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He found it difficult to tell the story of grass and the aspen
that shivered
and the names inside him.

Such a boyhood
Holding perfectly still in the green unspoken.
If the grass was democratic it was owing to unspeakable loneliness.

He lay low and still.
The times were plain.
He knew the names—
A favorite was the White Throated Sparrow
Called the Peabody Bird
Whose little song could break your heart.

This was in the final days before television
When some of us played dead
And really heard the bird songs.

Suppose that for just one day you are not trapped in habitual thinking. Let’s call it "leap day" and imagine that green forces rise through human beings until they finally see the earth as a collective heritage and our planet is no longer a real estate sandbox populated by covetous children. Yes and as John Lennon said, "and no religion too."

**

Meanwhile, suddenly everyone in America is lonely. I was always so. It never occurred to me there was anything different. As a boy I’d watch the other kids playing ball. They shouted quite a bit. And so they were lonely too. They were like flames vanishing inside red coals.

**

Cripple’s Lament

    “they say I'm alienated from reality
    as if I had the power to decide life”

                    —Sanni Purhonen

They say I’m blind and they swap my eyes
For jellyfish—or a coral in darkness

They say I’m nothing more than wind enraged

For cover, in polite society they say I’m like them
But they don’t invite me to the grand reunion

Its written someplace I’m a match end

When I was small I carried
A dead pocket watch

I thought one day I’ll have a clean reality

They say I’m a dry season

They change their minds: I’m a rumor of tears

They say I’m a poor infinity

I’m not afraid

**

Anyway, so on leap day the cripples no longer stand for, no longer represent abjection. And, as Transtromer once wrote, the houses walk sideways like crabs and the sun makes statues blink.

Outskirts, October

I would tell you with this poem
Which is a color
A melodramatic color
Like green leaves seen through tears
I’d tell you about the forest of blindness
With its twilit roots
But you must believe me
When I speak to you
Now and forever
You with your wide eyes
Which only signal danger
You who can’t imagine
Gliding sightlessly down a street
Are those people or birds
High up on the balconies
I’m passing between trees
I can be free
Not as you conceive it
But waving dry stalks
Hearing the air whistle

In the morning what with rain
Beating against the house
Rain falls inside me

Gently at first like a slim memory
Of blue nets by the sea

**

And if I cried out, what of that?

**

Hard rain at the windows
When I switch on the light
My shadow is more real
Than my body

**

Homeland you’re my sadness
Mother-ghost and father-ghost
Rain falling and falling

“Don’t try to please anyone,” I tell myself
“Stop trying so hard…”

**

Because I was an old man as a child
This is nothing new
The darkening season inside me
Truths draw nearer
Then as always they put out to sea…

I know, I know, there are those who call—
Two horses in particular
So that I, a blind man
Hear them like books read aloud.

Each has his voice
Each wants a touch.
I run my fingers gently
Down their long foreheads
And lightly across their noses.

What are we waiting for?
What are we going to do about it
In the meantime?

When I was a kid I learned a lot about stigma. Blind and a bit frail I was routinely bullied by children. But the adults were worse. From my earliest days in school to college disability meant I was a problem. One professor said I didn’t belong in his class if I couldn’t see. My story isn’t unique and believe it or not it endures for thousands even as I type these words.

By the time I was middle aged I thought I’d mastered the art of disablement. I’d learned to be proud of my blind life and I wrote a best selling book about the matter. I turned up frequently in the national media. I was a joyous disabled man. Moreover I was celebrating others. I thought I’d figured things out. If I was blind I also had value. That American thing.

I didn’t recognize that my triumph would be a limited thing. As I near the end of my sixties ageism is now upon me. Not long ago I posted something about disability discrimination on Facebook and a very young disabled person commented that old disabled people should “just go away”—a thing so nasty even the “Snark Fairy” would wash her mouth out with soap had she trespassed in the same way.

I puzzle over the matter. If you’ve a disability and you sneer at older cripples you might think you won’t be disabled when you grow older. In the field of disability studies we call this the “medical model” of disability. It’s the idea that doctors will cure you. And if they can’t fix you today then they’ll do it tomorrow. In this view the cripples only have value insofar as they can be fixed.

Maybe the callow cripples don’t believe this. Perhaps they think the old crips failed to make the world fully welcoming place. I remember telling my dad his generation caused the war in Viet Nam. I was 16 when I said it. This is a more likely scenario.

In his essay “Of Cripples” Montaigne wrote of gullibility, a curious word and I’ll return to it in a moment. Here is the master:

“Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye. I find that we are not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as a thing conformable to our being.”

How I love the phrase “to be gulled”! Gull comes from Middle English “to swallow” or, and this is even more interesting, to pretend to swallow—one imagines its early usage—“he gulled me with the proffered poisoned pill for I swear he’d swallowed it…” Gull is from “gole” which means throat. Some lies will stick in your gullet.

