Author: stevekuusisto

Dear Ted Cruz:

My stepdaughter lives in Austin, Texas and has been entirely without power, water, and nutritious food for many days. She is not a symbol or metaphor–she’s one of the millions of Texans currently fighting to stay alive. Do you understand fighting to stay alive? Do you know the “golden rule?” I sense it’s fruitless to ask. After all you’re the man who, speaking of history said: “Twenty years from now if there is some obscure Trivial Pursuit question, I am confident I will be the answer.”
Question: “Who was the Texas Senator who abandoned his constituents and fled to a Mexican resort during a pandemic and a vast power and water crisis?” Maybe those people of the future will play Trivial Pursuit in Cancun? But let’s forget them. What other “obscure” questions might be asked which your name could fit as an answer? Your Princeton roommate Craig Mazin might help with this. He said of you: “Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics, but truthfully his personality is so awful that 99 percent of why I hate him is just his personality. If he agreed with me on every issue, I would hate him only one percent less.” Ready? Here’s another TP question: “What male Senator would be most likely to dress as a woman to escape the Titanic?”

Poetry is to prayer as wheat is to bread. One of the reasons I’m uncomfortable with academic creative writing programs and organized religion is because too few professors or priests have strawberry jam.

**

Joan of Arc ate quince jam before battle as it gave her courage.
I’ve had quince jam and judge it to be fine, but it’s not strawberry.

There’s a Finnish saying: “Sweden is a blueberry, Finland a strawberry.”

How I wander.

**

The soldiers who survived the Crusades introduced  jam to France. Many of them were blind. I picture them tramping over hostile terrain, sightless, clutching jars in their arms.

Nostalgic for the local bus there’s a pandemic…

Thinking of Saarikoski
Windows retreating to Platonic originals
God’s casements now dirty over the world

(Or “less than” God, press two)
Women and men drive circles in the dark
Herakleitos in Finnish more sensible than Keats

Through Logos all things are understood
Sick lights on at the neighbors
“One must talk about everything according to its nature…”

Nostalgic for the local bus there’s a pandemic…

Thinking of Sarrikoski
Windows retreating to Platonic originals
God’s casements now dirty over the world

(Or “less than” God, press two)
Women and men drive circles in the dark
Herakleitos in Finnish more sensible than Keats

Through Logos all things are understood
Sick lights on at the neighbors
“One must talk about everything according to its nature…”

The Art of Asking Able-Bodied People For a Life, Part One

With apologies to Georges Perec let’s start with his words: “Having carefully weighed the pros and cons you gird up your loins and make up your mind to go and see your head of department to ask for a raise so you go to see your head of department let us assume to keep things simple – for we must do our best to keep things simple – ”

Let’s say this isn’t about a phobic man whose alienation is insurmountable. We’ll substitute disability. Having carefully weighed the pros and cons…we gird the loin cloth and go to see our head of department to ask for what’s rather quaintly called a “reasonable accommodation” and Lo! Lo! We’re of course asking for the right to have lives. Accommodation, reasonable, means the right to live.

Please forget the soul crushing experience of having to ask for the right to live. You must forget how brutal this is. You must behave like those passengers on the Titanic who played pickup ice hockey. The art of begging for your life must be a game. Able bodied people love games, the crueler the better.

This is why the boss, the Dean, the district manager, (able bodied people have many titles) like to keep you waiting. You need something central–permission to use your oxygen tank in the library; a Braille sign pointing out the exits in the dormitory; a fire alarm for the deaf; Lord how it goes on–someone to shovel the sidewalk in front of the wheelchair ramp; medical coverage; maybe just a single day of acceptance which I think is also an accommodation–but Mr. or Mrs. Able keeps you waiting. All you want is an equal shot at life.

Once upon a time I was told by a waiter that I couldn’t come in his restaurant. He didn’t understand that my guide dog is protected by law and is allowed everywhere the public goes. In fact he didn’t care about this at all. It was raining. Hh was playing the ableist wait game. So I pushed past him, entered the Tony little restaurant and announced loudly to the assorted diners that I was being told I couldn’t come in as a blind person. Diners booed. I was seated.

The point is accommodations are not negotiable no matter what the abled employment-education complex wants you to think. Any modification that allows the disabled to fully live is a matter of life itself.

Dignity is not a game. Not anymore. Black Lives Matter; #metoo
speak to a thing beyond dignity, nobility itself.

Life is noble.

Can I get away with this?
I wrote “Percy Shelley”
Now you must think of him
Flitter moth on fire
Predatory cruel
Great talker though
Alright let’s play this game
“Erasing Shelley”–
“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.”

I once went to the home of Sergei Esenin in Tashkent. There was a Caruso record on the Victrola. One of Isadora Duncan’s scarves was framed behind glass and hanging on a wall. A book of poems lay open on a table. All three of these artists died tragically when still young. The cramped apartment was a museum to arias I thought. Esenin wrote:

“I do believe in happiness!
The sun has not yet faded. Rays
Of sunrise like a book of prayers
Predict the happy news. Oh yes!
I do believe in happiness!”

Describing the ardor of dance Isadora Duncan wrote:

“Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure, a totally white thought. It is always in my heart; it blooms at each of my steps… The Dance is love, it is only love, it alone, and that is enough… I, then, it is amorously that I dance: to poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to anything but the rhythm of my soul.”

And then there’s Caruso singing “Donna non vidi mai” from Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut”:

“I have never seen a woman, such as this one!”, “To tell her “I love you”, my soul awakens to a new life.”

I pictured Duncan and Esinen whirling around the little room to the astonishingly beautiful aria sung by a tenor who was said to spin gold threads. And I thought of death at bay in that tiny room.

As I recall (but may have it wrong) Esinen’s book mark was a demi tasse spoon.

