Author: stevekuusisto

I have a friend who loves distance running and he has no problem working against a 20 mile per hour wind in the Boston Marathon. He recently ran a five day race inCosta Rica. I think its safe to say that he’s made for resistances. He knows how to take them inside himself and convert oppositions to opportunities.

I admire this more than I can easily say. I want to be a runner of   sideways or spindrift forces. For myself the matter is more inside the man. I want to be a local Pythagoras who changes the numbers he must endure. I’ve been carrying perfect numbers up a long hill. I’ve been carrying them all my life. I imagine you have as well. The numbers are stiff, grey, elastic, green, revelatory, silent, futuristic or steeped in the past. Oh but they are always heavy. I walk uphill in the sunlight of late spring and the numbers are no lighter today than they were in my youth. I was a lonely child. Blind. Often in solitude. I am lonesome now. I am so very lonely. I imagine you are just as alone. We are, each of us carrying our weighted numbers against the seasonal winds. 

I remember as a boy listening to my grandmother’s 78 rpm records. She had a recording of the Red Army chorus singing some kind of Stalinist anthem and I would play the thing over and over in her dark parlor and see in my mind’s eye a boy’s idea of a forested brotherhood though I did not attach faces or uniforms to it–the brotherhood was synesthesia. My brothers were blue and hemlock green like the trees. And in this way my brothers became numbers I could carry beneath my shirt. Little Stalinist-Pythagorean chorus numbers of a wished for identity. I played the record repeatedly.

Now firmly in middle age I walk in all seasons feeling the losses as they accrue. I like people but cannot understand them. Perhaps this is because I cannot see their faces. Perhaps its because I am meant to be solitary although I have a talent for conversation at least some of the time. I like it when others succeed. I know they are walking with their own numbers, those cobalt and watery integers of loss and wishful meanings that are privately heavy as all valuable things. I wish I could be Pythagoras. Could tell others what their secret numbers will give them if they sing in the proper keys.

Our job is to sing our numbers and run without a chorus. Or say the wind is chorus enough.

Or the numbers are my chorus: all gravity and teeth and the labored breath.

S.K.

They are back in Iowa: our prairie version of the swallows that return to Capistrano though they arrive with less fanfare taking their places in the tall grass beside the roads or in the untended fields. Out walking I hear them making their variable announcements. One or two actually sound like a minor problem with the ignition–something is wrong with the magneto–they give up a metallic spattering although they sound happy about it. If I could see them I’d know why they’re happy–I mean I’d see it for myself as opposed to merely saying it. They are alive. They are in love with the new green that’s everywhere, even inside their hollow bones. And they are beautiful. They are jet black and red as the occult   hopes of palm readers and they talk from the tops of fence posts. They are birds of the hot weather. They are the advance guard of summer. They brought me some swift joy today, doubly good for its being unexpected; doubly good because I was worrying about my life when I heard they were with me.

S.K.

Last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington comedian Wanda Sykes turned her “tell it like it is” brand of humor to bear on  the G.O.P. and Rush Limbaugh. Citing Limbaugh’s oft repeated assertion that he’d like to see President Obama fail Sykes suggested that this position is really a desire to see the United States fail–a stance which she argued is “treason”. Sykes then went on to say that Limbaugh is no different than Osama Bin Laden and she wished him a good, old fashioned case of  “kidney failure”. 

Of course I’m no fan of Mr. Limbaugh. I abhor his views about race in America and I think he’s dead wrong about the role of government in upholding the social contract and I don’t like his bluster which invariably reminds me of a drunken uncle shouting at the kids forgetting the pages of the magazines all sticky. Who needs all that hot headed , avuncular blather?

Kidney disease is a terrible thing. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Yet my point has more to do with the easy availability of disability as pejorative symbolism even in liberal circles. 

Apparently its okay to use disabling illness as a comedic lancet. You can say that Wanda Sykes employment of kidney disease was arbitrary, that she was really wishing Mr. Limbaugh a debilitating and painful demise and that she might have used any figurative device to get the point across. For instance she might have wished Mr. Limbaugh a long, screaming fall into an active volcano. 

