Planet of the Blind

Blind I walk into the reddening glow. It is not the sunset or sunrise others see. Its my own retinas. The journey has no familiar speech. Still I go along thinking about the histories of sacrifice. Mostly I think of the hagiographies of common people.

**

Early this morning a neighbor says hello. I think: “I’m not a ghost, not yet.” The white bird of my soul is still here.

**

The sighted think, “he can scarcely see me, therefore he doesn’t exist.”

**

I pass through the branches, a visitant, one of those Roman ecstatics in February.

See all the apparently whole people walking around in their hidden half bodies. The joke is they’re temporarily “not” disabled so they get to pretend they’re complete. Compared to them the cripples are Odysseus or Wonder Woman.

At least the folks in my tribe fully understand the shifting vicissitudes of the inner life. Andrew Solomon put it this way: “Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”

Being disabled is the only “whole” condition there is.
Being disabled is to laugh and cry simultaneously.
Being disabled is to wish always to free the zoo.
Being disabled is the truest quality of happiness.

Throw off whole-person costumes you able bodied types!
Dance with us!

**

Meanwhile, a memory from 1994:

I was at the guide dog school and it was Sunday. I did some unrehearsed and ridiculous dances with my dog. I had a blues harp and I played and lunged around the room and she jumped and wagged. My hair was crazy. I was a Viking beserker, the stranger you don’t invite home to meet your mother. I was cross-eyed and happy and unkempt. I was blind Enkidu. And that’s when a knock came at the door and I opened it and there before me was the Mayor of New York City and his family—his wife and children and a photographer, and the president of the school. “Hi,” said Rudolph Giuliani, “I’m Rudy Giuliani.” It was 1994. Rudy wasn’t yet “America’s Mayor” and he hadn’t yet cashed in all his political and PR capital as “the man who cleaned up New York” but he was working on it. Instead of his daily charcoal Armani suit he was wearing a “Members Only” aqua baseball jacket and blue jeans. He was having a day in the country. Life was “tres sportif” and photogenically arranged, save that now the Mayor was meeting Volroth the Hairy whose forest green cable sweater was covered with dog fur; whose hair was pure electrolysis—his hair almost on fire with weirdness. To better understand this moment, you must know I’m a lifelong Democrat, without reservation and I wasn’t certain I should touch Giuliani, for I am truly a primitive; he might have had cooties; but his kids were there, and my dog Corky was poking her head into the hallway and Giuliani’s little daughter had come forward and was reaching out and so I shook the man’s hand because what else could I do—and I said something about the wonders of the guide dog school and its amazing dogs and staff. And the Mayor smiled. He had one of those glacial smiles. Its chief asset was its largeness. And the entourage moved on.

**

The invention of a tactile alphabet produced the promise of literacy for the blind, which sounds significant enough, but I think it’s also useful to think of literacy as Peter McClaren describes it: “an animated common trust in the power of love, a belief in the reciprocal power of dialogue, and a commitment to ‘conscientization’ and political praxis.” The blind appear in a communitarian sense when they’re given books and the means to read them. Books, especially in Braille represent a common faith in the power of community.

Someone should have taught Braille to Rudy.
The poor bastard. Like everyone in the Trump circle, he’s just a half human walking pretend-whole-person charade.

When the Victorians read Dickens they read for plot and confirmation–they could see their world. When we read Dickens we still read for plot but less for confirmation as we think we are superior to his characters. This is a great mistake. Dickensian sins are fully our own though we’ve one extra: post-modern irony.

I’m thinking of pastiche as Frederic Jameson would say: irony that references itself. Most often it’s mediated consciousness draped with the status conferred by consumer fetishism. Dickens characters were vain or greedy but never so self absorbed they fell into anhedonia.

Most days I read like a Victorian who wants plot and confirmation but also a bit of compassion. I’m also an admirer of Cardinal Newman’s dictum: “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”

I’m old fashioned that way.

Of Newman I also like: “Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.”

