Planet of the Blind

Rolfe Jacobson: The age of the great symphonies is over now.

Today I’m feeling the loss of several poets—Kizer, Kinnell, Strand…

One night, years ago, I ran as fast as I could with my guide dog, late for the opera,  and came hurtling toward the doors of Lincoln Center, and though they were already closed, an usher, wearing a long cape, saw us, and swung his door wide and we were admitted to the music.

May the departed poets be admitted to the great opera house.

**

Its a tenderness I sometimes feel. Half of the United States in poverty and I don’t know how else to say this—I feel it in my hands. The roots of my fingers ache because of injustice. Poverty is collectively rheumatic.

If I wanted anything it was the shy, unassuming dignity of my neighbors, my neighbors who are not like me.

I wanted my country to be more daring.

Tenderness, speaking on behalf of others.

**

“When Jesus was asked “[W]ho is my neighbour?” (Lk 10:29), his answer was: everyone. ”

Excerpt From: Johnson, Paul. “Jesus.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/C8qKv.l

Poetry commences in circles like Gunderson’s plough—granite rocks and sometimes unmarked graves. No circle is what it seems when you’re close to the earth. Late September and crickets sing inside an abandoned stove. The opera, about electricity, life after life.

I love reading biographies. In an strange way, for me,  it doesn’t matter very much who the book is about. The thing I like is narrative fidelity to oddness. If history cleans things up, or at least attempts to, the biographer keeps things messy. I like knowing that whatever passed for the erotic in Charles Dickens’ life caused him to be dishonest and often cruel, that he cultivated the public’s affection by inventing the literary reading. Dickens wanted to be liked though he was heartless; though he paraded sentimentality before his family and his readers in lieu of whatever it is we mean when we talk of self awareness. Charles Dickens had very little emotional intelligence. That’s “oddness” for sure. He was one of us.

If someone wrote my biography I think in all fairness the writer would have to say I wanted to be liked—wanted it too much—wanted it the way a blind child remains inside the man and still fingers the worry beads he played with in solitude. (His father had gone to the Middle East and came home from Beirut with beads he could finger and slide on a string, an accoutrement of loneliness.)

I wanted to be liked but like most of us, found ways to sabotage the hope. Life does this. The super ego is a hydra headed thing. You meant well when you placed lawn ornaments outside your house—they were inoffensive, or so you thought, a soap stone skunk and a daisy wheel. You didn’t know your next door neighbor dislikes chachkas, dislikes them the way some dislike dogs. You couldn’t have imagined he’d come by at night and kick them over. Your neighbor, an older man, no moist teenager. All you’d wanted was a little joy. You hadn’t thought a soap stone skunk would incite the old insurance man’s shadow—that Jungian nexus of subconscious anger and projection that’s largely unimpeachable if you spend time among human beings. The nasty neighbor saw too much of his own repressed pleasure in your innocuous skunk.

If someone wrote my biography I hope she’d say the setbacks didn’t set me back much. Wanting to be liked is only a tragic circumstance if you don’t possess irony. I hope she’d say I had plenty of irony. I could enjoy bad music when I had to. I could like people who didn’t share my core beliefs. I hope she’d say I climbed a security fence when I was young, in order to sit all night in a Greek temple. I was in a Lord Byron phase.

I hope she doesn’t say I loved animals more than people, though that’s a tempting thing.

Like Dickens I could be self-deceiving, though not in my personal relationships. And I don’t mean thievery. But while I profess to being an Episcopalian, I have sometimes supported military solutions to intractable problems. Thirteen years ago I thought the United States should invade Afghanistan. Now I see why the sermon on the mount doesn’t have footnotes. After 9/11 I tried to juggle my beliefs to fit circumstances. I pray for forgiveness. I try to learn from my transgressions.

I make up stupid songs; dance around the house until my wife has to retreat.

I struggle with my temper when I see gay people, transgendered people, people of color, foreigners, the disabled, women, you name it—when I see the marginalized being further marginalized.

In any event I wasn’t one of those blind people, who, having a tough childhood, grew up to pretend he wasn’t disabled.

Sixteen years ago I wrote a memoir about growing up blind titled Planet of the Blind. The book continues to sell because it provides a rare glimpse into the complex and thrilling elements of beauty that the blind often perceive. Everyone realizes beauty but the idea that the blind are capable of being discerning esthetes remains vaguely foreign to most sighted people. After all, blindness is thought of as a complete blankness, a mineral state, something like the life of Ariel imprisoned inside a tree.

Then there’s this: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re eyes don’t work, what could you possibly know? A woman approached me once as I was entering the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. She saw my guide dog. She said: “Why go to a museum if you can’t see?”

