Category: No Name for It

Good, Old Walter Pater

Oh Walter Pater for a Renaissance scholar you had charm. You’ve haunted me for years with your childhood portraits. Unlike Montaigne your utopia was less a matter of craft and more of memory. Once, to shock an academic questioner I said creative nonfiction was Pater’s invention. I’m still not certain I’m wrong. If its honesty you’re after Pater’s your man.

Who was it I was reading last week–who said he was a possibility-ist rather than an optimist. I read a lot and can’t remember. He was one of those data-utopians. The planet will sustain us; we won’t actually slaughter each other. That’s when Pater jumped up. “The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts.” Data is a clean sport and that’s all there is to it. If you want to know about the heart I’ll go with the Renaissance.

The Planet That Would Have Me

It was Auden broke my heart then put it back together. Caruso followed with a love song from Naples. By the age of 8 I could read poems and listen alone to gramophone records. Blind I’d little street life though I pretended I belonged well enough in open air. Like most people who come from provinces I was happiest in my privacies, my attic with scratchy records and grey books. Though I could scarcely read that’s the world that would have me.

The ugliness of school was both a matter of being bullied for my disability and a curricular austerity. School never let me share what I was learning while alone. As a university professor these past thirty years I think of this. What do the students before me bring to the room? What can provinces teach us?

Provincial culture means the one we must create. Yeats couldn’t be Tennyson and though there were Irish poets before him, he had to be both cognizant of his inner life and the outward world. If he was going to be Irish-provincial he’d have to do it in a dual way. Its a matter of accomplishment that Yeats doesn’t quite fit anywhere. His planet doesn’t exist. Yet its apparent.

Is it a bit silly to invoke Yeats next to a kid with a large print book and a Victrola? I don’t think so. The inner life is Romanticism and strength of mind and each must find it in her or his way. You don’t have to be a poet to need your planet. More and more contemporary fiction and memoirs seek to find planets that will have us. Everyone hails from some version of my childhood attic.

I’m guilty of reductionism here. What I’m after is emergence not life alone with some arias. The planet that will have us is a made place and not granted. What is it made of? Yeats wrote:

By the help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I have handled least, least looked upon.

The planet that will have you won’t look like you. Yeats knew and if we’re lucky we also learn it.

Yes when I go walking the world does not resemble my stride, my frame, nor, despite my yearnings for mysticism does the world answer my longings. The world simply is and not what I say of it.

From a notebook, 1982, Helsinki

After so much is said and the candles are low…

I’m no match for the godless nights
And if there are gods I’m no match for them either
I build a fence badly, tear it down after dark

**

I used to love Wallace Stevens
I was young

**

Thus the dog bursts into my poem
Follows me home

A mild wind follows the dog

**

Up river where a stand of birches leans
Walking with a spent candle in my coat

Typing Mister Roberts

As a ten year old who though he’d become a writer I attempted a novel. My model was “Mister Roberts” which meant that I was writing about the Navy and imagining the doings of grown men at sea. How I wish I had those pages now and could see what a blind kid thought the maritime world of wholly fictive adults would be like. I suspect I imagined an adult world that was honorable as a distinction to my grade school life of constant bullying. As a disabled child in public school I was a target for physical and emotional abuse. The novel “Mister Roberts” and the film based upon it suggested shipboard life was decent.

I think of this now because I know better. As Wallace Stevens famously wrote: “the world is ugly and the people are sad”—and while that may not be a life’s goal, that is, to live in wantoness and depression—these are factors in the reality principle. The Navy may have honorable men and women but their stories and presences aren’t always probable. We’ve a land of permanent wars and poverty and bigotries of every kind. And the grade school bullying I once endured still goes on for children everywhere and I even experience adult forms of it in the workplace.

It’s the utopian hope of writing that’s so compelling to me. When I write I clean streaked windows with vinegar. Animals come. Some eat from my hands. Strangers come to understand each other. And these things are not entirely of imagination Wallace Stevens notwithstanding.

Yesterday I took an Uber ride. My driver spoke very little English. He was from Central America. He loved my guide dog Caitlyn, a yellow Labrador. Suddenly he said in his halting English: “I wish her long life!”

The world is ugly but people still have love. In turn I’m not certain I’m all that different from my ten year old self. That kid was insisting on decency.

His grown up variant still does.

The Conditions

In the years to come they will say
Horses lay in the fields
Crows resisted flight
We bartered air
A Senator on TV
Asks: what will we tell our grandchildren?
I shout in my living room
Will there be any years for them
I say we are the gods of years
And the dogs look up at me
I am blind
I put one foot in front of the other
In the dark I move quickly
Faith is simply faith
I’ve an old hymn in mind
Only a moment in time
Footfalls

Eric Hobsbawm, the Welsh, Brexit, and Donald Trump

In his excellent memoir “Interesting Times” the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm says of the Welsh, circa 1960: “For most of the mountain people the Welsh language was chiefly a Noah’s Ark in which they could survive the flood as a community. They did not so much want to convert and converse: people looked down on visiting South Walians with their ‘school Welsh’. Unlike Noah, they did not expect the flood to end. ”

Excerpt From: “Interesting Times: A Twentieth-century Life.” Apple Books.

There is a practical sense though a dark one to be found in provincial communities, a noir pragmatism that the flood (whatever it stands for) will never end. In rural Wales the English built summer houses and despoiled the landscape. Enterprising locals burned those houses down rather frequently. The constabulary never caught a single arsonist and yet the flood kept coming. Ironic then that Brexit is among other things a response to the post-colonial flood of foreigners and their influences on Britain, and a simultaneous self-induced house burning. Unable to stand the flood the English are burning their house down.