**

Dear Charles: you pushed your wife into the asylum when you were done with her. You rooted for the American Confederacy. You were silly. You thought Anton Mesmer was on to something.

Dear Kuusisto: and who are you? (Reader, does he get to answer? Does anyone get to answer?)

He tries: “I was half destroyed by war movies. They tried to brain wash me into thinking the good guys always won. I’d no idea that beneath Roy Rogers’ horse was the blood of indigenous people. Man was I tricked. And you can’t get your money back!”

OK. You’ve said who you aren’t but nothing more.

He tries: “I’m a human consciousness growth project lacking some essential vitamins.”

That’s better.

I seldom write about pop culture. I’m a real snob. I think Verdi’s greatest opera is “Don Carlo” and not “La Traviata.” But sometimes I have to stagger out of my Cave of Making and wave a flaming broom.

I think “Succession” is the worst television program in history. The writing is sub-Cartesian—“I don’t think, therefore I don’t exist.” If you have any self respect you should listen to “Don Carlo.”

In fact HBO hasn’t made a good series since “Boardwalk Empire.”

Why should you care what I think? Because I’m a blind writer who has no patience for lousy writing and stage settings that are nothing more than visual porn—which is why I think everything Julian Fellows does is junk. If you don a blindfold and listen to “Downton Abby” you’ll know.

“Succession” is just an explosion in an adderall factory. So why is it so popular? Well for one thing it dramatizes a chief tenet of Christopher Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism”—

“For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”

That’s the best summary of “Succession” you’ll find.

A good poet said “the age of the great symphonies is over now” and he imagined the once played notes coming down as rain. It was a good line, written after the second world war. Despair can convince us of things that are wholly wrong. But what if we say “the age of the great symphonies is just beginning now”? What happens when we not only embrace the future but invite it into our souls? I heard all kinds of music this morning walking in my John Cage bird filled neighborhood. What happens now? What happens? This is more than a fanciful question. It’s a moral imperative in disguise.

Deep in the night and half awake I hear apple branches sway in a light breeze. What a good life. I think of Shakespeare toasting his actors in the Anchor pub where I too have toasted others. What a good life. I get up early and walk in a gentle rain. Laugh. Think of Hegel. “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.” A good life. And how good my shoes feel. Hegel: “History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.” These blank page sneakers. A good life. Water in a cup.

So I’ve now broken a cheap thing,
A plastic corkscrew—nothing to fret about—
But I’m sorry for it, like Paracelsus
Who apologized to lead.
The morning spreads out like a cloak.
My friend “M” has been dead one year.
I’m finding no book can amuse me.
I don’t like the telephone.

What is this? I want to cry
Like a child at the movies.
I don’t know my neighbors names.
I haven’t visited my parents graves
For a decade and like a boy
I wonder if they know.
They must, if god flows
Through the small things
Though I’m close to seventy
And suspect I’ve grown simple.
See my eyes welling up
At cracked plastic
As the windows darken.

Back in the day I put my face against the radio and it was warm. My eyes felt good there, pressed to the Bakelite cabinet. Tchaikovsky, “Swan Lake” and my aching face were relieved by tubes and magnets. Adults thought I had a small life, being a cripple, hugging the Philco. True life is a private business like dowsing for water. I had hot birds in my eyes.

It wasn’t much. A scrap of paper. A dropped thing from the terrible world. The walls were oscillating the way they do when spring has arrived. Later in life he’d see how even the smallest items are an inheritance. But on the day he found the torn paper he was free and rather light as befitted a small boy who was legally blind and couldn’t read what he’d found yet he put it in his pocket. He was already in love with guesswork. And other things happened. In the woods fir trees swayed and cones rained down. A dog barked from a great distance. Those were good times. Everything was far away. It took no strength to be at rest. All around him light lay on the humid earth.

Robert Bly

Reading in Fall Rain

The fields are black once more.
The old restlessness is going.
I reach out with open arms
to pull in the black fields.