But that is not what she wished for Mr. Limbaugh. The context of her remark had to do with Limbaugh’s famous problem with oxycontin, the highly addictive pain killer which will in fact cause kidney failure if you are unlucky enough to be addicted and you never get help. That of course is the world of the poor and Wanda Sykes was playing with schadenfreude meets Munchausen’s by Proxy. Why not? Mr. Limbaugh doesn’t seem to like the poor very much.

Disability as metaphor or as symbolism is almost never used to promote a positive human characteristic (though there are exceptions–Tiresias’ blindness or the compensatory powers of superheroes    who are exposed to toxic chemicals) and so more often than not a disability appears in a novel or movie as a figure that reflects bad character flaws. Blind Pew in Treasure Island comes to mind or Captain Hook.

Disability as vengeance fantasy is nothing more than the reapplication of a second rate Victorian story telling custom and in these times, in this age I demand more from my entertainment from Washington.

S.K.

I’d just gotten off a flight from Iowa and was about to board another for Brainard, MN and I was standing near the gate in a cerebral limbo quandary thinking about time vs. getting coffee when a woman’s voice said: “Will your dog bite my cleaning cart?”

“What?” I asked.

“Will your dog bite my cleaning cart.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your CLEANING CART?”

Now she was impatient.

“Yeah, I’m cleaning the women’s room and I have a cleaning cart. I thought your dog might bite it because it has chemicals.”

“No, my dog won’t bite anything or anyone.”

“Well good.” Cleaning cart woman pushed her appliance with its chemicals and foamy liquids right on by us.

I wondered if as a girl this woman had been attacked by a dog while pushing a baby sized cleaning cart.

S.K. 

Like everyone I’ve decided I need a spring outfit. Something cheerful to the eye. In this way I am thinking of my fellow citizens. I’m thinking of their eyes. What will lift their spirits? Make them feel young, coltish, have them gambol by the river? 

What shall I wear? First I think a new spring hat is in order.

In a kitchen store I find a spaghetti strainger made of aluminum with a couple hundred little holes. I take it home and put tinfoil wrapped Q-Tips in every hole. Its a lot like reading Braille. Soon I have a wonderful space age topper with glittering ex-cephalic dendrites stretching toward the sun. Its perfect for spring. 

For a shirt I’ve chosen a serapemade from a hundred  store bought bread wrappers. Wonder Bread works best. Red, blue and yellow dots all over and words too. Words like poly-sorbate 80 and partially hydrogenized particulate matter. I’m a poet from the shelf life school! I’m vertiginous as Charles Dickens writing another happy ending. So what the bread wrappers are a bit hot? Its no different than living in Tucson in July.

Pants? Nah. I’ll wear my uncle Mert’s tartan plaid swim trunkswith the attached telephone lineman’s toolbelt. (His boat you see was always in danger of sinking.)

I think this will get me started.  

Anyway its really spring in Iowa. Yesterday a bumble bee about the size of a baseball followed me as I made my way down the sidewalk outside the library. He had a little spaghetti strainer on his head and these cute little tartan shorts.

S.K.

The poets of my time are muscular. They eat Capitalism for lunch and fight to digest it much as wild dogs keep down their food by staggering. The poets are staggering in the alley between the old fisherman’s church and what used to be the Bowery in lower Manhattan.

**

It is hard to hold Capitalism down; difficult to breathe; nearly impossible to hold one’s head up. No one is less admired than a ruined dog. Even so the poets wave their diplomas and their grants and awards as if they were selling programs at a ball park. Surely someone will admire a poem. 

**

Mise en scene: three or four poets retreat to an abbey and try to make a go of interpolation. The grounsman comes around with a sack of potatoes; tells them they’re still Capitalists.

**

Electricity cam make a poet look taller. I know a poet who rubs himself with a cat’s skin imported from Helsinki. When he feels tall enough he goes to a fine restaurant.