In the United States the flood is largely a fiction which Donald Trump has borrowed from the language of white nationalists and because of this he knows in whatever it is that passes for his heart that he must burn the government down rather than negotiate the terms of his wall. If the wall—the need of a wall—which is really a dyke against the flood of foreigners—is based on fictive presumptions than any negotiation about it will quickly fall apart. Better to burn the houses of government.

This is made all the easier because the Republicans have campaigned against government for decades. Their rhetoric has devolved from Reagan’s call for smaller government to Trump who scarcely knows what governing is and like most real estate criminals imagines the governance of a nation to be a blight on his own ambitions. That’s a view he inherited from his racist father who was fined for discriminating against people of color in his public housing projects. Government t will make you do the right thing. All hail the collapse of the government.

I suspect there was never a Noah. I do like the idea of him. Lord knows he was an optimist. He preserved life in a dark time. There’s no evidence he burned houses. He didn’t arrive on dry land and slaughter the locals like Columbus. I have no idea what he thought about governance but the birds liked him.

From a notebook….or, “the warlock hair”….

This morning I’ve too many thoughts to hold in place. No meditation “app” will help. Mozart on the stereo is doing his best. Good old processed Mozart.

Late stage Capitalism is eating my wiring like a wild mouse. Good old processed Kuusisto.
I’ve got the algorithm blues.

I type too much. My neck is a mess.

There’s a single black hair growing on my nose. I’m a warlock.

Because I was beaten as a child I’ve a warlock hair on my nose. Nothing stays hidden.

Of course I’m imprisoned in myself. Of course that self is something else. Of course these words are something else.

There are stones inside my fingers.

I’m trying to not age out of hope.

Blind I cannot track the flight of birds but I know they happen all around me.

The history of the mind is not the history of ideas.

Miniver Cheevy! I bet he had a warlock hair.

I remember a thing or two. Just like my tongue does.

Of course I found a spoon in snow
While missing you,

Gulls above the harbor
Baltic yellow mid day mid winter

A policeman talked softly to his horse
I was proud of my new wristwatch

Cheap but Swiss made
Being of the scholar class

It was a totem thrill on my wrist
You my brother my twin

Gone in infancy who followed
And follow—listen

I’m sewing together
A seahorse like the one

We rode in the womb

Where shall I put this shaved magic hair?

The Identity Pluck

My identity needs water. My identity is a dried turd. A 16th century one. Identity from “idem” to be the same. I’m the same as you. I’m not without my qualities but they’re significant only insofar as someone else also has them. My identity is troubled by this. It scratches and moans at all hours of the night. I’ve never met anyone like me. If I claim an identity aren’t I by the very act claiming a fantasy?

Well yes. Oscar Wilde said it: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Given what Wilde endured in the name of originality who’d want to go beyond mere identity?

This is, in effect, what a free thinking human being should strive for: life beyond identity, not a sameness, a politburo, a glee club, a political party. This is scary. Institutions are against it. Churches, universities, corporations….Who dares to be naked?

Rousseau said: “I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.”

Different frightens every school child. It scares the pants off of me. I want desperately to look like you.

Disability is interesting in this regard since no two people experience any disabling condition the same way. No. Two. People. In this way disability is not an identity. Disability is an enforcement.

Einstein wrote: “We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.”

Consciousness is predisposed to a sea sickness—staggering between separateness as ideation and the desire for sameness in the name of affection. Disability identity is enforced separateness (the social construction of normalcy) and a longing for others like us.

But no matter your disability there’s no one like you.

A disability by any other name would smell as sweet.

In this way I can’t be scripted by disablement. The name can’t help. The affections for likeness are fictive.

Audre Lorde, one of my favorite poets wrote: “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.”

Disability by Any Other Name

I’ve been disabled all my life and I hate the term. Beneath it, like Poe’s tell tale heart, is the pulse of loss. The “d” word is Karl Marx’s term: a 19th century mark for injured workers. It originally meant the lack of utility or earning power owing to a broken body. I prefer to be called a citizen.

That I’m a blind citizen should matter not at all. Did you know that blindness is nothing more than being born left handed? Disability is a false name which pulses underneath us and continues to cause human beings with diverse bodies terrible harm.

Of course there are cutesy efforts to fix the d word like putting the “dis” in parentheses to emphasize ability. This has always seemed to me like putting antlers on a cat. Diversions are seldom more than gestures and unless you’re using sign language gestures don’t mean much. Most if not all disabled will agree we’ve had enough of gestures.

The d word can’t describe me or the hundreds of d people I know. My band is made up of practical men, women, and children who have imaginations, wisdoms, loves, sorrows, tastes, and ambitions. For them the d is a horse collar—outdated, heavy. No one needs a horse collar anymore. Blind I’m disabled by the idea I’ve nothing to give. Disabled I’m doubly blind—not seeing becomes figurative worthlessness.

Citizen is better. I’d like my value to be understood as a matter of the hive. And yes, “value” is another tell tale heart. Value for whom? What does value mean? Why should the tax payer pay for a kid with Down syndrome to go to school?

Hitler called the disabled “useless eaters” to suggest the state shouldn’t support the unproductive. The presumption of competence, that the disabled have potential can’t co-exist in a purely industrial and essentialized vision of human bodies. It’s a terrifying vision. The d word is outworn, dangerous, and like the horse collar above, unsuited to a century when work itself is being reexamined.

I believe the future of work will involve more and more autonomous systems—robotics, driverless cars, supply chains that are fully automated. What will work mean for humans? It’s possible that deconstructing the d word will be important for everyone. Or it already is.