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G.K. Chesterton, explicating conservatism, once wrote: “All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”

Chesterton, in his discrepant way, begs the question, “why repaint the post?” And it’s a fair question—liberal, conservative, whatnot, for “why” is at the core of situational ethics as all children know.

I’m in mind of Chesterton in part because I’ve a good friend who loves him but also because I believe that in a torrent of change one should know conclusively what one believes and understand precisely why, which means separating pathos from the well spring of an idea, then quizzing that idea half to death. I see very few conservatives or liberals doing this work, which is “the” work of democracy.

When a man or woman is sick and the doctor can’t find the cause she’ll use the term “idiopathic” which sounds like a blue-ribbon diagnosis until the patient learns it means the physician has no clue why the poor soul itches from head to toe. Just so, if we don’t know why we’re repainting the post, or whether the thing should be painted at all, then we’re simply framing positions based on artful shrugs. The Mexicans are the problem. The big banks are the problem. Idiopathic rhetorics.

Within ten years the United States will not be able to grow corn. We know this. Climate models tell us. Our national debt is escalating at alarming levels. Inequality is at its highest levels since 1968. These issues will not be properly discussed during the coming campaign for the presidency. We will hear old idiopathies. Law and order. Strengthening NATO.

Even a gardener who reads no news understands you should choose a post carefully.

 

What is it about the “soul” that it needs prepositions? Of or from the soul constitute our relational understanding, our separateness, for souls are always understood as being transitive extracorporeal rhetorics which we strive to master or at the very least receive. Sometimes we get silly and say “Come Soul clap your hands,” by which we mean, “c’mon, say something” as if perhaps, in a final reduction, the soul is like a horse counting numbers with its hoof. Surely “of or from” the soul will always be easier to say than “with” as soulful accompaniment is mystic and evades phenomenology—with the soul is like the hue of heaven, unfounded and pious. Now I’m on this humorless path because I believe in the soul—that green force of the sea—and because hugging it, loving it, turning with it, it’s impossible to tell who is my teacher. I am “with” for certain.

When the soul is kidding it says it’s sad. When it’s having a riotously good time it listens for oncoming rain. Wind blows darkness against your cheek. Soul is admiring.

So I wake this way.

My soul was convinced that it loved me. In my life I sat in the grass, knitting it a failed sweater.

Sometimes we get silly and say “Come Soul try this on.”

 

 

Getting struck by a motor vehicle is my worst fear. The news from Nice is universally terrifying and I make no special claim to dread. The is not the time for philosophizing about the internal combustion engine but I can’t resist pointing out trucks and cars can be easily engineered to prevent running over human beings. And now that I’ve broken my vow to avoid pontificating I’ll stop for the dead need us to circle our minds around love just as children place their hands around a ball. It’s easy to forget that love is a practice and more—a thirst perhaps, but never a habit. All things not habits are devoted roundly and magnifying. Remember hate is square. A white truck, a tank, a naval destroyer are never “of or pertaining to” our rounded angels.

I cannot give up on love.

Love is a few flickering points like the starlings at dusk. One wants to hold them, bear them up somehow. Impossible. So the mind paints them with its tiny brushes, carries them inside. In dreams we love every bird. Even the homely ones.

I cannot give up on love.

Perhaps everything I’ve wished for has belonged to someone else. Then I will love the empty circle.

Grieving for the victims of Nice…

 

“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer

Disability-Time: I am waiting for the third truth.

Crippled people are still trapped in the ridicule and violence stages.

And Truth circles like a crow, waiting for ridicule and violence to expire for then they can be eaten, digested, and expelled.

Happy the man, woman, child, “they” or “it” who, like the crow, has eliminated the past.

Fox says: “But Crow, don’t you need the past so you won’t repeat it?”

Crow says: “Truth is now, dude.”

Crow says: “Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!” (Crow loves Deleuze)

Meanwhile disability is the animal I’m sheltering.

I shelter it in my spine and fingers. In my eyes and hair.

I’m tired of fighting for servitude, really.

Up this morning early.  Everything I touch belongs to someone else. I can hear truth in the high branches.

 

In his excellent novel Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides offers the following resplendent passage:

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.” I'd like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I'd like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”

There’s a hint of Mark Twain here—Twain who once said: “…mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.”

