Planet of the Blind

  

He sees at last infirmity is a trick.

something achieved with string,

 

a game played best on the floor—

puzzle, wish, fear, and ache

 

are what a magician is for. 

Its raining as always 

 

but he has a stick

and he waves it at the orient wind. 

 

**

 

“Well, the lamb must face the lion,” he says, entering the halls of medicine. Sometimes he thinks of doctors as howler monkeys. Sometimes he sees them as fish swimming in schools. “Doctors,” he thinks, “think their job is to defeat grief, poor dears.” They think a crippled man or woman can only be (at best) a victim reconciled. He wonders what Doc X was like as a child.

 

 

 

I don’t know precisely what’s happening inside me. Old English words have been disturbed like leaves in a lake. Feorhbold, the OE word for “body” has floated up. Feor (as the unconscious knows) is a foreboding. Foreboding (as the unconscious knows) is knowing what’s going to happen to your body. Your body and mine. Feorhbold is also related to feorhus—a little house of fear. 

 

Inside my left knee are the sad nights of youth, railway arches, dark skies. My left eye (the “good one”) holds residual pennies from foreign trips, the ones I shoved into the back of my sock drawer. There are Old English words for these vestiges of psyche. 

 

Now of course there are countable fears and uncountable fears. One must be exact with the dictionary. 

 

**

 

Walking my guide dog this morning we were passed by a woman driving a big SUV. She waved at us. She knows I can’t see. But she waved. I like that. “But how do you know she waved?” My feorhbold told me. 

 

**

 

My demands are multiple. I want honesty from poetry. That’s because people in the village square often can’t muster it.

 

I want compassion in my nation’s discourse. What kind of fool am I? I’m the one with uncountable fears. 

 

I want intellect that parts the cause from the effect. I’m tired of the balloon animal class of historians. 

 

I’m tired of sorcerers.

 

**

 

Last night in the little house of fear I lay awake listening to branches scraping the eaves. 

 

 

 

 

“If you’re going to live with a dog” he thought, “then you have to decide what kind of person you want to be.” 

 

Dog-man was learning essential secrets about himself—what he began calling love’s way of living . 

 

He had sufficient irony to understand this sounded like the equivalent of loud kissing. 

 

He decided he didn’t care. 

 

He was flying when love’s way of living first came to him. It was a domestic flight from New York to Chicago, the plane one of those “regional jets” with an overcrowded cabin and a prevalent odor that reminded him of gym socks.

 

The plane hit some turbulence and dropped. A woman beside him, a stranger, screamed and grabbed his arm and shouted “Oh my God, Oh my God!” 

 

Then Corky, big dog that she was, sat up and put her head in the woman’s lap and then the plane was smooth and the woman began crying and Corky washed her tears and several passengers, seeing this, applauded.

 

“I have to unlearn much that I was taught,” he thought then. “Much.”

 

 

 

  

Retirement

 

—For Doug and Sari

 

 

In the bad old days it was bad in another way:

Children climbed ladders in the dark

At a priest’s word, or sat 

 

When they were told, maybe one book 

went around 

Bunyon—What God says is best,

 

is best, though all the men in the world 

are against it.”  In the bad old days

no one breathed without permission.

 

A girl who couldn’t speak

and a boy gone blind

read nothing—their lives blanched

 

by the hands of clocks—

Who’d take the time?

Only the brave, averse 

 

to the middle,

a mean average 

would dare to teach.

 

One sees 

how bold that was—

calling for tomorrow 

 

when there were defeats 

to remember.

Stirring this very night

 

freed from final ends 

we once called school

are all the little “yeses”. 

  

 

 

 

 

“No world wears as well as it should,” said Auden, who was thinking of art and culture. But daily life doesn’t hold up either—especially if you have a disability. The things you hear from strangers are hackneyed and tedious—“Why don’t you look where you’re going if you’re blind?” or “How does the dog know when its time for you to go to the bathroom?” The frontiers of personhood are assaulted daily. On the 4 train in New York a woman once asked me if I knew she was a goddess. “Yes,” I said, “you’re Hera.” “That’s right,” she said. “How did you know?” “My dog told me,” I said. This satisfied her. 

 

  

If you have a disability you know a lot about abjection. You also know irony. You say things like: “Well if Jesus could cure a blind man, why didn’t he just get rid of blindness?” “What’s a self-respecting man-god good for after all?”

 

Contrarian irony was unlocked in me quite early. I’m inordinately suspicious of cant. (For my blind readers that’s “cant” with a c and not with a k–though I have my suspicions about him as well.) 

 

 

 

My friend Bill Peace is fond of the phrase: “I’m not impressed.” Bill is an anthropologist so he knows when you’re less adept at pottery than your neighbors. For example: my immediate neighbor (who I’ll call Erasmus) can’t spin a pot to save his life–whereas my thrice removed neighbor can turn out a pot that would make Josiah Wedgwood weep.

 

The thing about being or not being impressed is the choice we make about saying so. Especially when we’re outsiders. You can bet Margaret Mead didn’t tell the Arapesh their pots were laughable. 

 

But what do we do when the pots are laughable? When we have disabilities and the constructed world is mediocre? How you say it–how you “tell it” is a complicated business.  

 

Look: they’ve plowed snow into the disability parking space. Look: they’re hosting a conference without disability accommodations. Look: there are not alternative methods for reading the handouts in a meeting. No sign language interpreters. 

 

The pots are laughable. 

 

Some days it seems to me that while disability culture has been progressing by leaps and bounds, the mainstream has been under a spell—delusional iron age magic—and so we have neighborhoods of potters and whatever might be the opposite of potters, shatterers I guess. 

