Author: stevekuusisto

I dreamt I was moving somewhere and dishes were a problem. Dear Freud, Dear Jung, they kept breaking in my hands. There was tremendous urgency. Something sinister was happening. It was one of those offstage dreams. And I reached for the dishes and they fell from my fingers and shattered repeatedly. And someone who I couldn’t identify but who seemed to know me said: “leave the plates. You won’t need them where we’re going.” This is around the time I woke up.

Dish comes from the Latin “discus” which transformed in Medieval Latin to “desk” so maybe I was supposed to abandon my desk. I won’t need a desk where I’m going. I wonder if there are desks in the afterlife. Could there be a room of one’s own in heaven or hell? Would hell be ok if you had a study with a lock on the door? I wish I could ask Philip Roth. Meantime I’m reminded of the old “desk in the afterlife joke”:

“A writer died and St. Peter offered him the option of going to hell or to heaven. To help decide, he asked for a tour of each destination. St. Peter agreed and decided to take him to hell first. As he descended into the fiery pits, the writer saw row upon row of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they were repeatedly whipped with thorny lashes by demons. “Oh, my,” the writer said, “let me see heaven.”
A few moments later, as they ascended into heaven, the writer saw row upon row of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they, too, were whipped with thorny lashes by demons.
“Hey,” the writer said, “this is just as bad as hell.”
“Oh, no it’s not,” St Peter replied, “here your work gets published!””

Meanwhile I’m in mind of the old piece from The Onion about the pros and cons of “stand up” desks:

“Standing desks are becoming more popular in workplaces where employees would otherwise sit all day, but not everyone thinks a standing desk is right for them. The Onion looks at the pros and cons of using a standing desk.

PRO
Improves ability to talk about having a standing desk
Encourages more natural spinal curvature while staring at screen for eight continuous hours
Increases blood flow to your feet, where your best thinking is done
One step closer toward the ultimate dream of flying desks
Easy way to create illusion you actually give a sh*t about work

CON
Could wind up forgetting how to sit entirely
Might be happier not knowing how difficult it has become for you to stand up for longer than 30 minutes
More visible target for office shooter
Eliminates satisfaction of leaning back in your chair with your hands behind your head after sending a killer email
You’ll still eventually die.”

The dream was filled with broken dishes and a prevailing sense that a nameless but terrible enemy was coming.

I’m praying for refugees everywhere.

As Jung would remind us, our dreams ain’t always about ourselves.

This morning I unfolded the flower
That is my heart but I must tell you
I was thinking of something else
A boyhood house which was
In fact quite small
So it equaled me—
It was a garment
And one put it on.
I say, ambition
Is lovely, the light
Of the mind is like tea
In a glass
And it is mystic
In this strange room
And rain with its proficiency
Makes one dreamy.
I love you, my heart
Oh heart.

How lucky I was
When as a boy
I lived more alone
Than others
And there was no one
To tell me why.

Even now I stay up late
Sending instructions to strangers.

This morning on seventh avenue
A woman cried on the sidewalk—
She wept into a paper bag.
I walked by not wanting to get involved
Which is violence also.
There are not enough perfections.
At first I thought I shouldn’t write this.
We call it ‘virtue signaling’
As if ardor and hope are vain
And poems are vain.
I wash my fingers in cold water
And think of Rachmaninoff who,
Learning he was dying,
Went to his study, shut the door
And said farewell to his hands.
Perhaps there’ll be music where we’re going.

Last night I dreamt I was making balloon animals in a windstorm. I love the unconscious. Later the storm turned horribly intense. The unconscious has a limited sense of humor.

Meanwhile, it’s important to know what you love— especially the small things. I love the morning song from Peer Gynt, hot soup in winter, the sound of distant dogs barking at night, jazz piano any time.

Of course I love people, my wife, stepchildren, family, old friends, two horses in particular. But I talk about them all the time. I seldom say “I love that barn mouse.”

Back to the ballon animals. I love that barn mouse.

**

Oh America! Your swimming grows weaker and weaker, and the whale, just as Melville predicted…

**

Long ago I thought suede shoes were stylish—not the Chet Atkins variety, but the “Hush Puppy” kind, the beige ones. I was 13 and those were some good shoes. I say so without nostalgia.

