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I am traveling to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan with writers Chinelo Okparanta, Christopher Merrill, and Ann Hood and Kelly Bedeian of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Because of the long flights involved I’m leaving my beloved guide dog at home and will be getting around with my beat up old white cane. I confess to some blind anxiety–traveling is always exciting but with a vision impairment its also a bit tricky. I still remember almost getting run over in London about 8 years ago, again using the white cane. There’s a damn good reason blind people travel with dogs. 

They are trained to prevent you from stepping into harm’s way. But I’m going. The opportunity to meet with poets and writers from central asia and travel with such excellent contemporaries is too much to pass up. So I’m packing my duds as Walt Whitman might say. 

With any luck I will be posting from the silk road! 

One day he saw he’d grown old in the service of stories. Salt on bread, dusk and heavy furniture–he sat alone for a long time. A geranium caught the last light at a window. Stories, reeling time backwards, the charity of time, a lifetime’s habit of making time soft. The old woman beside the Oyster River, who picked flowers; who the children knew to be peculiar–someone said the word “lobotomy” though no one knew what it meant–how he’d made up a story about her, so long ago. The woman with her florid face, who talked to herself, she took in the stray animals. Now, he saw he was old as well, saw the stars were of a different magnitude, and still, he thought, someone has to take the lost creatures, because the world is both harsh and simple.

Say what you like, physical and intellectual differences still trouble the public nerve in America. The best evidence comes not from news reports (though they are bad enough) but by way of our entertainment media. From television’s “Law and Order” to “Criminal Minds”–from the crime novels of John Sanford to “name anyone” the imprint of deviance and disability is legion. This is hardly news in the disability community where good writing about it has been underway for quite some time, (I urge you to read Beth Haller’s book “Representing Disability in an Ableist World” as well as her excellent blog “Media Dis&Dat”) but what is news is the scope of the problem. The scapegoating industry is out of control.

The cynical proceedings on Capitol Hill aimed at linking mental illness to gun violence (or the potential for same) are not reality based. The average American would be surprised to know that people with mental illnesses are far less likely to commit violent crimes than the general population. This is the god’s honest truth, but you wouldn’t know it from the NRA induced gas cloud rising over DC. Worse than the wholesale political scapegoating of mental illness (a red herring if ever there was one) is the fact that Congress kept citizens with mental disabilities and their advocates out of the proceedings.

While the NRA and its supporters assert their right to bear arms the rights of people with mental illnesses are in jeopardy. The right to privacy, the right to confidentiality. And dignity of course. I find I’m rather old fashioned. I still hold out for dignity.

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Good afternoon. I presume I’m the first person to address you as honors graduates. Because I’m almost certainly the first I think I’m allowed to let you in on a couple of secrets, for after all, what’s the use of commencing without good old fashioned sub-rosa pearls of wisdom? Are you ready? Okay.

The world before you does not know you’re coming. You can be forgiven for thinking it does, for many of you already have plans for graduate school or fellowships, and some among you have found jobs reflecting your interests and others may be taking time to let everything sink in, which is a euphemistic expression but “taking time” has a glorious history and we shouldn’t forget it–yet all these circumstances aside, the world has no idea you’re on the way. As the great folk singer Greg Brown says: “The world ain’t what you think it is, it’s just what it is.”

This is a really good thing. Why? Because right now, and I do mean right now, you have a chance to enter the indifferent world with the empowerment that comes with thought. One way to imagine this is embodied by the term “fresh thinking” which is a favored expression of my friend D.J. Savarese who among other things is the first non-speaking student with autism to attend Oberlin College. Fresh thinking. A blank slate. A chance to ask hard questions, because, why not? The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker writes of his book called “The Blank Slate”:

“This book is about the moral, emotional, and political colorings of the concept of human nature in modern life.” Pinker wants us to understand that the nature vs. nurture debate about human development is far from being a tired containment in our age of rapid intellectual and social changes and that we have a greater obligation to understand ourselves right now than at any other time in history. Pinker believes in what he calls “a realistic, biologically informed humanism” and that fresh ideas can “expose the psychological unity of our species beneath the superficial differences of physical appearance and parochial culture.”

For Pinker, hard questions quote “make us appreciate the wondrous complexity of the human mind, which we are apt to take for granted precisely because it works so well. They identify the moral intuitions that we can put to work in improving our lot. They promise a naturalness in human relationships, encouraging us to treat people in terms of how they do feel rather than how some theory says they ought to feel. They offer a touchstone by which we can identify suffering and oppression wherever they occur, unmasking the rationalizations of the powerful. They give us a way to see through the designs of self-appointed social reformers who would liberate us from our pleasures. They renew our appreciation for the achievements of democracy and of the rule of law. And they enhance the insights of artists and philosophers who have reflected on the human condition.”

