Planet of the Blind

I’ve been attempting an assault on my morbid imagination much as one might undertake housecleaning but first must imagine the process, seeing disheveled rooms in his mind’s eye. Perhaps the homely analogy isn’t quite right:  the world’s dreadful conditions in no way match bourgeois domesticity but my analogy is a gesture toward weariness. The morbid imagination has lately spent too much time with the news, has coursed repeatedly across digital media and now has concluded there’s no hope for human kind.

There were eras when the word fortune was warmth itself. Even in the darkest corners of the globe one could conceive of a future unencumbered by the evidence the planet is dying.

In those innocent ages the future wasn’t easy and we endured hard physical and intellectual labor but the steady nature of the “coming times” was possible. (Not probable but viable).

That ended with Hiroshima but then again we could hope, even pray for disarmament. The improbable but still viable future was still in our hands.

Now morbid imagination tells me otherwise—eco-destruction is so advanced and economies of warfare are so fully determined there’s no way out. And the morbid imagination says “we’re just playing a lost game until the clock runs out”.

As I say, I’ve been attempting an assault on the M.I.. I write my name with a finger on the vapor of the future. When this doesn’t work I attempt Zen laughter. Ha Ha! So much is nonsense! All is transient. Even the planet. Life will go on elsewhere.

Oh we’re in a fix alright. My nation is dying and now apparently lacks the political will to affirm its own freedoms much less tend to the destruction of the world. I channel surf, see the bloated corporate shills who pose as national leaders. The M.I. despairs.

I try seeing myself as a mind committed to a larger body. And in a few moments I will clean the rooms of my old house. I wonder if I’m tired because I’m nearing sixty. I wonder if there’s evidence for optimism—a way to beard the lion of the M.I.. I’m having some trouble. I remember a therapist who challenged me when in an earlier time I was also morbid—who said: “When have your negative expectations, your dark visions of what’s ahead been proven true?”

She was right to ask. I have a quick and gloomy mind. I adjust. Things, good things, agains seem possible.

Herein I admit I’m fighting. I’m walking straight up to my name and touching it gently.

My friends, how are you?

 

 

 

 

When I think of Lao tzu I get dizzy. I press my face into a lake and open my eyes.

Underwater my blindness is a virtue; I’m as much a lake as the lake.

I laugh sideways, water and darkness slip in and out of me.

When I’m dizzy I have to ask: who do I propose to become

and who will I leave behind?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suppose I asked you to be my friend?

How would I do this as an honest man?

I have so many secret artifacts,

so many broken parts—

I’m a house that gleams on the outside

but its rooms have been cleaned quickly of spilled blood.

I’m carried in my shadow by another shadow.

I wave at you under the long thin streaks of clouds.

 

I read a post last night on a rather unskillful group blog entitled “In Defense of Ableism”. Its  author argues being physically whole is simply better than being disabled and therefore able bodied people oughtn’t worry about tropes or phrases betokening disability as a miserable state of affairs. I love how non-disabled people imagine they know all about the cripples much as I enjoy pink men who declare their familiarity with the circumstances of racial differences on Fox News. I’m sincere about this—when pink men wade into the dank waters of aggregate imperial assumptions and intolerances and wave their $5 Disney souvenir magic wands I see the retreating vanguard of privilege soaking its collective knickers. The “Pinkies” (for so I call them) never inquire as to what it is they’re defending.

The Monty Python once had a skit depicting soldiers in WWI. They were in a trench with terrifying explosions all around and their single concern was the protection of a tall grandfather clock that had been inexplicably entrusted to their care. So it is with the aforementioned defense of ableism, not merely because the privilege of the argument is misplaced (though it certainly is) but because physical wholeness is not a useful paradigm for understanding the human condition. I would not want to defend physical perfection as the sine qua non of ethics for the same reason I avoid patent falsehoods in general. If physical ability is thought to be the signature of the human book that book is stitched too thin to be important. Its a comic book argument, puerile and complacent. Worse: its draped in neo-Victorian wool (smelling of camphor and anti-Macassar) and when spoken it assumes the weary tones of adults who must, alas, tell their children its a hard life and (insert here—art, liberation theology, post-colonialism) won’t help you live. The post might just as well have been titled: “In Defense of Infantilization” but of course such titles presuppose comic irony which is in short supply in the Ableism Defense Department.

Taxonomies of physical value are the stuff of eugenics and function in America as justifications in support of the prison industrial complex. The Los Angeles County jail is the largest psychiatric facility in the United States. This state of affairs is only possible or tolerated by means of ableist assumptions. Its a very hard life children. The philosophers have said so. It really is too bad. Maybe if you’re really really good the warden will give you a grandfather clock.

 

 

I walked around the barn without words—

no nouns or memories

 

a long clean glimmering silence in mind

as I circled horses.

