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In Defense of the Insuperable

“But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.”

–G.K. Chesterton

When I was a boy and in love with Superman I took the “old super” at face value and chose, insofar as a child does, to equate super-ness with truth, justice, and the American way. It wasn’t until I went to junior high and owing to blindness was subjected to cruelties by classmates and teachers that I first recognized insuperable obstacles–the social and physical architectures of ableism. Ableism is the fear of a skeleton.

Nowadays when I think of design justice I know that the singular thing as Chesterton puts it is the horror of humankind to the architecture of things and hence a fealty to whatever is unimaginative. Ashamed of our bodies, grasping and covetous that in their vulnerabilities they should remain unchanged, we design physical and digital spaces that are as unwise as the fear of bones.

Ableism is the fear of a skeleton. Oops. Here comes a blind one with his skeleton dog. The security checkpoint in your average airport grinds to a halt. How will the man and dog proceed through our metal detectors? Panic ensues. Buttons are pressed. Behind the blind skeleton man and his bony dog all human progress comes to a halt. Frustrated passengers cry out. The underpaid and hapless transportation personnel are themselves panicked. Can we take his dog away? Can we pat down the dog? How do we talk to the man? Can we grab him? Everyone in this scene is ashamed of his, her, or they body. All are secretly conscience stricken about working in this iridescent slaughterhouse.

Here comes a woman with a metal hip. Here’s a transgender man. The algorithms of the scanning machine flip out. The transgender person is subjected to a cruel public show trial which is loud and entirely demeaning. Who will pat they down? The computer design team behind the AI behind the screening machine are 80 per cent to blame for this misery, the rest, well the shaming industry resides in every pencil.

It is the skeleton principle. And there’s no Superman in sight.

Nature has set insuperable obstacles to ignoring or outrunning the skeleton which is the chief value of the thing, for Mr. Bones is nature itself. Shouldn’t we admit we’re all falling apart? Can’t we build public spaces that not only incorporate (yes pun intended) this idea, but make much of it?

I shall defend the insuperable, hopeless, insurmountable grind of the imperfect perfect.

“Therefore all deformed persons are extreme bold — first, as in their own defence, as being exposed to scorn, but in process of time, by a general habit.”

–Francis Bacon “Of Deformity”

From a notebook:

Pregnant emptiness.

Morning, the color of shipwreck.

Without leaving the present, the condition prior to our entrance, bent like an embryo.

Ignominy, jewels of perdition strung together. The eyes are nudists. The eyes have no philosophy but cry to be entertained.

Boyhood: all lapsus linguae.

Even now I keep a mortal house with no inhabitants.

Last night I cracked a window and my hands shook as they often do. The body, the dark, the raising–what? I saw how literalism and futurism are of little value when you’re crooked.

The broken body is fire. Das Lebend’ge will ich preisen/Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet

Walked the neighborhood, slowly, in the way of the crippled, but I was really in the cave of phantoms–

Playing a part, spiritual body, no singular life

Still, bones full of warnings

Routine, dismal, bored with gathering

A cripple reads too many newspapers

Canary on the terrace filled with excess. His narrow throat of destiny

Of deformity, knowledge is specific, enters the man by bits

Incarnation is iconoclasm. The crooked man throws ashes

Advances across borders

He moves stiffly in the lamplight’s theater

Prose, How I Love Thee

Poets complaining about prose are like cobblers criticizing the pavement. With apologies to John Lennon, prose is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Ah but prose style knows poetry full well and sometimes exceeds it. Here’s Evelyn Waugh describing of the first flush of youthful ardor (which is consciousness) in “Brideshead Revisited”:

“That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.”

When prose works like poetry it is compounded, attentive, circular, and spicy with particularities.

Here’s a small sample of Toni Morrison’s prose from her exquisite novel “Home”:

“A mean grandmother is one of the worst things a girl could have. Mamas are supposed to spank and rule you so you grow up knowing right from wrong. Grandmothers, even when they’ve been hard on their own children, are forgiving and generous to the grandchildren. Ain’t that so?

