Planet of the Blind

Years ago I read a poem, east European—
Its a hard life, and art won’t help you live…

Rain at the window

And last week a dear friend
Went to his grave

Why write?

The long grass and a field horse
Ask me to persist…

I shout to life: odd or even
As if the world had a stake in me

As if only one man’s voice could steer shadows…

Disabled people don’t need interlocutors. We can talk to ourselves. I’ve often thought we are best alone. Some years ago I read a poem by the American poet James Tate wherein he describes a man who’s so lonely he goes to a stock yard and buys a sow’s ear which he sews to the back of his couch that he may have a listener. Tate’s poem ends with that which is fine but of course he leaves out the low voice of the man rising and falling as he divides up the future and arranges grains of sand. I’m digressing of course.

The disabled are alone even when they’re in crowds. We talk inside the carapace, the Iron Maiden, the filigreed Venetian mask, whatever you want to call ableist projections—we’re not of this world according to the “man on the street” and so the Hell with it, I’d rather talk to the inside me. Now the jailer’s cat listens to birdsong and stays hungry. I confess I’d like to have an authentic talk. And I have three adult friends who are, at present, non-disabled, who understand me when I discuss my sow’s ear life inside the carapace of disability in the big normative world. Just so you know: that last sentence was a pleasure to write. I’m digressing of course.

Alone with my sow’s ear I reckon how the world of normalcy presses against me. Its a heavier thing than gravity. Normalcy world speaks like Iago. “Trust me,” it says. “We’ll understand you today.” Little sow, they were joking. My blindness scares the daylights out of them. Isn’t that funny?

My “inner life” of disability is a sort of desolate wildness. Its also despairingly lovely. The non-blind sometimes know what its like where I live—Gunnar Ekelof wrote:

“My world is a dark one
But I will go home in the darkness
Through the grass, under the woods.”

If you object and say I’m mystifying blindness that’s OK. I champion your right to say what you like. And if you’re blind like me and you don’t talk to a dismembered porcine ear, that’s OK too. I don’t worship life so much as I worship learning to use life. Each of us must do this in his, her, or they singular way. Each life is an experiment. The lines of force are on the inside however and as Emily Dickinson said, “where the meanings are.”

As for mystifying blindness all I can tell you is that my world is a dark one…I go home in darkness…and yes, through the grass, under the woods…

Ekelof is my interlocutor. I hardly need a couch or a dead pig’s ear to talk to him. He wrote:

“I had a confused feeling I was inside my own eye which was opening again.”

Pain is that joke you can’t un-hear though you try. Or more precisely: its the jest wherein you’re the punchline. Maybe you’re less than that—you’ve been reduced to a slur. For me as a child it was always “hey Blindo!” Or “here comes blindo!” Sometimes they’d call me “Mr. McGoo.” It turns out you can’t un-hear it. Its the triumph of the bullies. You’ll always be McGoo. You’ll be McGoo when you win a prestigious award. With your white stick or dog you’re McGoo at the ballgame. God help you if you lean close to see the beautiful petals of a strange flower. I did that once in a botanical garden and a guard rushed over to tell me it was forbidden. This was in a foreign city. I couldn’t figure out what was taboo: looking closely at a flower or trying to look. But I know the answer: my blindness would harm that loveliness. That man in the uniform knew it. I knew he knew it. We would not have a discussion about this. I moved on. So sometimes the slur is simply “no!”

I like to think of disabled people getting free. That they are not presently free should be indisputable. Human rights, the subject heading is a late arrival on earth. As far as I know the first person to use the term was Gerhard Ritter who coined the term in 1948. Ritter was the earliest scholar to write about the history of human rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act is now thirty-three years old. Disability freedom is a very new kid on the block. So if you’re fighting for disability inclusion, and taking into account cultural history, you’re a pioneer. But you’re alive to the hopes of the creatures inside all cripples. Free you may not be but freedom you shall continue to hold.

You’re still McGoo. In my case (as a professor at a noted university) I must contend with faculty and administrators who can barely tolerate my difference. One professor called me ignorant when I pointed out that his rudeness was potentially readable as ableism. Case closed. He was a genuine ableist and not a dime store knockoff. McGoo ye will always have with ye. Bigotry of all kinds assures you’ll never un-hear the slur, the crude joke, the perverse infantilization, the institutional neglect. Its a shame I’ve never been able to stand the voice of Jim Bacchus.

It wasn’t winter yet but the shrubs were kneeling down and the meadow was pale as milk…and the boy’s radio didn’t work…yet it was a day when he felt he was in the center of things…king of the streets…snow was coming…

**

The interviewer asks why I write about childhood… The answer is simple…that’s when they told me I was defective…

**

I think it was Transformer who said, “how clear every leaf is…they follow me all the way home…”

When the blind kid’s radio didn’t work, that was the radio…

**

And nowadays there’s a lot of talk about loneliness…I have to laugh…I was always on the frontier…leaning my face into the icy petals of the overlooked roadside flowers…

I read this morning that one third of America’s birds have vanished. Of course we shouldn’t call it America. North America? The United States? The birds are gone. I also read this morning that Thalidomide is back.

I remember a line by the poet Edith Sodergran: “I am blood’s whisper in men’s ears…”

This does nothing for the birds. I don’t know how to help them. My local town council is busy banning books while the forests burn.

Maybe the politicians will take books to the burning forests. And then they’ll hand out Thalidomide tablets.

* 

I’m thinking of these lines by Cesar Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet:

“There are blows in life so violent—I can’t answer!
Blows as if from the hatred of God; as if before them,
the deep waters of everything lived through
were backed up in the soul … I can’t answer!”

(translated by Robert Bly)

Oh I can’t answer but I’m searching the corrugated quick of the page.

Again I come back to the birds and Thalidomide.

**

Andrew Solomon says that depression is “grief out of proportion to circumstance.”

The circumstances suck.

Here’s a link to an article on the return of Thalidomide:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00002018-199921030-00002

Essay on Green Leaves

Midday, late summer clouds coming on. This is the hour when I was happiest as a child–alone in the woods, light suffused, everything quiet. Somewhere far off the town had a parade. I was alone in my cave-green, darker than morning village, trees donning sorrow hats. And the birds quiet. Hint of coming rain.

They sleep, they dream, they vanish
The men and women
Fir cones underfoot in my neighborhood
A toothache, a dropped memory
I promise, Dear Jesus I’ll be your envoy
But not this morning
And not this morning
Will I become a beautiful rose
They sleep, they dream…
My friend will I ever see you again
I hear, through the trees,
Someone building a house

All my poems begin this way:
My Lord, the pine tree
Stands near as darkness comes
Who is not alone
Who is not astonished
And the brief life
Waves its perpendicular hands

All those who believe I’m homeless—blind as I am
Walking with my stick or dog—
That woman in Boston who prayed for me
Who ran off when I offered to pray for her,
What’s wrong with a cripple’s prayer?

In London a girl cried “poor Dearie”
And thrust coins in my hand.
In Cleveland a red faced man
Followed me block after block
Proposing to help…better I thought

Than the alternatives—
Asylums; work houses.
In general the poets of my nation
See the blind as existential blanks.
But tired of standing for nothing

I sing my way down Broadway
The sweet, manifold syllables
Of William Yeats—
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind…