Planet of the Blind

I’m a writer which is like saying you’re a house painter. Everybody is a writer. Your uncle Dortmunder is working on a memoir; aunt Kitty is writing a variorum history of the fall of Rome with recipes. Sometimes I wonder if violinists have this problem? Of course they don’t. If the famous violinist says: I’m a first chair violinist for the Uppity Orchestra” the person next to her on the aeroplane doesn’t say “Me too!”

That it takes hard work to become a writer is scarcely credited by the happy many and lately I’ve begun to see that this is a good thing. (I used to think otherwise, snarl a bit with the kind of exceptionalism usually reserved for brain surgeons and rocket scientists.)

If everyone believes she or he is a writer then they still believe in tribal meaning, still want to make signs, share something around the fire…

Black Elk speaks. Then the amateur Black Elks spoke. Everybody got to speak.

You don’t have to be Ernst Cassirer to like that picture.

And the dogs get up, circle three times, then lie back down.

May you have a good story today.

 

S.K.   

 

If you spend enough time in the world of blogs and bloggers you quickly learn that the secret of gaining a readership resides in linking to other blogs. Bloggers X and P are writing about the inconsistencies of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalism (just for argument’s sake?) and I, fervent but askance observer write my scree proclaiming Jefferson’s my man (though I stop short at embracing Fruitarianism?) and then I link my article to the neo-Federales and voila! Now I have something like an audience.

The trouble with me is that I cut my teeth on poetry and so I don’t expect an audience. I even imagine a posthumous audience, a coterie of library researchers (assuming there will be any libraries) far in the future. They will find me in the obscure-going-to-dust final final archive of old fashioned hope (for I believed in the soul and dared to imagine human progress). How silly I was! I was like a flower pinned on Stalin’s chest. I was a street sweeper in Pompeii. Silly to the end.

Back to the Federalists: they should have eaten more fruit. Alex Hamilton was a ferocious meat eater and his posse had trichinosis.

**

Random thought number 1:

 

The sight of Sarah Palin excoriating Rahm Emaunuel for using the “r” word while carrying on as though she’s a true champion for people with disabilities is more disagreeable than Rahm Emanuel. Sarah Palin cut budgets for social programs in Alaska that would have helped people with intellectual disabilities. The hypocrisy here is without analogy.

 

RT number 2:

 

Most legends are unlivable. I remember James Baldwin remarking that the symbolic Paris, the Paris of pure freedom merely existed as a necessary idea. Being able to see this is of course an American trait. Whitman understood that America only existed as an idea. If you want to see America you must look to Leaves of Grass.

Lots of people in contemporary America seem to be miserable believing that we’re now living through the Fall of Rome “American Style”. Apparently for these people this is a necessary idea. The quick way to sat it is: “I’ve got mine, screw you.”

 

RT number 3:

 

So Americans need to become revenants of America. Don’t worry about how many readers you have. In my mind we’re all equal but there’s responsibility goes with that. Don’t be bitterly estranged. Don’t give up on gallantry.

 

How’s that, my five readers? How’s that?

 

S.K. 

 

The New York Times recently carried an article about a new ad campaign uses gentle humor to advocate for for people with disabilities in the job market. The shtick is that everyone is different: there’s a guy in the office who is “jargon impaired”; someone else is “copy impaired”; another person talks to loud and is “volume control impaired” etc. Against this one sees a person in a wheelchair who just naturally fits in. I must say that I like this pitch, I like it a lot. The underlying message is that despite our superficial differences we all bring strengths to the table.

Part of the problem that people in the U.S. tend to think of strength as a bodily attribute before they think of it as a matter of character. Our worship of Hollywood westerns and competitive sports get all the ink in this regard but the bodily semiotics or symbolism of strength is more pervasive than the O.K. Corral–we believe all too easily that a narrow conception of normal fitness equals character. Obviously in this symbolic universe people with disabilities are conceived as being uncompetitive and flawed in darkly Freudian ways. I don’t want to hammer this point like Kruschev with his ugly shoe, but one needs to be clear: real people with real disabilities remain unemployed in the United States and elsewhere largely because employers believe that character “is” the body, the fit body if you will.