So pearl number one is yours: an opportunity. Fresh thinking is in demand just now and I know you’re the right people to deliver it.

Pearl number two is more avuncular, a little less lofty, but nonetheless important. I think it’s spelled out nicely by this quote from the writer George Sand: “Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.”

Notice that Sand makes kindness sound easy–”know how to acquire without meanness” she says. What Sand proposes is not easy, for acquisition, whether it be of ideas or capital is de facto a competition and as Tom Hanks said famously in “A League of Their Own” “There’s no crying in baseball!” Kindness requires empathy which recent studies suggest is a quality that dogs possess naturally but humans need to learn. In the Renée Crown Honors Program we encourage you to try your hand at civic engagement because community activism is kindness mixed with curiosity and represents the practice of living an empathetic life. But since I’m speaking here as your uncle, let me add that kindness requires deliberative reflection and one more thing: you have to slow down to achieve it. In a world of increasingly fast thinking kindness is at a disadvantage. There’s no app for it. Split second decision making ignores it. Kindness is often described as a simple thing, but its actually a factor of sustained consciousness. I urge you in whatever down time you have to turn off your televisions and video games and read anything that promotes kindly wisdom. If it has humor in it, all the better. I frequently reread Huckleberry Finn and seldom reread Moby Dick. Twain’s book is about kindness, Melville’s is about unbridled capitalism.

Lord knows we need more kindness in the world. The Dalai Lama, with whom many of you are familiar said:

“This is my simple religion. No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy. Your own mind, your own heart is the temple. Your philosophy is simple kindness.”

So go forth class of 2013, and be both fresh and kind. And may you never grow tired of the liberating value of ideas.

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Day one with a new guide dog is a milkweed moment: you’re swelling as if you might burst. In turn everything is softer and the world is open. My first solo walk with Corky was a festival of sorts–the trainer said goodbye at LaGuardia airport and Cork and I were suddenly on our own and we walked around the American Airlines gates like two celebrities, a freshly washed yellow Labrador with a huge head and big smile, and a mostly washed man with a look on his face that said, “I think I ate the canary.” Day one with a guide dog. Hour one. We walked past a hotdog stand; up a flight of stairs; down an adjacent corridor; flights leaving for Las Vegas; we thought we could go there too if we wanted to. But we didn’t want to. We were happy in the rainbow of the world.

Back on March 3 I posted the entry below about Lera Auerbach’s opera “The Blind” which will be performed in July as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer Festival. I’m reposting what I wrote because its worth troubling the public nerve on behalf of people with disabilities and, among other things, that’s my job. It’s very interesting that Lincoln Center has declared that opera goers will be required to wear blindfolds during the performance. It’s as if they’ve decided that the opera itself isn’t bad enough as public instruction about visual disability–they need to make certain that able bodied people experience temporary vision loss as a means of reinforcing the metaphor of blindness as an aid to musical comprehension. Either that or they want to scare the able bodied into a state of cheap gratitude–“there but for the grace of god go I” etc. 

The doctor in Uncle Vanya says famously: “they will call us fools, blind, ignorant, they will despise us”. Perpetuating stereotypes about the blind is a serious business. 

Thoughts on Lera Auerbach’s Opera “The Blind” Upcoming at American Opera Project’s Summer Festival at Lincoln Center

Note: After I posted my dismay about Lera Auerbach’s operatic revival of Maeterlinck’s  1890 play “The Blind” on Facebook, her publisher Sikorski removed the following description from its website: 

“At a lonely clearing in a wood, a group of blind people await the return of a priest who led them there in order to enable them to enjoy the last rays of the sun before the beginning of winter. Only the sound of the nearby sea can be heard. The longer they wait, the more restless the blind people become; in their desperation they realise that they are helpless and cannot move from their place. Their fear escalates to naked terror when they discover the corpse of the priest. The blind people form a circle round the dead man and begin to pray for forgiveness and salvation. Steps become perceptible during the prayer. The presence of something mysterious makes the blind people panic; they pray ever more fervently. In his mother’s arms, the small child, the only person in the group who can see, breaks out sobbing. What does the child see? Is it rescue, the rescue so ardently hoped for, or is it death?”

