Planet of the Blind

“Our man works in his garret, therefore, in the hope of becoming a pearl.”

Excerpt From: 1694-1778 Voltaire. “Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/voltaires-philosophical-dictionary/id510945575?mt=11

 

I shall be a pearl today and so shall you. The secret to the art rests not in the word “becoming” nor in “hope” but in the imagination’s power of admission. 

One is more of the pearl as she grows older than of the sand. 

The secret is work. 

The metaphor is made manifest by your life in the garret. 

Later today I will read a poem in memory of Steven Taylor, an activist scholar who fought on behalf of people with disabilities. He was in his own way a pearl.

 

Mid Day, Elegy

 

 

—in memoriam, Steven Taylor

 

 

A blackbird sat and called in the pine just west of the house, its voice so clear at first I thought it was water, as if I’d heard the coming rain—

the coming rain but discrete, rain a hundred miles away. 

Though I’m blind I saw the bird—

 

I saw the bird, saw him as I see, merely shape and hue; I knew he was night itself,

at noon, night alive. 

Mid day, a blackbird calling west of the house, 

Shape and hue; blind; saw him, night coming 

 

and saw too how we make work of it

as the day spins forward, unmindful,

our work, night alive, a blackbird calling,

the alert and unmindful day.

 

 

The pearl derives from what we do with the unmindful day. Make your day the garret. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because I’m like a bird who can’t decide which tree he wants to live on.

Because disability is the whole forest. 

Because my deaf blind friend writes astonishing poems and my two best autist friends are (every day) freeing unspoken vowels from long hidden boxes. 

Because myths of “normal” are a trap—Joe wishes to be normal so he won’t stand out. 

Of course people don’t want to stand out. Its best really to be normal. 
Take it from the boss. Have a nice weekend barbecue. 

Because as a blind kid I dared a boy who was bullying me to ride his bicycle blindfolded. He broke his arm. 

“The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.” (Martin Amis) Comedy is not concerned with the sufferings of normal people. (Kuusisto)

Because normalcy is getting smaller and my forest is growing. 

Because I believe in a just society. One that takes care of aging children with intellectual disabilities. One that celebrates parents with disabilities. Did I say this correctly? One that celebrates. 

Because, as John Hockenberry says: “In America access is always about architecture and never about human beings.”

I blog often about disability because I believe in human beings. 
 

 

The excellent scholar of disability studies Tom Shakespeare writes over at BBC that disabled achievers should be remembered. Indeed. And he shows that Matisse was a disabled achiever in his later years: 

“Matisse moved from painting to the medium of cut-outs after losing his mobility in surgery to remove cancer in 1941. It was impossible for him to paint freely as he had done before so he turned to the decoupage technique, getting an assistant to pin and re-pin painted shapes to his wall until he was satisfied with the effect, creating undersea creatures, stars, and abstract compositions. It is still possible to produce something beautiful and memorable, and we should have higher expectations of older people with disabilities. Over half a million people visited an exhibition of Matisse’s cut-outs in 2014 at the Tate Modern.”

Tom makes several important points in his blog post. The aging process can be a creative experience; we expect too little from the elderly; classifying people by embodiment is a mistake. The imagination is not beholden to your physical capacities. Or another way to put this is that obstacles or formal constraints in art lead to breakthroughs. 

I have a poem (the title poem from my book “Only Bread, Only Light”  that among other things, makes the case that blindness can be a vehicle of beauty even on an ordinary street:

“Only Bread, Only Light”

At times the blind see light,

And that moment is the Sistine ceiling,

Grace among buildings—no one asks

For it, no one asks.

After all, this is solitude,

Daylight’s finger,

Blake’s angel

Parting willow leaves.

I should know better.

Get with the business

Of walking the lovely, satisfied,

Indifferent weather —

Bread baking

On Arthur Avenue

This first warm day of June.

I stand on the corner

For priceless seconds.
Now everything to me falls shadow.

Excerpt From: Stephen Kuusisto. “Only Bread, Only Light.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/1017I.l

Tom Shakespeare is right: the embodiment of beauty, the very idea of it, may be a mistake.

 

 

  

Freedom of expression is on everyone’s mind following the barbarous attack in Paris. 

I remembered three quotes from Thomas Paine yesterday: 

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

“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person: my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” 

As the late Christopher HItchens would remind us, scripture is often violence. 

The weather man says big things are coming, by evening an avalanche will likely occur though I live in a flat place where the few straggly hills are largely domesticated—he points to a map—snow, he says, snow will kill us all. He knows of course it isn’t true. But he can’t help it. Disaster 24-7 is what the producer wants and there was a bombing today in a schoolhouse and the snow must therefore be lethal. “Its killer snow,” he says, looking like a scribe, an ancient keeper of scrolls, who has written a doleful note in the margin. I want to tell him I love the snow, that the world doesn’t end, but in these electronic dark ages the best you can do is blog.  

What is a disability exactly? The answer is inexact since disability isn’t a physical matter.  Its an economic idea, the term put into currency by Karl Marx to designate laborers who, owing to misfortune, were no longer able to work in factories. Disability is therefore a 19th century term. And today Karl Marx haunts every disabled person like one of Scrooge’s ghosts—“you shall work no more; work no more….”

We don’t acknowledge the economic origins of the term, preferring to imagine disability is a medical circumstance. Legislatiion is written to reflect this view. But disability is not a physical problem. Its still an economic idea. Give disabled people proper work place accommodations and most can work. 

The numbers are terrible. 70% of the disabled remain unemployed in the US. This is a failure of imagination. Its the 19th century. 

I think its worse than that. I think its national cynicism. “We don’t need to hire these people; they might be expensive; besides the government looks after them, doesn’t it?” I believe when we use the term “corporate welfare” we should always add the word disability. 

