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You will be half sane for one more day

According to the poet who writes about dreams.

Snow falls lightly, glitters on the road

Where dream stuff 

Works itself into solid figures. 

The boy inside me counts footprints. 

The night is round and the dogs are round.
The two roundnesses are one
So a dog sees the moon 
When you turn off the light in a hallway
Or when he follows you as you’re searching 
For lost keys or even a single word.
A dog’s eyes say we made it through the winter
And we traveled on the back of round
Though you my friend did not always know. 
Each man or woman may forget
Then rediscover the moon. 

If there’s a better form of poetry for the Twitter Age I don’t know it. “Haiku” you say. Yes, fast and obscure fits the bill, but unlike Haiku the Clerihew shoots off deft sparks because its intentions are overtly comic. It beards the lions. If Groucho Marx wrote poetry he’d have gone all in for the Clerihew.

The “thing” (for so I shall call it) (for its a curiosity) was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. When Bentley was a teenager in school (and doodling in the margins as any self-respecting adolescent must) the following lines percolated straight into his head:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

The “thing” is faster than a mongoose and just as absurd as a mongoose. The rhyme scheme is AABB which is sufficient unto the purpose—the Clerihew’s implicit agenda is to push famous people into the fun house. Bentley also wrote this one:

George the Third
Ought to never have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder. 

Edmund Bentley’s best friend was G.K. Chesterton. I’m sure hardly anyone on Twitter recalls Chesterton but he was a major literary figure in Edwardian Britain and he popularized the “thing”—so much so that esteemed poets took it up.
W. H. Auden was a superb practitioner. Here are two of my favorites by Auden:

Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.

When Karl Marx
Found the phrase ‘financial sharks,’
He sang a Te Deum
In the British Museum.

As you can see, the second Auden Clerihew is especially witty—Marxism, god, and intellectual serendipity all cozy together in the British museum is dryly hilarious.

Late last spring a new collection of Clerihews by the poet Paul Ingram hit the stores and its delights are salty and colorful. First off I should say I love the book’s title: The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram. It makes perfect sense that wit should have been hidden—like some hitherto unrevealed manuscript by Voltaire—one is more intrigued by lost marginalia than the plain graffiti next door. The book (which has a wonderful Foreword by Elizabeth McCracken) does not explain why the Clerihews were lost though Ingram says they were scrawled on cocktail napkins and scraps of discarded paper and one day he found a mother lode of them in a moist basement box. Ingram’s readers are the beneficiaries of his spring cleaning. How I like knowing this. I like old comedy unearthed. As a college student I adored ancient Greek graffiti I found in Athens. But I digress.

Ingram is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where he studied poetry. For over thirty years he’s made his living selling books to writers and he’s arguably one of the best read citizens in America. Unlike so many who’ve made their lives among books, Ingram exudes merriment. As McCracken says: “The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram are everything that Paul Ingram himself is: hilarious, ribald, tender, erudite, naughty, every decibel and every octave.” 

McCracken is right. What’s in a Clerihew? Plenty. Here are some of my favorite “Ingrams”:

Jan Sibelius
Used a alias,
He always checked in
As Huckleberry Finn.

Greeleaf Whittier
Thought nothing was shittier,
Than being stuck in the snow
With Henry Thoreau.

John James Audubon
Took too much laudanum, 
And became unpleasant 
With a ring-necked pheasant. 

And perhaps my favorite: 

Jesus Christ 
Was sliced and diced,
And punched with holes
To save our souls. 

Paul Ingram reminds us that wit and economy are the barbs of poetry—a good message in the age of the Tweet.

 

 
  

 
  

What does it mean to be a sustainable cripple? The terms are inconsistent, unstable. Medicine aims to cure disease. What is a sustainable illness or disability? Why should this taxonomic assignment matter? 

I have several friends who can’t speak. They are wise, discerning, capacious in thought. On the coarse street they might appear to be greatly disadvantaged. They are not. Their wisdom )both individually and collectively) is even now only partially understood. If we assume the medicalized notion that they’re fit only for cure or for study, we fail to take into account their remarkable talents and individualities.  A sustainable cripple is one of us, a talented “other” and while the value of a cure is well established, the value of suspended judgment in the face of difference is very poorly recognized.

The sustainable cripple leads whenever the subject is difference. 

The SC understands that if a limb can feel revulsion there’s still a false move in store.

SC knows imagining tomorrow requires recollections of defeat. 

Architectures: inclusive, no segregation, no separate classrooms or hospitals. 

Governments re-designed to prohibit segregation. 

The abolishment of panopticons.

Teaching with the motto: “presume competence”. 

Neurodiversity understood as human potential.

Economies built for diversity—no more pyramids.

Demand religious leaders stop using disability as metaphor. 

Disability as metaphor is usually hate speech or superstition. 

Sustainable planets do not require hate speech or superstition.

My Thoughts early morning. One year ago on a cold day. Syracuse.   

I remember on my 27th birthday alone in Berlin walking in the rain. Walking alone when you’re blind is a trick and in those days I didn’t use a cane or dog—I trusted fate and followed strangers often because of the color of their clothing. 
I followed Mr. Red macintosh on Kurferstendamm and as we went along I began humming jazz standards in my head. 
All good songs are yellow flowers in one’s head. Bud Powell: “Collard Greens and Black Eyed Peas”; Thelonius Monk: “Straight, No Chaser”; Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: “Along Came Betty”. At Cafe Kranzier I shed my coat to feel rain on my arms. O Bohemian jazz boy both lonesome and strangely happy under the plane trees.  

