fish called the moment…

This is my origami for Thursday, August 6, 2009. See post below…

S.K. 

Our friend Vicki Vogt, a librarian at the Perkins School for the Blind sent the following message to us this morning. We are humbled and privileged to pass this along in faith.

S.K.

A Thousand Cranes for Peace
Sadako Sasaki died of Leukemia at age 12 as a result of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1948. In the hopes of getting well, she began her prayers of folding 1000 origami cranes. She wrote of her cranes: ‘ I will write Peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.‘. Sadako died before she completed her goal. The rest of the world has taken up the prayer of folding origami cranes for WorldPeace.

This is our cry. This is our prayer.
Peace in the World !

Vicki Vogt, Librarian              

Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library

175 North Beacon St.

Watertown, MA 02472

617-972-7418

vicki.vogt@perkins.org

Los Angeles

By Andrea Scarpino

On heavy nights, I think about family, its many complexities, how it can feel like suffocation and also safety, or at least a past, a thing that knows you, faults and all. How, wrapped in family, I can feel myself regress, act like a person I used to be, not the person I’m trying to become. I can feel myself slip away.

My mother is 70 years old today. She walks with a cane, is in near-constant pain from fibromyalgia and other complaints. She looks and acts much older than other 70 year olds. She struggles to remember things and lives in her own reality, telling herself impossible stories about where and how she might live, what we might do together if she comes to visit, how she might take care of my niece. Stories that have no hope of coming true. She hasn’t always been a good mother, the mother I would have chosen if anyone had asked. But it’s difficult for me to walk away from her. Mired in her own demons, she did the best she could. I believe that.

My brother is angry though, at our mother. He called the night before her birthday and did nothing but upset her. She’s called me crying three times, asked what he means, why he is angry. I’m caught in the middle, not wanting to insult or worry either of them, and growing angrier myself as the conversations continue. My brother has every right to be angry. She wasn’t always a good mother. But he wants to hurt her like she hurt him, and that doesn’t seem fair, not on her 70^th birthday.

A heavy morning, negotiating pasts, hurt feelings on every side, I look up the word family in the Oxford English Dictionary online. Etymology: familia (household) and famulus (servant). Definition one: “The servants of a house or establishment.” Definition two: “The retinue of a nobleman or grandee.” It’s not until definition five that we get: “the body of persons who live in one house or under one head,” a closer match to how we think of the word today. But my favorite is definition four: “Rom. Ant. A troop, school (of gladiators).” The example is G.J. Whyte-Melville’s 1863 book, Gladiators: “You look as if you belonged to the family yourself.”

Indeed. Family as a school of gladiators, ready to do battle, ready to protect and fight and kill and maim. My father used to say that Roman gladiators wore their swords on their right sides because their arms weren’t long enough to cross their armored bodies and draw a sword from their left. I’m the only Italian in my family, the only one with short arms, my brother’s father different from my own. My mother is taller than me even now, stooped over her cane. She has long, strong arms. My brother is a foot taller than either of us, does martial arts, could break both my arms before I knew what was happening. They’re both better equipped for battle than I am, better able to duel to the death.

I’m of a different gladiator school. Make peace. Forgive. Show gratitude, even if what you have is not what you’d prefer. Fight when need be, but run away too. Try to understand family, even when they’re not interested in understanding you. Leave the past behind, its long tentacles around you still, but gentle now, almost kind.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

The following article comes to us via The Inclusion Daily Express. We have some comments about it which follow as they say “On the other side”.

State Settles 9-Year-Old Suit Over Waiting List
(Associated Press)
August 4, 2009
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA– [Excerpt] The state government has settled a 9-year-old lawsuit over the lengthy waiting list to get services for adults with mental disabilities.

‘This is going to be a much more open system for all people who are interested,’ said James Tucker, an attorney for Alabama Disability Advocacy Program, which represented disabled adults in the litigation.

The suit was filed in 2000 and accused the state of violating federal law by not having enough services, ranging from in-home support to group homes.

Robert Regulus of Jefferson County said his 23-year-old son, Jeremy, who has Down syndrome, has been on a waiting list for services since he left public school two years ago.

Entire article:
Lawsuit over Alabama services to disabled settled
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0804c.htm

**

The laws of this great nation guarantee people their civil rights. Accordingly health care reform is a civil rights issue when considered in the context of aging or the elderly or of children or adults in poverty. You will not hear this assertion broadly in the media–making the connection between the health care reform debate and civil rights is apparently too risky for it is redolent of the game of Russian dolls, each smaller and inserted inside the larger. Health care reform is best discussed as a matter of saving money for our nation. Inside that “doll” you will find another smaller doll, this one betokening a severely shrinking American middle class that cannot afford basic human services of any kind.

(Five or so years ago I spoke with a psychologist who had put up a new shingle: his office was in a wealthy suburb of Columbus, Ohio and his new Welcome sign was in the service of finding elite residential mental health facilities for the troubled children of the very rich. During our talk he said to me: “Not everyone gets to go to Harvard.”) 

Inside the shrinking middle class doll is the doll of national survival though you could also call it the doll of St. Stephen for failing to understand this doll will lead to the hurling of stones. The survival of our nation depends on our ability to save the middle classes for America is not temperamentally suited to becoming a banana republic wherein the rich have their private medicine and the rest are left to wander the streets in search of food and medicine according to luck. Yet even if Americans were temperamentally prone to sanctioned heartlessness, our nation’s laws tell another story.

In effect the lobbyists who are spending in a giggling fit to preserve the scarcity model of medical services are actually proposing that the United States should violate its own civil rights protections. Money can accomplish only so much. While the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the insurance lobbyists have spent 263 million dollars this year to derail health care reform on capitol hill, the story above tells us that the courts will very likely demand fairness in mental health facilities, as well as all programs that provide health care for those who can’t go to Harvard.

It is my belief that President Obama needs to talk to the nation much as President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This address would argue the evident truth–that our very survival as a middle class country depends on reform “now” and not simply because this will save money but because our courts and laws demand it.

S.K. 

We just received a message from Guiding Eyes for the Blind announcing that tomorrow’s edition of The Today Show will feature a segment on GEB. Tune in!

Home: http://www.guidingeyes.org/site/R?i=_VWfhUY_FsfWWe-EjVLMIw..
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Be sure to watch the Today Show tomorrow, Thursday August 6 between 8:30 and 9 am.  Correspondent and animal lover Jill Rappaport has prepared a wonderful segment on Guiding Eyes for the Blind’s work and volunteer programs.