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My guide dog and I walked into a hat shop; a boutique; a room filled with tiny crescent hats on mannequin heads. To me they were splotches of color; weird as a Kandinsky painting, lovely. And there I was, a man in a hat shop with a dog. It began. The shop keeper wanted to know what I was doing there. She landed right in front of me like a jumping spider. She couldn’t say what she was thinking—”why is a blind person in my shop? Why is a blind person interested in women’s hats? Why would a blind man know any women? Why would a blind man have taste? Or money? Or curiosity? Most likely he is lost! Oh my God! A lost blind man has entered my little store! What should I say?”

Then the man terrified the hat woman by touching a hat. (Oh Lordy who knows where the blind man’s fingers have been?) The blind man, moi, saw a burgundy thing. It was a wide brimmed felt fedora the color of cranberries. His fingers caressed it. His guide dog admired him admiring the thing. It was a moment of small, contained, aesthetic pleasure. Nothing more.

“What are you doing?” asked the shop keeper. She fumbled her opening gambit—didn’t say “can I help you?” or “what are you looking for?” (She didn’t know if blind people “look” for anything…was it OK to say “look”—and maybe it wasn’t—so she said “what are you doing?)

“A fedora,” I said. “A mauve fedora!”

“Well, yes,” said the shop keeper.

(She wanted to know how I “knew” it was a rose-purple fedora but couldn’t ask. She imagined all blind people see nothing. This is a common presumption.)

“A mauve fedora,” I said again because I liked saying it.

“Mmmm,” said the shop keeper.

“Indifférence violet,” I said with a bad French accent.

The shopkeeper stared.

“Je veux acheter un chapeau pour mon chien,” I said.

“You want to buy a hat for your dog?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I want to buy her the mauve fedora.”

“Oh dear!” she said.

“I might decide to buy two,” I said.

“One for my wife, one for my dog,” I said.

We can be misunderstood and stylish. Two components made into a third thing in this blind life.

Sometimes I play a mind game called “it is late or early for different people”—It’s hard to describe. Essentially it’s an exercise in appreciation. I try to imagine how much of life’s sweetness remains inside people. It’s a game of admiration. When I meet old acquaintances after years I see some have managed to keep their joy. They still have the “early” within them. You can play the game with anyone—eyeing strangers on a bus, sitting at a concert.

I heard blues legend B.B. King in live performance just once. He was playing a small club in Iowa City and I was lucky and got a ticket. I was smart enough to get there early and I grabbed a seat down front. This was in the 1970’s. I don’t think there was a single person of color in the audience. I felt badly about that. I sensed the qualified risibility of playing blues for favored people. But if Mr. King felt it, it didn’t show. He played and sang as if he knew everyone. And on that evening I figured it out—he had the “early” inside. The power of blues resides in what a singer won’t give away. “It’s bad out there, but you can’t have this!”  It’s why Leadbelly’s “Bring Me a Little Water, Sylvie” is so darned sweet. Bogart always had Paris but King always had “early”.

The thrill is gone, but I’ve still got first love, right here, under my ribs.

Each day I wake and stretch my arms. The stretch is almost the first thing I accomplish. I do not take it for granted. I’ve too many friends whose disabilities prevent even this. And so I stretch and silently express my gratitude. I am not Pollyanna. Nor am I essentialist. I’m certainly not capable of writing like Eleanor Porter, whose narrative prosthesis subjected her dear girl to a disability a la God to Job, testing her famous character’s prominent optimism. As I’ve written many times: disability isn’t a test of identity or ethos. But it is a test of something, and you, as the cripple, get to be the examiner and supplicant. I do not like my blindness. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do like the bluejays. And I like my morning calisthenics. In this way, precisely, I’m like you, you non-disabled thing you, for I’m engaged in the pursuit of happiness. My pursuit may have a few more rules than yours. Or, obversely, I may know the rules you don’t.

I’m Pollyanna with a difference. It’s not my job to prove anything. If the world is filled with cruel men, women, and children, then let it be. Performative optimism gets you nowhere because in the real world, (every place that is not Beldingsville, Vermont) the locals will never see your optimism as fettshcrift largely because of what Carl Jung called “the shadow”. Unhappy people will take your cheer for odious tooting. Now, back to Job via Jung—or, why Job isn’t Pollyanna—Job’s suffering is so entirely and only in the sight of God (don’t forget, Job’s neighbors disappear early) that only God can reckon what human suffering means. In Jung’s view, God undergoes transference, and feels the soul of his creation, a thing so profound that it leads to the appearance of Jesus.

There has not been a Pollyanna Jesus. There have been many poster children. There continue to be unhappy people. Very few of them deserve their sufferings. Job is all of us. Which leads me back to gratitude. I stretch my arms. I’ve accomplished this. It is a small gratitude. It gives birth to others. It is a small thing I know. I live this way. It is a small thing I know.

