Planet of the Blind

Poets customarily ask if poetry has a practical impact and often come up despairing. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden said, and he was right if happening is meant as carpentry, which is what the question is about–in essence it asks why can’t poetry be a blueprint? The late Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski once wrote he’d like to be the sort of poet whose songs call trees and stones to come forward, that he might build houses for people. The line is about as far as one can get from Auden–even as the wish may be impossible it musters intention. In this way the line is ridiculous.

Saarikoski knows it. Ambition, intent, and their failure together frame the insistence poetry must carve a plan, however utopian and improbable. Poetry makes nothing discernible happen but it’s blueprint is, much like Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, enticingly clear. Poetry can be concerned with the potential city–an urban romanticism surely, but one yielding a realized eschatology, as Kenneth Rexroth once said of “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman’s Manhattan offers a vision of what America could be, or may still become, a harmonious, loving, broad minded portion of the Earth, elect and free. Whitman insisted spiritual and civic life, a life equally enacted of mind and body will simultaneously propose and affirm true democratic love.

Makes nothing happen? Call the walking stones. Tell them.

When I think about inspiration I get a cramp in my foot, as if I’m swimming. Aside from it’s obvious and lengthy history as a central idea in art and religion, inspiration has become in modern times a strident and proprietary thing—the incitement for self help books and motivational speaking, pop psychology, and a thousand narratives in which people overcome tremendous obstacles to finally live in some kind of contentment or self acceptance. This mode of inspiration is a bourgeois figure, and it is a figure, as it becomes a metaphor with wings, angels, big puffy hearts, houses with tall windows facing the ocean. For the disabled inspiration is an ugly piñata. A piñata that looks like an eel. We were always supposed to inspire the non-disabled with our pluck, our optimism, our winning smiles, our earnestness. We were matchless representatives for the charities that served us. We were Disney, pure Goofy, always cuddly.

And if we weren’t, well we were guilty of not playing the game. We were “disability Debbie Downers” who simply cried out frequently, because there was much to decry, and we were insufficiently sportive, and we were bad cripples.

It is good I think to de-legitimize inspiration. It was always simply breath, the mystic breeze we take into ourselves, perhaps sent by the gods, or maybe just oxygen—it was about breathing and hence, about life itself. It’s the essential word you want if you’re discussing life.

If you live to be 80 you’ll take 672,768,000 breaths. Every last one will be about air. These breaths will primarily have zero to do with making others feel better about themselves. You’re breathing for you. You’re breathing for your children. You weren’t inspiring the Greeks on the beaches of Troy.

This is of course where metaphors of inspiration begin. Breathing is a private affair but in our formative years as a species we imagined breath was sent by the divine. The Greeks called this theopneustos—which means breath sent by God. Thus inspiration (breathing in) became a kind of mouth to mouth resuscitation by the “big guy” and it’s one of the oldest notions humans still hold. Or many do. Bob Marley sings “there’s a natural mystic blowing through the air” and he could just as well being singing for the cave painters. When St. Paul uses theopneustos he means that God’s breath is not only in him but that it blew across the pages of his holy writing. (God can even make the ink dry.)

One thinks of God manning a pump, leaning above the Earth, eternally pushing air into our lungs and hearts. God exhales oxygen and likely breathes in CO2. Either way he’s busy. We don’t know if the fish are inspired but some of us think so. All air is heavily laden with life’s possibilities. Whatever my spiritual inclinations may be, I have to believe this. Breath will be what you make of it. Perhaps you will live like a bird who moves from branch to branch but you will sing. Maybe you will never be free of assignments but you will build a neighborhood. If it is not possible to know what is up or down, it is possible to build a neighborhood. It’s done with breath, breath first.

Because the mouth to mouth resuscitation God image doesn’t matter, is irrelevant, is almost hilarious, you are allowed to own your own breath. You’re allowed to be someone who mends the narrow cracks in the house. Who builds houses for those who don’t have them. You’re allowed to feel the tameness or wildness in your every action. And this is inspiration.

So if you’re disabled you don’t have to inspire anyone. But you can make an art of the breath sent. God or no God; charity or none.

