Author: stevekuusisto

It is unfair to suggest Michael Meteyer is simply an advocate of the blind–we all know that just as blind people themselves are widely diverse and interesting so too are those who work on their behalf. Michael is a writer, poet, teacher, artist, traveler, husband, educator, free spirit, and as  all of this implies he’s a man with “a far roving mind” (to borrow a phrase from the Kalevala).

Michael travels widely as a field representative for Guiding Eyes for the Blind and on any given day you might gfind him in South America or Colorado or in the mountains of northern California. Now he has decided to start a blog that allows us to follow him both “on the road” and in reminiscences and spirited journal entries. He is also looking for contributors and if we understand things correctly he’s even going to give away airline tickets to anywhere in the continental U.S. if you’re one of the correspondents who answers his festive questions correctly.

Visit his blog at: http://michaelmeteyer.blogspot.com/

When you’re with Michael you’re in good company!

S.K.  

From Northrup Frye:

“Psalm 148, in the fourth verse: “Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens.”

Well, it’s a matter of common observation that the rain clouds are below the heavens. And the implication of there being water above, or behind the windows of heaven, indicates another dimension of water. So that you are, first of all, presented with a conception of a water of life which is both above and below, and that leads to the suggestion that the water of life that is being talked about here is not quite the same thing as ordinary drinking water. In other words, the suggestion is that man could live in water like a fish: there would be a state of existence in which water does not necessarily drown, in which man can live in water as one of his own elements”

Speaking personally I like a good metaphorical water. Still I don’t try to live in it. . This is because drowning is an even worse metaphor. One doesn’t have to be Herman Melville to figure that out.

Biblical metaphors differ from the metaphors in poetry in two essential ways: they offer a promise of resolution if one follows a creed–that is, if you change your life in a devotion to spiritual  governance you wil finally resolve the illogic of the figure; and if you in turn undergo that transformation your longing for deeper understanding will be forever satisfied. Hence the image of heavenly water in which mankind can breathe.

Me? I’m too weak for that. I shop at CVS and I buy Odor Eaters and sour ball candies and I like my water to behave like the water I can swim or drink. I don’t want my heavens filled with sting rays and anemones. Can you imagine having to spend eternity talking with Flipper? C’mon. I expect some comments on this urgent matter.

S.K.

The Department of Justice has warned the governor of Texas that the state’s residential schools for the “mentally retarded” are putting people in harm’s way.

The article below is indicative of the incapacity of the state’s legislature to fully grasp the human rights dimension ofthis matter. 

Rename ‘state schools,’ add cameras, panel says
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2008/red/1217c.htm

S.K.

By Jon Chopan

Rochester is snowed in.  Like the rest of New York and all the cities layed down along the lake.  The city is under siege.  There is gray in the sky and the smoke funneling from Kodak.  The lake threatens to wash away the summer homes of people who do not stay to brave the winter but anxiously watch the weather report. The city council has been gassing up the plows since August in preparation.  Grade schoolers still walk to school, tunneling through six-foot tall snowdrifts and arriving late after epic snowball wars.  The parking lots conquered and reconquered with the removal and arrival of fresh snow.  Rush hour traffic and holiday travel go unaffected except for the out-of-towners who are going too slow.

The bars along the river have closed their doors until April and handed out what was left of the summer stock.  We’re moving into the city, moving closer to one another.  The warmth of 100,000 people melts the snow on Saturday nights.  But we don’t retreat into our homes.  There is ice fishing and snowmobiling and games of hockey to be played on the frozen canal.  Everywhere you go you hear whispers: hypothermia, through the ice.  Children are not praying for snow days because they know there is never enough, that more snow only means longer walks and salt stained pants.  The hills of salt at the town hall become smaller as the snow piles higher, as shopping carts from Wegman’s grocery become mangled and lost, as the inevitable child goes missing, a snow fort caved in.