**

Here is Maeterlinck’s mise en scene, and the play’s opening dialogue:

A very ancient northern forest eternal of aspect, beneath a sky profoundly starred. In the midst, and towards the depths of night, a very old priest is seated wrapped in a wide black cloak. His head and the upper part of his body, slightly thrown back and mortally still, are leaning against the bole of an oak tree, huge and cavernous. His face is fearfully pale and of an inalterable waxen 

lividity ; his violet lips are parted. His eyes, dumb and fixed, no longer gaze at the visible side of eternity, and seem bleeding beneath a multitude of immemorial sorrows and of tears. His hair, 

of a most solemn white, falls in stiff and scanty locks upon a face more illumined and more weary than all else that surrounds it in the intent silence of the gloomy forest. His hands, extremely lean, are rigidly clasped on his lap. To the right, six old blind men are seated upon stones, the stumps of trees, and dead leaves. To the left, separated from them by an uprooted tree and fragments of rock, six women, blind also, are seated facing the old men. Three of them are praying and wailing in hollow voice and without pause. Another is extremely old. The fifth, in an attitude of mute insanity^ holds on her knees a little child asleep. The sixth is strangely young, and her hair inundates her whole being. The women, as well as the old men, are clothed in ample garments, sombre and uniform. Most of them sit waiting with their elbows on their knees and their faces between their hands; and all seem to have lost the habit of useless gesture, and no longer turn their heads at the stifled and restless noises of the island. Great funereal trees, yews, 

weeping willows, cypresses, enwrap them in their faithful shadows. Not far from the priest, a 

cluster of long and sickly daffodils blossoms in the night. It is extraordinarily dark in spite of 

the moonlight that here and there strives to dispel for a while the gloom of the foliage. 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

Is he not coming yet? 

SECOND BLIND MAN. 

You have waked me! 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

I was asleep too. 

THIRD BLIND MAN. 

I was asleep too. 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

Is he not coming yet? 

SECOND BLIND MAN. 

I hear nothing coming. 

THIRD BLIND MAN. 

It must be about time to go back to the 

asylum. 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

We want to know where we arc! 

SECOND BLIND MAN. 

It has grown cold since he left 

FIRST BLIND MAN. 

We want to know where we are! 

THE OLDEST BLIND MAN. 

Does any one know where we are? 

**

I was alerted to the upcoming performance of Auerbach’s opera by someone wishing to enlist me as a post-production panelist. I won’t name names, nor do I want to spoil the tenor of an idea–given the offensive and ableist representation of blindness at the center of Maeterlinck’s play, and with no evidence of irony from Auerbach herself, a panel of disability studies scholars to follow the July performance at Lincoln Center may be a good idea. I use conditional language because I’ve been trying (without success) to find a sufficiently tasteless analogy for this revival. A colleague who is a disability studies scholar likens it to staging “Triumph of the Will” or “Birth of a Nation” but I don’t think these will “do” for we fought wars against the “isms” in those examples and last I looked we haven’t broadly resisted pejorative and disenfranchising metaphors of disability in the arts or our politics.  

No, my analogy for Auerbach’s re-dedication of Maeterlinck is Amos ‘n Andy the American radio show from the Great Depression (later a series of movies and a TV sitcom) where two white men in black face (Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll) pretended to be aimless and shambling “negroes”.   

Lest you think I’m being too hard on Auerbach, here is what she says about the enterprise:

“I love Maeterlinck. When I read ‘The Blind’ I thought to myself – this story is a perfect opera. Or anti-opera. And it needs to be done a-cappella. Since some of the characters are continuously praying or chanting – this provides a perfect structure for a chamber-music approach to balancing of the voices where some of the voices provide a constant harmonic base, while the others play more prominent voices.”

**

Once oppression is reduced to aesthetics you can say whatever you like. Amos ‘n Andy can be reconstituted as an ironic paean to oppression–two white men who had to make their terrible living by lampooning black men in the age of lynchings, You see, its man’s inhumanity to man! 

Blindness lends itself to paltry and derisory metaphors–psychic imminence, vaticism, despair, death, compensatory talent, and of course utter hopelessness. These things have no genuine connection with blindness save that figurative influence holds a strong place in the public imagination. One wonders if Ms. Auerbach knows that 70 % of the blind remain unemployed in the United States despite having degrees from Princeton and Swarthmore. One wonders if Ms. Auerbach will stage this production with blind opera singers–though I already know the answer to that. 

I was asked to say nothing about the upcoming performance or the effort to create a post-performance panel, as apparently Lincoln Center hasn’t decided whether this disability studies  panel is a good idea. But they’ve apparently decided it will be lovely to have the audience experience blindness by means of artificial darkness and there will be atomizers with evocative scents and controlled temperature shifts for the credulous. I’m thinking odor of wormwood and gall might be nice. A few stinks from the illud tempus of superstitious ideas.   