His Most Serene Highness, the President of the United States…

In their wonderful book “Washington’s Circle” David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler characterize the maiden voyage of the US Senate:

“In the new constitutional government’s first days, the Senate argued at length about appropriate titles for officials, particularly for George Washington. Makeshift titles for the president had popped up in print in various places, some of them–such as “his Most Serene Highness”–distasteful for a republic at its outset. ¹ John Adams regarded this matter as something he could sink his teeth into, and he ultimately made a fool of himself by insisting that lofty titles were necessary for the president, vice president, and senators. At this early stage, the men in the Senate were prepared to be charitable, even to the point of reckoning Adams’s idea as a mark of his concern for the new government’s prestige. A majority agreed on “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” Some senators, however, thought the episode confirmed what they already knew about Adams. The plump little man became a comic figure whose concern for titles was lampooned with one reserved especially for him in cloakroom conversations: “His Rotundity.” ²”

If you are sentimental about government you believe in a “golden age” of conscientious discourse. The cloakroom conversations in the Senate was always coarse, especially concerning the inflated rhetoric of others.

In our time we recall Sen. Arlen Specter as “Snarlin’ Arlen”.

“Senator: a person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time.” (Mark Twain)

Poor John Adams, who believed a good name resided in the name.

Now I grew up in the age of the Imperial Presidency and so did you. There are three political liabilities of the IP:

1. A belief in his most serene highness.
2. A belief in his ability to protect our rights.
3. A belief in his military infallibility.

**

The last two “serene highnesses” have instigated a systematic killing of civilians.

They have suborned our right to privacy and free inquiry.

They have employed the military without transparency or clear objectives.

Right about now I’d welcome “His Rotundity”.

Adams had his faults, but a lack of accountability was not one of them.

I’m voting for John Adams.

 

 

Above is a photograph of George Orwell speaking into a BBC radio microphone.

 

George Orwell wasn’t the first writer to declare the personal pronoun had been thoroughly infested. He was the first to give the infestation a Linnean system.

He was the last true figure of the Enlightenment.

He wrote: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed, everything else is public relations.”

The recent flap over PEN America’s decision to give the French humor magazine  “Charlie Hebdo” an award for courageousness requires a dab of Orwell for journalism isn’t “taste” and it may also lack nuance.

The writers arguing against the Hebdo award (so I’ll call it, as every award deserves its own name) rightly point out the effects of lampooning Muslim belief—Hebdo’s satire is overtly scornful and in a world where Islamic refugees struggle without human rights, giving satirists a courage award feels like a sham.

But what the critics want, alas, is what Orwell would declare public relations.

Free speech isn’t tasteful.

Free speech is (as always) under attack both in the United States and around the globe.

For this reason I’m for the award.

Free speech means never being comfortable.

“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” (Orwell)

 

 

 

 

It happened this morning. I was watching MSNBC when a local advertisement came on. A mortician spoke earnestly into the camera. He was wearing a Sears and Roebuck suit. He had very pink skin. And then the jingle, which was sung by an ear piercing soprano. She sang: “we’re here for you when you need us, Fettucini’s Funeral Home!” (Not their real name…I confess I’ve forgotten their true name, so aghast was I by the pitch.) What does it mean to be a funeral home professing its total readiness for my needs with a wincingly cheerful tune? According to the syntax they’re not there when I don’t need them. The advertisement was metaphysical.

Of course one should never ask what something commercial means. The answer is self-evident. The funeral business is tougher than one might think.

The plastic, hyper cheery, a-social insensitivity of the lyric was ghastly.

I tried to picture the scene: the sweating mortician and the jingle gurus sitting on naugahyde chairs, listening to saccharine songs promoting antacids and foot powders, all of them recognizing that one product is the same as another, it’s not the steak its the sizzle, and why not sell “happy” when it comes to the dark trade?

Why not indeed. And the mortician forked over his money. I imagined he had a failing business. That was the only thing I could bring myself to believe, for the opposing view was too much–that a jingle can bring in buckets of grief and cash. But experience suggests it must be so. And so I lost one more unit of innocence.

 

 

Today, in case you missed it, is “World Naked Gardening Day” which is an instance of preferred abstraction, for like so many ideas it's better in the mind than next door. And yes, I have an advantage owing to vision loss–I'm safe from the prospect of Mr. and Mrs. Drupe bending low over beds of kale.

But if you live in Mendocino your day may be distracting.

Consider yourselves warned.

 

 

I was talking yesterday with my friend Lance Mannion via the old fashioned telephone. We weren’t Skyping or Apple Watch-ing. We imagined our respective faces and gestures. On the phone everyone is blind. We must coin a neologism for “phone nostalgia” while it’s still possible. Soon it will be impossible to speak without Dick Tracy micro-cameras. Accordingly we’ll have to observe our friends and acquaintances stretched on sofas wearing Sponge Bob Square Pants leisure wear.
In a college class recently one of my students at Syracuse said people dressed better in the United States fifty years ago. “Have you been to Wal Mart lately?” she asked. “Everyone slumps around in pajamas and horrible sweat pants.”
“Well,” I said,  “fifty years ago people dressed up because there was a general expectation you could get a job. Dress for Success meant something. Nowadays millions have given up. A new slogan might be: Why Get Dressed When You’re Depressed?”
“It’s a Sponge Bob nation,” I said.

Let us imagine our respective faces and gestures. Faces still matter.

My face has harvested black currants.
When I was five years old I danced around the house buck naked while wearing a cowboy hat. “I’m the bare cowboy!” I said. I thought this was the funniest thing on earth. That was a face.

Nothing terrifies us more than godforsaken faces. Let your face always spark.
Let it be real and alive.

Imagine this for your friend.

Imagine it for someone you don’t necessarily like.

Every face is a foreign dialect we can get to know.

Yes, I’m blind but I know your face.

I heard it on the telephone.