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Pain is that joke you can’t un-hear though you try. Or more precisely: its the jest wherein you’re the punchline. Maybe you’re less than that—you’ve been reduced to a slur. For me as a child it was always “hey Blindo!” Or “here comes blindo!” Sometimes they’d call me “Mr. McGoo.” It turns out you can’t un-hear it. Its the triumph of the bullies. You’ll always be McGoo. You’ll be McGoo when you win a prestigious award. With your white stick or dog you’re McGoo at the ballgame. God help you if you lean close to see the beautiful petals of a strange flower. I did that once in a botanical garden and a guard rushed over to tell me it was forbidden. This was in a foreign city. I couldn’t figure out what was taboo: looking closely at a flower or trying to look. But I know the answer: my blindness would harm that loveliness. That man in the uniform knew it. I knew he knew it. We would not have a discussion about this. I moved on. So sometimes the slur is simply “no!”

I like to think of disabled people getting free. That they are not presently free should be indisputable. Human rights, the subject heading is a late arrival on earth. As far as I know the first person to use the term was Gerhard Ritter who coined the term in 1948. Ritter was the earliest scholar to write about the history of human rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act is now thirty-three years old. Disability freedom is a very new kid on the block. So if you’re fighting for disability inclusion, and taking into account cultural history, you’re a pioneer. But you’re alive to the hopes of the creatures inside all cripples. Free you may not be but freedom you shall continue to hold.

You’re still McGoo. In my case (as a professor at a noted university) I must contend with faculty and administrators who can barely tolerate my difference. One professor called me ignorant when I pointed out that his rudeness was potentially readable as ableism. Case closed. He was a genuine ableist and not a dime store knockoff. McGoo ye will always have with ye. Bigotry of all kinds assures you’ll never un-hear the slur, the crude joke, the perverse infantilization, the institutional neglect. Its a shame I’ve never been able to stand the voice of Jim Bacchus.

It wasn’t winter yet but the shrubs were kneeling down and the meadow was pale as milk…and the boy’s radio didn’t work…yet it was a day when he felt he was in the center of things…king of the streets…snow was coming…

**

The interviewer asks why I write about childhood… The answer is simple…that’s when they told me I was defective…

**

I think it was Transformer who said, “how clear every leaf is…they follow me all the way home…”

When the blind kid’s radio didn’t work, that was the radio…

**

And nowadays there’s a lot of talk about loneliness…I have to laugh…I was always on the frontier…leaning my face into the icy petals of the overlooked roadside flowers…

I read this morning that one third of America’s birds have vanished. Of course we shouldn’t call it America. North America? The United States? The birds are gone. I also read this morning that Thalidomide is back.

I remember a line by the poet Edith Sodergran: “I am blood’s whisper in men’s ears…”

This does nothing for the birds. I don’t know how to help them. My local town council is busy banning books while the forests burn.

Maybe the politicians will take books to the burning forests. And then they’ll hand out Thalidomide tablets.

* 

I’m thinking of these lines by Cesar Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet:

“There are blows in life so violent—I can’t answer!
Blows as if from the hatred of God; as if before them,
the deep waters of everything lived through
were backed up in the soul … I can’t answer!”

(translated by Robert Bly)

Oh I can’t answer but I’m searching the corrugated quick of the page.

Again I come back to the birds and Thalidomide.

**

Andrew Solomon says that depression is “grief out of proportion to circumstance.”

The circumstances suck.

Here’s a link to an article on the return of Thalidomide:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00002018-199921030-00002

Essay on Green Leaves

Midday, late summer clouds coming on. This is the hour when I was happiest as a child–alone in the woods, light suffused, everything quiet. Somewhere far off the town had a parade. I was alone in my cave-green, darker than morning village, trees donning sorrow hats. And the birds quiet. Hint of coming rain.