I know that this is true the way I know that certain cloud formations warn us of impending high or low pressure.

So the advent of humor in a national advertising campaign on behalf of people with disabilities is a good development indeed. But humor cannot solve our longstanding assumptions about physical strength as a determination of inner strength. We must challenge our very culture to stop thinking of Stephen Hawking as the exception.

 

S.K.

 

I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to a poetry reading only to sense that the poet in question, he or she, old or young has no interest in his or her audience. This type of poet (who I’ll call “marchito” –Spanish for “dried up”) reads her work like an electric mill, buzzing and sparking in the middle of a field. In most cases I leave events like these feeling as though a vampire has stolen my juices.

The plural poet knows that her audience “is” the world, the world in which words will find their utility; that words are much like the fallen acorns gathered by wintering animals, they must be carried away and become something beyond their first intention; that poetry lives in the bewildering weather of others, many many…

If I go on about this I will fill up the Britannica. Who are the “weathering” poets? There are riches to be sure.

I won’t make a list. Here however is an example of the art of plural weather poetry. This is from An Atlas of the Difficult World by Adrienne Rich:

 

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your once of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for .you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, count themselves out, at too early an age. I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your

hand because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

 

The plural or “weathering” poet knows that her readers turn to poetry because in all honesty “there is nothing else left to read”–the bibles or newspapers or blogs won’t do. They won’t do at all. And our nation’s tawdry fiction with its recitals of bad middle class marriages won’t do. We are listening for something; we’re trying to protect our souls. We want to know what words keep other alive; what words keep the soul reading. We want to make an ark out of this knowledge. But a poem will do.

S.K. 

 

Groucho Marx once said: “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” 

He also said: “I have a mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.”

Finally: “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

It occurs to me that the spectacle of Barack Obama meeting with GOP Representatives can be summarized by Trinitarian Groucho. The GOP with its Tea Party cathexis is both a club joined and a TV centric design and both dynamics reflect a willingness–a giddiness really–one that abjures books or important ideas.

The Tea Party crowd believes that government spending is evil. But they don’t seem to think that waging two wars without paying for them is a problem. Its all that other stuff they don’t like.

Groucho again: “Humor is reason gone mad.”

If you parse the GOP’s vision for America, which is the Tea Party’s vision (though you mustn’t call it that, for “vision” is an intellectual sounding word–call it common sense…) the whole idea is to turn America into a vast aggregation of very very poor people and a select group of immensely wealthy folks who will live in gated communities. The poor, the former middle class, will clean John Boehner’s swimming pool.

If the poor and the unraveling middle class now have a three legged stool the Tea Party types feel they ought to have no stool at all; not even a crutch.

The GOP now plans for a nation of house cleaners, a nation without medical benefits, a nation without public transportation, a country of robust entitlements for the richest which means shaking down the poor and those who are becoming poor. This is reason gone mad and unlike Keith Olbermann I can’t laugh at Glenn Beck. The Tea Party GOP has in mind the most brutal and vicious agenda for social reconstruction imaginable. The aim is to do away with everything decent that government does to protect the social order of our nation. Meantime, books are a load of crap.

“Who are you going to believe,” said Groucho, “me or your own eyes?”

How beautiful, nay, how thrilling the delusional becomes.

The GOP believes that good jobs are not coming back and that its not the business of government to help create opportunities. Only business creates opportunities. Never mind that business hasn’t moved the yardage marker in this country since the 1970’s.

The GOP believes (as Barbara Bush rather nicely put it) that the victims of Katrina were better off living in the Astrodome than they were in their own homes.

“Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?” (Groucho again.)