Back to Amos ‘n Andy. Would someone from Lincoln Center call up Al Sharpton and tell him “we’re staging an operatic revival of an old classic–it’s probably a good idea to have a panel, and we’d like you to be on it, but don’t say anything for the time being. 

I’m an American poet, memoirist, translator, essayist, professor, public policy advisor, and disability rights activist. As a result I’m suspicious of aesthetes. I’m also chary of neo-liberalism and hipsterism. Don’t tell me to shut up. Here’s what I wrote on Facebook:

The description of the opera on Lera Auerbach’s website left me speechless, inasmuch as it employs nearly every conceivable “ableist” cliche about blindness one can employ–blindness is embedded in her précis with more cliches than any one person may creditably imagine. In fact the synopsis is so offensive I’m left with a dislocated mandible which I hope is a temporary condition as I’m at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts and there are no local dentists. How could Ms. Auerbach imagine that in 2013 blindness can still be used as a metaphor for lack of knowing or knowledgeability; powerlessness, spiritual failure, immobility, or worse, stand as a metonymic reduction for death itself?

It’s interesting to me that of the several disability studies scholars I’ve written to about this, only two have answered–one to say he likes Maeterlinck and while the premise is offensive, a nice panel should do just the trick. Another wrote to congratulate me for standing up for blind people. Most have avoided saying anything–I suspect they want to be on the panel. I know how politics works. 

Now Sikorski has taken down the description. Good for them. But the conceit of the production lives on: blind people, aleotoric, driven by cosmological forces beyond our ken, people asleep or in terror. It’s really hard to believe. But then again it’s easy to believe. They don’t teach disability studies at Juilliard.  

I know what’s coming: I’m going to be accused of extremism by disability studies scholars who want to be empaneled. But I talk daily to real blind people and they’re suffering, not because they lack education or technology or ambition but because he public still lives in Maeterlinck-land. 

The blind are less powerful than the organized deaf, less apparent than wheelchair racers, and since blindness is a low incidence disability its easy to talk about us without hearing an informed response. 

Meanwhile I’m going to write an opera in which the blind, like dragonfly larva, crawl over a murky lakebottom singing in indeterminate tones the Mosaic Standard from Ur.

There’s an article over at Jezebel about Rian Dean, a woman employee of Abercrombie who was banished to the stockroom because her prosthetic arm didn’t fit the “look” the company wants. Before I say more about Rian’s story, I want to mention Hortense Smith, the author of the Jezebel piece. I am an old blind guy. I’ve fought all my life for inclusion in the mainstream. I know a thing or two about being banished. Accordingly I love prose like this:

Just in case their racism, sexism, and general awfulness hasn’t been enough to turn you away from Abercrombie & Fitch after all these years, here’s another glimpse of the inner workings of the horrible store.

When I previously (and gleefully) wrote about the economic troubles that Abercrombie was having a few months back, I mentioned that my personal hatred for the store comes from the fact that one of the women I was in the intensive inpatient unit with during my treatment for anorexia was heavily recruited by the store just days before her hospitalization (she was incredibly underweight) because she had “the look” they wanted. Turns out that this horrific “look policy” doesn’t just revolve around being stick-thin; according to Riam Dean, she was forced to work in the stockroom, as opposed to on the floor, at Abercrombie’s London flagship store because her prosthetic arm didn’t fit the company’s attractiveness standards. You stay classy, Abercrombie!

Oh be still my old grumpy blind man’s heart! Hortense is giving Abercrombie a good spank! In the bloody monolith of commodity fetishism and corporate greed Abercrombie wants its employees to stand alertly at the cash register, half starved, tricked out in skimpy tee shirts and pre-washed jeans, and by God they need all their limbs in order to suggest emaciation. By God! A prosthesis might look too healthy!

Here’s what Rian had to say:

“A worker from what they call the “visual team”, people who are employed to go round making sure the shop and its staff look up to scratch, came up to me and demanded I take the cardigan off. I told her, yet again, that I had been given special permission to wear it. A few minutes later my manager came over to me and said: “I can’t have you on the shop floor as you are breaking the Look Policy. Go to the stockroom immediately and I’ll get someone to replace you. I pride myself on being quite a confident girl but I had never experienced prejudice like that before and it made me feel utterly worthless. Afterwards I telephoned the company’s head office where a member of staff asked whether I was willing to work in the stockroom until the winter uniform arrived. That was the final straw. I just couldn’t go back.”