Scholars and students of disability studies have had a great deal to tell us about the components of embodiment by which we mean “fringe” bodies held at remove from the tasteful drawing room. The TDR is your university, corporate conference table, the chamber of commerce, and yes, organized religion which is excused from adhering to the Americans with Disabilities Act presumably because in this “Christian” nation everyone knows the lame and halt are outcasts though Jesus said no such thing. One imagines the bishops reading John Rawls whose just society supposed no one would ever become ill. With a tip of the hat to Mel Brooks: “let’s have the dancing Jesuses over there; the singing Jesuses over here!”

Of course I like the wheelchair Jesus and the sign language Jesus and the guide dog traveling Jesus, the limping Jesus, and so forth.

In her edited volume “Foucault and the Government of Disability” the philosopher Shelley Tremain unpacks the creation of enforced disability, that is, disability as a vehicle for governance:

“…the governmental practices into which the subject is inducted and divided from others produce the illusion that they have a prediscursive, or natural, antecedent (impairment), which in turn provides the justification for the multiplication and expansion of the regulatory effects of these practices. That the discursive object called “impairment” is claimed to be the embodiment of a natural deficit or lack, furthermore, conceals the fact that the constitutive power relations that define and circumscribe “impairment” have already put in place broad outlines of the forms in which that discursive object will be materialized (Tremain 2001). In short, an argument about disability that takes Foucault’s approach would be concerned to show that there is indeed a causal relation between impairment and disability, and it is precisely this: the category of impairment emerged and, in many respects, persists in order to legitimize the governmental practices that generated it in the first place.”

If you’re not a philosopher or a historian of governmental effectuation this passage might be as difficult as abstract poetry but let’s say disability was created by government to withdraw status from outlier bodies because they couldn’t work in the newfangled factories of the late 18th century. Disability originally meant and continues to mean lack of economic agency. Governments then created carceral institutions hidden behind tall hedges. Thus the government of disability both creates disablement and enforces the lived experience of disability.

Now putting a ramp on a church is just too damned expensive. Easier to keep the fringe out. If there wasn’t something wrong with them Jesus wouldn’t need to cure them. Curing them is Jesus’ job. We love Jesus. But you must agree the disabled aren’t tasteful.

What does this have to do with Foucault and the government of disability? Plenty. Enforced unfitness is designed to be unresolvable. Then exclusionary. A human difference that’s always too expensive. And in the pandemic, why not let them expire?

The best of the liberal intellectual tradition calls on us to engage with and talk back to the enforcements of bio-politics.

Here comes wheelchair Jesus.

There are lines of poetry that once you’ve read them you’ll never get rid of. “The world is ugly and the people are sad” is one of them and it’s bugged me for almost forty years. I was an undergraduate when I first read the lines and if you’re a reader of American poetry you know they are by Wallace Stevens.

The lines represent a mood. Moods are to truth as armadillo meat is to–well, anything. It doesn’t matter that the world is beautiful and people are at least happy on occasion. Mood wins in poetry and the darker the better.

What would a poem which argues the world is glorious and people are, if not happy, at least capable of happiness sound like? It would sound like this:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

I’ll take Keats over Stevens any day. Why? Because the imagination insists the gloomy days have no noble nature. Because the sails of beauty can be slack or filled with wind but they break the monotony of gloom. (Sails and horses running will always do this.)

On the night Stevens wrote his lines someone was playing a banjo in New Haven and singing softly something the poet did not conceive of. And whether it was a spiritual or the blues or a song of the working classes doesn’t matter. The world was never ugly. Some people are occasionally sad, or cannot shake sadness and in any case saying so bears nuance and scruple neither of which are evident in Stevens’ original lines.

Stevens for all his capacities could be cheap, a thing you never find in Williams, the poet against whom he’s often positioned. Williams would tell us an old woman eating plums finds them good. I’ll take Williams and Keats and plums.

One is tempted to say appetite is everything. I know you know. I’m ravenous. The old stomach is cleaving to the backbone. With wings I’d be a raven like the one that flew over my house clutching a live snake in its beak. Now the raven is nature’s true hunger. With human beings appetite becomes voracity, greed, it’s entirely covetous. This is why real estate agents tell home sellers to bake cookies before potential buyers visit. Eat that house. And while you’re at it devour the tricycle in the yard.

The raven represents true hunger. Late capitalist hunger is something else unless you’re in poverty. The rich who are America’s decision makers only understand the desire to eat your Chevrolet. That’s where their appetites are centered. The children who suck on pebbles to get to sleep are nowhere in their minds. Literal hunger differs from hedge funder’s appetites. If this was a college classroom, right about now a student would raise her hand and say “professor where are you going with this?”

I know. Forgive me. It’s just that I’m seeing a new kind of American appetite, an edacity, a thing beyond desire or covetousness–a Thanatos driven wild fire quickened rage to eat anyone who stands in the way. I will chomp you and I’ll wash you down with milk and iodine or blood.

Once you’ve turned people you don’t favor into symbols they’re nothing more than the other industrial junk you’d like to eat, the swing set, the pony, the Mercedes Benz, the cash cow megalith shopping mall your neighbor invested in, the great post-modern dehumanized but entirely human hungriness. It’s like the prose Edda. Kill your enemy, drink from his skull.

That’s what I saw when the Trump fed Q-Anon Proud Boys and their molls attacked the Capitol. These were people who’d eat anything. Grandfather clocks. Settees. Dropped mittens. The faces of policemen. They were hoping like Piranha to eat the Speaker of the House. They’d eat anything before them. The new appetite is of course the old appetite, straight out of Jefferson Davis’ kitchen. It’s a racist hunger. “Here,” say the Proud Boys, “I’ll get down on all fours and eat the rug.”

And then they’ll eat you.