Of the Hush Puppies I recall after you wore them for a day or two they tended to stink. I remember my father saying: “Your shoes smell like dead rats.” “How do you know what dead rats smell like?” I asked him. “I was in WWII,” he said.

I tried washing the shoes with dish soap and a rag. This ruined the suede and made them smell like the beauty parlor where my mother went for her “permanents” which were sinister since she was a drug addict and lacquered hair meant there’d be a burning sofa in the near future.

BTW I could never get my father to talk about the war. He fought in the Pacific. There were lots of rats.

**

It’s god’s trick, making me sadder as I grow older.

**

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine, or idealism.” (Carl Jung)

Idealism is how I get out of bed. And it’s likely going to pull my strings until the end.

What’s the balloon animal for that?

Last night I went to a jazz club in New York City and it was way too loud for my guide dog Caitlyn. She tried. She lay at my feet. But when a particularly hot squeal from the saxophone hit the room she stood up and I saw it was time to go. We left early. When you have a service animal you must be willing to compromise and know you’re not just you. Plenty of blind folks don’t want guide dogs in their lives for this very reason. Me? I’d rather have a creature who looks out for me in traffic and whose sweet life I have to reckon. A white cane is fine for everyone else. I gain a lot by caring for my canine companion. And really the jazz wasn’t that great. It sounded like an amplified fight in a lobster trap.

**

The above passage is okay as far as it goes. But if my dog wanted to visit a shit pile would I compromise, saying, well sometimes I have to admit I’m not just me?

**

Enough! We look after each other. And not all jazz is equal.

**

When you say you’re somebody think of your dog and subtract the ambitious fealties to super-ego which have held you hostage to pure life.

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.

You can tell the difference between a star and a man because the man has teeth. Against the heavens there are always teeth. The dawn, the most important of all, well, it’s toothless also. Please stop kidding. You certainly love your teeth. But again closing your eyes there’s just a memory of the Milky Way, all those broken windows.

**

Bus Going Somewhere (True Story)

A woman, a stranger, a person entirely unaccustomed to the blind
Leaned close, rustling something in her hands I knew not what
And said: “I’d have to kill myself if I was you.” I think she had flowers.
She kneaded the cellophane, breathed hard. “Oh I already did that,,” I said. “I used to be you in the far flung spindrift galaxy
Called the Black Eye. I rode a bus with hot house flowers And hey diddle diddle one day I couldn’t take it anymore
So now I’m a blind man beside you on a boppity bumpity bus.”
Yes in case you’re wondering, I smiled. She got off at the next stop.

**

Fragments:

“A dear child has many names.”

Finnish proverb. Dear child. Iris.
Buttercup. Mockingbird.
Mouse behind a chanterelle.

Who cares the clouds are low?
See how the grass waves?
Throw open the doors.

**

A strange proficiency in evidence
Look for it among people you don’t know
That’s kind of “the work” of Christ

**

Listening to the radio for company:

I might have been another man
Climbing stairs
To a different tune—
A black underworld between stations

**

Maybe I got it wrong and the stars do have teeth. And they have voices like coarse children.

Nietzsche: “All truth is simple…”

Is that not doubly a lie?

Not if you can get away with it.
(As if “all truth” is what? A glass of water?)

Can you imagine serving on a submarine with Friedrich?

**

An old shell am I, O Lady of Zephyrium…

**

When winter comes from the radio you know tragedy.

**

In this notebook, which is its own crude comic, we laugh as Batman steps on a fat frozen turd. Robin says: “Oh, that’s going to take some scrubbing!”

**

OK. Meanwhile:

I want the owl’s peace…

Hunger over for the day

Gibbous moon

Sleep…but not yet…

**

Ding Dong.

“Who’s there?”

“The Baba Yaba!”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to collect your breeze of inspiration.”

(Sound of chicken legs….)

Thoughts one has during a respiratory pandemic.

**

Poem discarded:

Walking Around

Did I know this? Blind strolling
Through Houston passing
An open window (who knew
Windows can be open
In the Texas summer?)
And a piano and someone
Playing it
And Franz Liszt the composer.
I have to ask
Did I know?
Lyric in the inhospitable.
“Tre sonetti di Petrarca”
Broadens
From a house
I cannot see.
And Liszt with his cataracts
His dropsy, a failing heart
Asthma, insomnia
Places his performer’s hands
On my shoulders.

Solo Dancing

Crippled kid, all body.
All body.
Think of that.