But emotion, which is necessarily complex should absolutely require hybrid expression. Any true account of feeling must be composed of elaboration. Disabled people know this and live it. “The disappointment of finding an auditorium is inaccessible, when the talk for the evening is about human rights.” “The misery of being asked by concert security to leave the theater because your wheelchair is blocking the aisle.” “The humiliation of being told we just filled that job when just this morning you were encouraged to come in for an interview and now they see you’re blind.” Compared to these, Eugenides hybrids are tame, even quaint.

Disability is both corporeal in-pleasure and un-pleasure, which is to say embodiment is diverse and dynamic, refined, lovely in the mind itself, and yet, whatever is not enabled becomes transitive and dislocating. There's a simultaneity to ableist narrations of un-belonging and my crippled friends know the phenomenon quite well. Hybrid ableism reduces one's affect, bleaches the mind, and it's tedious. “The loss that occurs when you're told your protests for inclusion are tiresome to the normals.”

 

I am a man of big emotions which means I have flaws and virtues in accord with intensity. It also means I’m suited to a life in the arts, right for catching the arsenic lobster falling straight toward your head, and once it’s in my arms I’ll reshape it like a balloon animal and gift it to you. I suppose like all poets I’m useful that way. There’s an old horse inside you eating spring grass and he was always inside you, and I can help you feel gratitude for the return of May. I say gratitude is a big emotion. I am grateful for the grass and wonders. I’m often moved to tears by nothing more than whispering, undecipherable leaves. When I wake I’m surcharged with streaming immanence and hope—the two main ingredients of innocence. Some days, like the poet Robert Bly, I dance in my kitchen.

Big Emo means one’s married to intensity and there’s no help for it. By this I mean one takes the passions however they come, though not without love. By this I mean I will raise my voice in defense of honesty, clarity, human dignity, or any idea that will help others live with respect. Big Emo means believing in integrity and scrupulousness. This is why I’m a good friend and not a very good politician, for I won’t promise things I have no intention of pursuing. Big Emo means, when mediated by intelligence, knowing what one stands for and why. It means entering into the public square, essentially radicalized. Paulo Freire puts it this way: “[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled.”

And so intensity is unveiling. One is again the child pointing out grandpa’s flaws—“you said one thing but did another…”—and living this way, bearing this quality makes one occasionally insufferable for systems, committees, cub scout leadership forums, conferences of a hundred kinds tend toward agreement that assures small transformations at best, and stagnation at worst. The man or woman or “they” who lives Big Emo will itch all over in such settings.

Inquiry is suffused and directed by big emotions. If you don’t occasionally weep in your laboratory you’re not doing science. If you don’t want praxis to fall over dead you’re not sufficiently stimulated. This is why teachers are so sad. They understand life without passion, the life too many students adopt, is a cultural invasion—“the combine” as Chief Bromden understands it in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the mechanized but inapparent machinery of normalizing society. Faced with this understanding the Chief spends his life in the mental hospital pretending to be mute and deaf, hiding all emotion.

Big Emotion doesn’t mean being contrary or aggressive, though if you live an emotional life you’ll likely make social mistakes and perhaps more than one. If a meeting tends toward the adoption of small ideas and you had what you thought was a larger vision you may become jaded, say something untoward, and where Big Emo and disability are concerned this is not unlikely for like Chief Bromden those of us with disabilities who are passionate are often disappointed, misunderstood, and even patronized. Big Emo will always confirm your wounds.

I believe emotion and disability are the most complicated subject on earth for the history of disability and the passions is a long and terrible one, replete with lobotomy, electroshock, beatings, big pharma, isolation wards, homophobia, ostracism, and all the concomitant demands to be quiet. One of the great backstories in American poetry is the fact that Allen Ginsberg’s iconic poem “Howl” represents a bold refusal to be quiet about the effects of forced institutionalization. (Ginsberg had been sent to a psychiatric hospital because of his gayness and his passionate intensity.)

If disability and passion are inseparable it’s because the imprints, the names of physical differences have such terrible and accumulated power and the names have consequences and the consequences create real wounds. How many times have I been told I don’t belong in a room? I can’t count the occasions any more.

Big Emotion means endurance. It means carrying in your shadow the compensatory love of living itself. It means loving others though you don’t always agree. If that sounds like pap then you haven’t tried it. I’ve had profound disagreements with many and I learn from each experience. I go home and sit beside open windows and listen to the rain and stillness. I sense there is a tiny violin in my shadow. I decide to learn how to play it.