I’ve learned to call these kinds of sighted questions, “blind envy” since the unguarded and moist subtext is “what does the blind man know that I don’t know?” If the sighted fear blindness, imagining its a mineral blank, they also suspect we’re onto something. The blind are Tiresias, the seer whose sight was stolen by the gods but was compensated with the gift of prophecy. These old figurations still haunt us—we’re either helpless or brilliant but whatever the case we’re probably deficient when it comes to beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Its the eyes, stupid.

The sighted think music is OK for the blind. Its probably the right thing for us. What else would Stevie Wonder or Blind Lemon do with their lives? No joke. Throughout history the blind have been familiar as musical beggars. Pete Seeger’s recording of “The Blind Fiddler” is haunting and it sends a shiver down my back every time I hear it. We were beggars who played music long before we were recognized for having authentic talent, and in the old days, in the age of begging (which is not over in many corners of the globe) it was often thought that if we had any talent it was a miracle, a gift from God. “Blind Tom” the 19th century American slave child piano prodigy comes to mind. He performed as a “miracle” and while we like to think we’re beyond that, many talented blind people will tell you such a position is optimistic.

“How do you dream if you can’t see?” “How do you write about the world if you can’t see?” And most obviously, “How do you enjoy art if you can’t see?”

Pablo Picasso said: “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” At the core of sighted ideas of blindness is the unrelenting misapprehension that blindness is an obstacle to thinking. Another way to say this is that thinking is seeing.

I’ve always like the community poets as opposed to the garret-only poets. Thinking is seeing but its also generosity. Generous thinking means a great deal to blind people who love art. If I can’t see a painting I can see it through my sighted friend’s eyes; moreover I can admire that friend’s poetry of description. Blind people do have friends. We go to the museum with them. Professor Georgina Kleege of the University of California at Berkeley, who is herself blind, and a writer and scholar on disability history and the arts, describes an experience she had with blind people at the Guggenheim Museum in New York:

Several years ago I introduced a group of visitors with low vision and blindness to an art work by the contemporary artist, Angela Bulloch. Her Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus.12 (2008) is composed of a round framework about twenty five feet in diameter, fitted with LEDs to simulate a night sky. The piece was installed in the glass dome of the Guggenheim Museum, some ninety feet above where we were standing. After I described the work, the group engaged in lively dialogue about other details and their own observations. A new visitor, who had been blind from birth, was quiet during this interaction, so eventually I turned to her and asked what she thought. She said, “I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the night sky.”

Art is a field. We enter it and we’re both individually and collectively suffused with a renewed sense of the mystery of life. Art is not what we say it is. It’s always just beyond our narrations. And as any astronomer will tell you, no one has ever seen the night sky. We see versions. All sighted viewers are allowed to see versions. Your eyes permit you to see a subjective Platonic and imperfect model of something ineffable and delightfully strange.

When I was a little kid I said to my very Lutheran Finnish grandmother: “I wouldn’t want to be God.” “Why?” she asked. “Because I like surprises.” I said.

I love other people’s descriptions of art. They are, in no small measure, how I know the world. Sometimes when I get up close to a painting or photograph I can see elements of it. I love the tricks of perspective and light. But quite often I prefer my smart friend’s version. I like the poetry of others.

And someone hands you a description and you, in turn, make another ambient, turning, mobile sentence.

There’s no Tiresias involved.

I hear the tree of the world under my shoes while walking my dog. You may hear it too, I claim no exception. Anyone can hear the tree. It has the leveling unconsciousness of attenuation and it sways below earth even in winter. Of course you hear it too. The light of day comes. Something infirm and sweet calls but you put it aside. There’s coffee to be made.

I claim no exception, but if blindness has an epistemology its this: I was long ago expelled from the sphere of the senses. I have half a sphere, a concave exaction. And a silver birch. Something to be proud of.

You have to practice reality. When your husband tells you his dreams you have to insert lilacs into his story. “Were there lilacs next to the dancing mannequins?” Try to listen but ask the right questions. Memory too is practice. Wake up. Ask if there were shoes in your dream. In general a good dream has good shoes.

In my dreams the one wearing black rubber boots is me. You have to practice reality. Today in snowy Syracuse, New York, I shall wear my ungainly dream boots and practice memory as I walk through the clotted snow banks. I remember being seven years old and wearing rubber boots that fit over my shoes—I told my mother they were like Egyptian sarcophagi for my Hush Puppies. My mother said, “yes, your feet are the lords of Egypt.” You have to practice.

In the foaming sea of wild flowers that is your dream, look down for your shoes.

I am loved. I am not afraid. There were lilacs. The boots had wings.