Is it unseemly to suggest one doesn’t like Father’s Day—do you become the contrarian at the party who ruins the tenor of easy conversation? I should get it off my chest: I don’t like Father’s Day, White Cane Day for the Blind, National Donut Day, or any other emo hostage taking daylong remembrance. I’ve always favored Kenneth Rexroth’s assertion: “I’d cold cock Santa Claus if he got in my way.”

I should say I liked my father. He was a peace maker. As a university president in the late 60’s and early 70’s he invited student protestors to sit with him and talk about the military industrial complex and the place of higher education—a place, he attested, that was “right” for expressions of concern about the state of the nation. And I’ve always loved this photograph of him meeting with students at the State University of New York at Albany in 1969. My dad is at the lower right. You can see him holding aloft his reading glasses as he makes a point to the students seated at his left. Notice how seriously he’s taking them.

Those were still the days when college presidents were educators rather than bureaucrats or bean counters. If you believe in peace you need to talk about it. My father did not call the campus cops or the state police; did not rope off the building. There were plenty of people who told him he should do those things. “A university is a place for ideas,” he said. “It doesn’t hold them merely to the classroom.”

Later that same year he’d insist that progressive attorney William Kunstler should speak on campus even though the apparatchiks of state government pressured him to cancel the event.

I know he’d be dismayed by the actions of many contemporary college and university administrations.

I don’t know what he thought about Father’s Day.

I do know he didn’t like to go shopping.

I don’t think he would have cold cocked Santa Claus.

He did like poetry and he’d have thought the Rexroth line was funny.

I’ve reached the age when for many reasons it’s necessary to admit the things I will not live to see and bid farewell to goals I can’t possibly accomplish. As an American born in the decade after the second world war, who came of age in the 1960’s, I find I’m struggling with this pragmatism born of aging. It feels like fatalism, that most decidedly un-American characteristic. I should, according to all the glossy magazines be preparing to run a marathon at 90 or perhaps buy a villa in Costa Rica. But I will not be doing these things. Nor will I be tricked into imagining whatever time I may still possess is—well—timeless.

I’m not going to be reading contemporary American fiction anymore. I need to delve deep into Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass which has always been the most important book on my shelf.

I don’t have time for novels with titles like The Summer Girl from Uppsala or The Big Rock Candy Mountain Breakdown. I might re-read The Adventures of Augie March. 

I certainly don’t have time for middle brow books about aging like Michael Kinsley’s Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide. Here’s the publisher’s happy synopsis: “Vanity Fair columnist Michael Kinsley escorts his fellow Boomers through the door marked “Exit.”The notorious baby boomers–the largest age cohort in history–are approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. Now they are asking: What was that all about? Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you’re gone the reputation you leave behind? In this series of essays, Michael Kinsley uses his own battle with Parkinson’s disease to unearth answers to questions we are all at some time forced to confront.”

What’s next? Gumby’s Book of the Dead? 

I of course salute anyone who ruminates on disability and Michael Kinsley is certainly right to wonder what physical difference may mean both in personal and collective terms. But then one encounters prose like this:

Decades before the nursing home, though, we all cross an invisible line. Most people realize this only in retrospect. If you have a chronic disease–even one that is slow-moving and nonfatal–you cross the line the moment you get the diagnosis. Suddenly, the future seems finite. There are still doors you can go through and opportunities you can seize. But every choice of this sort closes off other choices, or seems to, in a way that it didn’t use to. In every major decision–buying a house or a car, switching your subscription from Time to The Economist–you feel that this is the last roll of the dice. It needn’t be this way; in the more than twenty years since my own Parkinson’s was diagnosed, I’ve moved half a dozen times, changed jobs even more often, gotten married, let my New Yorker subscription lapse and then renewed it. Each change feels like an unexpected gift, or a coupon I’d better redeem before it expires.

This terror of being written off prematurely (like being buried alive) makes it difficult to write about a medical condition that may linger and get worse slowly for decades while you try to go about your life like a normal person. People say, in all kindness, “Hey, you look terrific,” which leaves you wondering what they were expecting, or how you looked the last time you saw them. They seem taken aback that you are around at all. The first time you hear or read a casual reference to “healthy persons,” it is a shock to realize that you are permanently disqualified for that label. And then you realize–even more shocking–that you’re the only one who’s shocked. Everyone else has adjusted, reassigned you, and moved on. Even if you feel fine, you walk around in an aura of illness.