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” (Groucho redux.)

Thinking of Glenn Beck as an author, one is indeed reminded of Groucho:

“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.”

But withal, the Tea Party GOP isn’t funny.

Preaching cynicism about government in a time of economic collapse and yes, a time of war, is unpatriotic despite all the tri-cornered hats.

I also thought that many of the Viet Nam protests back when I was in college were essentially unpatriotic, for they spilled over into a distrust of government that was flip, ill-informed, unwashed, and designed merely to subborn good thinking.

Groucho:

“I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn’t educate America if they started at 6:30.”

Nowadays TV is out to promote cynicism and the GOP is taking full advantage of the medium.

Talk about 24-7.

 

S.K.  

 

The death of J.D. Salinger leads Lance Mannion to wonder if there are any writers nowadays whose books can be stolen from parents’ bookshelves by teenagers. (Lance wonders more than this for he’s no mere Manichean Mannion; the man sees beyond light and shade, he’s an adept of the gray areas.) But his basic premise is good. Books reach kids and become important to them insofar as books are in the tribal circle. T’was my dad gave me Catcher in the Rye –he had it on his bookshelf along with novels by John Updike, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, William Manchester’s A Thousand Days, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, countless books really. The tribal circle…

When I think back I seem to recall that I didn’t like Holden Caulfield very much. I was, after all, a kid with a disability and I didn’t think Holden had it so bad. I saw that the narrator was shallow. How old was I? 12 I think. I was in the 6th grade. I had glasses as thick as dinner plates and I could only read with one eye by holding the book to the end of my nose. Kids made fun of me wherever I went. Holden Caulfied was a whiner.

Stay with me. I’m trying to spin two plates at once. Books matter insofar as kids find them in the tribal circle. I didn’t like Catcher in the Rye but it did something for me. In turn, I loved Catch 22 and that lead me to Mailer and Capote.

Still one does indeed wonder in these post-middlebrow times when the novel has been bumped off of TV (can you imagine Conan or Leno having a novelist on their meager shows?) just “what” would fall off mom and pop’s bookshelf and turn kids on?

Of course because I teach nonfiction two best selling books from “the fourth genre” come to mind: The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr and NIck Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. I can imagine these books falling into teenaged hands and lighting up the dendrites of suspicion and incipient wickedness that’s so necessary for independence. 

Now it’s a little tough. Who has taken the place of Vonnegut? Who reaches the prematurely wisened super egos of teens because the books fall from the shelves into their hands?

We ought to be worried about this. How about a stimulus plan to encourage Book of the Month Club subscriptions for the nation’s struggling middle class parents?

I’m not kidding.

Catcher in the Rye sold 250,000 new copies last year. To which I say thank God for that.

Here’s what I liked back then, oh yeah baby:

Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a
little anxious.  Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that
time, like a comet.  LIKE a comet!  Why, Peters, I laid over the
lot of them!  Of course there warn’t any of them going my way, as a
steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like
the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart
for the Hereafter; but I happened on one every now and then that
was going my way for an hour or so, and then we had a bit of a
brush together.  But it was generally pretty one-sided, because I
sailed by them the same as if they were standing still.  An
ordinary comet don’t make more than about 200,000 miles a minute.
Of course when I came across one of that sort – like Encke’s and
Halley’s comets, for instance – it warn’t anything but just a flash
and a vanish, you see.  You couldn’t rightly call it a race.  It
was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph
despatch.  But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I
used to flush a comet occasionally that was something LIKE.  WE
haven’t got any such comets – ours don’t begin.  One night I was
swinging along at a good round gait, everything taut and trim, and
the wind in my favor – I judged I was going about a million miles a
minute – it might have been more, it couldn’t have been less – when
I flushed a most uncommonly big one about three points off my
starboard bow.  By his stern lights I judged he was bearing about
northeast-and-by-north-half-east.  Well, it was so near my course
that I wouldn’t throw away the chance; so I fell off a point,
steadied my helm, and went for him.  You should have heard me whiz,
and seen the electric fur fly!  In about a minute and a half I was
fringed out with an electrical nimbus that flamed around for miles
and miles and lit up all space like broad day. 