Truth and lies are faced alike so long as they appear or sound profitable. Gull capitalizes on wish. Desire is conformable with our being—is our being—and Montaigne, like Shakespeare, understood the dread implication of modernity: we’d rather be lied to than question our yearnings.

Montaigne never uses the word cripple in his essay. It appears only in his title—and so implicitly his readers are the cripples, all of them. All pretend to be someone or something they are not— soldiers, prelates, merchants, scholars…everyone is alike in his falseness so long as his vanity is conformable with being.

Cripples were everywhere in Montainge’s time. The blind were still thought to be uneducable and were turned out to beg. While the juridical blinding of criminals had largely ceased in Europe by the 17th century blindness in particular, but crippled-ness generally still carried the symbolism of thievery. Moreover, there were false cripples, a story as old as humanity itself.

So maybe the young cripples don’t believe they’re disabled at all. Instead they’re gulled by a feature of contemporary identity politics, namely that if you insist that you’re remarkable you needn’t worry about anything else.

At twenty she came to me
Saying: you will write books
And some people will read them
But you’ll not be happy
Life will become
A muffled clamor
You’ll be foreign
To yourself
Like a man
Who speaks
The glaucous dialects
Of herdsmen
And all I could hear
Was “books”
Authorship—
Not understanding
The loneliness
To come
And the crying out
For trees
To rescue me

There’s a lot of talk about Americans being lonely these days. From Hillary Clinton to NPR to Harvard a consensus has emerged that loneliness is now a major health concern. I do not scoff at this. But as a blind person who’s been disabled from childhood, I have some qualms. I’ve experienced acute periods of loneliness throughout my life. To paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel he’s “my old friend” and I learned long ago he’s sometimes my only friend.

In the old days I didn’t know how to be with people. Sure there was all that “not fitting in” known to the poor and cripples—but now I see biographical detail has nothing to do with it. I am deliciously lonely. I’ve wept in foreign churches, swum in the Aegean in winter when only fishermen are about; stood on my hands where Finland meets Sweden touching two lonesome places at once. I’ve walked in a monastery, was found by a priest who carried a candle.

Sartre said: “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”

Years ago I read a poem, east European—
Its a hard life, and art won’t help you live…

Rain at the window

And last week a dear friend
Went to his grave

Why write?

The long grass and a field horse
Ask me to persist…

I shout to life: odd or even
As if the world had a stake in me

As if only one man’s voice could steer shadows…

Disabled people don’t need interlocutors. We can talk to ourselves. I’ve often thought we are best alone. Some years ago I read a poem by the American poet James Tate wherein he describes a man who’s so lonely he goes to a stock yard and buys a sow’s ear which he sews to the back of his couch that he may have a listener. Tate’s poem ends with that which is fine but of course he leaves out the low voice of the man rising and falling as he divides up the future and arranges grains of sand. I’m digressing of course.

The disabled are alone even when they’re in crowds. We talk inside the carapace, the Iron Maiden, the filigreed Venetian mask, whatever you want to call ableist projections—we’re not of this world according to the “man on the street” and so the Hell with it, I’d rather talk to the inside me. Now the jailer’s cat listens to birdsong and stays hungry. I confess I’d like to have an authentic talk. And I have three adult friends who are, at present, non-disabled, who understand me when I discuss my sow’s ear life inside the carapace of disability in the big normative world. Just so you know: that last sentence was a pleasure to write. I’m digressing of course.

Alone with my sow’s ear I reckon how the world of normalcy presses against me. Its a heavier thing than gravity. Normalcy world speaks like Iago. “Trust me,” it says. “We’ll understand you today.” Little sow, they were joking. My blindness scares the daylights out of them. Isn’t that funny?

My “inner life” of disability is a sort of desolate wildness. Its also despairingly lovely. The non-blind sometimes know what its like where I live—Gunnar Ekelof wrote:

“My world is a dark one
But I will go home in the darkness
Through the grass, under the woods.”

If you object and say I’m mystifying blindness that’s OK. I champion your right to say what you like. And if you’re blind like me and you don’t talk to a dismembered porcine ear, that’s OK too. I don’t worship life so much as I worship learning to use life. Each of us must do this in his, her, or they singular way. Each life is an experiment. The lines of force are on the inside however and as Emily Dickinson said, “where the meanings are.”

As for mystifying blindness all I can tell you is that my world is a dark one…I go home in darkness…and yes, through the grass, under the woods…

Ekelof is my interlocutor. I hardly need a couch or a dead pig’s ear to talk to him. He wrote:

“I had a confused feeling I was inside my own eye which was opening again.”