Planet of the Blind

I remember on my 27th birthday alone in Berlin walking in the rain. Walking alone when you’re blind is a trick and in those days I didn’t use a cane or dog—I trusted fate and followed strangers often because of the color of their clothing. 
I followed Mr. Red macintosh on Kurferstendamm and as we went along I began humming jazz standards in my head. 
All good songs are yellow flowers in one’s head. Bud Powell: “Collard Greens and Black Eyed Peas”; Thelonius Monk: “Straight, No Chaser”; Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: “Along Came Betty”. At Cafe Kranzier I shed my coat to feel rain on my arms. O Bohemian jazz boy both lonesome and strangely happy under the plane trees.  

I woke to the waves and sand and realized I’d been dreaming of my father. We were in Finland back in the late fifties, a time when it seemed people didn’t laugh. The water had to do all the laughing in those days. Clouds watched the children. There were very few televisions. I remember the adults reading books by the sea. The ocean was everyone’s philosopher. Those were beautiful days. Everyone had his cup of sand.

Mark Twain said quitting smoking was easy, he’d done it 17 times. At least I think that’s what he said. I could look it up but I don’t want to. And that’s my problem: I’m getting “clear” with my digital demon. I just plain, flat out, spend too much time online. 

This isn’t easy—this business of leaving Facebook. I was a lonesome child. Disability in the fifties and early sixties was a ticket to isolation. For me, Facebook has been a wonderful means of connection to a world of thoughtful and ardent neighbors. 

But I confess I can’t control it. I spend hours scrolling up and down and worse, I’ve been posting every inflammatory thing I read as do  many of my friends. I’ve come to understand FB as a place in cyberspace where people like me throw open their windows and shout to their neighbors: “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” (If you’re of a certain age you’ll get the movie reference.)

Some days I feel like Dr. Jekyll when I’m on Facebook. I love people. In fact I have a wee bit of Walt Whitman inside me. When I walk on the streets I see strangers and think “there’s another soul” and the idea thrills me. The “Hyde” of FB is its lobster trap effect: I’m locked in with too many wild emotions. 

Facebook turns me into Mr. Hyde. 

Now you can argue and say something like Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous dictum “no one can make you feel bad about yourself without your permission” (I think that’s what she said. I could look it up…)
Mrs. Roosevelt was right about that. She learned that from her encounters with her mother in law. (Everyone do your own joke.)

But the thing is, you don’t become Mr. Hyde unless you’re too preoccupied with London. Hyde is the dark side of the London Victorian flaneur. 

Facebook turns me into a lobster-flaneur very quickly. 

I’m sorry Mrs. Roosevelt. Permission is too quaint. 

A few months ago I said I was leaving FB and the experiment lasted two days. Then I was back. I didn’t even bother to explain my return. Crustaceans don’t have to explain anything. 

You see its the lonely kid in me who doesn’t want to leave social media. He was terribly lonesome. But there’s no help for it. You can be lonely and preserve your essential sweetness I think. 

If people on FB who like connecting with me want to write me my non-Facebook email is stevekuusisto@gmail.com 

My blog will go on as usual, largely because I receive many notes from disabled people around the world and if being a writer has any merit it may reside only in that we can speak for those who cannot do so for themselves. 

I will miss you my fellow lobsters. Drop me a note now and then. Unlike regular fish, lobsters can read. 

Like the spoon inside the shovel, my memories, slim and silvery. Like the eyes inside the oak. 

The one who was me is no longer. This is one of the godly lessons: we die several times even as the plucky heart goes on beating. 

If the tincture of growing old is a remedy was life, was all acquisitiveness some kind of pathology? 

The worm inside the thistle; the burgeoning thorn inside the worm; the boy in memory, whose first toy was a wooden top, he’s inside the thorn inside the worm inside the thistle. 

My Finnish grandmother had a time honored recipe for thistle soup.

My father has been gone for almost fifteen years and yesterday I saw him vividly as my aunt described how she and her brother used to drive around Boston—my father at the wheel, Miriam in the rumble seat. The year was 1947. Allan was working on his doctorate at Harvard; Miriam was an undergrad at Boston University.  
 
They were children of the depression, Finnish kids who’d grown up in the conservative confines of Finnish-American Lutheranism. (I remember seeing one of my father’s diary entries from the day he turned 12: I got ten cents and a new hair brush. Pretty good! 

Poverty was one thing; the Lutheranism another. Miriam and Allan’s father was a minister. Stern and formal their upbringing was. Their mother, devout to a T, was fond of vanity, vanity, all is vanity. If my father brushed his hair he didn’t do it before a mirror. 

Now the war was over and the Finn kids were driving around Cambridge, Allan home from the Pacific, Miriam released from the parsonage and the wind was blowing through their hair and so were the ideas that struck everyone who went to post-war college as new and liberating.

“Allan was talking about Karl Marx and I was regaling him about Freud,” Miriam said during our phone chat. “Ideas were fresh; everything was heady.”

This was the happiest New Year’s Day conversation  I’ve ever had.