 

That’s of course from Mark Twain’s story “Captain Stormfield” –the Captain dies and goes to heaven only to discover that its so vapid he’d rather go to hell.

This is far better than Holden Caulfield.

Funnier too.

S.K.

I’ve been away from my blog for close a week because I contracted the “head cold from hell” complete with a special instruction book from Satan–“blow your nose ceaselessly you huge, hairy, boneless slob.” (The Devil is all about self contempt especially when you’re in a diminished spot.)  Withal we fell from the world and coughed like poor John Keats and hoped for better days or at least a full moment of thought.

Meanwhile we did our best.  We tried to read. And we found ourselves thinking about university life and its uneasy relation to people with disabilities. We think about this rather often for we are like a marble cutter of human rights: steady, habituated, working on an angel that still has no head. What I mean is that colleges and universities “admit” students with disabilities but see them as separate from the broader pedagogical and cultural work of education, imagining that “the disabled” are in effect a kind of nuisance that must be grudgingly accommodated. I believe that faculty at American colleges and universities bear a lot of the blame for this grudging and minimal inclusion as they fail to ask themselves when thinking about the art of teaching the kinds of questions that disability can productively promote. A good example of “the questions” can be found in the introduction to Disability and the Teaching of Writing. edited by Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann. They write:

 

“Whether acknowledged or not, disability does have an impact on the college classroom, and it often raises powerful, unexpected questions:

• What attitudes about disability and disabled people shape perceptions and actions by students and teachers?
• What social, physical, and learning barriers complicate access to learning for disabled students and to teaching for disabled teachers?
• What information and history (about disability and people with disabilities) do we not know that might change (our) attitudes and dismantle such barriers?
• What literacy skills are developed when embodied differences and disability are included as topics in the curriculum?
• In what ways does attention to disability forge connections across campus?
• How can we better understand learning and writing as embodied practices, foregrounding bodily difference instead of bodily perfection?
• How can the inclusion of disability improve the teaching of writing?”

 

Such questions are central to the affirmation of citizenship of course. But they also speak to the complex, poly-semous and neurologically diverse qualities of human consciousness and learning styles. I believe that great teaching (in any discipline) requires an essential curiosity about one’s students and in turn that curiosity should inevitably support individual achievement to the greatest degree possible. The use of assistive technology in the classroom as a means of demonstrating ideas–letting the Kurzweil reading system read aloud a passage in Milton will capture attention. Letting Kurzweil track what its reading with colored icons on a an overhead projection helps visual learners follow along. But I digress.

As Brueggemann and Lewiecki-Wilson point out, there as a terrible tension surrounding disability. Students with learning disabilities remain in the closet. Professors with hearing loss, vision loss, or other unapparent disabilities hide their conditions fearing a kind of attitudinal demotion from their colleagues or worse. And yet embodied differences are the source of considerable power in language and in self-awareness, the two things university instructors are most often hoping to foster, at least in those courses where reading and writing are paramount.

Embodied differences are the nerve of our nation’s body politic. Bringing those differences forward in the teaching of writing continues to be a critical matter and yet, today, still a bit under the weather, I can still say in full confidence that the most college faculty still don’t know that people with disabilities are not only one of the largest minority groups on campus, but that by understanding their differences we can improve how we teach. 

 

S.K.

 

 

Los Angeles

 

By Andrea Scarpino

Dear M. Proust,

I’ve now finished Book IV of In Search of Lost Time and am solidly into Book V. If my book group schedule holds, I will finish your sixth and final book by the end of June. This has been quite a long journey—we started last April, as you recall. Then, I promised you I would read every page of your mountainous journey, and I’ve mostly kept my promise. I’ll have to admit, the long conversations with Robert’s friends about military maneuverings —well, I skipped through much of that. And the detailed etymologies of place names—again, some skimming occurred.