All morning rain has fallen
steadily on the roof.
I feel like a butterfly
joyful in its powerful cocoon.

*
I break off reading:
one of my bodies is gone!
It’s outdoors, walking
swiftly away in the rain!

I get up and look out.
Sure enough, I see
the rooster lifting his legs
high in the wet grass.

1.

Let’s dare to say reading—whether blind reading, autistic, deaf, fully sighted, up river, in the hold of a ship—let’s say the act is synchronous as the poet Robert Bly suggests; and let’s say that synchronicity has to do with the leveraging of words, the Archimedean words, for each noun is an object in the mind and chances are excellent that the reader was not thinking of a pearl handled walking stick before he encounters it in a sentence; and so this is a violence like all the violences of the psyche; we are betrayed in mind; changed; affirmed; perhaps allowed a revery; maybe sickened; occasionally tickled—but we are not in our usual frames when, as Bly suggests, we “break off” reading for now our mind is not what we supposed and moreover our bodies are transformed, and in the case above, the poet sees that one of his bodies is gone. Think of this: we have several bodies. Poets know this. Painters. Dancers. Jazz trumpeters. Why don’t the behaviorists who preach about autism understand this? I’ll suggest they read the wrong stuff.

One of my bodies is gone! Then Bly sees a rooster lifting his legs. The private day is now a public one. Nature is the book and the body. No sensible poet presumes to speak for nature.
One of my bodies is gone! The poet has written these words: “ecstatic blue stone” and the body I began the day “in” (some stoical, foolishly small and practical Lutheran grandmother’s body which I’ve inherited) that body is now holding the blue stone my father brought home from Beirut some sixty years ago—the evil eye—which I carried in my pocket for years to ward off schoolyard bullies who made fun of my blindness. The blue of that stone way joyful and it had no reaction to its putative name. We read things not for what we imagine them to be, but really reading, reading deeply, reading with our antennae out, we know the forgotten treasure colors in things and yes, one of our bodies has walked away to become springy in the grass.
If you’re alert enough all reading is asynchronous, multi-phasic, transmogrifying and inviting as it brings us into the unassuming world.

One of my bodies is gone! Once, walking alone in Venice with my guide dog, I played a game, reading the rough doors of strange houses as if they were Braille books, reading the happenstance aleatoric script of rain and wind. One or two strangers thought I was lost and offered to help. I told them I was reading books. They ran away. In their world I was a blind, crazy foreigner. Inside, where “the meanings are” as Emily Dickinson would say, I was hopping in the garden of particulate bodies, ones we can no longer see, but which have never left.

This is not, as you might suppose, just a fanciful way of being. I cannot see your face. I’m freed from the causal and casual inherent in every social encounter. I assure you I’m not in the least sentimental. I’m no Tiresias imbued with prophecy; no Finnish wizard who talks easily to the dead. I just read. And then, you guessed it, one of my bodies is gone!

Wallace Stevens said famously “reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.” I’d say this is true but Stevens is too proleptic—he imagines we can plan what the metaphor will do for us, or at least I take him that way. Escape is the wrong word. One of my bodies is gone! It left because I was reading and an agate perhaps a hundred years old found in a market in Lebanon took the morning time body away just as Bly says this happens.

One of my bodies is gone and there’s no normal reading. To believe so is to imagine reader reception is dis-embodied; cemented; too Latinate for the outdoors.

One of my bodies is gone! Which ones are left? Too many to count.

Here are the things I’m not saying. I do not believe in normative reading, hence, I don’t believe that yoga is a kind of schizophrenia—when one of my bodies is gone because I read about chasing tigers in red weather, then so be it, one of my bodies is gone and I’m the better for it. It will come home again though changed. All the multiple multi-form bodies are oceanic as is language itself.

I’m not saying as the great hermeneutical scholar of metaphor would say that you can find a rule or ruling class about the matter. You see, there’s a chicken walking away while hold your book in my hands.

One of my bodies is gone.

It rings like a bell in a far village.