Category: Uncategorized

 

Let’s be clear. Substack ain’t friendly to the blind and all sorts of public intellectuals and literary types are on the platform. I won’t play. Substack is a heavily JavaScript-dependent, single-page-app-style platform, and historically, JS-heavy dynamic interfaces are exactly where screen readers run into trouble — things like comment threads, the “Notes” feed, and subscription/paywall interactions tend to be the weak points, more than the basic reading of a published post.

Here’s what that looks like in practice: comment threads that don’t announce new replies, a “Notes” feed that never stops refreshing, paywalls that just go silent mid-page.

I know I’m pissing in the wind. I know.

Yet there’s another issue with substack beyond accessibility that bothers me. Why do people believe the public should pay for their content? Especially in an age when groceries and healthcare are utterly unaffordable?

That’s it. I’m done, My blog is accessible and it’s free. I don’t have a tip jar. I do have a subscriber button. It’s free too.

 

In her excellent book “American Enlightenments” Caroline Winterer reminds us that 18th century Americans held a different view of happiness than the self-help individualized notion most people cling to today. She writes: 

“The happiness of humanity. Crèvecoeur’s words—and Thomas Jefferson’s far more famous ones in the Declaration of Independence, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—remind us that the pursuit of happiness was one of the principal quests of enlightened people. But happiness meant something different in the eighteenth century from its meaning today. In our era, an industry of self-help books reminds us that modern happiness is an emotional state of self-fulfillment and personal well-being. Eighteenth-century people would have been puzzled by our narrow definition. For them, happiness first of all had expansive, public meanings. People at that time often spoke of a happy people and a happy society. A society was happy when its people enjoyed the security, stability, and peace that allowed them to prosper. The purpose of government was to create public or social happiness by shielding the state from foreign enemies and internal threats. The opposite of public happiness was not sorrow but anarchy or tyranny. Educated leaders would be the architects of the good government that led to a happy society.”

It’s public happiness, stupid. Its knowing your neighbor can afford her groceries and medicine. 

The cos-playing small “p” president spends his nights sending vicious posts on his stupid social media platform. Public happiness is not his thing, to say the least.

I will never give in to the rage machine. Never. Even though I’m a disability activist who’s watching the new eugenics washing through the corridors of power like sea water in the movie Titanic. 

There’s a line in a Beatles song: “Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go…” That’s how it was when I was a student years ago at the University of Iowa’s “Writers Workshop”–one could walk all day around Iowa City and there were no mobile phones. And in addition to this wonderful unplugged way of living, and owing to the fact I was a graduate student studying poetry writing, well, I could drink tea and read whatever I wanted and no one could find me for hours on end. Oh that magic feeling.

And so this morning, briefly, walking the neighborhood I felt that life. It came back to me like an old friend.

So I was having nostalgia for something proportionate to my need for living in imaginative sustenance. These lines by Emily Dickinson have long puzzled me:

“That Love is all there is,

  Is all we know of Love;

  It is enough, the freight should be

  Proportioned to the groove.”

The first two lines are an assertion and express a sentiment older than Plato. The second two lines create a problem as while we dimly understand love and accept this condition, now there’s a simile dressed as a metaphor, we carry our inexact knowledge of love like freight (which we assume is heavy) and further, that freight is proportioned to the groove by which she means a furrow—so there’s a plough in this figure, we press down with our limited knowledge of love into the field of life. But what about “proportioned”? She means, I think, that our thinking of love should be in accordance to the lives we’re “in” and not according to the lives of others. In the end the effect is lonely. Love confounds. Keep ploughing according to your own understanding. 

**

In his excellent book “Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief” Robert Lundin writes: “Dickinson realized that belief is an art that demands trial and practice. A product of the romantic age and a prophet of modernity, she comprehended more fully than most people in her day how much the human mind contributes to the process of belief. Art, after all, is about the making of things; and in matters of belief, the history of the modern world is the story of our increasing awareness of the extent to which we participate in the making of truth as well as in the finding of it.”

Are making and finding connected to “proportionate”? Are truth and faith? One has to conclude that faith has material effects much as Spinoza told us—God is in the gravity and answers no prayers. God in the Spinozan sense is not concerned with you but is nature alone. Proportoniate means in this sense a man or woman corresponds exactly to something else. We are each responsible for the proportioned making of our places in the world. Faith, as Dickinson understood it, is material.    

 

And so you decide at last you’re a notebook jotter. It’s like finding at last you’re the inventor of scissors. 

As for who invented scissors he or she lived in what we call, quaintly, ancient Egypt. 

From Claude:

“The earliest known scissors were bronze, with two blades connected by a curved strip of metal that acted as a spring, holding the blades apart until pressed together.”

