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Years ago (precisely 23) I heard Kurt Vonnegut Jr. give a talk in which he suggested that there were only three kinds of plots for a story: the first, he said, involved a person of great success or good fortune who steps on a cosmic banana peel and falls horribly into tragic misery; the second was totally the reverse–the “Cinderella” plot wherein a “wretch” gains good fortune. The last was a yo-yo affair in which the main character goes up and down and down and up–with lots of variants.  

Although I adore Mr. Vonnegut’s work and treasure his memory I think no one should wholly believe this, especially if you plan on writing creative prose. Plot may be materially limited to the scenarios above but a great piece of writing isn’t driven by plot any more than your car is driven by its tires. In short: plot is simply the incidental journey. Or to put this another way: the frame of the story is the thing that matters.

This is especially true in the fourth genre known as creative nonfiction. The non-fictionist has to write about things that have happened either to the writer or to other people. Sometimes he or she must write about the globe and its hurricanes or about nations afflicted by war. Whatever the subject the thing that matters is what the writer makes of the incidents and not the incidents themselves. In the writing trade this is called dramatic or comic irony. What does the narrator know “now” as opposed to yesterday or a decade ago or even ten minutes ago?  The cultivation of this irony is the literary variant of what Daniel Goleman has called “emotional intelligence”. It is a tricky craft. Done poorly it sounds like Dorothy at the end of “The Wizard of Oz” who tells us she’s learned never to search for happiness beyond her own backyard. Done correctly the voice of the writer assumes a quiet and confident quality–a thing that is often delicate and emotionally quiescent.

Here is a lovely example of the technique from Christopher Buckley’s moving memoir “Losing Mum and Pup”–an autobiographical treatment of his famous parents’ complex marriage and their final challenging years. Its a book that many with ageing parents will take to heart and for those of us who have lost our parents its a superb paradigm of  narrative quiescence to say the least. In sum: all too often there is no good or bad fortune in real life save what we imagine in our times alone. I’ll end with Christopher Buckley: 

 

“Yesterday, I was driving behind a belchy city bus on the way back from the grocery store and suddenly found myself thinking (not for the first time) about whether Pup is in heaven. He spent so much of his life on his knees in church, so much of his life doing the right thing by so many people, a million acts of generosity. I’m–I shouldn’t use the word–dying of curiosity: How did it turn out, Pup? Were you right after all? Is there a heaven? Is Mum there with you? (Grumbling, almost certainly, about the “inedible food.”) And if there is a heaven and you are in it, are you thinking, Poor Christo –he’s not going to make it. And is Mum saying, Bill, you have got to speak to that absurd creature at the Gates and tell him he’s got to admit Christopher. It’s too ridiculous for words.”

“Even in my dreams, they’re looking after me. So perhaps one is never really an orphan after all.”  

 

S.K.

Thirty years ago when I was in college we talked about Dr. Rorschach’s famous test. Our professor held ink blots printed on card stock. He resembled someone trying to sell magazine subscriptions. “What do you see?” he said, as if the mystery was deep, so deep that no singular mortal could furnish even a weak answer.

Ah but we were the last students of “the sixties” and accordingly we were by turns truculent and irreverent. One guy shouted that the figure before us looked like shit. “We all know its shit,” he said. “Freud said everything’s shit: money is shit, death is shit. So its just shit.”

We laughed. The professor laughed. He was kind of hip. He was an ageing athlete. “Okay,” he said. “Its shit. But what kind of shit?”

“Well,” said a woman who was famous for stealing the U.S. flag from the college’s flag pole, often in broad daylight. “Its like the shit of Mad King George III–we’re just peering into a 20th century version of the chamber pot.”

That pretty well ended the discussion. The professor became self-consciously engaged in defending 20th century psychology and back in those days if you were over 30 and forced to defend something you were toast. Those were uncomplicated times. 

We were amateur phenomenologists back then.

But I took a walk this morning with my guide dog Nira. As I said yesterday my left eye has been restored from total blindness to a simulacrum of sight and as we strolled down the sidewalk birds were rising out of the grass –birds that were difficult to identify and which I may never be able to name–birds that flew like red and black ink blots and rose and rose before us as we went. 

Unnamed though they might be, the flickering of wings gave up small sparks of reflected sunlight.  One incognito bird was half gold, half the green of the tropics before she vanished in the branches of a sycamore.

I laughed then. Thought of Rorschach. Thought of  the professor now dead who had hoped to teach us that some shit is worth something more than casual analysis.