Do you remember when ideas were fresh? Listening to Miriam I recalled reading Lorca for the first time and being so struck by his rich figures of eternity I ventured into a cemetery and ate some grass.  

My father has been gone for almost fifteen years and yesterday I saw him vividly as my aunt described how she and her brother used to drive around Boston—my father at the wheel, Miriam in the rumble seat. The year was 1947. Allan was working on his doctorate at Harvard; Miriam was an undergrad at Boston University.  
 
They were children of the depression, Finnish kids who’d grown up in the conservative confines of Finnish-American Lutheranism. (I remember seeing one of my father’s diary entries from the day he turned 12: I got ten cents and a new hair brush. Pretty good! 

Poverty was one thing; the Lutheranism another. Miriam and Allan’s father was a minister. Stern and formal their upbringing was. Their mother, devout to a T, was fond of vanity, vanity, all is vanity. If my father brushed his hair he didn’t do it before a mirror. 

Now the war was over and the Finn kids were driving around Cambridge, Allan home from the Pacific, Miriam released from the parsonage and the wind was blowing through their hair and so were the ideas that struck everyone who went to post-war college as new and liberating.

“Allan was talking about Karl Marx and I was regaling him about Freud,” Miriam said during our phone chat. “Ideas were fresh; everything was heady.”

This was the happiest New Year’s Day conversation  I’ve ever had.

Do you remember when ideas were fresh? Listening to Miriam I recalled reading Lorca for the first time and being so struck by his rich figures of eternity I ventured into a cemetery and ate some grass.  

It was long ago I read Voltaire alone in the college library. Nixon was in the White House; students ran across campus “streaking” and everywhere I looked, people who were perfectly respectable were smoking as much marijuana as they could get their hands on. I understood at 18 there was something overtly deleterious in the air, a disatisfaction with fortune. Voltaire was just the balm. As to authority Voltaire got me laughing with: 

“Wretched human beings, whether you wear green robes, turbans, black robes or surplices, cloaks and neckbands, never seek to use authority where there is question only of reason, or consent to be scoffed at throughout the centuries as the most impertinent of all men, and to suffer public hatred as the most unjust.

A hundred times has one spoken to you of the insolent absurdity with which you condemned Galileo, and I speak to you for the hundred and first, and I hope you will keep the anniversary of it for ever; I desire that there be graved on the door of your Holy Office:

“Here seven cardinals, assisted by minor brethren, had the master of thought in Italy thrown into prison at the age of seventy; made him fast on bread and water because he instructed the human race, and because they were ignorant.”

And so around this time I began to ask questions. “Why to you think that?” “What is your proof?” “Show me?” 

In graduate school I got into trouble as people would make aesthetic judgments and I would argue any position against inoculation. It is best to learn early that you’re a contrarian. Voltaire assured me: 

“If you want to be an author, if you want to write a book; reflect that it must be useful and new, or at least infinitely agreeable.

If an ignoramus, a pamphleteer, presumes to criticize without discrimination, you can confound him; but make rare mention of him, for fear of sullying your writings.

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.

Someone says you are ill, be content that you are well, without wanting to prove to the public that you are in perfect health. And above all remember that the public cares precious little whether you are well or ill.”

It was long ago I read Voltaire alone in the college library. Nixon was in the White House; students ran across campus “streaking” and everywhere I looked, people who were perfectly respectable were smoking as much marijuana as they could get their hands on. I understood at 18 there was something overtly deleterious in the air, a disatisfaction with fortune. Voltaire was just the balm. As to authority Voltaire got me laughing with: 

“Wretched human beings, whether you wear green robes, turbans, black robes or surplices, cloaks and neckbands, never seek to use authority where there is question only of reason, or consent to be scoffed at throughout the centuries as the most impertinent of all men, and to suffer public hatred as the most unjust.

A hundred times has one spoken to you of the insolent absurdity with which you condemned Galileo, and I speak to you for the hundred and first, and I hope you will keep the anniversary of it for ever; I desire that there be graved on the door of your Holy Office:

“Here seven cardinals, assisted by minor brethren, had the master of thought in Italy thrown into prison at the age of seventy; made him fast on bread and water because he instructed the human race, and because they were ignorant.”

And so around this time I began to ask questions. “Why to you think that?” “What is your proof?” “Show me?” 

In graduate school I got into trouble as people would make aesthetic judgments and I would argue any position against inoculation. It is best to learn early that you’re a contrarian. Voltaire assured me: 

“If you want to be an author, if you want to write a book; reflect that it must be useful and new, or at least infinitely agreeable.

If an ignoramus, a pamphleteer, presumes to criticize without discrimination, you can confound him; but make rare mention of him, for fear of sullying your writings.

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.

Someone says you are ill, be content that you are well, without wanting to prove to the public that you are in perfect health. And above all remember that the public cares precious little whether you are well or ill.”

 

Dogs’ lives are rounded compared to ours. Humans lead Cubist lives, our minds are jagged and point everywhere, often in states of confusion. Dogs are round. They wake to sun and sleep with the moon and when they scent the atmosphere they get their news simultaneously from all directions. A dog’s life is a yurt; a man’s is a paltry shack.