What else? I’m no better or worse than anyone else who feels our job as long as we’re alive is to make the world more agreeable and accepting for freedom, health, and collective life.

Big Emo.

 

 

The story of Hannah Cohen, a disabled teenager who was beaten by police and TSA agents at the Memphis airport has not been sufficiently reported and appears to have been consigned to the outlier media. Video and photos of this human rights violation have spread across the internet and one would hope a federal investigation will ensue, for if beating a half blind, partially deaf, brain tumor survivor is allowed to stand then any semblance of decency and morality must be declared finally dead in these United States. According to the scant news stories one can find, her family is suing the TSA. This is right and proper. But where is Loretta Lynch? Where is the American Civil Liberties Union? How about one ounce of attention from NBC? Have we truly arrived at the point where the beating of a teenaged disabled girl by police is simply not substantive news? Have we in the fullness of time arrived at George Orwell’s putative life ahead? (“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”)

I make no special plea. How can one say beating a girl with a brain tumor and who can’t hear is categorically more appalling than the cold blooded murder of Trayvon Martin or the calloused indifference to the well being of Freddie Gray? It can’t be done. Shouldn’t be attempted. I’m no singular appeal department. Yet when Barack Obama said Trayvon could have been his son, I thought without hesitation he could have been mine as well, and Fox News be damned—with it’s racial contempt—he could have been my son and Hannah could be my daughter. If you imagine a boot stamping on a human face you must conceive that face belongs to someone in your family, for if you don’t you’re the pure product of privilege and you might as well admit the fact.

I will give NBC credit for reporting there’s a “Lord of the Flies” culture at the TSA. According to TSA whistleblowers, there’s overt hostility and retaliation directed at any employee who decries bad behavior within the agency.

The disabled are especially ripe for beatings by police—taserings, shootings, smackdowns, even murder. Americans with disabilities are victims of abuse at nearly three times the rate of their fellow citizens. Police violence against the disabled is legion. 15% of all 911 calls involve a person with a disability.

Where is the clamor in the media? How can 60 million Americans be targeted with such apparent impunity?

The answer rests in the able-bodied assumption that the disabled are simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time”—a canard familiar to black people and women and yet where disability is concerned there’s a special shiver to this—shouldn’t we simply be in hospitals and asylums? Of course we should. Why expect people in the village square to acknowledge disability in general and psychiatric disability in particular? It’s all too hard. Too draining. We don’t have enough money in the richest nation on earth to protect all our citizens. We never did. We were never interested.

Hannah Cohen was beaten because she was frightened, uncomprehending, unable to see, and could scarcely hear.

She could be your daughter or your aging mother.

I’m deeply troubled by the apparent shrug her story has received from larger news outlets.

 

I worry some days about my reputation for as a disability activist and writer who must contend with many varieties of ableism and in turn feels always obliged to draw attention to same (whether discriminatory behavior is directed at groups, individuals, or myself) I am confronted with hardened rhetorical choices, and, as we say in the vernacular, “that ain’t easy street.”

It ain’t easy street because normalizing practices in speech tend toward the elimination of complexity and what is disability after all but convolution? Disablement is the ear inside the ear, folded, curly, wildly perceptive, and inapparent on the common street. That is how it is. That deaf woman, that wheelchair man, the blind walker—all are more cunning and imaginative than we may know, or better than normality will admit. Those of us in the disability studies arena talk about disabilities as ways of knowing precisely because as rhetorician Jay Dolmage notes, we understand “imperfect, extraordinary, non-normative bodies as the origin and epistemological homes of all meaning-making.” Imperfect and extraordinary are not “of” or “pertaining” to custom in Western thought, though as Dolmage demonstrates in his wonderful book Disability Rhetoric one may peel back the layers of storying and find examples of disability as a generative principle. Or, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, (and here I’m paraphrasing) “a story is interesting if a nun has broken dental floss trapped between her teeth…) Vague or overt discomfort generates all stories. But disability is less of plot and more of mentation when we admit difficulty. Precisely because it isn’t easy, disablement is metaphorically evocative. Precisely because it isn’t easy, disablement is contentious to the body politic which always hopes to ignore or sidestep disability perspectives in favor of limiting narratives—whether we’re talking about a bad novel with a forlorn disabled character or an IEP for a student. Making disability “easy” is to not admit it into either a theoretical or practical arena. Who among us disabled hasn’t been pressured in many a circumstance to say disability is easy? “Oh, it’s nothing,” we say, because the literal, daily experience of disability both inconveniences normal thinking, and because we feel always the implicit demand to project overcoming, which in terms of narrative, is always easy—you kiss the prince, pull the brass ring, you go home richer.

