There are many poems now—
Think of carousel horses
Carved with love, hand painted,
The child inside us thrills.
Yesterday my wife said:
See how they have their mouths open?
Those horses are in pain.

Turi, Turi, Turi

Caruso, the boy, eats a blood orange sorbet outside the café Risorgimento. They call this dessert the “frozen sunset” –a dish of scarlet juice and ice, misted with lemon. All morning he’s been singing love songs to the fiancée of a very rotund man from Caserta. “Only a boy can carry my heart,” says the fat man to his beloved. “Boys are still sweet as the baby Jesus!” Then he clapped his hands the way impresarios do: a fleshy sound of exaggeration. 

The girl seemed embarrassed. This was a street urchin, a boy in a dirty shirt. A child hired to sing love songs! This thing is a joke! But there on the via Carraciola in the din of carts and boats and street hustlers the boy sang Bellini’s Ma rendi pur contento his black eyes shining with joy and concentration so that passersby stood still. Two men, twin brothers from Rome stopped eating their sugared almonds. There in the heat of the day in that unforeseen place was a prodigy. What could surpass the unassuming purity of such a child’s voice?

The boy sings as if the edge of his heart is catching flame. 

The fat man from Caserta is delighted and bobs his head like a pheasant, struts, ruffles his feathers. His fiancée,

Elena  Bianchini-Cappelli tips her head in wonder, her features softening, a portrait reversing to a sketch. Her enormous hat with its absurd ribbons cannot hide the smile. 

Now the boy sings Bella Nice, che d’amore, his hands stretched out, palms up, without irony. Could anything be this sweet again? Vin santo and peaches? Cloves in the boiled sugar?

The boy and the hot Neapolitan day are working together, visioning ice, ice on the fat lip of a hungry lover. There are these oddities to Naples, street boys and libidinous passions and simple coins.  

One of the Roman poet Martial’s verses goes this way (as translated by Garry Wills):

“This darkling world he claims, with rue,
Has run itself into a ditch.
And he can prove his thesis true:
In such a cosmos—he is rich.”

As 2019 concludes this surely is a darkling world. Certainly the thesis true is pessimistic. One’s reminded how cheap the pessimism is.

I’m reminded of Chesterton who pointed out that fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

Fashionable pessimism is all the rage.

This is an old story.

Chesterton again: “the reformer is always right about what’s wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right…”

Reformers are better than pessimists because they believe in actions. But as Chesterton rightly points out, reformers can miss what’s good.

Harkening back to Martial I have the following New Year’s resolution: I will not be rich in the darkling cosmos of my own making.

ABOUT: Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger 

Today is the international day of people with disabilities. It’s one of those symbolic days that often don’t translate into the other 364 days of the year. The principle reasons for this are fairly simple: democracies view disability as belonging to the social contract but it’s also an inconvenience. Totalitarian states see it as a sign of cultural weakness: the disabled are defective. I’m using a sharp paring knife. Certainly no one who’s disabled would dispute these assertions. 

Now having a “day” is really rather fascinating when you get down to it. One imagines it’s a bit like Andy Warhol’s declaration that in the future everyone will get fifteen minutes of fame. Today is your day so don’t waste it. 

Alright. As we’re fighting for a livable future and the salvation of our planet I offer the following thoughts with sufficient hope for sharing. As Barbara Kingsolver writes in her remarkable novel Animal Dreams: “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” 

Livable cities are inclusive cities. Accessible was good, but livable is better. Livable is beyond compliance: it means scalable, breathable, recyclable, open, clean of design, all of which mean human usefulness and dignity can be affirmed for all. I chose the word “usefulness” for a reason: when I enter a library and there’s no system for me to get accessible books and materials then the system is saying I lack usefulness. This tacit design flaw with its associated ableism is akin to the idea that taking care of the environment is simply inconvenient. There’s no difference. 

We disable the environment and we disable people. Advanced design and sustainability can change this. Moreover we must stop disabling people as a principle of war and colonialism. We must see disablement as central to human rights and the attainment of peace. 

And on this day let’s remember that even a Nordic country like Iceland is eliminating children with Down syndrome. Let’s remember that the advanced countries embrace of euthanasia has a eugenics twist. Let’s remember that disability rights are human rights. One should say this is simple but look what happens when the disabled have a “day.” Fifteen minutes isn’t enough.

Human Rights Watch puts it this way: “Worldwide one billion individuals have a disability. Many people with disabilities live in conflict settings or in developing countries, where they experience a range of barriers to education, health care and other basic services. In many countries, they are subjected to violence and discrimination. People with disabilities are also often deprived of their right to live independently, as many are locked up in institutions, shackled, or cycled through the criminal justice system. Many of these human rights abuses are a result of entrenched stigma and a lack of community-based services essential to ensuring their rights, including under the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.” 

I’ll add to Kingsolver’s idea of hope: we have to live inside it but carry it into the light of day.

ABOUT: Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger 

No one who teaches disability studies who isn’t disabled—who doesn’t need accommodations in the workplace can understand the operational cruelty of administrative systems that function according to routinized appropriations of normality. No white faculty member can understand the daily emotional drain of being black in the faculty ranks. Hetero-normatives can’t grasp what queer faculty go through. And the reason this is so has little to do with nascent bigotry but rather a failure of the university to create meaningful pedagogical and social dialogue systems for people who teach. The first university to do this will be a national and even international leader.

One of the first books I truly fell in love with, outside of novels and poetry was Mutual Aid by Kropotkin. I still consider it highly. He opens the book this way:

“Struggle for existence.—Mutual Aid—a law of Nature and chief factor of progressive evolution.—Invertebrates.—Ants and Bees.—Birds: hunting and fishing associations.—Sociability.—Mutual protection among small birds.—Cranes; parrots.”

As opposed to the emergent social Darwinists, Piotr Kropotkin saw that cooperation rather than vanquishment was the key to successful evolution and the establishment of a just social order.

Not so much in the faculty ranks. The reason is simple: the attainment of education must be a race, largely individualistic, sanctioned by the strictures of a conservative past (the trivium) and maintained by a fierce but often unstated ideological belief in narrow normative learning styles.

Academic ableism is, if not the foundation of the other isms, its social Darwinist flag.

Kropotkin again:

“The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism.”

ABOUT: Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger