Planet of the Blind

At the Translators’ Conference

It was strange to have a language.

It did not sound like anything else.

The Russian man talked and became familiar

though he was more peculiar each minute.

“We are like God,” said a woman from Korea

though she didn’t say precisely how.

Later I walked beside the frozen river

hearing human wishes

like vows under glass.

Someone Has to Fall out of Love Today

Before the Enlightenment, before scientific method, people thought everything in existence was tied to fate, gods, and Olympian caprice. Throughout history life has been like a game of “she loves me, she loves me not” and there’s not much to add about this except to say Newton saved us from many a plucking and sensible people should be grateful. Kurt Vonnegut once said something to the effect, “I’m gad I don’t have to spend time thiinking up what to give God anymore”—to which he added: “what do you give someone who already has everything?”

I think Vonnegut knew the answer. You give God your despair. This is after all what plucking petals is all about. When someone falls in love, its the work of Cupid. When we fall out of love, well, what then? Did God steer you badly? Did God hate your wedding dress? Does God hate honeymoons in Paris? Falling out of love should be Newtonian but its always marked “return to sender, on high”. Atheists like Christopher HItchens always say religion belongs to the infancy of the race—but really, its all about broken hearts.

Please don’t fall out of love. I urge against it. But if you have to fall out of love today. Please don’t resort to superstition.

A Guide Dog’s Imagination

So when you’re with your dog all the time your imagination is changed. One afternoon in San Francisco Corky and I sat in a small park on Nob Hill watching as about a dozen people practiced Tai Chi. I couldn’t fully see them but I knew they were there. I heard the sounds of their feathers if you will. And Corky basked in the sun, stretched out at my feet. It came to me that dogs differ from humans in several crucial ways. Corky didn’t care about the number thirteen. She didn’t worry about diminishing sunlight at the end of day. No dog on earth needs “happy hour”. They don’t worry about sinister dreams or omens. “Tai Chi,” I thought, “is a beautiful, graceful analgesic, it gets us humans through the hours.” But Corky was her own analgesic. And so she did not see the need for one.

My dogified mind was undergoing natural development.

My dogified mind saw that the best of love is now.

The poet Lorca wrote: “But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;

flesh exists.”

Men and women are carried in their shadows, like musical instruments in their cases.

Dogs see no need for shadow or case.

Dogs see light has no bottom.

Dogs dream of daylight moving their feet beside you in the dark.

Yes because of my dog my imagination was changed.

I saw the darkness I’d worshipped in my life was just a trap.

Again in San Francisco talking happily to strangers. “You two look so happy,” said a woman in a tea shop.

She gave me a free cup of chrysanthemum tea. She gave Corky a bowl of water.

“Change is possible,” I said. She nodded.

“Yesterday morning my dog and I walked straight out of a cloud.”

Dogs are against Romanticism.

No dog believes the past is the key to the present.

No dog believes in heroic simplicity.

Corky was pragmatic, trusting, loyal and centered in our steps and stepping.

How could living with such a being not change your mind’s qualities?

Human beings have strained features, believing they’re in training for eternity.

Not your dog.

Maybe her optimism comes from her nose. She can smell vanished islands.

All things scented are still present.

Any dog’s nose is a myth preserving instrument.

Any dog’s nose reckons happiness past and translates the past.

We went to Santa Cruz, California and walked the seaside boardwalk.

I told my friend Ken, a poet, I was coming out of a private sphere.

“I’m learning to like the open,” I said. “It’s like Corky is turning me into the artist formerly known as agoraphobia…

Blind, No, Blind…It’s Only Blindness…

I was checking into a Minneapolis hotel fifteen years ago. I can’t remember the year exactly, but I was checking in with my dog and suitcase and my steadfast hope dignity would attend me, for as all disabled people know, when you’re in public dignity is fickle. Maybe the doorman will grab you by the arm, believing he’s helping you. He’s sincere. But as soon as he grabs you you’re leached of 15% of your dignity. Again, all disabled people know every day is a dignity leaching measure.

But in this case it wasn’t the doorman who de-dignified me. Nor the desk clerk. The job was reserved for two very drunken college girls who appeared beside me as I was approaching the front desk in the conditionally respectable Marriott.

“Hey,” said girl one. “Can we touch your face?”

“No, stupid,” said girl two. “He’s supposed to touch our faces!”

Roller skate laughter. Heavy odor of gin.

“Hey,” said girl one, “Wanna touch my face?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” said girl two. “We’ve got great faces!”

“I’m not Helen Keller,” I said. “And I’m not Patty Duke either.”

“He won’t touch our faces!” said girl one.

“Please leave me alone,” I said.

The desk clerk was immobilized. And useless.

“C’mon,” said girl two. “Touch my face!”

Around this time a security guard appeared. He said: “Come with me ladies. It’s time to go.”

They were compliant which surprised me.

But as they walked away, I could hear girl one saying: “He wouldn’t touch my face!”

You can’t make this stuff up.

What are you going to do? I checked in. I estimated I was down 85% on the dignity scale.

Up on the seventh floor I said aloud: “I like my life. I am full of ideas. My dog and I don’t get lost. This is a good day.”

You Have to Practice Disability

When your disability comes to visit you often speak of lilacs as if they were customary, as if it’s always Spring. This works so well you add some birds: larkspur, titwillow, pine thrush—all song birds are beautiful and undecipherable.

You offer disability some tea.

How can anyone who doesn’t love tea and larkspurs expect to be loved in return?

Disability taps out the names of things on a table, one by one, original things, words, bird skeletons, clocks with decimals.

Disability and the Three Way Mirror

Remember those three way mirrors in the clothing department when you were a kid? (These mirrors still exist of course, but I want you to remember when you were little and seeing them for the first time.)
You were dragged before that mirror. Dragged on a Saturday to get good clothes maybe for a funeral. Maybe a wedding. It doesn’t matter what the occasion—you were there in that stuffy store, stooped, sweating, scowling most likely.

And maybe your mother said: “Wipe that look off your face.” But of course you couldn’t. For not only were you there on sufferance, you were being forced to see yourself as others would see you. A childhood ego is not as fragile as its adult successor, but even a diminutive ego hates to see itself posed for others.

That was the moment when childhood was over.When commodified staring was a fait accompli. “Sit up Huckleberry. Don’t slouch, Huckleberry.”

If able bodied people want to know what disability is like, think about this: its a forever of that Saturday hijacking where you stood before an unrelenting mirror, salesman, and grudging elders. No end in sight.

What’s Wrong with Yoga Pants?

I was talking with my friend Lance Mannion on Friday morning. We were having our respective cuppa. Columbian Supremo for me, something decaffienated for Mannion, as he’s working on his blood pressure. Me? I drink coffee until I feel suffiently paranoid to face the day. (A phrase from my friend G.W. in Iowa City.) I was sipping Supremo when Lance said something about a GOP legislator in Montana who recently proposed a ban on wearing yoga pants in public.

As Jenny Kuttner writes at Salon:

We live in a world full of problems. Thankfully, we also live in a world of problem-solvers, such as one Rep. David Moore of Montana. The Republican legislator recently proposed an innovative response to a tricky situation his town found itself in last summer: A group of naked cyclists biked right on through Missoula in August, and they couldn’t be stopped for fear of violating free speech rights. So, to get back at ‘em, Moore would like to ban yoga pants in public.

Ah stretchy schandenfreude! Rep. Moore of Montana so hates naked bicyclists he decided to issue an edict about yoga pants—a “through the looking glass” topsy turvy Feudian “reaction formation” in which one unregulated hostility becomes another.

Lance and I couldn’t figure out why any American legislator would want to ban clothing. We don’t ban guns; we don’t ban flag burning; we don’t ban Nazis from marching in the streets; we don’t ban warrantless spying on innocent people; we don’t ban toxic chemical dumping in hydraulic fracturing; its a long list—but for Rep. Moore, in an era of climate disasters, terrorism, police brutality, and Charlie Hebdo, yoga pants are “it”—and worthy of a chronique scandaleuse.

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Yes, Mr. Paine. Apparently the American Revolution was fought to install a tyranny of Puritan taste.

Ah, Dear Mr. Paine:

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. ”

Excerpt From: Thomas Paine. “The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete.” iBooks.

I suspect, being spiritual and all, yoga pants are highly esteemed in Heaven. So should it be in our democracy.

Disability as Snow Sculpture

The frozen wheelchair, the wheelchair tipped over. Sculpted by the boys of fraternity row. I think I’d like to see that.

Frankly I’d like to see anything in this Disneyfied nation that isn’t drivel. See Ariel Dorfman’s “How to Read Donald Duck”.

Meanwhile the disabled must inevitably turn on their own snow machines.

