Planet of the Blind

So it came down to this
Green in mind
Like that moment
A pill dissolves
So that I felt alive
Without permission
As free men do
As free children do—
A cob webbed forest
All about me

Outside three deer nosed a snow bank
A lonely neighbor carried a book
He might have been my grandfather
A minister with his bible
Walking the lanes
In the age of rickets
He too might be alive without permission
I am not a sad man
No one needs free will
O green in mind
Without mercy…

You never swim out into the same ocean
But I woke this morning
A flock of school children passing,
One child dragging a stick along the fence,
The music of a boy
Who has more than he can carry,
And I thought, I’m no longer
So fond of travel…
Not “old” but inside
I’m pushed now
Farther to a corner,
The birds of my flesh rising
Coursing over my house.

The Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski wrote in his diary: "I don’t experience my life as a road, a journey from the cradle to the grave, but as an object, a vessel that gradually fills up and, when full, falls apart."

I think it’s good to stay off the road.
It’s good to think of your body as an urn.
Climbing the stairs I imagine I’m carrying water.

**

In disability circles there’s a lot of talk about “gain” as in, being crippled one has advantages where critical thinking is concerned. I like this idea, but not as much as I like the urn. I’m just filling up. It doesn’t matter what I think about this. And it certainly doesn’t matter what road I imagine for myself.

**

“Look at that man! He’s one heavy urn!”

**

An urn walks into a bar. The bartender says “what’ll you have?” Urn says:

(Readers note: the questioner is a cross between the Id and a river mule…)

Q. Did they always treat you unfairly? And when did you first notice this?

No, not always. I had a full day of happiness in 1959 when I was four years old. I had a stuffed monkey and a wooden top. The top whistled when spinning. As for the monkey, I talked to it. The loss of one’s virginity to unfairness doesn’t happen suddenly. I was a disabled child. Spent a lot of time alone. It dawns on you, even when young, there’s a yin and yang to solitude. As a friend of mine who’s blind says, “sighted people suck.

Q. Did you ever want to stomp on the sighted people?

No. They’re outwitted by the complexities of nature.

Q. What have you learned as a disabled person teaching in universities?

In meetings with faculty and administrators I scrawl signs behind my eyelids.

Jesus held up a coin
With Tiberius in profile
A profile without love
Power in circulation.

            —Tomas Transtromer

1.

In a smallish fantasy I’ve had for years to think at the moment of my death I’ll be on a far shore, relieved to find my coins are useless. This is not a Greek thing as we all know Charon collected cash. I’ll get over without a dime. So will you. Its good to distrust power in circulation. Love is another matter. Trust and love are sisters. They are as reliable as rain.

I’ve been a disability rights activist for a long time. It has earned me equal measures of positive recognition and a ton of contempt. Able bodied people are not often reliable allies and they’ll turn on a cripple very quickly if she insists on accessibility and justice. But trust and love are sisters and they’re trustworthy.

3.

Trustworthiness is often found wherever power in circulation is absent. This is one part of Jesus’ story—the best part really.

4.

Some years ago I was walking along a street in a medium sized Scandinavian city and found a baby stroller outside a department store. There was a crow sitting in it. He was supremely displayed, wings up, fierce head darting from side to side. Seeing me he flew away. Then the parents came out, strapped their baby into the seat without any idea the dark one had been there. I am, among other things, an amateur philosopher. I thought of Theodor Adorno: “Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.”

5.

Truth is not illusory and Adorno knows it. His sentence depends on a fantasy real as a coconut. Adorno I must leave you. But tomorrow there will be sunlight and it will make the statues gape.

6.

Jesus knew a coin without value when he saw it. This is because he dwelled on the far shore of the minutes.

7.

Someone has to sing so I do
Beside the hole, my father’s grave
& it’s April snowing
Our Savior much like a blue jay
Goes about his business
Talking to no one
Up in a birch.

There’s comfort in the unexpected and seemingly empty places.

The White Horse

D. H. Lawrence, 1885 – 1930

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent, they are in another world.

9.

Power is always loud but silence is where the love resides. Take a little time for quietude. (A reminder to the self.)

Perhaps today I’ll listen to a little Parsifal…

10.