**

The poet next door looks up from the newspaper. He sees a girl’s bonnet, a yellow hat floating between the poplars. Because he is a poet he thinks he must know what this means. It is terrible really to suspect it means nothing. 

**

The poets have been on the sea. They’re mercantile poets. They carry goods and hold tight to what remains of their instincts. Meaning or no meaning there must be money. Poetry in our time is tromp le oleo and  there must be poems on the shelves.  Poems with which you can butter your bread…Of course then you have to keep the stuff down. The poet who can hold the most Capital in his gut is the winner and  gets invited to Washington. 

**

They have been eating money the poets. They appear very strong. It is hard to walk or concentrate with money inside you. Of course this is when traditional forms come in handy.

S.K.

I have watched the outsourced members of the Bush administration “newspeak” about torture and I’ve also observed the middling Democrats and the Washington “bubble” media caste their own sugared bread upon the waters. “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” and the “ticking time bomb” are engineered narratives designed as justifications  for illegal statecraft. I saw Condoleeza Rice telling a Stanford student that we never used torture at Gitmo. You could see the intoxication of saying so. She looked like she believed it. One wonders if she ever read Hannah Arendt. Surely the former U.S. Secretary of State knows that subborning the rights of human beings and breaking international law are addictive behaviors among the tyrant classes and that Orwell didn’t have to look far to the left or far to the right to see the grievous material effects of propaganda and all the ideologically corrupted language of the 20th century.

Former Secretary Rice wants it both ways. We didn’t torture anybody. Oh but we were forced to take tough positions because 3000 Americans died on September 11, 2001. Presumably revoking habeas corpus and spying on tens of millions of innocent U.S. citizens is co-determined with the right to torture captives in her revisionist view of human rights–which is to say that human rights are conditional. Therefore we should rename human rights. We might call them “occasional operations of dignity” or “symptoms of engineered equality”–anyone can find something suitably evanescent.   

The emerging struggle to name torture for what it is becomes by turns the most important debate of our time since repairing our standing in the world and reinvigorating diplomacy are the keys to achieving everything from a reduction in greenhouse gasses to cooperation on peace talks wherever conflicts may be.

It is not a comfort to hear from our former Secretary of State that whatever you call it, torture is legal if the president says it is. Where’s Rosemary Woods?

S.K.

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on increasing my running speed and I’ve turned recently to a style of running called forefoot striking. Naturally, it seems, I land very heavily on my heel, so running more on the balls of my feet is supposed to not only help me run faster, but also help save some of the stress that running can cause on the rest of the body (at least some researchers believe that the balls of our feet are better designed for weight bearing landings than our heels).

As a side note: I tried running barefoot on the cement last week as an experiment to see what my feet would do without high tech running shoes. Since humans have spent most of our history running barefoot, I thought it would be telling to see what my feet did in a more “natural” state. Interestingly enough, barefoot, I run on the balls of my feet.

Trying to change from striking my heel when I run hasn’t been easy in part because my running shoes have thick, sturdy heels that practically beg to hit the ground. But as I was out struggling this morning to make my stride longer and land more fully on my forefeet, I was struck by an irony of this attempted transition. I was born with severely clubbed feet, which means that my feet turned inwards and wouldn’t flex at all. When my father used to tell me about my birth, he would always describe the moment when he first saw me, and how one of his first thoughts was to wonder “why your feet were so pointed.”

After an unsuccessful series of casts and metal braces, when I was four months old, orthopedic surgeons clipped my Achilles tendons to lengthen them, allowing me finally to flex my feet. Apparently, they did an excellent job, because here I am decades later, trying to transition back to running more in line with my original foot position, on the balls of my feet.

So as I was running today, concentrating ridiculously hard on the position of my feet, I thought about how different my life would have been if I hadn’t received first-rate medical care as a baby, or had been born before the surgery technique I received was practiced. And also, how strange it is to try to transition to a more “natural” stride that disregards all the modern technology and convention associated with running and running shoes.