On R News Yolanda Vega is calling out the numbers for the New York “Take 5” and we are on the edge of our seats because my mother always buys a ticket and because we are mesmerized by Yolanda’s voice.  When she calls out her name, “Hello New York, this is Yo-LAN-dah VAY-ga,” drawing it out, it almost makes it all right that we will never win.  We love Yolanda.  We love the snow.  They are constant.  They are here to stay.  Or they will return again.  There will be no layoffs, no jobs shipped to other cities never to return. 

After the break the news reports that sales are down at local retail outlets, and they explore the connection between that and decreases in Kodak bonuses and layoffs at Delphi and cutbacks at Xerox.  It is no wonder everyone in this town is holding a lottery ticket.  The weatherman comes on with spectacular photos of the city covered in snow, and he describes some kind of effect with the light.  There is always something new to learn about snow and winter weather.  My friends and I, though we are too old and do not have the right winter gear, find old sleds in our garages and go out into the snow with beer and a camera.  We have forgotten flashlights but the weatherman, for once, was right.  The light from the city is bouncing off the clouds and it is bouncing back off the snow and it is almost like the sun is just now rising, even though it’s well past midnight. All at once the world feels beautiful, more than I can say.  From the top of the hill where we stand, in one of those silent moments that comes when the world appears covered in snow, every inch of the city is burning.                  

Jon Chopan is a roving correspondent for “Planet of the Blind” and we urge you to visit his website: http://www.pulledfromtheriver.blogspot.com/

When the country gave up on justice

We imagined the poem

Had a soul, we

Spoke of poems

As being like refugees

Or prisoners.

When you strangle a poem

It chokes

Like a real man,

Thrashes about

In its hemispheric

Dying brain,

And the poets

Of my dead country

Salt that poem

With studied tears.

Think of all the elegies

We will write for the Republic!

Think of the poem

Carried through the streets

Weighed down with flowers,

The poem, burning

On its pyre

In the great public square.

Of course you should think what you will:

Perhaps poems are not human at all

Or they represent something worse?

Can I say the poem

Alone is a verdict—

A slave who recites at Ephesus,

The speech of a captive child,

And the morning star, the moon up…

S.K.

So there I was just this morning drinking coffee and channel surfing. I heard three public figures tell three separate lies in just three minutes on three different channels. First up was that old reprobate Newt Gingrich who told Matt Lauer on the Today Show that Americans don’t need the president’s health care plan because health care can be paid for by cutting existing medical costs. Mr. Lauer absorbed this without a twitch. Newt’s nose grew a couple inches but the viewers didn’t see because they’d cut to Al Roker by then.

The second lie was over on ESPN where I heard Shaq tell viewers that falling over backwards when playing defense, thereby landing flat on the floor, arms outstretched, all as a reaction to being bumped by an offensive player is in the NBA’s rules. If you believe that you’ll buy almost anything and the good news is that pro sports will sell almost anything these days. But falling to the floor like a demolished building is not part of the rule book in basketball.

The third lie was really really quick. I don’t know what channel it was. The voice said that Jesus only helped the poor people who helped themselves. Jesus of course said no such thing. I love how these slick, blow dried Christo-quacks appropriate the most beautiful man in history. They’ll say anything.

Three TV lies in three minutes. And no one on any of these stations was available to stand for truth. The truth is too slow these days. We need more   clowns! “Hurry! Get us some talking clowns on speed dial! We wouldn’t want any veracity to break out!”

S.K. 

Given the fact that this blog is called “Planet of the Blind” you might suppose that all blind people know one another, the way all the people in Iceland are rather openly related. But such is not the case and yet we at POTB are cheering for Scott MacIntyre who we haven’t met as if he was the guy next door. Let’s be clear: it isn’t every day that a gifted musician who happens to be blind turns up as a finalist on one of the nation’s most widely viewed television talent contests. Though the groundbreaking aspect of Scott MacIntyre’s accomplishment on the show are obvious to all who are interested in the subject of people with disabilities its surely worth pointing out that Mr. MacIntyre has classical music training and he is bringing a keen intelligence as well as his considerable ardor to bear on his Idol quest. And so we are cheering for him as an artist who is in love with his art and whose passion is captivating.