Each day now I climb into the sheltering tree that lived outside my boyhood window. I am no longer cold and feel no shame when I’m in its branches. I’m not certain I know much more than the boy knew. Up in the tree “knowing” means my body is a string. That’s what music is of course—sensing your body as one of the strings. Between the notes, true power.

A longing—one of those poetry words
Like wishful—ice at the windows
And the window glass frosted
And the emptiness that rides us
All coming together as we draw
With a finger on a frozen pane.
Its the season for broken connections
Between memories
Startling again, everything
Turned round, mother
Long dead laughing
As she’s fallen while skiing.
And no one knows how it shall be…
The respite of the dead season…
Hope in nothing…
And the smiling that goes on inside twilight…
I look up as the branches sway…
Gulls eating from the pine cones in snow…

As Transtromer said, there are bare winter days when the sea and fields are fully known to one another. Now I’m sitting still. What is inside me—the angers of childhood, the lifelong contempt because I’m disabled, they sink now beneath the floor. Far below my house is a moon glow iridescent shelter where human grief huddles as in an air raid. That’s me down there. He’s blind too. He sits under a clock…one of those railroad clocks from the 19th century…it ticks with a language of dead straws…The blind grief boy throws himself forward without trembling; turns around and around; draws dark pictures on the water of solitude. Grief isn’t polite. It’s a stone that migrates up. He draws and the stones appear. He does not know about the world far above where pain might be deleted.

Good old Auden, so stinky and sad
In and out of love—
His ghost rushes past
Like a night train

**

The first time they broke my heart—
Well, I won’t tell how
But I promised myself
And man oh man

**

Blind, eyes still ache
Old, still laughing
Frozen tears in my drink
Still don’t know the teacher

**

Poetry?
Makes nothing happen?
Turn to the the walking stones
Tell them

**

I was thinking of you
I guess you’re still alive somewhere
You who read my thoughts
Better than anyone

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 disabled 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 discrimination. BTW: the ableists also avoid saying “maybe tomorrow.”

If you’re disabled and require reasonable accommodations you likely know all about this. At Syracuse U where I work I’ve been agitating, pleading, begging for accessible documents and websites for over a decade. “Non hodie” is the prevailing reply. What’s so demoralizing is that those who ought to be in the fight for disability inclusion are not interested. How can this be? Well, actually, the matter is simple: “there will be time enough to make things right, but not today.” That this “non hodie” includes administrators charged with accessibility and inclusion and also the faculty who teach disability related subjects tells you how big a muscle ableism really is. But there’s another issue…

Fighting disability discrimination makes you unpopular. One may say that fighting for the full inclusion of all historically marginalized folks does so too. But with disability there’s one more turn of the wrench: very few people want to serve as serious allies. There’s almost no up side to being a real disability activist. If you want to be liked, stay away.

It’s not easy in “non hodie” land. One morning, tired, feeling low, I wrote the following draft of a poem:

This morning talking to Stephen’s head…

“You’ve endured so much,
Bullying, lifelong ableism…”

The architectures of wantonness…

Walking alone one sees Raskolnikov’s room…

Confession: having lived in some bitterness,
I fear the cruelties of human indifference
More than
Anything in this world…

**

“Non hodie” harms disabled human beings. It’s not merely that it puts accommodations and full inclusion into a murky future—the disabled who need these accommodations are left hanging, and in order to make this palatable, the ableists employ gaslighting. “You’re asking for accommodations in the wrong tone of voice.” “This isn’t the venue for this.” (As if there was a venue.) It’s the old, “you’re a malcontent, you cripple you” defense. Never do such people say, “wow, we’re violating the law and injuring real human beings.”

Another aspect of the gaslighting business is to have a gaslighting committee—usually it has a name like “Inclusion and Access for One and All” and it meets privately because its all about “non hodie” and self-congratulation. These committees never propose to fix the problems. They have cookies. They talk about inclusion. There’s just one thing. The folks on the committee don’t suffer from a lack of accommodations. In general they feel pretty good.

If you’re like me and you need accessible digital materials to teach and participate in the community and no one wants to fix this in real time—so that you’re “non hodied” half to death—you’re not included in the inclusion and access for one and all club. But you betcha they’ll gaslight you. You’re not fun to be around. And that’s the kicker. In the Neo-liberal university feeling good is the game.