Category: Uncategorized

I return from the world of sleep and feel grudging acceptance of daylight, curtains, clothing. You do too. Oh you’ll tell yourself the snow is novel, the coffee perfect. You’ll resist my impertinent reach, declaring something about fatuousness—for even if what I say is true, even if you’re tired of dear things, you won’t admit it. And I don’t blame you. You have in mind hot yoga and a trip to the mall. The poet Anselm Hollo called American shopping malls “the bloody monolith” which beats anything I might add. 

 

**

 

If my identity has value its outside the city walls. The blind are making violins. A man with one leg is eating fallen fruit. If its true folly is unsafe, then these men are unsafe. I know about this. I’m an expert in folly and ostracism. In the ocean of perception I’m suspicious but I still make my violin. The blind are still outside the city walls. Outside. Outside. In the woods. 

 

**

 

I’ve entered the long winter of intellectual will at 58. My sentimentality has drained away. I still have a musical heart but its only interested in the later Mahler. My heart don’t give a shit about the Baroque. 

 

**

 

Let me not mistake the petty tremors of my mind for insight. If there are still a few gods. I want clarity in old age. 

 

**

 

See how these paragraphs grow smaller? 

 

       

My friend and colleague Bill Peace has written a post on his blog Bad Cripple entitled “Anatomy of Melancholy: A Post for my Good Friend Stephen Kuusisto” and my melancholy selves are honored. 

I live in fear that Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue. (The expression is Auden’s, the fear is general.) 

When I was a kid other boys taunted me for being blind. Some threw stones. Melancholy isn’t sadness. It comes later and steals up on you from within. Today we call it depression but like everything else with our language it doesn’t capture the nuances and tinctures of melancholy which are composed of love and desperation and something akin to crying for the moon. But whatever its recipe melancholy started for me that day in 1960 when the boys threw stones and sang a song about me and I retreated to the unoccupied spaces for the miserably identified—places oh so familiar to children and adults with disabilities. Oh I’ve squeezed some poetry out of those attics and bomb shelters. Melancholy may not be the muse but she’s got her number. And melancholy loves anyone who cries for the moon. 

I take 40 mg of Citalopram (Celexa) per day. It helps me get out of bed. Nowadays its part of a conversational song though I don’t sing it, only arrange it in my head. I won’t share it. Melancholy has her dignity. The anatomy of M is highly articulated like the skeleton of Joseph Merrick. The full song would take a long time to sing like a sea chantey. But the song has a line: “look yonder, there’s melancholy rock.” 

 

The year is new—hypo allergenic like certain poodles—and you can feel lucky or dreadful but the year (like a poodle) will have none of you, for the year is high strung and indifferent as years must be. I won’t go on with the simile. I’m sorry. Perhaps you love your poodle. I’m sincere. I don’t wish to offend “poodlers”. No one can live without sentiment. Capitalism as its now bruited will do anything to rob you of your last ounce of sentiment. I’m sorry I kicked your poodle. But whatever I say, the year will have only indifference like the stars. 

 

When I think about the virgin year I’m mindful of just how provisional and difficult the lives of people with disabilities remain worldwide. If you want to know about cruelty and “ranking” (in the crudest sociological sense) than look to disability. Look to it here at home in the United States and you’ll see how the police in Maryland killed a young man with Down Syndrome; see how a blind man and his guide dog were kicked off a US Air flight; see how the liberal press (Chris Hedges, Democracy Now, Alternet, etc.) actively rooted for a disabled American veteran of the Iraq war to kill himself—just so they could pin it on Bush and Cheney. These examples are from the US. When you look at disability globally things are no better. A UNICEF Report on the state of the world’s children highlights the plight of kids with disabilities across the planet—ill clothed, unschooled, without health care, denied food. The virgin year indeed. Don’t let the new year rob you of your heart’s renewal. If you’re an able bodied person I suggest you write your Senator and demand passage of the UN Charter on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 

 

A friend sent me a poem in which he calculates how far William Wordsworth walked in his lifetime and in turn, calculates the poet’s mileage per line of verse. I love this idea. What if instead of watching vulgar automobile commercials (as most Americans will do today, especially if they watch college football—for every sporting event is now sponsored by Lexus, BMW, Audi, and Mercedes Benz. Gone are the days of shaving cream, Schlitz, and Aqua Velva)—what if instead of vulgar car advertisements Americans were challenged to imagine their human and social productivity per mile? Emerson would have championed this. Why I think even Teddy Roosevelt would have endorsed such a plan. Our new year dawns on a nation more politically immune to suffering and the true calling of our souls than at any time in its history. I take no pleasure saying so. 

