Planet of the Blind

Personal Essay

As I walked under trees.
As my dog was with me.
As my father had died.
As Fall had come without him.
I said, “insufficiencies of the living.”
I said, “living…”
I was alive in an orchard.
The apples, golden,
Were suspended
Like the nothing
From which they grew.

The Blind Know Where the Umbrellas Are

“Eilis noticed a number of black umbrellas resting against the hallstand.”

In Colm Toibin’s novel “Brooklyn” one finds the sentence above in the middle of a scene. Ellis has been summoned to meet Mrs. Kelly who wants to offer her a job–though the offer is strikingly unfriendly. Ellis sees the black umbrellas.

Once upon a time, long ago, when I was interviewing for a creative writing faculty job at The Ohio State University a noted fiction writer asked me how I could write about the world if I can’t see. It was a hostile question and likely illegal but I said without skipping a beat that all nouns are images and no one who uses nouns fails to create a picture. The man would go on to be trouble for me as after I was hired he proved to be an outright ableist.

What I didn’t say is the blind know where the umbrellas are.
We know what kind of rain is falling before stepping out.
Many of us can read in the dark and are expert listeners.

From Lyft, a Defense of Freedom

Lyft

Dear Lyft Riders and Drivers,

A new Texas law, SB8, threatens to punish drivers for getting people where they need to go — specifically, women exercising their right to choose and to access the healthcare they need.

We want to be clear: Drivers are never responsible for monitoring where their riders go or why. Imagine being a driver and not knowing if you are breaking the law by giving someone a ride. Similarly, riders never have to justify, or even share, where they are going and why. Imagine being a pregnant woman trying to get to a healthcare appointment and not knowing if your driver will cancel on you for fear of breaking a law. Both are completely unacceptable.

This law is incompatible with people’s basic rights to privacy, our community guidelines, the spirit of rideshare, and our values as a company. We are taking action on two fronts:
Lyft has created a Driver Legal Defense Fund to cover 100% of legal fees for drivers sued under SB8 while driving on our platform. Riders and Drivers: Nothing about how you drive, ride or interact with each other should change.
Texas SB8 is an attack on women’s right to choose. Lyft is donating $1 million to Planned Parenthood to help ensure that transportation is never a barrier to healthcare access.
If you feel compelled to join us as an individual, you can make a donation here.
Logan and John, Lyft Co-founders
Kristin Sverchek, Lyft General Counsel
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From Lyft, a Defense of Freedom

Lyft

Dear Lyft Riders and Drivers,

A new Texas law, SB8, threatens to punish drivers for getting people where they need to go — specifically, women exercising their right to choose and to access the healthcare they need.

The Final Gold of the Ruined Stars

Is tonight the final gold of the ruined stars?
Trakl please tell me.
I don’t want to take a wrong turn
Walk in the wrong field.

Mice eat the bark of the night trees
While great forces are at work.
Strictly speaking this is funny.
Yes the self is illusion.
It won’t be coming with us.

“The most beautiful arrangement is a pile of things poured out at random…”
In this raging world…

Leave the world out of this.
Allow the world to world without temper.
Call all the creatures like Noah.
Tell them how sorry you are.
What you do at home is who you are abroad.

Notebook Fragment, or, No One Should Mistake Desperation for Belief

If you don’t like the dream, change it. Turn your dial from hearse to horse. Don’t kid yourself: the carbon underworld takes any charge. My hearse, well, it shivers, stands, becomes a stallion, runs off. So what I’m flip with grief? The grim reaper has a tear in his underpants. They fly off, crow like. Ha ha! Naked reaper. Now he’s just another dead guy.

My uncle M drank. Preferred vodka. Sometimes he’d go into the old horse barn and strike discarded radiators with a hammer. He was musical that way.

In my poems, or, go ask Freud…

Old lovers flit through the trees—
Ah but what kind of trees—
Birches with gold ringlets
By the lake
Sometimes
High in the branches
They look down on me
Just a boy really
Searching
For mushrooms

Go to meetings with college faculty. More and more they speak neoliberal platitudes. They can’t hear themselves, or choose not to. Focus group. Task force. Sustainability. So I think about the Kreutzer Sonata—the second movement. I’m lucky, can replay the whole thing in my head.

It’s been said British writers have an elegiac sensibility while American writing is more optimistic. I don’t think so. America is a ghastly place. Writers have to move fast. Running for your life only looks like optimism—no one should mistake desperation for belief. Even Whitman would agree.