They sleep, they dream, they vanish
The men and women
Fir cones underfoot in my neighborhood
A toothache, a dropped memory
I promise, Dear Jesus I’ll be your envoy
But not this morning
And not this morning
Will I become a beautiful rose
They sleep, they dream…
My friend will I ever see you again
I hear, through the trees,
Someone building a house

All my poems begin this way:
My Lord, the pine tree
Stands near as darkness comes
Who is not alone
Who is not astonished
And the brief life
Waves its perpendicular hands

All those who believe I’m homeless—blind as I am
Walking with my stick or dog—
That woman in Boston who prayed for me
Who ran off when I offered to pray for her,
What’s wrong with a cripple’s prayer?

In London a girl cried “poor Dearie”
And thrust coins in my hand.
In Cleveland a red faced man
Followed me block after block
Proposing to help…better I thought

Than the alternatives—
Asylums; work houses.
In general the poets of my nation
See the blind as existential blanks.
But tired of standing for nothing

I sing my way down Broadway
The sweet, manifold syllables
Of William Yeats—
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind…

Blind I walk into the reddening glow. It is not the sunset or sunrise others see. Its my own retinas. The journey has no familiar speech. Still I go along thinking about the histories of sacrifice. Mostly I think of the hagiographies of common people.

**

Early this morning a neighbor says hello. I think: “I’m not a ghost, not yet.” The white bird of my soul is still here.

**

The sighted think, “he can scarcely see me, therefore he doesn’t exist.”

**

I pass through the branches, a visitant, one of those Roman ecstatics in February.

See all the apparently whole people walking around in their hidden half bodies. The joke is they’re temporarily “not” disabled so they get to pretend they’re complete. Compared to them the cripples are Odysseus or Wonder Woman.

At least the folks in my tribe fully understand the shifting vicissitudes of the inner life. Andrew Solomon put it this way: “Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”

Being disabled is the only “whole” condition there is.
Being disabled is to laugh and cry simultaneously.
Being disabled is to wish always to free the zoo.
Being disabled is the truest quality of happiness.

Throw off whole-person costumes you able bodied types!
Dance with us!

**

Meanwhile, a memory from 1994:

I was at the guide dog school and it was Sunday. I did some unrehearsed and ridiculous dances with my dog. I had a blues harp and I played and lunged around the room and she jumped and wagged. My hair was crazy. I was a Viking beserker, the stranger you don’t invite home to meet your mother. I was cross-eyed and happy and unkempt. I was blind Enkidu. And that’s when a knock came at the door and I opened it and there before me was the Mayor of New York City and his family—his wife and children and a photographer, and the president of the school. “Hi,” said Rudolph Giuliani, “I’m Rudy Giuliani.” It was 1994. Rudy wasn’t yet “America’s Mayor” and he hadn’t yet cashed in all his political and PR capital as “the man who cleaned up New York” but he was working on it. Instead of his daily charcoal Armani suit he was wearing a “Members Only” aqua baseball jacket and blue jeans. He was having a day in the country. Life was “tres sportif” and photogenically arranged, save that now the Mayor was meeting Volroth the Hairy whose forest green cable sweater was covered with dog fur; whose hair was pure electrolysis—his hair almost on fire with weirdness. To better understand this moment, you must know I’m a lifelong Democrat, without reservation and I wasn’t certain I should touch Giuliani, for I am truly a primitive; he might have had cooties; but his kids were there, and my dog Corky was poking her head into the hallway and Giuliani’s little daughter had come forward and was reaching out and so I shook the man’s hand because what else could I do—and I said something about the wonders of the guide dog school and its amazing dogs and staff. And the Mayor smiled. He had one of those glacial smiles. Its chief asset was its largeness. And the entourage moved on.

**

The invention of a tactile alphabet produced the promise of literacy for the blind, which sounds significant enough, but I think it’s also useful to think of literacy as Peter McClaren describes it: “an animated common trust in the power of love, a belief in the reciprocal power of dialogue, and a commitment to ‘conscientization’ and political praxis.” The blind appear in a communitarian sense when they’re given books and the means to read them. Books, especially in Braille represent a common faith in the power of community.

Someone should have taught Braille to Rudy.
The poor bastard. Like everyone in the Trump circle, he’s just a half human walking pretend-whole-person charade.