Cee stood up in the zinc tub and took a few dripping steps to the sink. She filled a bucket from the faucet, poured it into the warming tub water, and sat back down in it. She wanted to linger in cool water while a softly suffering afternoon light encouraged her thoughts to tumble. Regrets, excuses, righteousness, false memory, and future plans mixed together or stood like soldiers in line. Well, that’s the way grandmothers should be, she thought, but for little Ycidra Money it wasn’t like that at all. Because Mama and Pap worked from before sunrise until dark, they never knew that Miss Lenore poured water instead of milk over the shredded wheat Cee and her brother ate for breakfast. Nor that when they had stripes and welts on their legs they were cautioned to lie, to say they got them by playing out by the stream where brambles and huckleberry thorns grew. ”

Nicholson Baker once said poetry is prose in slow motion but I disagree. Prose is poetry given a chance to stretch after much confinement.

Coleridge said famously: “Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.” Again I disagree. Here’s Salman Rushdie writing about becoming a writer, a passage from his memoir “Joseph Anton”:

“When the British ruled a quarter of the world they went forth from their cold little northern island and became, on the great plains and beneath the immense skies of India and Africa, more glamorous, extroverted, operatic personalities—bigger characters—than there was room for back home. But then the age of empires ended and they had to diminish back into their smaller, colder, grayer island selves. Granny May in her little turret house, dreaming of the infinite pampas and the prize bulls who came like unicorns to lay their heads in her lap, seemed like such a figure, and all the more interesting, less clichéd, because her story had happened not in the territories of the British Empire, but in Argentina. He wrote down a name for her in his notebook. “Rosa Diamond.””

This is poetry because the best words “are” in the best order and just so, the self to self dichotomy of the writer’s awareness grows larger, more supple and ironic, for he knows more having written this passage than he did beforehand. What should the best order mean but this?

Who, you ask, are poets who write excellent prose? Walt Whitman; Audre Lorde; Langston Hughes; Ingeborg Bachmann; Agota Kristof; Pia Juul; Pentti Saariksoski; Kenneth Rexroth; Mina Loy–best words, best order, circuits and surprises; sugar when its unexpected; iodine on the cuts; morse telegraphy on the wind.

Proleptic

Proleptic. In rhetoric “the anticipation of possible objections in order to answer them in advance.”

Prolepsis is a socially agreeable internalized mode of oppression. All advertising depends on it and most selling in small “c” capitalism is driven by the subject’s anticipation of possible objections to her features. In disability studies we describe liberation from this as “crip ecology” recognizing the biopolitics of commodification and acknowledging the role of performance as creative epistemology.

Traveling blind is a performance both within normative subventions of assistance and cultural denotations of helplessness. All blind travel, taken as performance, is proleptic, both anticipating and answering implicit objections to the concept of blind independence in the very process of navigation. Accordingly tropes of blind travel always pertain to the incitement and enactment of art while walking.

Wouldn’t I just like to take a walk? Wouldn’t you?

Dale Carngegie and the Cripples

I worked at Guiding Eyes for the Blind one of the nation’s premier guide dog training schools for five years in the 1990’s. One part of the job was to speak to “the clubs” as we called them, the Rotary, the Lions, the occasional Odd Fellows.

My talks were on the order of “look at me and my impeccable guide dog; imagine more of us.” That was the gig. My guide dog always bowed at the end, a real dog and pony show.

I needed that job. I had an assignment. Though I hadn’t heard of inspiration pornography I knew what to avoid. I never spoke in a way that let my audiences off the hook. They were business people in Westchester County. So I’d ask if any of them had blind employees in their companies. None of them did. “Why do you suppose this is?” I’d ask. Someone would say, “we don’t get any blind applicants.” “Why do you suppose this is?” I’d ask. “They don’t know about the jobs?” someone would offer. And I’d ask them why this is so, and we’d get to the place I wanted them to be. “Our system is designed to keep the disabled unemployed, I’d say, and talk about social security disability and the general failure of vocational rehab agencies to do anything beyond the minimum when it comes to advocating for blind employment.

