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Did you know you were coming alive? Did you know, as you opened your eyes that Noam Chomsky had his hands inside you? I think I knew. All conceits aside, my first spoken word was “door.”

Now the trouble with doors is this: they take and give throughout a life. Bachelard: “How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”

Chomsky had his hands on my baby brain. There’s a pre-born door, a neurologic portal if you will, and it has nothing to do with the bardo or birth canals. I can say it has silent hinges.

The spirit also accounts for Noam. And our wiring. Accounts for hostile doors, the portcullis.

“Unscrew the locks,” Whitman said.

Try to picture both sides of a door at once. (A paraphrase from the poet Marvin Bell, who asks us to do the same with the umbrella.)

Remember your first door if you can.

Old Chomsky again…I don’t believe death has a door, only a sequence of numbers.

That is of course an elegant joke.

I don’t know if he’d have been better

But I’ve always been sorry for Trotsky.

Meanwhile I build story-homes,

Apple houses, corral apartments

With signs out front—everyone welcome 

And we mean it—shade elms,

Branches depending to and fro…

 

Up river the houses are bad,

No glass at the windows,

No gods in ambient sun.

What trick of mind shakes out carpets

Of misery, truly?

Here I create rooms with good light

And wicker chairs we can carry outdoors.

 

 

 

 

Years back my friend Jarkko

Of Turku, Finland, wrote:

Life is a rented room,

A phrase just a tad sinister

In Finnish as their word

For life opens

Your mouth wide

While room

Makes your smile

Disappear

Wiping that smirk

Off your face

Which is

How death

Will manage our lips.

And I went my own way, deciphering….

Good old Neruda

Faint morning light now

Still, memory, moon, wind

So many broken hearts

Under this shirt

But my legs are strong

Autumn dreams begin:

My father plays Sibelius on a grand piano.

“I’m in the underworld,” he says,

“We got it all wrong.”

Behind him are the vast windows of Hades

Which admit light favored by the dead—

All the light inside our bruises…

 

If you’re disabled you’re used to the digs. The current term is micro-aggression—you know, the non-disabled administrator who says, “I had a disabled friend so I know all about it,” or the human resources officer who says, “we’re doing our best and I think you disabled people are just whiners.”

These digs place the disabled in a template. We become objectified and thoroughly reduced. This process is enacted and reenacted daily. Moreover the intersection between disability and other diverse groups is seldom explored. At Syracuse University where I teach the LGBTQ Resource Center has no wheelchair ramp. If the disabled complain we’re seen as a nuisance. Sometimes you have to laugh. We’re viewed by others as an inconvenient truth, to borrow Al Gore’s phrase.

As a blind faculty member I’m fantastically inconvenient. Some days I think I should wear a tee shirt that just says “universal problem” or something equivalent. Imagine you’re a problem all day long. The digs are relentless.

When outside consultants are hired by my university to assess everything from the workplace climate to the future of infrastructure you can bet their surveys will be inaccessible. One complains. Not much happens. The “system” just stores up more evidence that you’re a problem. You see how it works.

I am on the street in a conditional way: allowed or not allowed, accepted or not accepted according to the prejudices and educational attainments of others. And because I’ve been disabled since childhood I’ve lived with this dance of provisional life ever since I was small. In effect, if you have a disability, every location is a gated community.

 

Outside on sixth avenue in the rain paper bags flying over the sidewalk—death’s house pets maybe—and the stretched, symphonic strains of capitalism are all about, wheels persistent, air brakes, taxicabs and buses, a mad man howling as if he was King Lear, and why not think of Manhattan as a moor or heath? Why not shed tears of distress? Of course I decide not to. I will present myself to strangers as—as what? Benign? Ironic? Kindly about the eyes? Ginko leaves brush my face like butterflies from the underworld.

I wept in a dream

But when day came I said

I slept well—and my boat

Drifted to Hades

With bread and flowers

The urgencies

In a common room

Sunlight crossing the rug

My dead mother

Waving from the reeds

I’m in Manhattan in a coffee joint on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Fortieth Street. My guide dog Caitlyn is curled at my feet beneath our table. She’s a yellow Labrador and like my three prior guides she flicks her tongue like an ant eater, looking for crumbs and not ants—though it’s entirely possible she’d eat an ant if it presented itself. My second guide dog Vidal once ate a bee. He grabbed it out of the air. He suffered no apparent consequences. Since every guide dog is different I should say that Caitlyn is a lady and she’d never snatch a bee. The girl has manners. Muffin bits are another matter. Dropped blueberries are fair game.

What’s fair game for me? I wonder. What is the equivalent of found food in a human’s life?

Eavesdropping of course. A man seated three tables over just said to someone via cellphone: “I told you not to sell the thing!”

One wonders what “the thing” could be.

This is an obvious pleasure.

My blueberry.