“Those bird, NIra,” I said, “those birds are some lively, psychedelic shit.”

 

S.K.

 

I have been absent from our blog for the past five days because on Friday, May 22 I underwent cataract surgery at the University of Iowa's Ophthalmology Clinic. My surgery was performed by Dr. Tom Oetting who is a widely esteemed cataract specialist. He removed a cataract from my left eye which, post-surgery he allowed was one of the worst he's ever seen. It looked like a black jelly bean all curled up in its little plastic container. My wife Connie couldn't bear to look at it and though he offered it as a memento we urged Dr. Oetting to keep the thing. Connie suggested helpfully that he might want to put it beside the brain marked "Abby Normal."

In an age when having cataract surgery is as common as having one's teeth cleaned I should say that Dr. Oetting was indeed playing with Abby Normal. I believe its safe to say that a considerable majority of American cataract surgeons view their craft as a utility for the restoration of perfect sight. Ophthalmology departments drive this idea mercilessly by means of statistics: "We have restored 20/20 vision in 98 % of our cataract surgeries" is a phrase one often hears. Many cataract specialists will view a procedure as a failure if the patient only has 20/30 vision post-surgery. (If you aren't familiar with the numbers, 20/30 vision is correctable with glasses or contact lenses and possessing such trappings a person could conceivably play major league baseball.)  (Alright, I take that back. Very few people can play major league baseball because hitting a fastball is harder than driving a cement truck through the eye of a cow. So I'm wrong with the baseball analogy. But you get my point.)

In my case our hope was that we could restore 20/200 vision in the eye–a level of seeing that's known as "legally blind". When we say that phrase it means that 20/200 is what you can see "with" your glasses. (Lots of people will say that they're legally blind "without" their glasses but that's simply untrue. If your vision is correctable by means of glasses or contact lenses then you are not legally blind even if without your specs you're helpless.)

The University of Iowa's Ophthalmology clinic is a different kind of place. The physicians at Iowa believe that giving someone 20/200 vision is a huge improvement over having next to nothing. And indeed that's what I was "down to" in my left eye. I was barely able to detect hand motion.

Although I had cataracts in both eyes we chose to operate on the left one first because it was always my "better" eye–in boyhood it was the eye that allowed me to see things up close.

Dr. Oetting wasn't doubtful or pessimistic about our chances of success. While that's certainly a good thing when contemplating surgery I had been to see several cataract specialists over a fifteen year span who were not sanguine about the potential outcome. This is because I have what's called "retinopathy of prematurity" and accordingly I have scarred and mal-formed retinas. Any surgical procedure carries with it the risk of unintended outcomes and with ROP one such outcome was the possibility that my retina might detach–a retina that would be incredibly difficult to repair.

So I represented a tough surgical challenge and yes I was the kind of challenge that lots of ophthalmology departments wouldn't bother with. Even if we were successful I wouldn't improve that bell curve.

But the difference between no vision and having legal blindness is an immense chasm if you will. A legally blind person can read magnified print, use a hand held telescope to read a street sign, see the faces of his loved ones, watch television if he's sitting close to the screen. Over the past 8 years I had not been able to do any of these things. I had put them aside like the other memories of youth. That's what one does. I was more blind than I used to be and that, as they say, "was that".

Dr. Oetting removed the cataract for sure and  five days later I'm seeing some amazing stuff even though the eye is swollen and I have 12 stitches around the implanted lens. I saw my neighbor across the street waving one of those plastic bubble wands for his 4 year old daughter and I watched as she tried to catch those soap bubbles in the Iowa wind. I've been able to see the true colors of the world, the blues and reds and oranges and yellows are back. They keep astonishing me. My clothes have colors. Who knew? My guide dog Nira, a yelow Labrador has rich swirls of honey colored designs going to toffee going to cream. My wife is skinnier than she claims to be. And she has the nicest smile. There are red winged blackbirds and robins and ducks in my yard. Sure: I'm seeing these things imprecisely. But they are announcing themselves. My brain is flooding with  its own black currant vodka and midnight sunlight.

The eye still hurts of course. Its raw, itchy, makes little pin prick sensations when I move it. It will be some little while before it settles down. Some stitches will dissolve. Others will have to be taken out. I get tired. But there's a red winged blackbird beside the lilacs and though I don't see him clearly I know he's there. He's dancing like Jimmy Durante.

 

S.K.

 

Note: if you are of strong persuasion and would like to see a video of my cataract surgery click on the link below.