 

When I was a child I wrote my name with a finger

on icy glass, saw how the letters

 

were evanescent—

innocence in training

 

for eternity, but truly

today I was for twenty minutes

 

moving in the shadows of late summer

without guilt or whisper.

 

 

 

 

 

If you imagine the tree of the world you’re doing the proper work of the mind.

Sometimes, late at night, I see the twisted branches of the world rising toward the Milky Way.

Now what does “proper” mean? The imagination has no manners. The tree is pure growth in its dark inheritance. The mind is jealous and wants to rise. If someone asks me what I’m thinking I say I’m seeing treasures for which there are no nouns.

 

**

Now I’m tired. I forget about the tree o’ earth. I read a cheap detective novel and fall asleep. In my dream someone has given me a pair of farmers overalls to wear. I discover I’m walking on water lilies.

 

**

 

Explain your disinterested self, I tell myself. You know, the self when you’re not apparent. I dip my writing hand into a well formed by two tree trunks and wiggle my fingers in the murky rain water.

 

**

Heraclitus:

It would not be better if things happened to people just as they wish.

This is why I love the tree of the world. It grows or doesn’t, always without hope.

**

It rains in the apple trees

Where a crow settles

In a dome of blossoms—

 

I watch him

With my clear head

The way blind people do,

 

Feathers, wet leaves,

Bird’s feet

Scratching the boughs…

 

**

Proper work of the mind. Leaves falling in rain…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the valley of dreams you find wandering men who bury spoons in the snow.

If you’re a Freudian you think of spoons as the instruments of motherhood.

If you’re a Jungian, spoons are solidified long tears of the gods.

But really, why should dream men bury spoons when all portable instruments

are useful to travelers?

 

In dreams you must walk light as you can.

In dreams food arrives in rare forms.

Last night I saw my father (long dead)—he was playing a grand piano

beside a window.

Snow fell outside and he leaned into the notes

though in life he hadn’t been a musician.

I knew he was feasting.

 

 

 

 

Czeslaw Milosz: A decent man cannot believe that a good God wanted such a world.”

Always the god outside the man. A failing of so many. Milosz god is extracorporeal and masculine. A gyne-corporeal god is on the inside. The god on the inside wants peace, drinking water, medicine, food, and shelter and in that order. A decent woman cannot believe in a god outside the body.

 

When I was a boy I found an abandoned stove in the woods and I sat beside it to hear the crickets singing inside. That was my first opera. Those crickets sang of unearthly latitudes and I sat listening for hours. I must be honest—sometimes I’d cry beside them. I was just a little kid and already I knew the varnished life of blindness for I was not allowed to play with others. I was in turn studying the masters, the tiny bodhisatvas who sang with their legs. How could I have expected such a provincial beauty would fill me? I did. I knew, listening with everything I had, crickets would materialize within me. They were my first talking books. My first Caruso. Later I’d discover Lorca, his line: the little boy went looking for his voice/the king of the crickets had it…

Yes. The cricket king. The little boy with his thick spectacles. The proscenium arch of that old stove among the birches.

 

 

 

—Only this table is certain. Heavy. Of massive wood.

 

Czeslaw Milosz

 

 

Sighted or blind the table is inarguable and so we must think of it is a fact.

 

“Its time to set the fact,” says mother and children place smaller facts on its smooth surface.

 

E.M. Forster (who should have known better) wrote: “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”

 

Forster forgot tables. The poor sleep at tables. If they’re lucky they eat at tables, give birth on tables, even die on them among the forks.

 

 

**

 

The Disabled. Tabled. Never at the right one. The culture table. Heavy. Of massive wood.

 

If they’re lucky the table fits wheelchairs; provides ample space beneath for guide dogs; there’s a place for your assistant or interpreter.

 

Mostly never the right one. Infelicitous. Crabbed. (The blind know those tables poorly set.)

 

**

 

Frank Lloyd Wright: “The truth is more important than the facts.”

 

**

 

The table can be a diminished fact. The truth is more important than the table.

 

**

 

And yet sometimes it is all I can do to stand or sit before a table. Merely arriving almost kills me.

 

 

 

**

 

The table—the first reasonable accommodation. We had to get the food higher than the snouts of dogs. We had to learn the word “sit” both for the dogs and ourselves.

 

**

 

A deaf man sits at a table. Beside him is his interpreter. Opposite: two job interviewers.

 

Job interviewer #1: “If we hire you, what accommodations will you need?”

 

Deaf man: “It depends on the job you offer me.”

 

Job interviewer #2: “We’ll get back to you.”

 

This is the table as portcullis. The table standing on its side.

 

 

**

 

This is the table I always wanted: antithetical meal—no dominant cuisine.

 

**

 

Disability is a tableaux, a tabula, a treatment of tables, since it undermines the furnishings. Here is my Platonic table: shifty but of original form which is to say shifty. The gods are always changing shapes.

 

**

 

After meals the Greeks slid their tables under beds.