 

Here’s wishing you long walks, walks with ideas, chance meetings with wise and kind strangers. And triumphs of the spirit. I’m wishing you those. 

 

I think we gave away too much when we abandoned Freud and Jung, preferring pills and “big pharma” to the hard work—the acknowledgment—that the unconscious has lots of darkness. America is a nation of terrifying smiles. I can’t find the quote right now, but Alice Munro said recently the most frightening people are the do gooders (paraphrase mine). I tend to think we’re in Fascist times and its proper and necessary both to say it aloud and to know who you’re looking at—whether on television or in a board room or on a street corner. As World War II commenced the poet W.H. Auden wrote the following poem. It strikes an eerie chord, or if not a chord precisely, maybe some thermemin music. 

 

 

Blessed Event

 

Round the three actors in any blessed event

Is always standing an invisible audience of four,

The double twins, the fallen natures of man.

 

On the Left they remember difficult childhoods,

On the Right they have forgotten why they were so happy,

Above sit the best decisive people,

Below they must kneel all day so as not to be governed. 

 

Four voices just audible in the hush of any Christmas:

Accept my friendship or die.

I shall keep order and not very much will happen.

Bring me luck and of course I’ll support you.

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

 

But the Three hear nothing and are blind even to the landscape 

With its towns and rivers and pretty pieces of nonsense.

He, all father, repenting their animal nights,

Cries: Why did she have to be tortured? It is all my fault.

Once more a virgin, She whispers: The Future shall never suffer.

And the New Life awkwardly touches its home, beginning to fumble

About in the Truth for the straight successful Way

Which will always appear to end in some dreadful defeat.

 

**

 

Yes. The Wise Men, poor dears, have walked into a story “in medias res” and damned if every human actor isn’t two actors—one smiling, the other stricken by guilt. What a dramatis personnae. Cue that Theremin music indeed. 

 

And the new year with its pretty pieces of nonsense is here. 

 

So if ostensibly I write to you about a clean slate, look behind me to see what my shadow is up to. 

 

I know for certain, owing to dreams, my shadow is very upset about the children of war. 

 

Happy new year. Small letters. Happy straight successful Way. Capital “W” for will and work.

 

   

I am rummaging into my life. My dime store sentiments; quicksilver fears; old laughter—its all here. The vanquished powers of youth are next to a premeditated revenge, now harmless. A handkerchief embroidered via minima; reason denied, love ignored. The past is much like weather: I see where it hindered or helped. There were novels that set me back—Knut Hamsun; Malraux; and some that furthered—Ben Okri; Virginia Woolf; The Adventures of Augie March… One recalls seasons of learning…One winter day in Finland I discovered Neruda’s trick—how to make a wall of memory fall away. On the other side, the eyes, all the eyes were bright, wide, and curious. That was a single day from boyhood. Despair forgets. Again I’m spinning the globe in secret while my family sleeps. The worn objects of wisdom are all about. As Auden said, time makes old formulas look strange.

 

Photo depicts front page of tabloid newspaper, headline reads: “Nancy Reagan’s astrologer: How i Ran the White House” 

 

 

 

Walking in the snow this morning I was shivered not by the ordinary cold but by the realization everyone in America is walking around believing in his or her own Socratic Sign—that each creepy citizen has a daemonic harmonic gassing his or her cerebellum. I recalled Nancy Reagan and her astrologer. 

 

It was cold alright. I wondered what became of Nancy’s astrologer, Joan Quigley. I came in from the snow and did a quick internet search. Quigley is 86 and apparently still living in San Francisco. There the trail ends. I picture Ms. Quigley in a room filled with star charts. Perhaps she has a butler named Max. Maybe when the charts are right, she tells Max to get the car. 

 

Perhaps she and Nancy Reagan still talk. This is the season. Man its cold. Maybe they’re talking right now. 

 

Amazing what happens when you take the dogs out. I love the wild, post-diluvian world. Wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I suppose that’s my Socratic Sign. A little voice says, “keep on walkin’ and talkin’!”