One wonders if Kinsley has any idea what a trite and singularly dull volume he’s written. Probably not since he’s busy redeeming coupons and buying another car.

No. I won’t be reading boomer books about aging.

If by chance you’re in the market for a great book about growing old, the best one I know is by the late Jungian analyst James Hillman, entitled The Force of Character and the Lasting Life which contains these splendid lines:

“…let us entertain the idea that character requires the additional years and that the long last of life is forced upon us neither by genes nor by conservational medicine nor by societal collusion. The last years conform and fulfill character.”

As does disablement itself.

Meanwhile, back to my abjure-ment list.

I’ve given up on the National Football League.

I no longer believe we will conquer global warming.

I generally think identity politics is not politics at all but a soapbox for grievance. Marxism is right about the class struggle. My disability and your life on the reservation should be vehicles for marching side by side.

I can’t read any more confessional poems.

I will never go on a cruise.

I won’t be swimming with dolphins.

I can’t read any more short stories about sad middle class Americans and their divorces.

I’ll never go to a Disney theme park.

I don’t think technology will save us.

I certainly don’t think religion will save us.

I have no time for Rudyard Kipling.

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 also thinks of his less personal failings, 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 an essay about the 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 on which to rely 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 Curtis LeMay. What matters finally is whether we choose to be Dickens or Whitman. I think we’re a country of sacred faces, faces of veneration.

If history is a guide Americans will not be electing Donald Trump, even as they may find many practical or potential faults with Hillary Clinton. The latter is merely imperfect; the former offers a detested and despised face. As a citizenry in a fulsome democracy we still understand the difference.

When I entered the woods alone; went in there as a boy; small, blind, very much in isolation, I invariably talked to myself. I remember saying, “Blue Jay has roller skates.” According to contemporary memory theory I shouldn’t recall this. Instead I should only recall a formative feeling over which my contemporaneous imagination inscribes it’s own ideas. But “hinx minx” I really said the Blue Jay has roller skates and I remember why. He was so loud and busy I just knew he was zooming along the branches on tiny wheels.

Now the world is filled with tiny wheels. Joy rolls. Sometimes joy falls like a leaf through space but trust me, it still rolls as if tumbles. Even when joy is darkness against your cheek, it still rolls.

Tears roll and mouths in love roll. All livelier dreams glide on wheels we’ll never be able to see.

Every human being rides their own wheels made of silver light.

I have seen a woman transform into a linden tree and I’ve seen other things as well. Blindness is no impediment to seeing things. I’ve seen autumn trees with dripping bark, reality weighing itself in a rising loaf of bread.

Wheels glimmering cold along the horizon.

Micro totalitarianism and sexual persecution are the terms that come to mind for me as I struggle to absorb the slaughter in Orlando. The first is best represented by Donald Trump’s Brummagem—his tweet of self-congratulation announcing his brand of Islamophobia has been proven correct. The branding of hatred, commodifying it, blurting it, as if it’s face cream or Viagra is how micro totalitarianism is spread and sexual persecution is just one of its targets. Islamophobia and homophobia are equally salable in the United States, almost as easy to sell as assault weapons. From a disability studies perspective one sees that the baseline narrative of micro “t” is, among liberals, mental illness—a convenient class, abstract, ridden to death by endless episodes of Law & Order, let’s blame them for violence. Micro totalitarianism depends on persecution and it’s practitioners will cherry pick their victims according to what sells.

The shooter in Orlando may or may not have been mentally ill. He may have been warm to Islamic extremism, but at this juncture, given his apparent declaration that he supported Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and ISIL—(which is like saying you support Stalinism, Trotsky, and Thomas Dewey) he seems more a figure of confusion, and perhaps someone with a persecution complex. He was, therefore, the perfect buyer, the proper customer for assault weaponry. Racial persecution, sexual persecution, disability persecution, religious persecution, all have in common the branding of hatred. Everyone in America is supposed to head straight over to the gun store.