I hope to meet Scott one of these days. His form of blindness, a genetic disease called Lebers Congenital Amaurosis is being researched right here at the University of Iowa and I know for certain that people with LCA have a good likelihood of being in another winner’s circle as a cure for this form of blindness is going to happen in our time.

The twin passions of the arts and the sciences are alive and well in this place and this time. There’s a lot to be applauding.

S.K.

My friend Leo who manufactures and sells eccentric toys and is a leader in the fight to cure blindness in our lifetimes once spoke to a toy maker in the far east and pointed out that the toys under discussion were defective–as I remember it, the heds were on backwards. “Ah, Mr. Hauser,” said the toy man. “Problem is just opportunity in drag!”

I rarely let a day go by without thinking of this story.

Once upon a time my father told me that in his view I seemed unable to learn from my mistakes. My father was very angry at me because I’d walked out of an exam in an English class and accordingly I’d failed the course. I should point out that I’d never done that kind of thing before. My father was painting me with a broad brush to say the least. Nevertheless I told him that failing the exam was a good thing. It would be some thirty years before I’d meet Leo.

“What in the Hell do you mean?” my father sputtered.  He was the president of the college where I had just failed the course. He was taking the matter rather personally I thought.

“Look,” I said. “I’m legally blind and frankly I don’t have enough help to read and study. I get head aches. Has it ever occurred to you that in my efforts to seem entirely independent and perfect that I might be genuinely in need of help and support?”

My father was a good guy but he was not very mindful of my disability. He had a “mind over matter”view of the human condition. This quite likely had to do with the fact that his father was a Finnish Lutheran minister who had a very strict view of our responsibilities regarding divine will. A simpler way to say this is: “Just get on with it.”

Disability requires a different language than that. One doesn’t say to a person who travels with a wheelchair: “Well just squeeze and crawl into the inaccessible bathroom my friend , for we at the University haven’t had the time to make this building accessible and right now we have bigger problems than your obvious character problem.”

The problem however is also an opportunity.

The person who says I need access is the one who opens the doors for others who will be coming.

The administrator who says that providing an accommodation for a student with a disability is really a burden is failing to see the opportunity in drag. When you bring true diversity and accessibility to a college campus you also bring more friends to the parents and alumni communities. This means more donors and even more opportunities.

Disabled people are not a burden.

S.K.

Congratulations to Scott MacIntyre for his performance this evening on American Idol.  And dare I say that the fact that he initiated that high five with Ryan Seacrest was very satisfying to those of us living on the planet of the blind?!  We thought all that chatter a few weeks ago about Seacrest trying to high five the "blind guy" was simply ridiculous.  I think Scott's gesture conveyed that very same message tonight. 

Good luck, Scott!

~ Connie

1.

You can’t rule the half light: not like you can at mid-day, the “mezzo-giorno”, that false impression of sunlight that says you will live forever and the baby will stay a baby and first love will always stay in your sleeves. Half light is merciless. There is a spiritual blue about the veins in the old man’s face and he’s your father and then he’s you and god almighty then he’s your child and the mirror remains standing as a museum piece at the Hermitage.

2.

In a winter dream I start my life, then forward it, hurrying the mathematical rivers and trees…Venetian masks rise and fall, friends from childhood…Two girls…their hair in braids…Finland, Midsummer…a boat…a boy with leukemia…Gray this. Blue that. A thousand suns…I whisper in house after house… Bread and wine…Old dog trying to stand…Now my own deathbed, a corner room under pines…my children coming near…Sons and daughters of Apollo—each a sharp sail on night’s river…Outside by moonlight crows build nests from the pages of my books…

3.

My father had such restless hands. Even when he was buying a suit and standing before the mirror he would reach out and tap at the glass as though confirming something with his reflection. “Hey, you in the suit,” the gesture said, “stand up more. Slouching like that you look guilty or sad.”

Me? I slouch. Think too much. Pray quietly. Forget the proper words. Walk about. Get lost in the Hermitage. Hell I get lost yes yes.

S.K.