 

Back to Joan Quigley: I do think it would be marvelous to have a phone pal who lives alone among Gnostic scrolls; who I could call anytime; who would say things like: “Go back to bed until 4 pm, then get up and have a taco.” Or: “go out today but for only 45 minutes. Then go home and read Charles Dickens.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Photo of 1950’s magazine ad featuring Ronald Reagan. Slogan: “Van Heusen Century shirts won’t wrinkle…ever! 

In his poem “The Quest” written at the beginning of World War II Auden wrote: 

 

Out of it steps our future, through this door

Enigmas, executioners and rules,

Her Majesty in a bad temper or

A red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools. 

 

This stanza occupied me on Christmas day. America has opened a door, its hinges slick. From corporate prisons, racially motivated laws, and the snooping of nation states, to wars on the poor, the disabled, and women’s rights my country (and yours) has extravagantly reconditioned Auden’s opening lines.  

 

Fate is sentimentality disguised as history. Each time a politician says diplomacy represents appeasement (Munich) or in turn says slavery wasn’t as bad as welfare, red-nosed big “F” fools assure us a darker fate than our children deserve. By spooning up the treacle of history they tell us things were better in the past and clearer. Can’t you see how clear it was? Santa Claus was white. The poor were grateful. And we open the door to misery.

 

The American poet Kenneth Rexroth said: “Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.”

Rexroth also said: “The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done. Nobody is going to read any advertising copy if he is what the Reichians call orgastically potent. This is a principle of the advertising copy writer, that he must stir up discontent in the family.”

**

I received an email late in the day: “There’s just one more gift to get. Yours.” Apple Computer wants me to buy something just for me. I thought of Rexroth. Of getting kicked in the nuts. A red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools. I’d been kicked by Apple Claus. 

**

I wrote in a notebook on Xmas afternoon: 

 

 

 

This is a test of the sub-Cartesian epistemology system:

For the next sixty seconds I will think nothing at all.

During that time I will effectively cease to exist. 

Any sightings of me will be strictly imaginary.

 

**

 

My wife Connie asked me yesterday morning what I was thinking. I said, “Oh not much.” But see the above. 

 

Are the holidays hard on you too?

 

“I don’t want to know you,” says the stare. Disabled people know the stare. It happens all day long. It happens regardless of your mood. There are many good books about the stare by scholars of disability. If you’re an artist you can put “the stare” into the Dice-a-Matic of cultural pan optics  and create an indicting performance—ironic and flinty. But the stare is ex-cathedra and a-performative. The stare is the stare. Its automatic, without mindfulness. Crip culture attacks the stare—re-performs it; disarticulates it; turns it into confetti. But stare don’t care. Stare don’t give a diddly damn. 

 

You look different. The aim of culture is to create language that bridges difference. Trouble is, human beings don’t live long enough to bridge anything. Here comes another staring baby, without the advantages of her great grandmother. Meanwhile staring is a genetic and neurological determination. Staring at unlike things is value neutral. 

 

Of course we have to stare. But what then? William Gass wrote “culture has completed its work when everything is a sign” but alas, from a disability studies perspective, culture has no lingo for aporia. Over the centuries we’ve failed to create the linguistic static to promote advantageous doubt.  

 

Comic books come close. Sci-fi too. And ancient stories like the Finnish Kalevala (from which Tolkein got most of his ideas). In general human beings desperately need stories that promote advantageous doubt about unlikeness.  

 

You can argue with my premise about the neutrality of the stare—the long history of social ostracism and scapegoating does, at first, belie my point, save that political exploitation of staring requires machinery, beatings, printing presses, Joseph Goebbels, Fox News, and legions of terrified parents. Even better: undedicated parents. Culture has completed its work when everyone is a sign. 

 

I’m just a blind guy. I walk with a dog. I don’t represent anything. I don’t portend God’s unhappiness. I don’t need you to pray for me. I don’t require a donation. I don’t want you to run in front of me and open the door. In general I like staring babies. They haven’t had the advantages of culture. 

 

  

 

  

 

    

 

Readers’ Note: Once again I’ve failed to send out Holiday Cards. 