I’d usually end by saying it’s business men and women who need to step up.

Of course some liked this and some didn’t. The latter were always the first out the door.

So where does Dale Carnegie come in? He once said where public speaking is concerned you should always practice the five “b’s”: “be brief brother be brief.”

It’s a good line though it’s dated, sexist, and now that I think of it, a joke “of or pertaining to” privilege.

If you’re got something important to say it’s gonna take more than five b’s Dale.

And you might not want to be too polite. Ask the audience some hard questions. Make them earn the rubber chicken.

Why are 70 to 80 per cent of the blind still unemployed?

I say its Dale Carnegie’s fault.

Let’s Talk About Neutrinos

“It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.”

–Christopher Hitchens

When I was in my early twenties I had the opportunity to travel some, and I did. Travel is broadening of course, but it’s also difficult if you have a disability. In my case I was both seriously visually impaired and unable to discuss the matter. Walking in strange cities hunched over, feigning sight, playing with shadows. That was my shtick.

The problem with a shtick is that it does things to you on the inside. You know you’re dishonest. And walking along a big thoroughfare like Kurferstendam in Berlin you feel your dishonesty step by step. I remember walking with five or six young scholars, all Fulbrighters like myself. They were admiring the sights. I was pretending to admire the sights.

On the inside I was scarcely able to trust myself. In Berlin I thought of Goethe’s axiom: “Trust yourself, then you will know how to live.”

If you don’t know how to walk safely you’re not living. In my twenties I lived a pantomime of freedom. I’ve written a great deal about this. What I haven’t said, at least not precisely, is that hiding a disability is another disability—the first is physical, the second is self-administered through an abeyance to culture. The culture doesn’t like your abnormality and you ingest that dislike, much like those cattle in France who eat poisonous flowers in the autumn. And you get used to eating the damned flowers. Goethe again: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”

Giving up the flowers is the imagination. Do not, I repeat, do not eat the culture’s flowers.

Of course being “out” with a disability doesn’t save you. Oprah, etc. Being “out” means you’ve traded the shtick of passing, of invisibility, for adventitious and hourly discourses with opposition.

Yum yum! You’re not eating flowers. You’re in a Starbucks in the Newark airport eating a blueberry muffin and your guide dog eyes you and twelve other people, strangers all, are eyeing you because you’re significantly different and roving eyeballs enjoy novelty and you’re the novelty de jour. So even eating your muffin you’re a discourse of difference and sometimes the whole thing is silent—you hear the muffin going down your throat—and sometimes the thing becomes vocal as one of the strangers can’t resist and opens a conversation this way:

Stranger (business man type, with London Fog overcoat): “I knew a blind person once…”

(There’s nuance to this—he knew a blind guy in college, or a blind person who lived down the street.)

Sometimes the stranger asks me if I actually knew the aforementioned blind person because after all, shouldn’t all blind people know each other?

You’re chewing your muffin and thinking “what if I asked him if he knows all the other men wearing London Fog raincoats?”

Stranger man sees your blindness. His language is cultural. He sees your difference. He may be sincerely interested. But by definition he isn’t talking to you with full intelligence. And you think about the reasons why this should be so: his bad schooling, his parochial experiences with physical difference; years of bad movies and TV; a vaguely decent neo-Victorian sentimentality pulsing through his veins. But no matter, you’re now a figure of difference and now you must decide how to avoid the self-administered abeyance to culture that once upon a time marked your efforts to “pass” as a sighted person and which now, threaten you with the “flip side”—your role when “out” is to make physical abnormality seem like a snap. My muffin tastes like dark flowers. I take a sip of house blend. I chew.

Do you see how mediocre this is?

Now you’re in a fix. The stranger’s invitation to talk is also an invitation to participate in conversational pornography—“inspiration porn” whereby you, the disabled one, say moderately inspirational things. Or majorly inspirational things. Or the stranger says inspirational things, like, “I knew a blind guy once who could take apart a radio and put it back together.”

