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I’ve been trying for many years (without much success) to think about blindness as a dynamic of imaginative insufficiency. My rhetorical tools have been limited culled as they are from a slumgullion of literature and history with some personal discomfiture tossed in. If you’re blind and you want to write about it you face several obstacles. First, no two blind people are alike. Second, blindness as it’s generally understood is a construction made by sighted people. (Think of Blackness as a white invention with all its horrors.) Thirdly there’s the compensatory and sentimental bullshit that accrues from category two. If the sighted fear us then they’ll always metaphorize us with their bifurcated Victorian view: sightedness is sophisticated and artful; blindness is despair, dread, and primitivism; blindness is a no name nothingness, a “Nemo” without volition. And if this is true, then lack of sight must also be rage. (Think of the blinded Cyclops throwing boulders.) And last but not least there’s juridical blindness, putting out the eyes of thieves, the blindness of Oedipus who wanders the countryside advertising his wanton dishonesty. From this we get the notion blind beggars are sinister. Blind Pew. Now throw in a few blind-compensations, blind Homer, blind Milton, blind seers who have occult powers and you’ve got the waterfront.

Enter a welcome and sophisticated literary and cultural study by the blind scholar and memoirist Leona Godin entitled “There Plant Eyes.” If writing about blindness is complicated (and it surely is) she has the deft touch of reason necessary to take on what I’ve long imagined as the “sighted theocracy” of ophtho-centrism. Don’t kid yourselves, the sighted “do” set our notions of blindness. “There Plant Eyes” calls this out. Godin urges blindness forward in several refreshing ways.

Reader’s note: my own work as a poet and memoirist is quoted in some lively passages, as well as work by many distinguished contemporary blind writers including Georgina Kleege who’s book “Sight Unseen” remains a classic study of blindness and culture.
Refreshing–back to refreshing–Godin dispels the tiresome and hoary sighted idea that blindness is like living inside a tree. She writes in a chapter on Milton (where she quotes me on my own first meeting with the blind poet):

“Yet you may be wondering about those born completely blind, or who went blind so early in life that no memories remain of having been sighted: Surely they live in a dark world? I will let the philosopher Martin Milligan, who lost his eyes to cancer when he was eighteen months old, answer: “Perhaps it’s just worth dwelling for a moment on the word ‘darkness,’ to emphasize that for blind-from-birth people and people like me this word doesn’t have any direct experiential significance. We don’t live, as is sometimes supposed, in a ‘world of darkness,’ because, not knowing directly from our own experience anything about light, we don’t have any direct experience of darkness.”

One may say, just as we understand there’s no true green in nature, so it is with darkness. Perhaps, freeing blindness from its cheap associations with death we might begin to fully live? Imagine! Apologies perhaps to John Lennon.

A favorite passage of mine concerns Godin’s analysis of sighted people’s inability to describe what they see–a pet peeve of mine. This is memorable:

“Sighted people don’t use their eyes nearly as well as they believe they do, and even more than that, they do not use their vocabulary. I believe that the speechless aspect of dealing with a curious blind person has much to do with the fact that so many sighted people take it for granted that a picture speaks a thousand words. Well, maybe they should start attempting to use their words to describe the visual and realize that they can’t. The frustration that sighted friends show when they are asked to put alternative text on their social-media images testifies to that. It’s an impoverishment of education that, if rectified, could go a long way in translating those so-called valuable pictures into complex problems of language and thought.”

Yes indeed. The impoverishment of education described above also translates to the “sighted” employing blindness as a metaphor for their own failings.

This is not, however, a rebarbative or tempestuous book. It’s a tonic if you will.

I’m looking forward to speaking online with Leona Godin and several distinguished blind folks “online” via Zoom this coming Saturday. Check out the link here:

“You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.”

–Thomas Paine “Rights of Man”

It’s easy to forget the revisionism and deceit that often follows a great writer’s death. Raymond Williams’ endless calumnies against George Orwell, falsely accusing him of selling out the left to the British police state is a classic example. When Trump cries “fake news” its
best to remember academics helped launch it.

Poor Orwell. Who never belonged at any dinner table.

Gore Vidal: “politics is knowing who’s paying for your lunch.”

No one ever paid for Orwell’s lunch.

Orwell: “If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human being, if you can catch him young enough.”

There is always hope for the individual human being.