 

Well, its been a big year in the Kuusisto household. Uncle Urpo Kuusisto (who is 108 years old BTW) invented the “reverse slingshot” and knocked out his right eye—BTW it wasn’t his good eye so he didn’t mind. The slingshot delivers vodka balls straight to your glottis if your aim is true. Maija Anna-Maija Anna Maija Kuusisto (who is 82) (and whose relationship with the rest of the family has not been precisely established) became convinced by overwhelming persuasion that one can find the true tomb of Jesus over the next hill. At first we kept her chained to the electric light pole in the yard, but she tore it out, dragging it behind her, trailing wires and sparks. At the suggestion of Sorpa Suru Kuusisto (home from college) we gave her a cocktail of Adderall and meat tenderizer and she’s now happily reading the Farmers’ Almanac backwards.     

This year, the biggest news in Kuusisto-land comes from the Communist side of the clan. Cousin Alpo Kuusisto (who is 108 years old BTW) lead a group of retired old men eating out (they call themselves ROMEO) in the singing of the Internationale at a Denny’s Restaurant in Fitchburg, Massachussetts. The police took no action because the sight of so many red phlebitis stockings robbed them of their customary stamina. Ah, anthropology! Other lefty news comes from Jussi Kuusisto who studies marketing at Slippery Rock College and has patented “The Old Joe Stalin Embalming Method” which he says, will allow every aging and unrepentant socialist to lie in state forever. “Picture it,” says Jussi, “old communists on severe display in every neighborhood in this bloody monolith of shopping they call America!” Jussi gets excited and we’re excited for him—as someone in our clan must make an honest living and we’re hoping the taxiderming of superannuated lefties will lead the way. The rest of the Kuusistos are up to their usual dark habits—watching flights of birds for omens, and of course, cooking atrocious meals. May your new year bring you endearments hitherto unimagined, a sincere wish, though we scarcely know you. 

 

     

I am slow. Alright. I’m not. I’m faster than Goethe’s cuckoo clock. Faster than a glass of water. For company I have a dictionary. Raspberries. Risible. Rococo. What’s that at my door? Its the Rosicrucians. 

 

In our youngest days when we were shaken awake by desires we loved the Phoebe bird. Even now, verging on age, we love the Phoebe. He sang from a birch as I passed this morning walking my dog. He thrilled my heart. My confused and abject little heart. 

 

A writer I admire once said there are many situations when the first person—second person pronoun monopoly of the English language is insufficient. I and You need gussying up. 

This is especially true in airports. To whit: “The passenger known as Kuusisto (see his ticket) would like the august and delightful employee of Curbcut Airlines (hereby identified as Herkimer Kiwi) to smile broadly and groove to the warmth of our combined and burning identification papers.” 

 

I wonder where the old, dried boys of my childhood are today? The ones who chased me with sticks because I was blind. Oh well. Goethe’s cuckoo clock cuckoos. “No time for weevils,” it says.

 

Let’s pass through the gate of horn. 

 

**

 

My mother was a woman of snow

My father was a man of snow

My fingers are made of snow

That is all

 

 

Äitini oli nainen lunta

Isäni oli mies lunta

Sormet tehty lumesta

Se on kaikki

 

 

**

 

I once ate a bear steak and felt rather bad about having done so. That is, I suffered only the ill effects that arise from eating your brother. 

 

**

 

I try to be funny—you know, only half in the world. In this way, the further griefs sometimes miss me. 

 

**

 

Thinking of the new pope—reminded of Carl Jung’s assertion Catholics are easier to cure of neuroses than Protestants. Francis wants more neuroses in the flock. And good for him. 

 

**

 

Here come the three strange angels formerly known as D.H. Lawrence. 

 

Let them in. 

 

 

 

The guide dog world is a small one. It surprises people to learn there are only 10,000 guide dog users in the United States. There are lots of reasons the number is small: blindness is a low incidence disability; not every blind person likes dogs; two thirds of “the blind” in America are over 65 which means, among other things, they may not be genuinely healthy enough to walk with a powerful dog. Add the indisputable fact the US doesn’t have comprehensive national rehabilitation services (providing outreach and information to newly disabled citizens) and “voila” you have the prospect that many people facing vision loss don’t know they qualify for a guide dog and they certainly don’t know guide dogs are offered free of charge.   

via www.planet-of-the-blind.com