Picture the last scene of “Aida” where, instead of singing as the oxygen runs out, Radames and Aida wave spring loaded blades. 

The notebook…back to girders above the city.

Insert here: I enjoy Sheila Heti’s “Alphabetical Diaries” which have as their incitement, lines from her journals:

“Keep a list of all the people you need to speak to, and read the books you need to read. Keep good track of your receipts. Keep in mind that none of these projects will make you any money. Keep it in a container, and publish only what has reached the next stage of accomplishment. Keep the energies in your body and contain them. Keep the house clean and neat, love him, love family and friends. Keep this paragraph which will ruin the whole entire thing. Keep this paragraph, this ugly worm that will eat all the papers and destroy it. Keep your eye on the distant, distant justification for all this. Killing evil thoughts. Knew it would only last a day. Knocked out my tooth this morning and can’t find my gold coin. Know how to love a man by knowing how to love writing. Know there is always an alternative to the situation, even being very babyish and all alone.”

Knocked out my tooth this morning and can’t find my gold coin. How excellent!

Charles Simic:  “Brothers my teeth hurt/and I’ve no money/to have them fixed”. 

Keep this paragraph which can ruine the whole entire thing. 

I want you to understand me. I come from the region beyond the blurry pasture

The world is barbarous and filled with shadows

It’s proper to find a neutral spot where you can think about it.

It’s proper to picture scissors while sitting under a birch tree.

Keeping notebooks, that’s when no one owns you. 

Here’s to the anti-capitalist diary. 

Here’s to my mother’s laughter which, though she was a sad person, had a lovely wickedness. 

Meanwhile, I have been in more than one ossuary on my travels. Skulls lined up like nouns for school children.

Don’t look at me ironically with your post-modern peepers. 

The falling we will do ere long will be without end. 

For almost twenty years this space has been called “Planet of the Blind”—a nod to my first memoir and, for a long time, an accurate description of its subjects: blindness, accessibility, the struggles of opposing ableism. That work isn’t done — it never will be — but the blog has quietly outlived its name. Over the years I’ve used this space to write about disability rights, but also about history, horror films, wordplay, literary biography, and the jottings of other writers. Its time for the title to reflect the writing.

So: welcome to “Off the Page”

I’ve always been drawn to the notebook as a form. Years ago I co-edited (with poets David Weiss and Deborah Tall)  “The Poet’s Notebook” for W.W. Norton, a collection of the fast jottings, marginalia, and half-formed thoughts that poets keep before a poem exists. There’s something clarifying about the notebook— unpolished, occasional, closer to thinking out loud than to argument. This blog has always worked that way too, even when I didn’t say so. A post about accommodation law sits next to a post about Bela Lugosi which in turn sits next to a fragment from an actual notebook. That miscellany was never a flaw. It was the point.

As for “occasional optimist” — I chose the phrase carefully. More than thirty years of working on accessibility at universities, watching the gap between institutional assurance and grassroots reality, teaches you not to be naive. Optimism, for me, isn’t a temperament so much as a discipline — something closer to what Gramsci meant by pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I don’t expect things to go well. I do the work anyway, and every so often — reading a poem, watching a student’s reading habits change, standing at a lectern in a room full of people who came out for disability poetry on a summer night in Washington — I catch myself feeling something like hope. Occasional is the right word. Earned, not constant.

So this is still the same notebook it always was: kept in the old commonplace tradition of writing things down because they mattered enough, that day, to write down. The title’s new. The habit of attention behind it isn’t.

Thank you for reading, then and now.

— Stephen Kuusisto

I am a writer of nonfiction and friends have suggested I should write about my recent heart attack. But write “what” exactly? I was in danger of dying. I had open heart surgery. I spent a long time recovering.

What’s more interesting is that having had coronary bypass surgery I’m not the same person.The cardiologist said it would be six or seven months before I’d begin to feel like myself. What he didn’t say is that there’s never a return to the former body—the one where you got up, bent over, tied your shoes and thought about berries. What he couldn’t tell me is that I’d feel alien in my body evermore, even after the most significant healing.

Because I’m legally blind I have tension headaches. My neck and shoulders and the muscles around my eyes turn hot and then they throb. I thought I knew pain. I thought post cardiac repair-life would be simple once I could walk.

Imagine, if you will, a pipe organ, all those pipes crying out. Inside my chest there’s a set of wires holding my sternum together. Its a compound structure and it sends signals in a kind of nerve damaged partita—a score for solo instrument. My surgical site remains sore. My sternum shifts when I lift a plate. My balance is shot. I drift sideways on the sidewalk. OK. I’m walking in circles with an apple in my hand, testing the waters of the next life. This is a way of being.

So its the metaphysics of post-surgery I’m after. I want post-reductionism. Meanwhile I take a lot of pills.