Orwell:

“When recently I protested in print against the Marxist dialect which makes use of phrases like “objectively counter-revolutionary left-deviationism” or “drastic liquidation of petty-bourgeois elements,” I received indignant letters from lifelong Socialists who told me that I was “insulting the language of the proletariat.” In rather the same spirit, Professor Harold Laski devotes a long passage in his last book, Faith, Reason and Civilisation, to an attack on Mr. T. S. Eliot, whom he accuses of “writing only for a few.” Now Eliot, as it happens, is one of the few writers of our time who have tried seriously to write English as it is spoken”

Beware of writers who sniff loudly that so and so is “too accessible” and further beware of those who proclaim with rococo jargon they’re speaking for the proles.

Orwell:

“…let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the Press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. ”

This shivers me. Always has. “Cancel culture” is a symptom of a weakening desire for liberty and is rather a desire only for power over the ideas of others.

Peaches ripened without any help
My nature is not “of” the state

I cannot play any kind of horn
My Heaven has something to do with Mozart

You can’t win by haunting others
My mirror sweeps the empty room

One day I’ll be light on my feet

I remember a famous poet asking his audience if they believed the earth has consciousness. No one raised a hand. I was a teenager and too shy. I knew the earth was smart. After this I resolved to speak up no matter the occasion.

**

“Now” is an advertisement so false even pineal glands know it. “Now” is the most favored word in capitalism. Worse of course is the expression “now and then” which is a stricture on tomorrow, governed by nothing since “now” has little predictive value.

“Right now,” say the tyrants, “things couldn’t be any better.” “Now” says global warming isn’t real. “Now” says the poor are imprisoned and they’re meant to be. “Now” in America is shorthand for “there isn’t any future unless you’re already in the “now” club.” We used to say salubrious persons are “in the know” but, well, you get my drift.

**

In disability circles there’s no future planned beyond this: your tomorrows are being erased in the halls of Congress. After health care and social security are gutted will they bring back the ugly laws? Will they lock up the disabled in ruined shopping malls?

**

This morning I found myself thinking of Aristophanes who I read assiduously in college. Here he is:

“Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.”

**

Now wants what it has to remain always. The plan is to take down future democracy always.

**

Sit for a time in the Agora thinking of Aristotle’s wrists. I believe he looked at them before he spoke. My favorite bird is the Phoebe. I like Miss Dickinson. I’m fond of the late Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski. He imagined snakes cleaning his ears. Some poets love the snake properly. I like to spread my ten fingers across my face. “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” (Werner Heisenberg) Don’t give up. Keep moving. Even in a small dark room.

And speak.

Day breaks and the moon still hangs.

There’s a moon in my wrist and one in my eye.

I wish I could call you father. 

O the moon has run away.

See how small the houses are?

And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes. 

And may at last my weary age 

Find out the peaceful hermitage, 

Day…O father…

Well there it goes, my old fancy. I loved loving you.
Goodbye happy childhood sneakers. (P.F. Flyers)
Sayonara transistor radio with your “top forty” (you got me through the 7th grade when bullies pushed me down the stairs because I was blind.)
Toodle loo bell bottomed polyester lime colored jeans from the tenth grade that, you guessed it, got me pushed down stairs for being blind and fashion clueless.
Get the Hell Out “Catcher in the Rye” as I never liked you. Holden Caulfield is a dick.
Write if You Get Work, you ableist high school math teacher who made fun of my crossed eyes.
I could go on but won’t.
Just doing some spring cleaning.

**

When people say “Black Lives Matter” they’re affirming the goodness in Blackness. Those who bristle at the phrase (which is more than a phrase as its a cry of the heart) are asserting in no uncertain terms that oppressed people can’t proclaim “the good” for the word doesn’t belong to them. “All Lives Matter” means white people get to imagine goodness so Black people won’t have to bother anymore. Just so, the disabled say our lives are not second rate. We ask “where did you get that idea and why is it so important for you to cling to it?”

**

I’m power washing the radar forest of moldy abstractions.