Confronted with hardened rhetorical choices…that’s the effect of “easy” for the compulsion to say disability is just nothing is immense especially in employment settings where difficulty of any kind is largely considered inadmissible. You assume a spoiled identity (Goffman) if you must highlight failures of access or accommodation at your workplace. If you do it frequently you will likely be pushed into the cement overshoes of the “bad cripple” (to borrow the wonderful name of William Peace’s blog.) In my case I’ve irritated college administrators for years by insisting that websites or auditoriums or community events aren’t accessible. The pressure is to make this sound “easy”—and though accessibility should always be easy when factored into planning–it’s never simple when inaccessible choices have been made. Software is adopted that’s not compliant; buildings are renovated badly. One speaks up. One is invariably a pest. Being a disability activist is never “easy street” and I wonder some days, now that I’m 61 if I’ll live to see a truly inclusive village. I know the answer. But hope is also a rhetorical choice.

This brings me back to my opening: in disability land hope is a hardened choice. What story shall we tell? Is it advisable to give away our essential difference, our complications, our needs, to assure easy interpersonal communications with human resources personnel or various bosses? It is a hardened story as well as a hard one. To tell it right we must tell it hardened.

And telling it hardened means, as disability scholar Brenda Brueggemann would say, telling it with insight. There is pressure here. I’m not selling you a Broyhill sofa and love seat—so plush and with all new seasonal colors! In fact, I’m not selling you a thing! Inclusion and human rights are always the sand in the oyster, the nun’s dental floss, they’re difficult precisely because they invade simple custom. I remember how, years ago, I entered a restaurant in Manhattan only to be told I should leave because I had a dog. Explanations ensued. Guide dog. Legally required to admit. Police summoned. Cops explain. Restaurant owner pissed off. I try to make nice. Smile and say kind things—“you watch, this is a wonderful dog; she’ll go straight under the table; you’ll never know she’s here…” Smiling and smiling. Trying to save face, really, because after being admitted how should I leave? You can’t. You’re making a disability rights point. Leaving is failure. Staying is complicated. You will endure a lousy social setting. You will eat without appetite. Your wind torn meal lies before you and you hesitate halfway between eating it and running. You pat your dog under the table. In turn your aim is to educate the public. And to do so by “being” right there. And so your very body is a cuneiform scrawl. Your body is oppositional. You’re a ring of darkness in the lunch crowd.

Over time I’ve come to think of Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the “three caskets” as it may pertain to disability rhetoric. Freud wrote:

Two scenes from Shakespeare, one from a comedy and the other from a tragedy, have lately given me occasion for posing and solving a small problem.

The first of these scenes is the suitors’ choice between the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. The fair and wise Portia is bound at her father’s bidding to take as her husband only that one of her suitors who chooses the right casket from among the three before him. The three caskets are of gold, silver and lead: the right casket is the one that contains her portrait. Two suitors have already departed unsuccessful: they have chosen gold and silver. Bassanio, the third, decides in favour of lead; thereby he wins the bride, whose affection was already his before the trial of fortune. Each of the suitors gives reasons for his choice in a speech in which he praises the metal he prefers and depreciates the other two. The most difficult task thus falls to the share of the fortunate third suitor; what he finds to say in glorification of lead as against gold and silver is little and has a forced ring. If in psycho-analytic practice we were confronted with such a speech, we should suspect that there were concealed motives behind the unsatisfying reasons produced.

Freud goes on to suggest the three caskets represent women’s bodies (Freud being Freud) but what matters I think is the glorification of lead and the fortunate third suitor. Disability rhetoric must always have a forced ring for preferring lead to gold suggests to the normative something, if not quite concealing, certainly unsatisfying. Who would choose to be blind? Who chooses to ride a chair? Isn’t all disability simply leaden? You who say you’ve a brand of imaginative intelligence—you must be fooling. Isn’t disability when considered alongside gold or silver more than unsatisfying, isn’t it vaguely dishonest (concealed motives) and dark?

