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Last night I dreamt of my father who was sad in a squinty room of the subconscious. In life he was like the rest of us—by turns funny, somber, witty, and occasionally distant.  In America nowadays its requisite to blame your problems on your parents and Lord knows I might get away with this but honesty is tougher than cartoon Freud and I know most of my difficulties are my own.

My mother was a drunk and a prescription pill abuser. One night, clutching a knife, she stalked my sister through our house. She threw glassware, dishes, or on a good day she simply passed out in the living room. My father ignored everything, stuck to his job. At times he’d open up and relate how his life was unbearable. I was the disabled kid, the one whose problems were unspoken but always in the room and I grew up thinking the family’s unhappiness stemmed from my blindness. My parents have been gone now for fourteen years.  They turn up in my dreams but never together.

With therapy and contemplation I’ve come to see just how much the human imagination can hurt us. If my parents weren’t emotionally supportive so be it. I allowed myself to internalize and narrate their miseries as if they were products of my blindness, a self-destructive fantasy that occupied me for years. I was like the Japanese poet Issa’s “crow with no mouth”—I was unlit and sharply alive but without the necessary and nuanced self-awareness that leads to honest language. I suspect this is why I don’t like much contemporary fiction and why I avoid short stories in particular. The narrators in most American short stories lack awareness that imagination can be debilitating. Story after story unfolds around the misery of divorce and a tragicomic insistence that the put upon narrator has something like a heart. The tenor of the story—its burden if you will—is to convey the injustice of emotional life. Few stories bring readers to a place where the narrator understands his complicity in illusion. There are exceptions. But usually contemporary short stories depend on nascent victimhood—a reader response agreement—we’re all budding victims because as Wallace Stevens once wrote: “the world is ugly and the people are sad.”

Are my difficulties really my own? Doesn’t the culture hold blind people at arm’s length? Is it not true I’ve had to fight for my place in the village square? Yes yes. And yet so much is still the work of the deleterious imagination. When I was 17 years old and in danger of dying from anorexia (my parents, blindness, ugly school administrators, cruelty of teenagers…) a friend gave me a book of poems. I read Walt Whitman:

Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour?

 

Hast never come to thee an hour,

A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles,

fashions, wealth?

These eager business aims—books, politics, art, amours,

To utter nothingness?

 

 

**

These eager business aims—the phrase holds as true for the imagination as it does for fashions or what often feels to me like “victim theory”—the business of abjection. So much work of the imagination is finally utter nothingness. What a relief! Surely its a commonplace of the avant garde to hold bourgeois culture in suspicion and one can read Whitman’s poem that way.

But the key word is “eager”—defined as “keen, enthusiastic, avid, fervent, ardent, motivated, wholehearted, dedicated, committed, earnest”—all central to imagination. “Eager” is also sinister. Its a word of suspension and indeterminacy. Eager also means: anxious, impatient, longing, yearning, wishing, hoping, hopeful; on the edge of one’s seat, on tenterhooks, on pins and needles; (informal) itching, gagging, dying.

As a teenager who was blind I was sure that whatever happiness might befall me would be the product of a miracle. That’s the problem with the eager imagination. It believes in rescue. Its a fairy tale yearning.

I’m in mind of this after a dream of my father. He was gray in my dream, two dimensional, like a figure in the Greek underworld. I think he went to his grave believing in the bubble of rescue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A mallard was in my dream last night—but she wasn’t one of those birds of dream, she was a real bird, swimming on the lake of my unconscious. I knew it. And I knew it this morning, when, early I walked the dogs and the orphic crows spoke up, narrating their private red wind.

 

There are three thousand tiny American flags planted on a hill at Syracuse University and above them a sign says “Never Forget”.

 

I’m predisposed to not forgetting. I lost friends on 9/11.

 

Walking yesterday and finding the flags and sign I wondered what the display and admonition meant.

 

William Gass wrote: “culture has completed its work when everything is a sign”—surely a dark irony as a “completed” culture would likely be wholly propagandistic. Wisdom fares best in  uncompleted cultures, the ones with porous boundaries. Tomas Transtromer the great Swedish poet has a poem called “The Half Finished Heaven” that speaks to this:

 

The Half-Finished Heaven

 

Despondency breaks off its course.

Anguish breaks off its course.

The vulture breaks off its flight.

 

The eager light streams out,

even the ghosts take a draft.

 

And our paintings see daylight,

our red beasts of the Ice Age studios.

 

Everything begins to look around.

We walk in the sun in hundreds.

 

Each man is a half-open door

leading to a room for everyone.

 

The endless ground under us.

 

The water is shining among the trees.

 

The lake is a window into the earth.

 

Excerpt From: Tomas Tranströmer. “The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/WAORD.l

 

Each day now I climb into the sheltering tree that lived outside my boyhood window. I am no longer cold and feel no shame when I’m in its branches. You can fault me for being a small “r” romantic and that’s ok. I was a small “r” romantic when I was five years old. I’m not certain I know much more than the boy knew. Knowing ain’t facts kitty kat. Facts include Wilson’s cloud chamber and the Greek alphabet. Up in the tree “knowing” means my body is a string. That’s what music is of course—sensing your body is one of the strings. Every lover is a quarter note, catching up.