Dang.

I knew a blind guy who climbed a mountain. I knew a blind guy who went sky diving. Who caught more fish than the rest of us combined…

And you want to say—I knew a short guy once. I knew a short guy who could reach the peanut butter on the top shelf with a special device called a step-ladder. He was amazing. Really inspirational.

But you don’t because its easier to get out of the intrusive moment by being as mono-syllabic as possible. Or you use the dog as a ploy. I’ve got to go. The dog needs to go out.

And you walk around the bloody monolith of the airport feeling the trap of performativity. Your script is handed to you and you can tear it up if you wish. You could screw with the guy’s head and say:

Yeah all blind people know each other. We have psychic powers as the Greeks well knew.

You could eat the flower arrangements on the table.

You could tell him you’re a misanthrope and urge him to go away.

But the best of you is empathetic.

What you say has become more refined over the years.

I don’t talk about blindness. There are agencies for that. Let’s talk about neutrinos.

Warm Rooms and Cold

—In memory of Marvin Bell

Because countless shadows populate this world

And because children like me leave finger prints

On windows you are given the speaker’s staff

And because the other sides of men and women

Rank their inhibitions and because the stone

Contracts with evening you are given the staff

And you hold it close and still so its a sun dial

In the midst of confusion its a marine instrument

You are given the speaker’s staff yes

Ex nihilo a song starts slowly you have it

Because you were steady and knew

When your turn would come

And would hold counsel because

Without actually knowing because

The rains arrive on time because

Because a free man like no one else

Dickens or Whitman

Once upon a time, back in the 1840’s Charles Dickens wrote to his friend William Macready that America was a “low, coarse, and mean nation” and moreover the United States was “driven by a herd of rascals…Pah! I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I travelled in America.”

Some of Dickens contempt for the former colonies was mercenary: American publishers refused to pay him royalties on his books sold in the US. There’s nothing like being cheated to effectively stir the pot of enmity, and Dickens, for all his virtues, was no exception when it came to fashioning willfully clouded judgments. (One thinks of his master-slave hostility to the people of India or his support of torture in Jamaica.)

It’s easy to kick a democracy, especially one that purports to be a classless society. It’s always been a piece of cake to misunderstand America. After all, the United States routinely seems to bear Dickens out. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is as low, coarse, and mean an affair as we’ve seen since the 18th century—yet these characteristics have always been present, not only in our politics, but in how we talk about them. In 1856 Walt Whitman wrote in an essay about the Pierce, Fillmore, and Buchanan administrations and said the presidency itself had become beastly:

“History is to record these two Presidencies as so far our topmost warning and shame. Never were publicly displayed more deformed, mediocre, sniveling, unreliable, false- hearted men! … The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States. The cushions of the Presidency are nothing but filth and blood.”

Our “topmost warning and shame” is a terrific phrase since it encapsulates the chief liability as well as the virtuous wager confronting any man or woman who assumes America’s highest office, which is it’s absolute visibility. If one prefers wit to truculence one can do no better than H.L. Mencken who said:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Our nation’s political life has always been concerned primarily with what we do as opposed to what we say. Nixon correctly understood this and dubbed his voters “the silent majority” in 1968 a year that is still unsurpassed for violent rhetoric and brutality in the village square.

America’s words are circumstantially low, coarse, and mean. Where else in the world can people behave this way? We’re entitled to be low, coarse, and mean. Americans are also perfectionists: visionary, celebratory, and affirming. Even as Whitman wrote the passage above he also wrote:

SAUNTERING the pavement or riding the
country by-road, here then are faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity,
ideality,
The spiritual prescient face—the always welcome,
common, benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces
of natural lawyers and judges, broad at the
back-top,
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the
brows—the shaved blanched faces of ortho-
dox citizens,
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s
face,
The ugly face of some beautiful soul, the hand-
some detested or despised face,
The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face
of the mother of many children,
The face of an amour, the face of veneration,
The face as of a dream…