 

I live in this reality. Its not disposable, like the disappointment following a loss by my favorite baseball team. The shatterers are all around the disabled.  

 

**

 

Shatterer number one, former boxer Evander Holyfield:

 

“Boxer Evander Holyfield, who is currently on the U.K.’s Celebrity Big Brother, is in hot water for remarks he made on the program comparing homosexuality to a disability, saying both can be treated by a doctor. All together now: Ughhh.

Holyfield made the remarks on Sunday when reality star Luisa Zissman asked him if there were any gay boxers, according to TMZ. He responded that homosexuality is something doctors can fix.”That ain’t normal!” he says. “The Bible lets you know what’s wrong and what’s right.” He continued his “handicap” analogy: “If you were born, and your leg was turned this way, what do you do? Go to the doctor and get it fixed…The only thing I’m trying to tell you is you know how handicapped people, you can’t say because they’re born that way you can’t move that…Yes, it is a choice.””

 

Full story here. 

 

Shatterer number two, the story of Joe Schultz:

 

“An Army veteran in Waco is trying to figure out who scammed him out of tens of thousands of dollars in back-paid disability benefits.

Now his fellow veterans are doing what they can to make sure he’s not left out in the cold.

“I’m disappointed and hurt,” says 66-year old disabled veteran Joe Schultz.”

 

Full story here.

 

And number three, the story of Marie-Patricia Hoarau, a wheelchair user who was booted off an airline flight. Read here. 

 

Shatterers all…

 

 

Dr. Gerhart Stalling invented the guide dog. His name has been lost. We remember Diderot who first said blind people could be educated. We remember Helen Keller with her vaudeville shows. 

 

Who invented the clepsydra, the water clock? What was the name of the Venetian who invented the hourglass? 

 

Dr. Stalling. I love you. I don’t care if Aphrodite’s garden is closed for repairs. 

 

**

 

I know an essayist who doesn’t believe in the truth. He teaches at a famous university. I hope he’s passionate enough when the inevitable punishment begins. He’s young now. But he’ll be old quite soon. In age you have to stand on the ladder of your own constructions. Me? I want a firm ladder.  

 

**

 

Error does not end with youth. That’s a problem alright. 

 

**

 

I want some Chinese firecrackers in mid winter. 

 

**

 

If you keep a notebook, don’t show it to your muse. 

 

**

 

I think the Venetian who invented the hour glass was named Popo. Popo Abeverrare. He was an annoying neighbor. No one likes people addicted to the laws of probability. 

 

 

 

 

I think about the beauty of bruises. The bruise of boyhood; the bruises left by slamming doors. The opportunity for a good bruising is never far off when you have a disability, or, more specifically the likelihood of same is increased—medicine pathologizes, colleagues in the workplace impose their unexamined neo-liberal assumptions and a smart bruising is guaranteed. The beauty isn’t moral—I don’t subscribe—“what doesn’t kill you” is just that; “you’re still alive” but not necessarily stronger. But if Ernest Hemingway was right and we are strong at the broken places then we are beautiful bumped and blue. 

 

Don’t let anyone make an example of your bruises. Protect them. Let them speak for themselves.

 

 

 

“Let me state up front, Doctor Normal is a fine man. On first meeting Doctor Normal, who seemed amiable enough, if intense, we decided we liked him. Doctor Normal was thorough. Doctor Normal took his time. Doctor Normal followed through with requests. Doctor Normal made us feel like, in the realm of his doctoring specialty, he knew what he was talking about.

But then one day Doctor Normal used the word “normal.” Something like, Well, in a normal situation…”

— Heather Kim Lanier “Breaking Up With Doctor Normal”

When my friend Heather takes her daughter Fiona to the doctor he only understands her developmental disabilities by setting them against a normal child’s life. Imagine! The poor doctor is bewitched! He thinks there are normal children! 

The bewitched doc obviously doesn’t get out much.

We might suggest he read some passages from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Democracy isn’t tidy and normalcy is hard to locate outside the dark warren of human thought. “Its difference we celebrate doctor!” (“Still it would be marvelous to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,” —Pablo Neruda) Doc Norm is scared of Fiona—she’s a cut lily in a law office. 

In the doctor’s imagination birth and death are equidistant from “normal”. 

In the doctor’s imagination the unchangeable losses of childhood are “normal” but never the changeable losses—the latter are too much work to contemplate.  How disabled children may prosper is the subject of life itself. “Normal” allows him to forget the largest share of existence. Poor doc! Cut lilies and dreams of talking oak trees surely must frighten him out of his wits. 

Its not enough to say Doc Normal is a symptom. (Though he is.) Not enough to say he represents neo-Victorian medicine. (Though of course he does.) Doc is a member of the mildewed mob of badly educated physicians and health care workers who cannot imagine patients as being other than their symptoms. 

One sees this with ophthalmologists. Ask a group of blind people what their experience with eye doctors was like and they will invariably tell you that the doc said: “I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do for you.”

There’s no life after blindness. No opportunity. No spirit. No joy. No family. No diamond. No hat. No honey. No green grass. You see, they didn’t discuss this at medical school. 

I once gave a lecture to a gaggle of baby eye doctors at Johns Hopkins University. While I was talking about the social construction of disability and why you have to see the whole patient, they were reading their mail, checking their palm pilots—this was just before the introduction of the iPhone. They figured I had a guide dog and wouldn’t know. My appearance was just some tedious exercise in political correctness. 

O the primal yawn that brings forth the writs of this world. 

O Doc Normal, with your sensitive Narcissus face.