Left in my “natural” state, I probably wouldn’t have been able to walk at all, or would have walked with a significant limp and pain. Medical technology allowed me to have a more “normal” gait, walking without much difficulty. And here I am eschewing modern technology in an attempt to return to that “natural” running state. I’m not sure exactly what my point is here, other than the inherent complexity of ideas like “natural” and “normal,” of allowing technology to help us when it can, and eschewing it when we so choose, of appreciating our contemporary lives as the strangely ironic things that they so often seem to be. But I’m going to continue to think about it—and continue trying to reconnect with my long lost pointed running feet.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief for POTB

You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

Diversity Inc has just posted its top ten list of the best and boldest corporate employers of people with disabilities. There are some stellar names: IBM; Aetna;Proctor & Gamble (whose animal experimentation programs still cause great concern for many); and still one is pleased to see that strong efforts are underway at V.I.P. corporations to hire and celebrate people with disabilities.

Its interesting to observe that there are no educational institutions listed. With their multi-billion dollar endowments why aren’t we seeing Harvard University or Brown? Or at least some compiled nominative like “the Ivy League” or the “Big 10”.

The sad truth I’m afraid is that we’re still in the era of rehabilitation modeling in the higher education arena. The model says that students “Must” be accommodated in order to get an education. The model isn’t very interested in seeing a seamless bridge between the academic accommodations that are provided in a classroom and the rich opportunity to put that accommodation process into a new model both of pedagogy and of employment possibilities.

OH but we can dream yes?

S.K.

The neighbors are afoot with their gasoline driven machines. When I walk with my guide dog at twilight they’re still at it, fouling the air, obscuring the birds, working mindlessly but without the muscle of Buddha.

One guy has a weed whacker which sounds like 42,000 mosquitoes amplified by a 70watt Marshall amplifier. He could play with “The Clash” except of course he has no genuine outrage. He thinks his taxes are too high and that all politicians are liars and that’s enough in the idea department to claim world citizenship.

Asleep I can still hear them. The bastards have entered my dreams. They’re mowing the orgonocity of my nautilus. The dream mowers are rectilinear, dim, unfeeling, plodding, stinking of fuel and hypo-minty deodorant. 

Gadzook! The American lawn! A pastoral jail with commodity fetishized pre-bagged toxins and ride ’em cowboy tractors and little white baseball caps. 

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans spend 3 billion hours annually mowing their lawns. One thinks inevitably of all the things they might be doing instead but if I tread there I will be susceptible to the charge of intellectual snobbery. Ah but occasionally some “I.S.”   feels good. Although his article isn’t about the depredations of lawn mowers I like Tom Vanderbilt’s essay over at Slate: “Lawn Pox: Children’s Play Equipment and the Decline of the American Yard” Mr. Vanderbilt’s vituperations are about the dread sprawl of overdetermined, plastic play devices that he sees in every suburban and ex-urban yard–all of it in iridescent oranges and reds and collectively modeled on the playlands at McDonalds.

He notes that children don’t actually play on this crap. They’re all in the house playing Nintendo. He wonders if Americans no longer believe in community playgrounds. We know the answer of course. The playground is a dangerous place. Of course this is likely to be true. There aren’t enough stay at home moms and cops on the beat to keep the old time swingsets free of meth addicts.

My point such as it is has to do with the fortress of the home, the manicured lawn its pastoral invitation, the unexamined sentimentalization of the English garden superimposed on American frontier fantasies, each further influenced by the suburban super-ego and the lawn equipment industry. Why not grow wild grasses, pachysandra,lilacs untrimmed, plenty of trees, force some germinal natureback into our lives?

Of course smarter people than I have written about these matters of American pastoral and the cowboy rancher at home next door. Michael Pollen and Debrah Tall   come to mind.

I’ll merely add that when you’re blind and hoping for some walking joy and all the little ball cap wearing Bubbas are erasing the soundscape you feel the stultifying and sleepwalking misery of the business. 

S.K.