The lead casket in The Merchant of Venice bears an inscription on its lid: “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.” By Shakespeare’s time hazard was understood to mean chance of loss and as a noun it meant an unfortunate card. Such is the dominant appreciation of disability—a bad draw—but to hazard at lead is illustrative of doubling misfortune, to play a steeper gamble, to bet everything on a third class chance or ticket.

Hope is a hardened choice.

Let us assume blindness is never static and always takes its meaning in phenomenological terms from movement. Let us describe blindness as “Proleptic Imagination. ”

Proleptic:  In rhetoric the anticipation of possible objections in order to answer them in advance.

Traveling blind is a performance both within normative subventions of assistance and outside cultural denotations of helplessness. Blind travel, taken as performance, is proleptic, both anticipating and answering implicit objections to the concept of blind independence in the very process of navigation.

In the restaurant that doesn’t want me I’m an inscription. It says on the lid of my casket: I doubled misfortune by moving. I transformed you who saw me by my very presence. Hazard is hope. Hope is hazard.

Motion is script. Moreover it’s lyric writing—by writing we discover our subject. Lyric discovery means disability was never what was thought, was never static, was always moving both physically and in the mind.

Let’s be clear: lyric imagination is never helpless. It’s incapable of dishonesty. It’s every discovery is just that: a pure finding.

In my recent collection of poems Letters to Borges I wrote a series of poems addressed to the Argentine poet whose blindness prevented him from traveling freely Jorge Luis Borges was never taught the techniques of independent mobility and lived his life with a constant escort. Accordingly, he never enjoyed the experience of lone blind travel with all its myriad strangenesses, hazards, and lyric discoveries. Throughout the book I send him my proleptic poems or lyric postcards. Each is written from a location where I’m a stranger and where I’ve managed to get lost. Getting lost is understood to be an artful experience, a hazard with many possibilities:

Letter to Borges from Galway

I go out in the early morning rain

And tap the cobblestones with my stick.

On my left, there is a river.

On my right, a loose window

Makes funereal percussions.

“Songs of Earth,” I think.

I am not unique.

I stand beneath the shutter and weep.

I love this world.

I am alone in a new city.

If I died here beside the river and the window,

Maybe everything I’ve known

would make sense in the gray of an Irish minute.

“Goodbye to the peregrine falcons,” I think.

Goodbye to the glass of water that contains a single daylily.

Farewell to Mahler on the radio late at night.

Don’t get me wrong:

I get lost in cities every week.

I have learned much by following the whims of architects.

Excerpt From: Stephen Kuusisto. “Letters to Borges.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/2eNPH.l

The whims of architects, steep facts, obstructions certainly, but perfect in their way—one takes detours, finds while lost a simultaneity of imaginings. Poets famously walk poems into being. Blind poets also. Blind surprise is lyric surprise—unplanned, not premeditated, perfectly unforeseeable which is of course a concomitant amusement of blind travel—I shall double down on the bad card, the paltry wager of disablement.

In his Introduction to Phenomenology Robert Sokolowski notes that where phenomenology is concerned: “there are no “mere” appearances, and nothing is “just” an appearance. Appearances are real; they belong to being. Things do show up. Phenomenology allows us to recognize and to restore the world that seemed to have been lost when we were locked into our own internal world by philosophical confusions. Things that had been declared to be merely psychological are now found to be ontological, part of the being of things. Pictures, words, symbols, perceived objects, states of affairs, other minds, laws, and social conventions are all acknowledged as truly there, as sharing in being and as capable of appearing according to their own proper style.” 1 (p. 34)

Excerpt From: Robert Sokolowski. “Introduction to Phenomenology.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/PYwzW.l

Ontology is oddly enough (mixing metaphors) a proper style; lyric findings are constituent parts of being. Blind proleptic imagination anticipates surprise, refuting commonplace assumptions about disability as a leaden intelligence. This is “the imagination” hardened and yet buoyant, like the figurehead of a sailing ship. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences. This is in the highest degree the case with many of Goethe’s and Byron’s poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of phantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.” 2 (p. 9)

Excerpt From: Arthur Schopenhauer. “The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/CLZo6.l