As a blind person I don’t always trust the “visual team” but when I do, I trust people who have, at least once, read the Communist Manifesto. Or Hannah Arendt. Or Kristeva. Or, or. or…

The best article about Abercrombie is by Benoit Denizet-Lewis over at Salon. Here’s why I like it:

Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says “dude” a lot. He’ll say, “What a cool idea, dude,” or, when the jeans on a store’s mannequin are too thin in the calves, “Let’s make this dude look more like a dude,” or, when I ask him why he dyes his hair blond, “Dude, I’m not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders.”

This fall, on my second day at Abercrombie & Fitch’s 300-acre headquarters in the Ohio woods, Jeffries — sporting torn Abercrombie jeans, a blue Abercrombie muscle polo, and Abercrombie flip-flops — stood behind me in the cafeteria line and said, “You’re looking really A&F today, dude.” (An enormous steel-clad barn with laminated wood accents, the cafeteria feels like an Olympic Village dining hall in the Swiss Alps.) I didn’t have the heart to tell Jeffries that I was actually wearing American Eagle jeans. To Jeffries, the “A&F guy” is the best of what America has to offer: He’s cool, he’s beautiful, he’s funny, he’s masculine, he’s optimistic, and he’s certainly not “cynical” or “moody,” two traits he finds wholly unattractive.

Jeffries’ endorsement of my look was a step up from the previous day, when I made the mistake of dressing my age (30). I arrived in a dress shirt, khakis and dress shoes, prompting A&F spokesman Tom Lennox — at 39, he’s a virtual senior citizen among Jeffries’ youthful workforce — to look concerned and offer me a pair of flip-flops. Just about everyone at A&F headquarters wears flip-flops, torn Abercrombie jeans, and either a polo shirt or a sweater from Abercrombie or Hollister, Jeffries’ brand aimed at high school students.

When I first arrived on “campus,” as many A&F employees refer to it, I felt as if I had stepped into a pleasantly parallel universe. The idyllic compound took two years and $131 million to complete, and it was designed so nothing of the outside world can be seen or heard. Jeffries has banished the “cynicism” of the real world in favor of a cultlike immersion in his brand identity. The complex does feel like a kind of college campus, albeit one with a soundtrack you can’t turn off. Dance music plays constantly in each of the airy, tin-roofed buildings, and when I entered the spacious front lobby, where a wooden canoe hangs from the ceiling, two attractive young men in Abercrombie polo shirts and torn Abercrombie jeans sat at the welcome desk, one checking his Friendster.com messages while the other swayed subtly to the Pet Shop Boys song “If Looks Could Kill.”

And of course Denizet-Lewis has hit the nail on the head. The look, enforced by the visual team, is for a thrillingly expensive deadness. 

Theorizing disability is like entertaining the court of Queen Victoria. Doctor Galvani applies electricity to body bits he’s collected from a charnel house and dismembered hands jump. The Earls and Dukes squirm in their seats. Afterwards no one knows what happened except the doctor and all those dead fingers.

Writing creatively about disability is like entertaining the court of Queen Victoria. Annie Oakley shoots an apple off the head of a wooden Indian from an impossible distance. Earls and Dukes squirm. Afterwards everyone thinks Annie absolutely must write her memoirs.

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Denis Diderot, the first intellectual advocate for the blind observed: “all abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs”.  By “study” he meant something more than dull, acquisitive method. Paul Feyerabend, the philosopher of science put it this way: “the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes”. I’m in mind of “anything goes” this morning because poetry at its best breaks containments of sensory lingo and offers anarchic signs–reintroducing us to the astonishing nature of perception. Feyerabend again: “Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress.” 

When Feyerabend talked about the misuse of language he was calling for resistance to method–and, by turns, hoping for the advancement of serendipity. Crick and Watson discovered the molecular structure of DNA by playing with puzzles. Break your method. 

Here are three poems that Feyerabend would have loved:

Orange

It was orange as always, when I heard the wind,

Orange it is–the sound of wind in spring

It made the branches swing. It colored every little thing.

….

It smelled in orange–that sound of wind in spring,

Orange it is–as always–the sudden wind

It kept on getting wilder–its orange on every thing.

–Tito Mukhopadhyay

You sew

I study your statistical method

Your formula sheet is a map of stars

I use

the seahorse’s coordinate system

–Risto Rasa (translated from the Finnish by Stephen Kuusisto)

Pulling a Rowboat Up Among Lake Reeds

In the Ashby reeds it is already night,

though it is still day out on the lake.

Darkness has soaked into the shaded sand.

And how many other darknesses it reminds me of!

The darkness the moment after a child is born,

blood pouring from the animal’s neck,

the slender metal climbing toward the moon.

–Robert Bly

**

The sensory world is less acculturated than the narrative and grammatical ones and that is worth celebrating each waking moment.