But the sex in Book IV thoroughly kept my attention (even though I think you may have overestimated how many women in Balbec were really lesbians). In any case, I want to thank you for the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read, from the section called “The Intermittencies of the Heart.” There, you return to Balbec for the first time since your grandmother’s death, and for the first time, truly understand she is dead. Grief works mysteriously, doesn’t it? You were in the room when she died in Paris, you attended her funeral, you lived every day in a house suddenly empty of her presence. And yet, it took a return trip to the last beach vacation you took with her to unexpectedly understand that she is lost to you forever.

Here’s my favorite passage: “And I asked nothing more of God, if a paradise exists, than to be able, there, to knock on that wall with the three little raps which my grandmother would recognize among a thousand, and to which she would give those answering knocks which meant, ‘Don’t fuss, little mouse, I know you’re impatient, but I’m just coming,’ and that he would let me stay with her throughout eternity, which would not be too long for the two of us.”

Because that’s what grief often feels like. A bartering, even if you don’t believe in an afterlife, an overwhelming need to be with the one you’ve lost, no matter what the terms. The terms, “Which would not be too long for us.” And a constant dreaming. You also write, “And then I seemed to remember that shortly after her death, my grandmother had said to me, sobbing, with a humble look, like an old servant who has been given notice, like a stranger: ‘You will let me see something of you occasionally, won’t you; don’t let too many years go by without visiting me. Remember that you were my grandson, once, and that grandmothers don’t forget.’” A dreaming more vivid than being alive.

Intermittency. Because we can’t be present in grief forever, for every moment. It must come at intervals, it must release. And all this in the midst of a book called Sodom and Gomorrah, a book full of sex and obsessions over who might be secretly queer. I love you for this, for giving us that moment to remember your grief, to remember our own, even as the world continues moving. Even as our everyday is filled with gossip, dinner parties, the stuff of the living.

Anyway, I’ve heard Book V is the hardest to get through (can’t you just let get of Albertine already?) but I want you to know: you’ve won me over forever.

Andrea

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

There’s a great website called Portlight and we urge you to visit it. Here in our small corner of the blogosphere we’re losing sleep over the conditions in Haiti. We are mindful that help and love can come in many forms. Portlight is a great entry point if you’re looking to assist in Haiti.

Americans in particular are invariably susceptible to thinking about the future. Investment capital depends on futurity and that’s as it should be, yet “now” is the proper word when one wishes to alleviate suffering. When people in the United States shift to “now” they can work wonders. We were, for instance, a bit disheartened to hear Bill Clinton speaking to the press from Port au Prince and (you guessed it) talking about a grand future for Haiti. And surely that’s important–Haiti needs capital investment and long term assistance. But the “now” is the nation of Haiti, frightened, her back up against the wall, and of course the walls are still terrifying. Now is a bright thread. We must be in the present. Now is where the deeper verifications of our humanity are to be found.

 

S.K.  

It has been gray in Iowa for a long time, too long to remember the last sunny day. I could look it up but I don’t want to. The last sighting of the sun in eastern Iowa must have been at least two weeks ago. Meanwhile sleet, icy rain, snow, more sleet, streets too slick for any pedestrian ambition, auto wrecks all about, sad winter clothing on every passerby, all of it looking soiled and thick with moisture, the old snow black as a chimney sweep’s hands. In this weather we all become scarecrows staring down the ravens. Someone long ago once loved this land for its spare dignity. But in our local caution, stepping gingerly we cannot remember those days. We are in harmony with the dusk. And some of us go to the gym. Others take up drinking. We find that the palliatives are also made of the dusk. It is good to know one’s place. Tonight three geese flew by on the level darkness for they are enduring.

 

S.K.