I woke to the waves and sand and realized I’d been dreaming of my father. We were in Finland back in the late fifties, a time when it seemed people didn’t laugh. The water had to do all the laughing in those days. Clouds watched the children. There were very few televisions. I remember the adults reading books by the sea. The ocean was everyone’s philosopher. Those were beautiful days. Everyone had his cup of sand.

Mark Twain said quitting smoking was easy, he’d done it 17 times. At least I think that’s what he said. I could look it up but I don’t want to. And that’s my problem: I’m getting “clear” with my digital demon. I just plain, flat out, spend too much time online. 

This isn’t easy—this business of leaving Facebook. I was a lonesome child. Disability in the fifties and early sixties was a ticket to isolation. For me, Facebook has been a wonderful means of connection to a world of thoughtful and ardent neighbors. 

But I confess I can’t control it. I spend hours scrolling up and down and worse, I’ve been posting every inflammatory thing I read as do  many of my friends. I’ve come to understand FB as a place in cyberspace where people like me throw open their windows and shout to their neighbors: “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” (If you’re of a certain age you’ll get the movie reference.)

Some days I feel like Dr. Jekyll when I’m on Facebook. I love people. In fact I have a wee bit of Walt Whitman inside me. When I walk on the streets I see strangers and think “there’s another soul” and the idea thrills me. The “Hyde” of FB is its lobster trap effect: I’m locked in with too many wild emotions. 

Facebook turns me into Mr. Hyde. 

Now you can argue and say something like Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous dictum “no one can make you feel bad about yourself without your permission” (I think that’s what she said. I could look it up…)
Mrs. Roosevelt was right about that. She learned that from her encounters with her mother in law. (Everyone do your own joke.)

But the thing is, you don’t become Mr. Hyde unless you’re too preoccupied with London. Hyde is the dark side of the London Victorian flaneur. 

Facebook turns me into a lobster-flaneur very quickly. 

I’m sorry Mrs. Roosevelt. Permission is too quaint. 

A few months ago I said I was leaving FB and the experiment lasted two days. Then I was back. I didn’t even bother to explain my return. Crustaceans don’t have to explain anything. 

You see its the lonely kid in me who doesn’t want to leave social media. He was terribly lonesome. But there’s no help for it. You can be lonely and preserve your essential sweetness I think. 

If people on FB who like connecting with me want to write me my non-Facebook email is stevekuusisto@gmail.com 

My blog will go on as usual, largely because I receive many notes from disabled people around the world and if being a writer has any merit it may reside only in that we can speak for those who cannot do so for themselves. 

I will miss you my fellow lobsters. Drop me a note now and then. Unlike regular fish, lobsters can read. 

Like the spoon inside the shovel, my memories, slim and silvery. Like the eyes inside the oak. 

The one who was me is no longer. This is one of the godly lessons: we die several times even as the plucky heart goes on beating. 

If the tincture of growing old is a remedy was life, was all acquisitiveness some kind of pathology? 

The worm inside the thistle; the burgeoning thorn inside the worm; the boy in memory, whose first toy was a wooden top, he’s inside the thorn inside the worm inside the thistle. 

My Finnish grandmother had a time honored recipe for thistle soup.

My father has been gone for almost fifteen years and yesterday I saw him vividly as my aunt described how she and her brother used to drive around Boston—my father at the wheel, Miriam in the rumble seat. The year was 1947. Allan was working on his doctorate at Harvard; Miriam was an undergrad at Boston University.  
 
They were children of the depression, Finnish kids who’d grown up in the conservative confines of Finnish-American Lutheranism. (I remember seeing one of my father’s diary entries from the day he turned 12: I got ten cents and a new hair brush. Pretty good! 

Poverty was one thing; the Lutheranism another. Miriam and Allan’s father was a minister. Stern and formal their upbringing was. Their mother, devout to a T, was fond of vanity, vanity, all is vanity. If my father brushed his hair he didn’t do it before a mirror. 

Now the war was over and the Finn kids were driving around Cambridge, Allan home from the Pacific, Miriam released from the parsonage and the wind was blowing through their hair and so were the ideas that struck everyone who went to post-war college as new and liberating.

“Allan was talking about Karl Marx and I was regaling him about Freud,” Miriam said during our phone chat. “Ideas were fresh; everything was heady.”

This was the happiest New Year’s Day conversation  I’ve ever had.

Do you remember when ideas were fresh? Listening to Miriam I recalled reading Lorca for the first time and being so struck by his rich figures of eternity I ventured into a cemetery and ate some grass.  

My father has been gone for almost fifteen years and yesterday I saw him vividly as my aunt described how she and her brother used to drive around Boston—my father at the wheel, Miriam in the rumble seat. The year was 1947. Allan was working on his doctorate at Harvard; Miriam was an undergrad at Boston University.  
 
They were children of the depression, Finnish kids who’d grown up in the conservative confines of Finnish-American Lutheranism. (I remember seeing one of my father’s diary entries from the day he turned 12: I got ten cents and a new hair brush. Pretty good! 

Poverty was one thing; the Lutheranism another. Miriam and Allan’s father was a minister. Stern and formal their upbringing was. Their mother, devout to a T, was fond of vanity, vanity, all is vanity. If my father brushed his hair he didn’t do it before a mirror. 

Now the war was over and the Finn kids were driving around Cambridge, Allan home from the Pacific, Miriam released from the parsonage and the wind was blowing through their hair and so were the ideas that struck everyone who went to post-war college as new and liberating.

“Allan was talking about Karl Marx and I was regaling him about Freud,” Miriam said during our phone chat. “Ideas were fresh; everything was heady.”

This was the happiest New Year’s Day conversation  I’ve ever had.

Do you remember when ideas were fresh? Listening to Miriam I recalled reading Lorca for the first time and being so struck by his rich figures of eternity I ventured into a cemetery and ate some grass.