Planet of the Blind

And so I have lived like a silhouette…

Darkling as I am
I may not get home
Today I’m walking
In a forest full of wind

This morning, early, bending to tie my sneakers I thought about the dead, how they do us no harm. It was a small freedom like pipe smoke. Also, I realized I never want to tell others how to live.

**

I arrive too seldom at kindness. Oh I talk about it. Point to it, like a child at the zoo who sees hippopotami. One day kindness will shove me out of the nest.

**

When I went to the school for the blind my roommate, who had prosthetic eyes, kept dropping them on the floor. Together we would crawl around groping for them. The moon rose outside the window.

**

There are so many folktales where the old man traveling never gets home. Homer wasn’t interested in those. The Odyssey is fine, but I prefer an old Finnish story called “Let’s Pretend We’re Eating.”

**

Its lovely to be nearing death without ambitions. I have a small homemade wooden whistle.

I’ve lost many friends in this life, some from illness, others from painful experiences. Of the latter I was often the one responsible for the breakup. I was hot headed in my youth.
Nowadays I wish I could repair some of the past damage but not enough to track people down. That’s the stuff of novels and I don’t want to enter the world of unpleasant sentimentality. I certainly don’t want to find that those with whom I once fell out have never developed emotional intelligence. But then I have to ask “how much E.Q. do I have?” The question is a bit like asking “how seasick are you when you’re seasick?” I’m more stable than that man puking over the rail. Then again I’m not feeling entirely well.

OK. I’m lonely. As a disabled child I was also lonely. When I was in my early teens I tried to kill myself. I was lonesome in college. I’m still not feeling entirely well.

Once in awhile you have to interview yourself This is especially true if you had a disabled childhood. A preliminary question: when did you first realize you were a stray raindrop?
The answer should include what you were sensing on the day of your primal loneliness…like Eliot’s objective correlative…I remember as other children mocked me for my blindness there was a blue jay crying out the names of his flock…

Rain journeys road calls bird walks small blind child turns knob on radio…

I ask you what it means to be a sufferer in this life, O Lord, but you keep silent in your golden storm. The Leonora Overture plays on my radio. A few leaves hang on in the garden.

My life is being blown toward a far shore and I’m laughing, O Lord. It doesn’t help. I’m fully conscious.

Its a trick of the poets to say the lamp is lonely in its corner.
Its a joke of the gods to give us so little talent.
Its words like heart, soul, and fate that say we’re still evolving.

I turn up the radio, anticipating the off stage trumpet.

At twenty she came to me
Saying: you will write books
And some will read them
But you’ll not be happy
Life will be
A muffled clamor
You’ll be foreign
To yourself
Like one
Who speaks
The glaucous dialects
Of herdsmen
And all I heard
Was “books”
Authorship—
Not understanding
The loneliness
To come
And the crying out
For trees
To save me

It’s time to write fast, the school bell is about to ring,
Dust flies through the aspens
And that bully boy has torn the pages
From his math book—they fly across the room
And all the Jungian shadows of the children rise
It’s time to write fast, time to run
The grown men, the grown women
Must now bury their hats
Hurry with the penmanship
Explain it
That day the President died
They turned us loose

I tell myself I’m going to be kind today. I tell myself I’m going to laugh.

I’ve been disabled all my life. I’ve been treated poorly by school teachers, children, adults, professors, taxi drivers, college administrators, airline personnel—its a long list.

I laugh. I do it a lot. I make up names for my ableist oppressors.

Charles Dickens ain’t got nothin’ on this baby.

College faculty are (to my mind) like those lobsters you see in restaurant tanks. Almost all of them are ableists…

There are of course many kinds of professors. In the faculty senate you’ll meet the following Moliere-esque figures:

The “Tartuffe” is an administrator, usually a dean or provost who will tell you with affected gestures that he, she, they, what have you, cares a great deal about blah blah blah but never helps out.

The “Harpagon” is also an administrator, but he, she, they, can also be a faculty member. The Harpagon is driven by rhetorics of cheapness but he, she, they, generally drives a nice car.

Statue du Commandeur: a rigid, punctilious, puritanical type—“this is the way we’ve always done it. If we changed things for you, we’d have to change things for everybody. Yes, it certainly must be hard…” See:

The Geronte: when his son is kidnapped he says: "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?” (What in the deuce did he want to go on that galley for?” In other words, he brought this upon himself. “Really, shouldn’t you try something easier? I could have told you.”

“I am, I fear, Inclined to be unfashionably sincere."

–Moliere

This is right and proper
My mother waves from behind this shade
She’s farther off—I suspect
She’s reaching for birds

**

Last night I dreamt my dead teacher was still alive
He was a famous poet
Then in a twist
He was alive and dead at the same time
I stood under a lamppost in twilight
I wrote him a poem
Though of course, being blind
I couldn’t see the page

**

Like Gunnar Ekelof I sometimes have a confused feeling that I’m inside my own eye which is opening again
I am in a field

**

Yes mother ghost
That’s a lovely bird in your hand
How did you capture it alive?