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One of my favorite quotes about obituary writers appears in Mark Helprin’s novel “Winter’s Tale” and it goes like this:

The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes.

I was put in mind of Helprin’s squib when I fell onto William Grimes’ obit of the poet James Tate which was clearly ripped from the notebook of a lazy tourist. Given Mr. Tate’s prominence one can scarcely imagine a vaunted paper like the New York Times approving so many cliches in any paragraph let alone the opening one:

Mr. Tate burst on the poetry scene in 1967 with the collection “The Lost Pilot,” selected for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets while he was still a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Julian Symons, in The New Statesman, greeted Mr. Tate as “an ironical, original, self-absorbed poet who glances with amusement at love, humanity, himself.”

And if that doesn’t satisfy your appetite for pap, hold on to your bowl for here’s the second crot:

A prolific writer, he turned out one collection after another, none of them slim. “The Ghost Soldiers,” published in 2008, contains nearly 100 poems. He won a wide following, especially among younger readers attracted by his colloquial style, his gift for making unexpected connections, and his ability to extract humor from dark places. John Ashbery, one of his most ardent admirers, called him “the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous.

Grimes’ meretricious blab (culled from second hand sources no less) laden with limp lingo and a patrician tone suggests the passing of a first rate American poet deserves nothing more than granulated rubber.

I had to rub my eyes. You’d imagine, reading this that James Tate turned out innumerable fat books of verse, all of them colloquial and vaguely adolescent. Moreover you’d assume the English countryside is home to tiny cows.

Later Grimes tries to right himself but fails to recognize the jokes buried in an interview with the poet Charles Simic and the parodic sensibility Tate brought to discussions about craft–an inheritance from Marcel DuChamp and Stephen Mallarme.

Indeed I thought of Mallarme while reading Grimes as he said famously a newspaper is fit only for wrapping fish.

No one outside of Norman Podhoretz would go to the obituaries for literary consciousness but let’s remember Walter Whitman’s optimistic suggestion that a nation of great poets should be a nation equally filled with great readers.

You will never know from Grimes that James Tate was a student of aleatoric findings in language; that he was deeply read in the contingencies of philosophy; and was a lyric poet of breathtaking originality.

I will let the poet have the last word:

Dear Reader

I am trying to pry open your casket

with this burning snowflake.

I’ll give up my sleep for you.

This freezing sleet keeps coming down

and I can barely see.

If this trick works we can rub our hands

together, maybe

start a little fire

with our identification papers.

I don’t know but I keep working, working

half hating you,

half eaten by the moon.

Yesterday ambling around downtown Syracuse with my friend Bill who is a wheelchair user, I thought I’d show him the magnificent Episcopal church, because, well, it was a sunny day and we were in admiring moods. The church was locked. We circumnavigated it. All the doors were locked.

I won’t say we needed to go into the church. Bill is a recovering Catholic and I’m a fair weather Christian and mostly what we were after was beauty which if you’re Jungian means we were feeling spiritual but as anyone who’s read Philip Larkin knows, you can love a church for its lambent emptiness.

It was Friday. It was a national holiday. It was the middle of the day. The big church was locked.

“Well,” I thought, “that’s the high Episcopalians for you. Nothing’s more tasteful than a locked door.”

Syracuse is a tough city. Poverty is high. Homelessness is plentiful. Surely it makes sense to lock a downtown church on a holiday. Then I said to Bill: “Well they could let the homeless sleep in the church and show people around when the need arises.”

I invented a homeless man named “Slappy” who has a cot beside the boiler and a bottle of muscatel.

I felt bad for making jokes.

But I also thought, “Jesus would do this.”

Jesus would not understand homelessness and locked churches.

Then I thought, because the church was flying a rainbow flag above its locked door, “there’s pain in the streets every day.”

The locked doors were very red. There was fresh mulch in the flowerbeds.

