Planet of the Blind

A week ago today I had the welcome fortune to attend a symposium at Syracuse University on bio-ethics, disability, and medicine. The event featured a keynote talk by Bill Peace with presenters Brenda Brueggemann, Barbara Farlow, and Sheri Fink. The theme of the day was, essentially, “in what manner can people with disabilities live in the age of pre-natal genetic testing, expensive medical technologies, diminishing public support for social programs, and the unvanquished shadow of eugenics?

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person according the the UN. Yet the moral principle is not certain with disability. One reason for this is that medicine (broadly) cannot distinguish between the science of “curing” and the art of “healing”–a difference which appeared in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As medical technology became more sophisticated so did the pressure to relieve patients of disablement. The inability of physicians to cure a disability meant failure rather than an opportunity. Healing means living and doing it well. People with disabilities do live beautifully and successfully, but often they do so in spite of their physicians.

I spoke two days ago at the University of Texas School of Medicine in San Antonio. My audience was composed of physicians and medical students. “The worst thing you can say to a person with a disability is, I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do for you.”

When doctors say this, they are not healers. It’s incumbent on physicians to imagine successful lives for patients whose “condition” can’t be cured, which means they must know more about the world of rehabilitation, art, and accommodations.

I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do for you, is essentially mal-practice.

 

I say no one lives the way I live

But the iris interferes—dark and thin—

My way was first, I’m here…

 

Early morning. I’m set straight by a flower. 

 

**

 

Wings. The poets always write about wings. I prefer hooves. I’m more interested in Pegasus’ feet. 

 

**

 

Still I love a world 

where nothing is 

as it seems. 

 

And I love the phrase don’t kid yourself…

 

**

 

I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.

 

—Wolfgang Pauli, on asserting the existence of neutrinos. 

 

**

 

I can’t get the old woman out of my head, she knitted sweaters, kept a crow in her shop. Can’t remember which island in the Aegean…

 

**

 

My dog wants to walk. Hello. Marvelous. 

 

 

“The one I worship has more soul than other folks,” said Auden. Then he added, “than any I have met so far.” Even poets need to be accurate. For accuracy’s sake I admit I’ve met some “big soul” people but they were pick-pockets also. 

 

**

 

I will be an old man just like other old men with watery eyes. But I won’t be cheaply sentimental. For accuracy’s sake I’ll be richly sentimental. Like my dog. 

 

**

 

Here’s to the old moonlight of romance, reflected in water, the water in a cup, the cup made of tin. 

 

**

 

Here comes Lord Byron, clunk clunk. Nimble, principled, cripple. Templar “tapper” to be sure. All of Greece was his reasonable accommodation. 

 

**

 

I gotta get right with the banana clock.

 

**

 

Irony and humor, lice to the body of pain. Or not. For accuracy’s sake I admit the lice may be bigger than the body. 

 

**

 

Good morning blues, blues how do you do?

Well I’m doin’ alright, good mornin’ how are you?

 

You see, when you really have the blues they’ll talk back. 

 

**

 

Someone asked me about tenderness. How to find it. The recipe for empathy is written whenever and wherever dogs turn in circles before lying down. Or yesterday, my wife, came upon her horse asleep. She talked to him softly and he opened his eyes and nickered. Small joy. Shared. 

 

   

I’ve never been bored. Perhaps the Manichees will toss me out. 

One must always worship without rules—

for instance I climbed several trees in my youth 

though I was blind and once 

I found an owl’s nest 

when I reached for a branch 

and my idiorhythmic heart was stormy green. 

 

 

 

    

Let me say something about my lute: its made from a birch which, as you know, isn’t always a musical tree. Birches grow by serendipity in marsh land—they are tall, thin mistakes. This is my instrument then, this thing making music from nature’s unseemly muddle.

Here’s to the devil of pejorative noises, rustic with goodness and polemical pen, who’d blow a trumpet without remorse though we trusted him. He’s American, Christian, slick as a specimen dish. Today he’s Joel Osteen, but he’s always a roulette pronouncement. Elmer Gantry, Billy Sunday, Jimmy Swaggart. All of them knew how to take your money. People on the left think these fellows are exploiters of crude hate—but I’ve always seen them differently as the thieves of goodness for they steal from their largely illiterate or alliterate followers in the name of a Christ their laity can scarcely know and surely can’t understand. This makes the American Public Preacher-hood the most cynical sect of all. Tawdry, lurid, greedy, smug—and I think it says a lot to note they’re less trustworthy than auto salesmen.    

My mother loves me but not in her heart. So her love is like water leaking from a neighbor’s apartment. As I grow older I see there’s no landlord and I take up amateur plumbing, stanching my mother’s accidental love however I may. Now that’s she’s dead I still hold the wrench—the one missing teeth—the accommodation of deflection will be necessary again. My poor mother, who loved so little. But at least I can embellish the wrench with corn flowers.

**

I live in a cold, northern city in North America. Though its spring its still snowing. One sees how sad the houses are—like the houses in Neruda’s poems—the houses are suicidal. The crows sail around in their unambiguous death watch.�

My mother loves me but not in her heart. So her love is like water leaking from a neighbor’s apartment. As I grow older I see there’s no landlord and I take up amateur plumbing, stanching my mother’s accidental love however I may. Now that’s she’s dead I still hold the wrench—the one missing teeth—the accommodation of deflection will be necessary again. My poor mother, who loved so little. But at least I can embellish the wrench with corn flowers.

 

**

 

What a thing to be a man-child with corn flowers. I can’t fix anything. But I love wild flowers and celebrate a patch of sun. I love my mother in memory though she was always a darkling disaster. 

 

**

 

I live in a cold, northern city in North America. Though its spring its still snowing. One sees how sad the houses are—like the houses in Neruda’s poems—the houses are suicidal. The crows sail around in their unambiguous death watch. 

 

**

 

New super heroes: Urchin Boy; Cornflower-Cat; Zero-Sum Sister…

 

**

 

How I wish I could be stronger, that wishfulness compares with peace. I wish for peace. A strange joke, born into a violent and inarticulate world, and wishing for something like grace. 

 

   

 

 

Someone will jump up and down on my grave,

a condition of being given life—

one must consider the dance.

And the wind plays no part in it. 

Heavy, wet, spring frost…