At Syracuse University the DCC (Disability Cultural Center) has been hosting for several years now, an annual conference called “Cripping the Comic Con” an event that brings together scholars, writers, performers, artists with disabiities or disability imaginations. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Me? I’m so damaged by popular culture I shut it out long ago.
As a kid I was harassed and physically beaten, always in the name of “Mr. Magoo” the cartoon character who couldn’t see.

I saw cartoons weren’t friendly. I made friends with Huck Finn and Jim on their raft.

Nowadays people come up to me al the time and say: “Hey have you seen Daredevil? You know he’s blind and all…”

I haven’t seen Daredevil. I think its likely good for someone somwhere that there’s a blind superhero.

But I have a suspicion, larger than a bread box, that Ameircan sentimentality can only handle disability as caricature—prevailing representation has to be two dimensional whether its Daredevil or one of Jerry’s kids.

There are rare exceptions in popular culture. Push Girls, Breaking Bad…

Disability makes its own snow sculptures, its own nuanced hyper-human drive toward the antithesis of abjection.

Cripping the comics is artful radicalism and this I applaud.

On the other hand (how many hands are there?) its best I think not to get carried away with the evolutionary progress of pop culture.

I don’t think that American Horror Story is a good turn in disability representation.

I’m glad I got that off my chest.

Someone Has to Answer the Disability Call

What call? Call me Ishmael. Call me early or late. Call me an unpleasant fact of nature, a lusus naturae or worse. Say I’m so unsuited to community I must be housed elsewhere—asylum, hospital, prison. Whatever you do, don’t say in the manner of Phil Ochs—there but for fortune goes you or I—Americans can’t stand fortune; can’t stand luck; people who are poor deserve their fate; the disabled are insufficiently competitive for life in the open. They are a burden on the rest of us, don’t you see? I made my fortune, let him make his own. I’m sorry she needs a wheelchair, a breathing tube, a service animal, talking computer, prosthesis; I’m sorry she has a temper because of PTSD or some other spurious invisible condition.
I say I’m sorry—that’s what we do in this country. I’m sorry for you.

“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist,” wrote Julia Kristeva. OK. And that’s because belief is harder than ambition itself.
And that’s because belief is not as disectable as faith. With faith you get to ask a hundred questions, questions ever more complex, see hermenutics, Paul Ricouer, Martin Buber. See the linguistic turn in hermenutical philosophy. But the depressed person, who for the sake of argument is Ishmael, is the girl with the breathing tube, is the wheelchair butterfly—she’s forced into the camp of disbelief in a hundred singular ways. They are not subtle. Suppose you wanted belief—something casually spiritual, suitable for a depressed Sunday. You’ll find Anerican churches are protected from having to abide by the Americans with Disabilites Act. Diid you know this? Perhaps its better to be a radical, sullen atheist. At least you’re not begging for entrance.

Call me Ishmael.

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

Melville’s whaling ship was a floating asylum. A sheltered workshop. It beckoned the abject, it created disabilities. There were reasonable accomodations on board. Ahab had holes grooved into the decks to fit his artifical leg. The masts were perches for schizophrenia.
The captain and crew were the ones who stopped begging for entrance; who chose brutal lives of delirium on the open sea. Whenever today I read of developmentally delayed men, locked in a warehouse in Iowa, forced to slaughter animals, scarcely paid, I think of Herman Melville. Without irony. Life without faith requires no irony.

America with your history of eugenics.
With your hostility to the global charter on disability rights.
With your jails, stocked with psychiatric patients—worse than the Soviet Union. We are Gulag Los Angeles; Gulag Rikers Island; Gulag Five Points in Upstate New York.
America with your young Doctor Mengeles.
With your broken VA.
With your war on food stamps and infant nutrition.
With your terror of autism and lack of empathy for those who have it.
Wih your 80% unemployment rate for people with disabilites.
With your pity parties—inspiration porn—Billy was broken until we gave him a puppy.
With your sanctimonious low drivel disguised as empathy.
With your terror of reasonable accommodations.
With your NPR essays about fake disability fraud, which is derision of the poor and elderly.
With your disa-phobia—I wouldn’t want one of them to sit next to me on a bus.
America when will you admit you have a hernia?
When will you admit you’re a lousy driver?
Admit you miss the days of those segregated schools, hospitals, residential facilities—just keep them out of sight.
When will you apologize for your ugly laws?
When will you make Ron Kovic’s book irrelevant?
America, you threatened Allen Ginsberg with lobotomy.
Ameica you medicated a generation of teenagers for bi-polar depression when all they were feeling was old fashioned fear.
When will you protect wheelchairs on airlines?
When will you admit you’re terrified of luck?