**

Meanwhile:

What is it about being alone in a strange hotel that drives me always to think of my dead twin brother? He died shortly after we were born. I did not know him. Yet always in places of loneliness he seems to be with me as he was, early morning, before sunup in the Sheraton in Frankfurt, Germany. Was I tired? Did this make me sentimental? Did I have Madame Blavatsky on the brain? Is he always with me? Will genetic research prove it? Am I really living for two? I had wild dreams and woke and felt him. It’s a sensation known to everyone I think—that your private dead are there when you weren’t especially thinking of them. Even in a sterile, megalithic business hotel there was a mysterious and unanticipated shiver and I wondered how many other rumpled travelers were with me.

**

We speak as though fear and certainty are co-determined. Goodbye to that also.

I’ve been lucky to have had good friendships. I say lucky because I’m not an easy person to know. I’m opinionated, contrarian, suspicious of cant, disposed to a generalized distrust of earnestness. I don’t believe in “theory” when applied to literature or culture. Literary “theory” is opinion that hasn’t been subjected to serious rhetorical analysis. Derrida on animals is not worth the read. As I say, I’m not easy to know. I suspect I’d have gotten along well with the late Neil Postman.

When I was 15 and staying at a Key Biscayne resort with my father (who was on a business trip) I found myself alone in an elevator with Melvin Laird, Nixon’s secretary of defense. The year was 1970. My hero was John Lennon. I looked at Mel and said, “How’s your war going Mr. Laird? Are the body counts where you’d like them?” I was anorexic, stringy haired, and rebarbative. He glared and bolted when the doors opened.

I’m not easy to like. Unless you’re against war, dislike social hypocrisy and all the “isms” as we say.

But then again I like those who have learned to like themselves.

Which means knowing also who you are not.

Which means knowing what Bob Marley meant when he said:

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”

When I was in the psych hospital at 15, anorexic, depressed about blindness I had a room mate. He was no older than I am now but I thought he was ancient. He was an immigrant from Eastern Europe and spoke almost no English. Anyway while I was busy starving myself to death he lay in his bed and moaned. Now and then he’d totter my way, lift his gown, and say: “Look at scar!”

**

How does it begin, the collapse of wish?
When you can’t ask how it ends.

**

Disability is everywhere once you learn to look for it. Elvis Presley had continuous high grade pain the last ten years of his life. Samuel Johnson was legally blind, suffered from seizures, and may well have had a variant of Tourette’s Syndrome. The people in my neighborhood are touched by disablement. Some show it. Others do not. Normalcy, the belief in it, the pressure to live it or else is the most destructive fiction on earth. What does it avail me to say so? And why do I keep saying it?

Because the defense of our planet depends on design justice and this in turn depends on defeating our addiction to normalcy as well as fossil fuels.

**

In her excellent book The Contours of Ableism (an elegant title I think) Fiona Kumari Campbell imagines the structural and attitudinal dispositions against the disabled as residing within a telos or set of illusions that maintain the non-disabled identity. When I write against disability discrimination and the privilege indexes of ableism I’m engaging in the work of all disabled activists by asserting the truth of the matter:

“Ableism refers to: a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human. Disability then is cast as a diminished state of being human.”

Excerpt From: “Contours of Ableism.” Apple Books.

So if there are so many disabled people around why does compulsory normalization still rule the roost? The contours of ableism are protean rather than strictly geometric.

Fiona Campbell writes:

“Whether it be the ‘species typical body’ (in science), the ‘normative citizen’ (in political theory), the ‘reasonable man’ (in law), all these signifiers point to a fabrication that reaches into the very soul that sweeps us into life and as such is the outcome and instrument of a political constitution: a hostage of the body.”

Excerpt From: “Contours of Ableism.” Apple Books.

**

One of the interesting things about ableism is that whatever form it takes it occupies the future perfect. There will be time enough to make things right for the non-normals but not today. One may fair say “not today” is the motto of the thing. Non hodie in Latin. Picture a flag bearing the image of an indolent house cat. Not today will we question our assumptions about the majority of bodies on the planet. Ableism also refrains from saying “maybe tomorrow.”

Blind like me you hate the song
Though you keep quiet.
Why ruin a party or twist sorrow
For effect like a shopper
Pressing his thumbs in cakes
Or the jeweler who tells you
Your watch is wrong?

Take “see” to mean release
And forgive the sighted.
Once in Venice
I walked the city
With my dog
Reading old doors
As if they were Braille
Though weather alone
Put the messages there
The words a dialect
Of accidents and rain.
I could feel my pulse
In my wrists.
I said half aloud
To no one in particular
I can’t love you
Any more than this.