Planet of the Blind

What I wouldn’t give to return to the past. You know the myth. So many stories…he goes back in time to prevent a war. But now I’ve changed my mind. It’s pointless. When you go back the ones you love aren’t there. Death’s real estate doesn’t open. You’re simply in another age standing in a thicket.

The personal past is like a garden, it’s different from the scenario above. Death is there alright, but you can hand him a potted plant and tell him to stand still. The one thing death hates more than anything is being forced into a tableau vivant. I pose him at my mother’s burial. He holds a ficus tree. My mother who died horribly because of a botched operation, whose graveside was unattended by anyone really, and then the undertaker appeared and handed me a black trash bag–a fucking Hefty bag–and said, “these are her personal effects from the hospital.” Her nightgown, a teddy bear. And death with the decorative tree. In my little garden death has to hold that thing forever.

Yes of course the personal past is a joke. If you go there it’s like sitting in an armored car without money.

We love the mythic trans-personal utopian past. Zip back in time and prevent the dictator from being born–ha! Mrs. Hitler goes for a walk in the park because you’re there selling balloons and Mr. Hitler, well you know, the Onan thing.

So this trans-personal past visitation theme is also a joke. This is why we love lamps at the windows. Reassurances in the dark! Wanna see my mother’s teddy bear?

**

As a disabled kid this was always the way of things. I remember the day a substitute teacher (who must have been all of 20) made fun of my blind eyes in an eighth grade math class. “Who are you looking at?” she said, with what today they call “snark”—and my “Lord of the Flies” classmates burst into laughter. I got up and fled the room.

I sulked. All alone. I knew a good place in that school. In the bomb shelter. I wept among empty aluminum water cans with radiation logos stenciled on them.

The crippled kid’s past is without equilibrium.

Your past is also unbalanced.

The writer has to fix this or admit it in just the right way.

I remember rather liking the fact that the bomb shelter was filled with empty cans. I thought: where did the water go?

When I want to get the attention of a co-worker I send her or him or they an email with the subject line: “Assorted Chocolates.” In truth I’m not much for chocolates but my studies suggest most are. You may wonder what goes “in” such an email. Here’s a sample:

To: Herkimer Kiwi
From: Kuusisto
Subj: Assorted Chocolates  

Dear Professor Kiwi:

There have been many kings of France but there’s only one copy of Sartor Resartus in our university library and you have it. Moreover library records show you’ve had it for ten years. This is your right as a member of the faculty and I presume you’ve rightfully renewed the book many a time and even if you haven’t we both know you’re free of consequence owing to your privilege as a “knowledge worker” but in these digital times “not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated” and I’m on to you Kiwi. One must ask “what do you do with the book?”

Kiwi doesn’t reply but I’ve hit him with marzipan and I know he knows it.

One should not expect replies from the Kiwis.

**

Chocolate #2:

Poor Groucho Marx. He once had diner with T.S. Eliot. He was hoping to have a serious discussion about literature. Eliot wanted to talk about comedy. Who needed “what” more?

I like this question. My guess is Eliot needed comedy more than Groucho needed to talk about poetry. Eliot worked in a bank.

Groucho’s mistake was to assume poets know how to converse about their art. I’m not saying they can’t write about it or give prepared lectures on the subject–not at all. But poets tend to clam up when one asks the question: “what’s your process?”

I’m betting Groucho asked Tom the third rail question above.

Worse is talking about comedy. There’s E.B. White’s quote: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”

One pictures Groucho and Eliot dining on frogs.

Chocolate #3:

It is entirely possible Eliot and Groucho talked of Shakespeare but the surviving account of their evening suggests it was glum. Here’s how I’d have liked it to have gone:

Eliot:

“Shakespeare was the first comic writer to dramatize reverse psychology as Petruchio, a wandering nobleman, undertakes the wooing of Kate who’s notoriously short tempered and cruel:

“Say she rail; why, I’ll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.
Say that she frown; I’ll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly wash’d with dew.
Say she be mute and will not speak a word;
Then I’ll commend her volubility,
and say she uttereth piercing eloquence.”

Groucho:

We are the ones invited to say she rail; we’re instructed to become as devious as Petruchio. Taken into his confidence we’re delighted by his promissory book of lies.

Eliot (waving a frog leg):

“That’s comedy. Not as a vehicle for pratfalls or put downs, but discernment where the irrational is concerned.”

Enter the waiter.

Chocolate #4:

A game I play, more often than I should admit, is a dramatic transference for which there may be a name but I’ve never found one. Perhaps there’s something in German. In short, I employ the characters of Shakespeare and Moliere as standard bearers for people I meet and especially for  public figures. The literary term for this is “comparison” but what I’m describing is better than that—“kayfab” is what they call it in professional wrestling, where everyone, both wrestlers and fans collectively pretend a false drama is real. Essentially I live and have always lived since my late teens in “Tartuffe” and “The Taming of the Shrew” and at this stage of life there’s no help for it.

Chocolate #5:

Are you still with me?