Because this is the summer when the Americans with Disabilities Act turns 25, and since a quarter of a century is generally imagined as the age of solidity, I am, in witness of my dog, today declaring the ADA an adult. Notice I’m calling the act a person, since it’s a custom in the United States to declare accumulations of people individuals. We do this because the primary synonym for person is customer and we sure do love our customers. So I’m nominating the dear ADA a tough customer.

Yes, the ADA is now grown up. Her longevity is remarkable because boy oh boy, did she ever have some enemies, especially when she was just a kid. (Remember Clint Eastwood? How about Antonin Scalia?) Yes, there was a considerable cast of characters (who we can also call a person) who ardently wished to kill ADA in her cradle. I, for instance, have a great memory. I recall Tom Delay saying on the floor of the US Senate in 1990:  “The cost to the nation and the economy is going to be dramatic. This goes way beyond the bounds of reason.” Or how about noisome blab from the National Review:  “Under the guise of civil rights for the disabled, the Senate had passed a disaster for U.S. business.” ADA’s enemies proposed that euthanizing the child was really for the best. Notice the use of the phrase under the guise of civil rights, as though equal opportunity and civic life are, after all, really, just a fiction, or, to put it more succinctly, they’re a true story only for some. Perhaps the most vigorous opponent of ADA was (and remains) the Chamber of Commerce, which even today, bloviates that accessibility guidelines kill small businesses. (In order to believe this, its crucial to think that “the disabled” are insufficient customers, who live alone, who have no families and spouses and children who also shop.) It’s always staggered me how little the Chamber of Commerce knows about America’s customers. But I digress.

Dear ADA, on this 4th of July in the year of your quarter century, let us remember Thomas Jefferson and his American creed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Dear ADA on this 4th of July in the year of your quarter century, let us remember that it was the consent of the governed, who hailed from both political parties, who brought you forth in the name of Liberty.

Dear ADA, here’s one more quote from Jefferson:

“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

ADA: you are standing like a rock!

 

 

 

 

You don’t need to be a Marxist historian to understand the Confederate flag but it doesn’t hurt to recall the central place of social class and economic controls when we remember the origins of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s slaves still matter because they were the human capital upon which the American banking system was founded. Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of New York was the first engine of liquidity in the nation, and though our founding treasury secretary took a dim view of slavery and favored industrialization, much of the nation’s wealth derived from the slave states. Moreover, even after the industrial revolution took a firm hold in North America, slavery drove the engines. When “some” people wave the Confederate flag today they’re attempting to imagine something noble—as if southern heritage has finally been bleached of substance like Wonder Bread. Most who wave the flag want to extoll racial hate.

I wrote a one liner on Twitter last week: “No matter how many times you wash the Confederate flag, you just can’t get the slavery out.”

We talk about the art of getting naked or of flower arranging, but we never speak of the art of becoming disabled. In America disability is discussed simply as rehabilitation, as if living is no more complicated than lighting a stove.

The art of getting disabled is a necessary subject. When we look to history we find examples of this art everywhere. Disabled makers stand against loss.  They make something of difference. When traveling in France Thomas Jefferson broke his wrist. A surgeon set the break badly. A major facet of his life was changed forever.  He was forced to put aside his treasured violin. In turn he took up long, slow, leisurely horseback rides as a meditative practice.

Blind people don’t necessarily need dogs. White cane travel is a very fine way to get around. But I say guide dog travel is an art. It’s a means toward living much as Jefferson learned to live. Moving in consort with an excellent animal is one way to make a life. Art is mysterious. Some find a path to a certain form. Some find an unlike form.

Oh I know Jefferson sang to his horses. He was very fond of singing. Moving in consort requires it I think.

It’s hard to imagine singing to a white cane.

Do you need to sing to live well? No. I’ve a great good friend who is nonspeaking. But in turn his whole body is music.

My deaf friends sing.

“You got to keep something moving all the time,” said Huddle Ledbetter, otherwise known as “Leadbelly” when asked how he played the 12 string guitar.