 

The geese are arbitrary. One has a problem with its left leg. So the leg is unpredictable. That goose is wounded and restless. He limps toward a museum, some avian institute. In a moment I’ll follow him but now I’m making a sandwich with my favorite arctic mosses.

A neighbor has come. He looks in my kitchen window. He’s such a lonesome man and he wants to give me old books. He knows books are good, especially for the brain. I trade with him, hand him a dish of cloudberries. The cloudberries are ice cold.

The first mistake of the day: I turn on the radio. A man with a voice like an electric razor talks about bombs. That is, he favors them. A hornet circles the ceiling light.

 

I’ve been attempting an assault on my morbid imagination much as one might undertake housecleaning but first must imagine the process, seeing disheveled rooms in his mind’s eye. Perhaps the homely analogy isn’t quite right:  the world’s dreadful conditions in no way match bourgeois domesticity but my analogy is a gesture toward weariness. The morbid imagination has lately spent too much time with the news, has coursed repeatedly across digital media and now has concluded there’s no hope for human kind.

There were eras when the word fortune was warmth itself. Even in the darkest corners of the globe one could conceive of a future unencumbered by the evidence the planet is dying.

In those innocent ages the future wasn’t easy and we endured hard physical and intellectual labor but the steady nature of the “coming times” was possible. (Not probable but viable).

That ended with Hiroshima but then again we could hope, even pray for disarmament. The improbable but still viable future was still in our hands.

Now morbid imagination tells me otherwise—eco-destruction is so advanced and economies of warfare are so fully determined there’s no way out. And the morbid imagination says “we’re just playing a lost game until the clock runs out”.

As I say, I’ve been attempting an assault on the M.I.. I write my name with a finger on the vapor of the future. When this doesn’t work I attempt Zen laughter. Ha Ha! So much is nonsense! All is transient. Even the planet. Life will go on elsewhere.

Oh we’re in a fix alright. My nation is dying and now apparently lacks the political will to affirm its own freedoms much less tend to the destruction of the world. I channel surf, see the bloated corporate shills who pose as national leaders. The M.I. despairs.

I try seeing myself as a mind committed to a larger body. And in a few moments I will clean the rooms of my old house. I wonder if I’m tired because I’m nearing sixty. I wonder if there’s evidence for optimism—a way to beard the lion of the M.I.. I’m having some trouble. I remember a therapist who challenged me when in an earlier time I was also morbid—who said: “When have your negative expectations, your dark visions of what’s ahead been proven true?”

She was right to ask. I have a quick and gloomy mind. I adjust. Things, good things, agains seem possible.

Herein I admit I’m fighting. I’m walking straight up to my name and touching it gently.

My friends, how are you?

 

 

 

 

When I think of Lao tzu I get dizzy. I press my face into a lake and open my eyes.

Underwater my blindness is a virtue; I’m as much a lake as the lake.

I laugh sideways, water and darkness slip in and out of me.

When I’m dizzy I have to ask: who do I propose to become

and who will I leave behind?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suppose I asked you to be my friend?

How would I do this as an honest man?

I have so many secret artifacts,

so many broken parts—

I’m a house that gleams on the outside

but its rooms have been cleaned quickly of spilled blood.

I’m carried in my shadow by another shadow.

I wave at you under the long thin streaks of clouds.

 

I read a post last night on a rather unskillful group blog entitled “In Defense of Ableism”. Its  author argues being physically whole is simply better than being disabled and therefore able bodied people oughtn’t worry about tropes or phrases betokening disability as a miserable state of affairs. I love how non-disabled people imagine they know all about the cripples much as I enjoy pink men who declare their familiarity with the circumstances of racial differences on Fox News. I’m sincere about this—when pink men wade into the dank waters of aggregate imperial assumptions and intolerances and wave their $5 Disney souvenir magic wands I see the retreating vanguard of privilege soaking its collective knickers. The “Pinkies” (for so I call them) never inquire as to what it is they’re defending.

The Monty Python once had a skit depicting soldiers in WWI. They were in a trench with terrifying explosions all around and their single concern was the protection of a tall grandfather clock that had been inexplicably entrusted to their care. So it is with the aforementioned defense of ableism, not merely because the privilege of the argument is misplaced (though it certainly is) but because physical wholeness is not a useful paradigm for understanding the human condition. I would not want to defend physical perfection as the sine qua non of ethics for the same reason I avoid patent falsehoods in general. If physical ability is thought to be the signature of the human book that book is stitched too thin to be important. Its a comic book argument, puerile and complacent. Worse: its draped in neo-Victorian wool (smelling of camphor and anti-Macassar) and when spoken it assumes the weary tones of adults who must, alas, tell their children its a hard life and (insert here—art, liberation theology, post-colonialism) won’t help you live. The post might just as well have been titled: “In Defense of Infantilization” but of course such titles presuppose comic irony which is in short supply in the Ableism Defense Department.

Taxonomies of physical value are the stuff of eugenics and function in America as justifications in support of the prison industrial complex. The Los Angeles County jail is the largest psychiatric facility in the United States. This state of affairs is only possible or tolerated by means of ableist assumptions. Its a very hard life children. The philosophers have said so. It really is too bad. Maybe if you’re really really good the warden will give you a grandfather clock.