Proleptic conception is movement and aptitude. It assumes shapes by driving ahead. It is not, however, simply freedom in the service of pleasure—that Western idea of the self as a noble enjoyer of its surroundings or its body. The traditional Enlightenment “self” is a free acquirer of sights, objects, tastes, sounds, and is understood to be a discerning tourist, a Thomas Jefferson in Paris if you will. Speaking of the individual and his happiness Schopenhauer says:

“We have already seen, in general, that what a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has, or how he is regarded by others. What a man is, and so what he has in his own person, is always the chief thing to consider; for his individuality accompanies him always and everywhere, and gives its color to all his experiences. In every kind of enjoyment, for instance, the pleasure depends principally upon the man himself. Every one admits this in regard to physical, and how much truer it is of intellectual, pleasure. When we use that English expression, “to enjoy one’s self,” we are employing a very striking and appropriate phrase; for observe—one says, not “he enjoys Paris,” but “he enjoys himself in Paris.” To a man possessed of an ill-conditioned individuality, all pleasure is like delicate wine in a mouth made bitter with gall. Therefore, in the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met, that is, upon the kind and degree of our general susceptibility. What a man is and has in himself,—in a word personality, with all it entails, is the only immediate and direct factor in his happiness and welfare. All else is mediate and indirect, and its influence can be neutralized and frustrated; but the influence of personality never. This is why the envy which personal qualities excite is the most implacable of all,—as it is also the most carefully dissembled.” 3 (p. 24)

Excerpt From: Arthur Schopenhauer. “The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/CLZo6.l

Schopenhauer would not have understood the crippled tourist, for he would likely have understood the defective body as a “general susceptibility” to disappointment or a neutralized personality. If, in our time, we know disability as a matter of individuality and a directed intelligence it’s precisely because we are aware of the incorporeality of symbolism—whether we’re talking of Georg Trakl, or Wallace Stevens—the former can write:

I am a shadow far from darkening villages. 

I drank the silence of God

Out of the stream in the trees.

The latter writes:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

Into a village,

Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,

Into twenty villages,

Or one man

Crossing a single bridge into a village.

The world is (entirely) our acquaintanceship with shadows and unfixed forms. Hazarded imagining is nearly always providential. We find by indirection the particles of revery.

One may say this is true of all lyric poetry but in the case of disability the poetics is always a gamble—that doubling of the unlucky card—we play it twice. Blind wandering is aleatoric like action painting. It’s discoveries are always impossible to have imagined before setting out for there is no framing of the eye, no anticipation of sights, but merely a sequence of astonishments. One relays them back to the reader much in the way a shaman tells a story of something discovered beyond the physical world though in truth the proleptic imagination is never overtly mystical. In poems I seek to avoid Tireisias—the figure of blind, vatic sight. Traveling is felicitous and its own reward. Moreover it’s an incitement to creativity.

Letter to Borges from Tampere, Finland

Winnowing and threshing in the far north—

Sunlight like tea in a glass (a stranger

Tells me) and local musicians play waltzes

In a coffee bar. Borges,

I got a bit drunk last night

And walked into a field and lay down where

The Caterpillar machines had torn a long seam in the earth

And the waltzing was, as the Finns say, nurin kurin, all topsy-turvy

In my head,

And my ruined eyes took the roses and broken shards

Of twilight and built another village—a countervillage

Where the houses stood like wineglass stems.

You could see through everything—

Even the walls of the church—

A fact that didn’t bother anyone,

As men and women made of light

Are necessarily long-lived and unconcerned

About the hour.

Excerpt From: Stephen Kuusisto. “Letters to Borges.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/2eNPH.l

The key word is unconcerned. Disablement is thought to be conditional and perilous.

It is not. It is never what is supposed by whatever we mean by normal people. Proleptic poetry, anticipating the assumptions of normative culture, slips through the knot of diminishment—insists on slipping through:

Letter to Borges from Dublin

The moon swims back and forth with insolence no matter whether Ireland

is rich or poor.

Entire lives turn over: the old are young once again,

The young break clean in the currents of stars.

Borges, the moon combs dark paving stones—

It follows the lines of streets.

The light it casts is a poor man’s fence.

Can I say my faith is stirred?

This light proclaims there is justice,

And I can still make it out with these ruined eyes.