 

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=110217361140

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President Barack Obama

 

I have been thinking hard for over fifteen years about the state of people with disabilities when it comes to the issue of employment. I am of course not alone in this obsession and yes I think its fair to call it that. One way to think about an obsession is to imagine that your world is shaped by the things that occupy its edges. The edge of the world was Christopher Columbus’ obsession; the white whale was Ahab’s–both things were at the corner of the map if you will. For me the daily reminder that people with disabilities are disproportionately unemployed is as terrible as Melville’s whale. And like Ahab my inability to forget the thing has to do with a powerful personal experience. I call it “the plastic lemon” story.

I was a 35 year old unemployed college professor living in Ithaca, New York. I called the appropriate agencies and one fine day a gentleman from the New York State Commission for the Blind came to visit me to talk about job training programs for the blind and visually impaired. He was a good man. He was a really good man. And yet when confronted with my CV and my work experience he was forced to conclude that the way forward for me would be steep if not impossible. He suggested that I make an appointment at a nearby sheltered workshop for people with disabilities–a place where among other things they were busy manufacturing plastic lemons.

Its hard for me to say what kept me from quitting. I think my determination to forge ahead with my hopes had everything to do with the support of good friends, the good luck of having had an excellent education, and a curious desire to write and keep writing. Ultimately even if you don’t have a job you can make productive things happen if you are in love with an art form. And so I bided my time and wrote and as they say in the vernacularI “kept my powder dry”.

So I set out on the ocean of possibilities  and I didn’t let the unknown clobber my psyche. I’d say this is an American story. Its a pull yourself up by your bootstraps narrative. But the difference between what happened to me as a consequence of having some writing ability and some publishing luck and the serious matter of finding employment has very little to do with my abilities. This is an American no-no. We’re not supposed to say that we are the beneficiaries of extrinsic factors that the Romans would have called auguries. We are self made men and women. And of course this is all nonsense. .

Persistence and talents are all to the good but one has to have luck. Someone has to offer you a job. Someone has to say that your capacities and strengths are going to be helpful on a team. Someone has to believe that your evident disability is very clearly a kind of epistemology or way of knowing that affords you some important qualities of mind–things like patience, imagination, empathy for others–those things we all hope we can demonstrate when called upon, especially to our own children.

It is clear to me that more employers in all sectors of our society need to help people with disabilities with that “lucky break” and in a time when we’re talking about national renewal this is the moment to reaffirm this goal.

It is clear to me that a new series of national conversations  has to happen. These roundtables need to invite new people along with the folks who have championed this cause for so long. In effect we need an Aspen Institute  or Renaissance Retreat that brings together those from industry, government,education, social services,and dozens    of other critical areas to imagine collectively how this century, this 21st century can be different from the last one. The last one was a hangover from the 19th century, the century that invented the word disability and tied it to the notion of helplessness and unemployment.

You can train a person how to use raille or a special computer but you can’t give them a job. Only the people in the complex worlds  of employment can offer human beings a place on the team. We know they won’t do this in larger numbers if they have a 19th century play book.

 

S.K.

Someone asked me not long ago how I became an outgoing and inveterate talker. The scene was a conference having to do with blindness and more to the point it was during the question and answer part of my keynote address on blindness and creativity.

No one who writes literary prose or poetry can say with any certainty how they became a writer but the odds are that in nearly every case it has something to do with poverty or deprivation in a writer’s young life. We are all the children of Dickens in some way or other.

My childhood was a lonesome affair. I’ve written about the isolation of a rural New England boyhood with my long attic sojourns and all my provincial hours of solo play. Yet for all that forced inventionI can’t say that I was in any way unique. My friend the poet Sam Hamill was essentially an orphan. The poet Kenneth Rexroth grew up for all intents and purposes as an orphan alone on the streets of Chicago in the years just after World War I. Writers are forced into early solitudes and they learn how to talk because they have to get out of jams.

I told the conference that I once gave a shelled acorn to a kid who was bullying me on the playground. I told him it was a walnut and suggested he try it. Of course an acorn will ruin your mouth and the kid couldn’t talk or spit and yes I outran him. And given the social psychology of bullies it wasn’t long after that incident that the boy became relatively friendly in my presence.

So that’s the other effect of a writer’s childhood: a rule breaking saucy quasi-belligerant outspokenness mixed with irreverence. I for one never felt like I belonged in a proper group and that has worked out rather well for me. I have always adored this poem by Kenneth Rexroth for indeed, though I never shat on a golf course, I might have done so given half a chance.