We don’t have so much guidance to rely on when it comes to assessing and cataloguing the worst in us—we’re either anguished or panicked in the face of it. What is surreptitious in the American psyche is also foundational—slavery, religious intolerance, xenophobia, so present are these building blocks of our national DNA we’re caught repressing them, then admitting their corrosive effects when they flash on the giant outdoor movie screen of our political theater. Trump is an instructive figure, as vituperative and ugly as any of our worst public figures from Andrew Jackson to Joseph McCarthy or Trump. What matters finally is whether we choose to think of this nation like Dickens or Whitman.

Thoughts on Despair, Near-despair, and Being Made a Symbol

If you think at all about Evelyn Waugh (a long shot these days perhaps) you may remember this from “Vile Bodies”–
“There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

No one has written a history of despair as for instance we have the history of the pencil but it may be time. It would of necessity require nuance as there’s despair itself and “near despair” which has a shred of value as the late Christopher Hitchens pointed out in his “Letters to a Young Contrarian”–

“… The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage rather than resignation. In a sense, with the back to the wall and no exit but death or acceptance, the options narrow to one. There can even be something liberating in this realization.” [Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 86–87]

I was in mind of Hitchens quote while listening to Amanda Gorman read her inaugural poem last week. She wrote it in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol and her poem is a cry for heartened daring amid darkness visible and we’re all lucky to have heard it.

Tyrants “dine out” on despair of course. Warmongers and merchants of death bank on it. Collective despair is a manufactured thing and differs from the organic sorrow of a single man or woman. In the Nietzschian sense consciousness is despair and that’s a fact like candy or coconuts. So be it.

Weaponized despair is a vast subject but at its core it depends of fraud.

The poet Kenneth Rexroth spoke of it this way:

“Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.”

More of Rexroth:

“The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done…Children are affected too — there is a deliberate appeal to them — you see, children have very primitive emotional possibilities which do not normally function except in the nightmares of Freudians. Television is designed to arouse the most perverse, sadistic, acquisitive drives. I mean, a child’s television program is a real vision of hell, and it’s only because we are so used to these things that we pass them over. If any of the people who have had visions of hell, like Virgil or Dante or Homer, were to see these things it would scare them into fits.”

Discontent, avariciousness, screwed up desires, hatred of the body, disdain for your neighbors, whimpering rage in the basement, all are products, commodities, and lovingkindness and whatever it is we mean by higher consciousness must resist this at every moment. You’ll burn a lot of mental calories resisting despair and demoralization.

As despair is being manufactured it employs symbolic human beings: people of color, the disabled, the elderly, and proclaims them representative of hopelessness. “Disability” means unable to work. Pauper-hood.

Best to work with near-despair and change costumes hourly.

Why Poets Can’t Have Nice Things

I must say I’ve been distressed beyond measure by the rebarbative snootiness of some poets on social media who’ve pronounced Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem lacking in the requisite qualities to be real poetry. Of course this is nothing new–the history of literature overflows with canonical disdain–Ovid didn’t like Sappho; Emerson aside almost everyone despised Whitman. The troll army employs the same time honored disapproval used against Allen Ginsberg: Gorman’s poem is simply prose, too stagey, lacking in literary seriousness. Reading this claptrap I’ve come to the conclusion this is why poets can’t have nice things.

I loved her poem and was thrilled by her rhapsodic incantatory weaving of darkness and light.

The racism and sexism behind the pallid critiques of Gorman are obvious but less obvious perhaps is the notional idea that the MFA driven (and now Ph.D driven) “academy” gets to decide what poetry is, which is of course a social lie, to borrow the poet Kenneth Rexroth’s term. Here’s Rexroth:

Yes and then there’s this:

“There is an unending series of sayings which are taught at your mother’s knee and in school, and they simply are not true. And all sensible men know this, of course.”

And sensible women and lovers of poetry. I do not welcome the MFA crowd governing joy, hopes and the widening of poetry’s reach.