Excerpt From: Stephen Kuusisto. “Letters to Borges.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/2eNPH.l

 

As I said above, normalizing practices in speech tend to minimize complexity. The poem resists. And all blind walking resists. One speaks of hardened rhetorical choices and hardened walking because probative intelligence isn’t leisure. Still the hardening isn’t without it’s tenderness for the poem can admit many things at once:

Letter to Borges from Grazer Schloßberg

Tourists are fighting at a nearby table

In this café close to the mountain,

Something about losing their map or the tickets.

My French isn’t what it used to be.

Borges, I recall your witty comment on the Falklands War,

Britain and Argentina:

“Two bald men fighting over a comb.”

It was worse than that of course:

Thousands dead for an ink stain.

Still, I like the morning

Taking the lottery of streets as they come.

No one should confuse aestheticism with sightlessness

Or blindness with desire.

In general, meeting people

Is the antidote

To airs of dissolution.

I am trying to learn patience through tenderness.

Excerpt From: Stephen Kuusisto. “Letters to Borges.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/2eNPH.l

Disability is the public square. It is openness. Patience and affection. One may say, a loving kindness toward one’s surroundings. I want to be kind. Even as I anticipate my rejection, I want to be kind. Prolepsis builds alternative architectures, the building materials are chance itself:

Letter to Borges from London

When I was a boy I made a beehive

From old letters—dark scraps from a trunk,

Lost loves; assurances from travelers.

It was intricate work.

The blind kid and the worker bee lost whole days.

I made a library for inchworms.

Now I’m a natural philosopher but with the same restless hands.

Some days I put cities together—

Santiago and Carthage;

Toronto and Damascus.

If strangers watch closely, Borges,

They’ll see my fingers working at nothing.

In Hyde Park near the Albert Memorial and alone on a bench

I reconstructed the boroughs of New York—

Brooklyn was at the center, Kyoto in place of Queens.

This was a city of bells and gardens, a town for immigrants.

The old woman passing by saw my hands at work.

She thought I was a lost blind man, a simpleton,

Said, “Poor Dearie!” and gave me a quid.

Excerpt From: Stephen Kuusisto. “Letters to Borges.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/2eNPH.l

The third casket is the glorification of lead. Inside, it’s never what it seems.

 

Up late and reading Schopenhauer I came across the following: “Metrodorus, the earliest disciple of Epicurus…wrote as the title of one of his chapters, The happiness we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings.”

Epicureanism aside, (a weighty subject t’is…) the disabled must, perforce, each and everyone of us, carry old Metrodorus with us wherever we may go, for though we may know and cultivate happiness, we often obtain from our surroundings something less than contentment as the built environment and social encounters invariably deprive us of many satisfactions. One is always reminded of the old joke about a man asking for directions from a farmer in the state of Maine who’s told “you can’t get they-ah from he-yah!” Arrivals are thwarted in disability-ville and unlike the joke, which plays off the improbability of arrival, we’re faced with too many circumstances in which happiness cannot be obtained from our surroundings and there’s no way to avoid the fact for it’s a daily matter, unrelenting, and yes, often ugly.

Ugliness is the keystone of ableism and it goes by many names, takes diverse forms, and it’s daily permutations are as convoluted and unbearable as a Rococo picture frame. I recall the time I was to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show and my flight from the Westchester Regional (suburban) airport was canceled. United Airlines hired a bus to take passengers to LaGuardia in New York City where we’d catch a later flight to Chicago. The bus driver wouldn’t let me on board because of my guide dog. The ensuing argument wasn’t merely torturous, it became a Rube Goldberg affair with feints and rhetorical drops—as in, tumbling from reality. He “loved the disabled,” he said. “I have a limp,” he said. “I don’t care about the ADA,” he said.

Eventually I simply boarded the bus, borrowing from the Rosa Parks playbook, for it’s harder to extract a passenger than to argue with him. He gave up.

Disability Epicureanism is an idea that’s both tautological and yet  necessary. Disability is happiness. It just damn well is. Got it? Hey, JoJo Mayes, you got it? Hey, Death with Dignity, capiche? If we do not obtain the same happiness from our surroundings as a rich white dude let’s admit that happiness is simply Jeffersonian—a pursuit. The paralyzed, blind, deaf, non-speaking, the hobbling, we have pursuits. Perhaps we should form a Metrodorus Society. It would have to be ironic, since he believed the perfect body necessary for happiness. But you see, every ear of wheat carries within its own excellence. Silly to write it, yes?