Disability corporate welfare means that no one in business should ever be inconvenienced by having to think about hiring the disabled.  The government will look after the lame and the halt. 

Last year National Public Radio and Planet Money aired reports about social security disability fraud. The reporting was discredited but the narrative reflected the struggles of blue collar workers claiming disability because they could no longer lift boxes. Ira Glass missed the point: without accommodations disability becomes an economic term. The workers with slipped disks and carpal tunnel are in need of work place reassignment. But we don’t do this in America. In this way the HR people are Marxists, irnocally enough. “We’ll let the government handle this.” Workaday America doesn’t believe in accommodaions.

How we manage accommodations and universal design will reflect just how eager we are to be a 21st century nation.  

You will be half sane for one more day

According to the poet who writes about dreams.

Snow falls lightly, glitters on the road

Where dream stuff 

Works itself into solid figures. 

The boy inside me counts footprints. 

The night is round and the dogs are round.
The two roundnesses are one
So a dog sees the moon 
When you turn off the light in a hallway
Or when he follows you as you’re searching 
For lost keys or even a single word.
A dog’s eyes say we made it through the winter
And we traveled on the back of round
Though you my friend did not always know. 
Each man or woman may forget
Then rediscover the moon. 

If there’s a better form of poetry for the Twitter Age I don’t know it. “Haiku” you say. Yes, fast and obscure fits the bill, but unlike Haiku the Clerihew shoots off deft sparks because its intentions are overtly comic. It beards the lions. If Groucho Marx wrote poetry he’d have gone all in for the Clerihew.

The “thing” (for so I shall call it) (for its a curiosity) was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. When Bentley was a teenager in school (and doodling in the margins as any self-respecting adolescent must) the following lines percolated straight into his head:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

The “thing” is faster than a mongoose and just as absurd as a mongoose. The rhyme scheme is AABB which is sufficient unto the purpose—the Clerihew’s implicit agenda is to push famous people into the fun house. Bentley also wrote this one:

George the Third
Ought to never have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder. 

Edmund Bentley’s best friend was G.K. Chesterton. I’m sure hardly anyone on Twitter recalls Chesterton but he was a major literary figure in Edwardian Britain and he popularized the “thing”—so much so that esteemed poets took it up.
W. H. Auden was a superb practitioner. Here are two of my favorites by Auden:

Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.

When Karl Marx
Found the phrase ‘financial sharks,’
He sang a Te Deum
In the British Museum.

As you can see, the second Auden Clerihew is especially witty—Marxism, god, and intellectual serendipity all cozy together in the British museum is dryly hilarious.

Late last spring a new collection of Clerihews by the poet Paul Ingram hit the stores and its delights are salty and colorful. First off I should say I love the book’s title: The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram. It makes perfect sense that wit should have been hidden—like some hitherto unrevealed manuscript by Voltaire—one is more intrigued by lost marginalia than the plain graffiti next door. The book (which has a wonderful Foreword by Elizabeth McCracken) does not explain why the Clerihews were lost though Ingram says they were scrawled on cocktail napkins and scraps of discarded paper and one day he found a mother lode of them in a moist basement box. Ingram’s readers are the beneficiaries of his spring cleaning. How I like knowing this. I like old comedy unearthed. As a college student I adored ancient Greek graffiti I found in Athens. But I digress.

Ingram is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where he studied poetry. For over thirty years he’s made his living selling books to writers and he’s arguably one of the best read citizens in America. Unlike so many who’ve made their lives among books, Ingram exudes merriment. As McCracken says: “The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram are everything that Paul Ingram himself is: hilarious, ribald, tender, erudite, naughty, every decibel and every octave.” 

McCracken is right. What’s in a Clerihew? Plenty. Here are some of my favorite “Ingrams”:

Jan Sibelius
Used a alias,
He always checked in
As Huckleberry Finn.

Greeleaf Whittier
Thought nothing was shittier,
Than being stuck in the snow
With Henry Thoreau.

John James Audubon
Took too much laudanum, 
And became unpleasant 
With a ring-necked pheasant. 

And perhaps my favorite: 

Jesus Christ 
Was sliced and diced,
And punched with holes
To save our souls. 

Paul Ingram reminds us that wit and economy are the barbs of poetry—a good message in the age of the Tweet.

 

 
  

 
  

What does it mean to be a sustainable cripple? The terms are inconsistent, unstable. Medicine aims to cure disease. What is a sustainable illness or disability? Why should this taxonomic assignment matter? 

I have several friends who can’t speak. They are wise, discerning, capacious in thought. On the coarse street they might appear to be greatly disadvantaged. They are not. Their wisdom )both individually and collectively) is even now only partially understood. If we assume the medicalized notion that they’re fit only for cure or for study, we fail to take into account their remarkable talents and individualities.  A sustainable cripple is one of us, a talented “other” and while the value of a cure is well established, the value of suspended judgment in the face of difference is very poorly recognized.

The sustainable cripple leads whenever the subject is difference. 

The SC understands that if a limb can feel revulsion there’s still a false move in store.

SC knows imagining tomorrow requires recollections of defeat. 

Architectures: inclusive, no segregation, no separate classrooms or hospitals. 

Governments re-designed to prohibit segregation. 

The abolishment of panopticons.

Teaching with the motto: “presume competence”. 

Neurodiversity understood as human potential.

Economies built for diversity—no more pyramids.

Demand religious leaders stop using disability as metaphor. 

Disability as metaphor is usually hate speech or superstition. 

Sustainable planets do not require hate speech or superstition.

My Thoughts early morning. One year ago on a cold day. Syracuse.