Kenneth Rexroth

Portrait of the Artist As a Young Anarchist

1917-18-19,

While things were going on in Europe,
Our most used term of scorn or abuse
Was “bushwa.” We employed it correctly,
But we thought it was French for “bullshit.”
I lived in Toledo, Ohio,
On Delaware Avenue, the line
Between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
We played in the jungles by Ten Mile Creek,
And along the golf course in Ottawa Park.
There were two classes of kids, and they
Had nothing in common: the rich kids
Who worked as caddies, and the poor kids
Who snitched golf balls. I belonged to the
Saving group of exceptionalists
Who, after dark, and on rainy days,
Stole out and shat in the golf holes.

And a beautiful nose it is, Connie.  Congratulations.

Andrea Scarpino muses on a portrait of a face.  Thank you, Andrea, for this very thoughtful contribution to the Planet of the Blind.

I can’t explain this but last night I had a dream in which Leadbelly appeared with his Stella 12 string guitar.  The first thing you should know (if you don’t know it already) is that Leadbelly didn’t look like a musician. He looked like a tough old share cropper who might have been photographed by Walker Evans. He was a big dark man with a richly lined face who would frequently get into trouble in the world of Jim Crow because he could never disguise his fiercely intelligent eyes.

In the dream he was just himself. He strummed that blonde wedding cake guitar and sang for his own protection; sang for his private soul; sang without regard for anyone.

That song was an unearthing: out of the dirt came medicine bottles blue as cobalt;lost dimes; cast away carvings left behind by slaves;shards of a mirror; laces of shoes…  

Surely that was a good dream.

 

In our time when the unconscious has been rendered unfashionable its customary to think of the mind as an amalgam of social forces before which all human beings are nearly helpless. We’re just performing with limited social scripting whatever limited freedom we can achieve. Or else we are properly or inproperly medicated pursuant to the whims of our HMOs.

As I get older I see that Carl Jung’s ideas about the unconscious are more relevant today than they were 80 years ago. Jung who saw that we have universal dreams no matter where we live and regardless of our time on earth. Jung who saw that its possible for human beings to dream the dreams of other human beings.

Man that was some guitar last night.

 

S.K.

I was having those last minutes of pre-dawn sleep. There was a telephone and I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear. The voice announced that it was Goethe’s–it said I should not be surprised. The voice told me that the dead make phone calls even if they died before the invention of the telephone.

“Okay Goethe, how do I know its you as opposed to Novalis?”

This is all I remember. The next thing I knew I was geting a face wash from my guide dog.

I wonder if Goethe will call me back?  

Awake now and feeling speculative I recall that Goethe was a poet of springtime. One could call him the official German language poet of spring.

So that wasn’t a bad phone call.

But what if it   had something to do with selling my soul to the devil?

Well then I can say my dog woke me in the nick of time.

In which case one may say that a guide dog helps its blind companion in more ways than one. 

 

S.K.

 

My wife Connie loves to ride horses and lately she’s been taking jumping lessons. People ask me if I’m also taking horse back riding and I tell them that I like horses when they appear in poetry or the other arts but otherwise I prefer to stay far away from them. In turn these people look slightly hurt as though I’d confessed to wilfully farting in church. There are many reasons for this and they include the hope that a good horse back ride will help me as I live and learn to love my disabled life; or, they hope that I will inexplicably fall  and get trampled like  a tax collector in Roman times; or they wish for an agreeable conversation about the mythic powers of horses who are, after all very mythic indeed.

My problem is that I don’t have any faith in the horse upon whose flanks I find myself perched like a wobbling melon and I have even less faith in my own ability to commune with such a skittish, wind driven creature. On the whole I think I could commune better with a potato.

You see I figured out long ago that horses don’t  like me. They see me as a walking version of a tumbleweed. They don’t have any respect for me because I’m just a dread nuisance disguised as a man. I’m neurologically wired to a fine pitch but its not a pitch that horses appreciate. IN short I make a horse’s skin crawl. I’m the guy who, had he lived among the Cherokee would have been named: “Secret Man Who Stands Behind Crazy Horse”.

I take no pleasure by saying so. I love horses from a distance. I love those who love horses up close. I love the ardor of horsemanship and the sounds of galloping horses. I love horses when they appear in my dreams.

But please don’t ask me to ride one. I’ll leave that to the trained professionals and those who don’t make horses turn into electrified be-hooved kamikazes.

 

S.K.