Texas and Permanent Opposition

The Texas abortion law unleashes vigilantes and corrupt judges on law abiding citizens and the Supreme Court keeps silent. I’m crying. And if you’re reading this you probably are also.

Mencken said it’s the business of the journalist to stand in permanent opposition. This means a presumption of guilt for the powerful who love to wash their hands. The refusal to stay the Texas assault on liberty tells us the majority of the Supreme Court justices were in the lavatory scrubbing away. One wonders what tunes they sang while soaping up.

For some it’s too difficult to distinguish between the apple and the tree. No one should be confused by vigilantism tricked out in judicial robes. I’m paraphrasing John L. Lewis here: “No tin-hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibble-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of women’s rights and a woman’s right to choose or divert its purpose to play its natural and rational part in the development of human rights.”

The Book Case

Doors opening, gardens revealed, and then dark carriages appear, another neighbor gone. The books are a throng, waiting. But waiting for what? The next death; birth; sad marriage; war. Volumes sit like satisfied men in a carriage. In a different light they resemble sad playthings from childhood.

When I finger them I say, “I could call you. I’m standing in blue weeds and drifting clouds and I could call.” And what might you say–Eluard, Transtromer, Hannah Arendt, Dear Langston Hughes, would you console me while I’m talking from my place in the walking wind? Everyone puts her or his words in vaults of oakum. Whispering and touching are up to the readers.

This book case must hold sadnesses and a few joys. It says to itself, “it’s still beautiful to feel the heart throbbing.”

And so here I am de-cocooned from dreams…

And so here I am de-cocooned from dreams.
Crickets don’t usually sing in the mornings, but now…
Percy Shelley was nice to people who interested him.
Everyone do your own joke.
C’mon orphan, one mitten is better than none.
Old man in Savo steals his neighbor’s teeth.
John Locke was the ghost behind Jefferson.
I love “War and Peace.”
“Stout, about the average height, broad, with huge red hands; he did not know, as the saying is, how to enter a drawing room and still less how to leave one; that is, how to say something particularly agreeable before going away.”
Sunup you get to be the sunup man.
Jacques Derrida didn’t understand a thing about nakedness.
John Locke: “Personal Identity depends on Consciousness not on Substance.”
“We don’t get much consciousness around here fella!”
Blue Jay just now seems to have silenced the crickets.
I wonder how crickets hear?
Two apples fell outside my window as I wrote that.
Without consciousness, no crafted lives.
Without craft no freedom.
Neighbor in Savo steals his teeth right back.
My guide dog walks me around a birdcage that’s inexplicably sitting on a sidewalk.

I woke this morning wanting to write…

I woke this morning wanting to write. Did you feel this too? You may be a writer! There’s a broken connection between things and it’s hard to name. Ten minutes into the day and already you feel alone. Yep. You’ve got the scribbler’s fancy alright. its best to write something.

Like: what did Judas do with his money?
Like: if you put your nose against the riverbank can you describe the smell in a single word?
I know these are foolish examples.

Years ago while visiting the former Soviet Union I sat up in my hotel bed and thought, “the microphones in the walls can’t hear my stream of consciousness! Ha!”

Meanwhile, just now, there’s the undeciphered day.

I hope you’re writing.

It will be September soon and our living stands still.
Now crickets sing at night and wave their canes.
Summer went by so fast.
The ships of dream sit together in the moonlight.
I don’t know much.
Birds are passing.

Derrida says animals are naked without knowing it which in turn means they’re not naked. Very well. But animals are also clothed without knowing which means what? Oh, back to nakedness. I get it now! No one can escape nakedness! Well then, Jacques, just say it.

When I wake and stand, a hinge moves in my lower back. It’s the Darwin hinge. It says, I’m no longer a horse–as I was in dreams.

The bus crawls through the summer evening.

You see, I’m all over the place: morning, evening, up river and down.

Here’s to the walking wind as summer disappears.

No Title to Begin With

I go on writing to the ocean
Because I’m foolish.
Ice blue as the sky.
Now what?
Old phone call
With a poet long gone.
He was an unhappy man
Who tried as best he could.
The sea outwits the pen.
Amber glow of houses.
Of clarity I know little.
Last night in the small hours I woke
To a voice:
“You used to play the guitar.”
Yes I need to be silly as I age
Mr. Dream.
I call this poem:
Man lying on his back
Under the high trees.