Many of my wheelchair pals are dancers.

Several of my disabled friends are comedians.

We crackle, zip, exhale, inhale, sport with our fingers, flap, jump, pop wheelies, and jingle with harnesses.

Resourceful life is practiced. Sometimes it is silly. Art can and often should be frivolous. With permission from curators at the Museum of Modern Art I was once allowed to spin Marcel DuChamp’s famous wheel, a bicycle fork with front wheel mounted upside-down on a wooden stool. DuChamp was a DaDaist. He made art by placing things side by side that did not formally belong together. A MOMA staff member handed me a pair of latex gloves and I pulled them on and with my first guide dog Corky watching beside me, I reached out and gave DuChamp’s aluminum wheel a spin. “This is the steering wheel of my life,” I thought. Eccentric motion. A dog walking life not always understood by others, but simple and smoothly elegant.

No you don’t need a dog, or any other animal if you have a disability. Solo life contains its own joys.

I certainly know some blind folks who would say I’m over the top talking about art in the context of service dog life. I know people who say a guide dog is just a mobility aid. I’m fine with that. As long as they’re kind to their dog machines I’ve nothing to say about this view. To each his own. I have friends who don’t like poetry. I don’t think their worlds are harmed by their disinterest. All I know for sure is what a guide dog can do. Though the stationary wheel of your life seemed forever stopped, she says give it a turn. You’ll be surprised where the imagination can take you.

 

 

It’s a game I have, as a means of cheering myself, to think of famous people and their dogs.

In respect to this pastime I can’t think of any of our forebears who affords me greater pleasure than George Washington who truly loved his dogs. You can read about our first President and his canine companions here. I especially love the following:

Imagine the Father of Our Country whistling for his hound, Sweetlips…or rubbing the ears of his coach dog, a Dalmatian named Madame Moose. When it came to pooches, George Washington had a sense of humor – and a tender side, too.

During his lifetime, Washington kept almost every group of dog recognized today by the American Kennel Club. Records show that he owned French hounds Tipsy, Mopsey, Truelove, and Ragman – just to name a few. Greyhounds, Newfoundlands, Briards, and various types of spaniels, terriers, and toys also called the estate home.

And they too probably had awesome names.

Every dog is a half open door leading to every other dog…

When I was small I thought about runaway dogs…our own dog, a mutt named “Woody” had vanished in the night.

I worried about him. And my father (who was an ascetic academic type, hence not very talkative…) told me a story about an elf named Mr. Bamboozle who lived in the woods and looked after all the lost dogs and cats.

Now I’m middle aged…the dogs come home or they don’t…but the ones who return shake all over with news of the Great Dog—like Schultz’s Great Pumpkin—the Ur Dog—the dog who perseveres in the woods…

Dogs: half open doors to dogs…and a hundred miles of moonlit woods…

I have lost my imagination much as Rousseau lost his dog—bending to flowers,

insisting on beauty in a strange land. Gentians for the philosophe!

Where has my Sultan gone? My fancy! (Foolish to have thought

he was as shunned as me.)

**

This is a game I play, much as some recall the batting order of old time baseball teams.

I think of men, women and their dogs…imagining their lives; seeing how they refer to my own.

I’m as lonesome as Rousseau. How I love my dogs. I stay with them long days fighting aleatoric and remote minutes, admiring how dogs defy death simply by ripping apart a grubby  hand towel.

Dogs. Temporal reductionism. Buddha Buddha. Woof. Scratch your ass on the rug.

**

I have lost my imagination. It was here, moments ago. I was thinking about unborn trees in the gloaming.

My imagination fell out of my pocket. Went down a storm drain.

But now the dogs are dreaming. They’re running under the earth, chasing St. John of the Cross who is gently on fire—that is, in the doggish underworld he’s not in pain.

You see how this works? Even when dogs are asleep and moving their legs, they’re better than friends or nation states.