Both Moliere and Shakespeare grew up watching morality plays, fables whose stock characters were invariably named God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. Because they lived during the first flowering of public literacy they understood the indispensable healthiness of word flipping. Talk about nature’s bounty! Words were no longer merely to be received and absorbed. Can you imagine the joy of a 17th century adolescent forced to watch Everyman or The Second Shepherd’s Play, as he substituted Satan, Life, Neighbor, Sin, Second Rate Demons, Ignorance, Ugliness, Gossip, and Basic Human Weakness for the stock characters of religious drama? Of course you can.

People on bicycles
Pass the dirt colored houses
Each with a half chosen image
And yes sometimes our eyes are bitter
When birds fly away
I know these things
I like the phrase up river
Though I don’t know why
If you can drag yourself to believe
God’s eyes are “on” this morning
Great things are coming
Water falls on my wrist
When I wash a cup
I listen to my heart
For the simple reason
That many say otherwise
I picture the bicyclists
Like Aztec hieroglyphs
With their portions of sun
Here at the bottom
Of the sky

I’m growing old now Randall
And all I want is a little oakum
To put myself back together.

I’ve lived in a broken way—
A soul lost in a field of flowers
Waiting for kindnesses.

I swear I’m trying to get to the point.
The spruce in my yard
Looks like the hand of a clock.

Alright. That’s about it.
“The ways we miss our lives are life.”
Almost autumn, I can smell leaves

Touching the very air.
Blindness is a perfection.
I can live in this voice.

Like it or not, even with your beloved dog beside you you’re still an outsider in most public spaces. Moreover, you’re “the show” and there’s no help for it. You’re the guy riding the old wooden escalators in Macy’s Department Store, while a hundred people stare. “I feel like I have a fried egg glued to my forehead,” I once said to my wife as we were navigating an airport. “You do,” she said. You can count on your spouse. When I think more deeply about this I think in terms of history. I belong to the first generation of public disabled. We’re not in the institutions. The laws of the land welcome us. Of course I’ll be stared at. 100 years from now, when everyone will have wild looking quasi-electronic rubberized appendages attached to their bodies this era will seem like ancient history. I hope for that.

Meanwhile one walks about. And you know you’re a symbolic father or mother. A political symbol if you will. In a way, every space you enter is a frontier. You’re clearing the road for others who may follow. I often think about the business of clearing. I’m not just asserting a right to inhabit public space for the disabled but for all my brothers and sisters who are still outsiders.

I took to whispering into my guide dog’s ear: “What’s an outsider?” Perhaps being a pack animal she knew, but she only said: “It’s something in the past.”

Dogs eat grass, just to know what’s in it. They eat the past. A lesson. Get over yourself.

And you do for a minute. You imagine you’ve eaten the grass; the here and now has fallen; you can taste a pure democracy. But the here and now is like rain at the windows, just persistent enough to haul you back from utopia. You’re in the Seven-Eleven again, being stared at by absolutely everyone. “What’s that man doing?” says a child to its mother. “Shush,” says the mother. “No Mommy! What’s that man?” “Shush,” she says, “Or there’s no birthday for you!”

You’re innocent. You are standing beside a rack of Twinkies and Hohos, just trying to figure out where the coffee is located, and now your the un-indicted co-conspirator behind the ruination of some kid’s birthday, all because you entered the damn store.

“You’ve entered the damn store” became a personal tag line. My father who served in World War II used to say, “You’re in the Army now, you’re not behind the plough….” His way of saying you’re screwed and just get over it.

In Macy’s I was once followed by a store detective. I was walking just to walk. Working my dog around mannequins and racks of clothing, mostly because it was something to do and it was a good exercise for the dog, and you know, what the hell. Sam Spade was about ten feet behind me wherever I went. What’s an outsider? He’s whatever they say he is. He doesn’t look like the other crayfish. Let’s eat him.

I dreamt I was moving somewhere and dishes were a problem. Dear Freud, Dear Jung, they kept breaking in my hands. There was tremendous urgency. Something sinister was happening. It was one of those offstage dreams. And I reached for the dishes and they fell from my fingers and shattered repeatedly. And someone who I couldn’t identify but who seemed to know me said: “leave the plates. You won’t need them where we’re going.” This is around the time I woke up.

Dish comes from the Latin “discus” which transformed in Medieval Latin to “desk” so maybe I was supposed to abandon my desk. I won’t need a desk where I’m going. I wonder if there are desks in the afterlife. Could there be a room of one’s own in heaven or hell? Would hell be ok if you had a study with a lock on the door? I wish I could ask Philip Roth. Meantime I’m reminded of the old “desk in the afterlife joke”:

“A writer died and St. Peter offered him the option of going to hell or to heaven. To help decide, he asked for a tour of each destination. St. Peter agreed and decided to take him to hell first. As he descended into the fiery pits, the writer saw row upon row of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they were repeatedly whipped with thorny lashes by demons. “Oh, my,” the writer said, “let me see heaven.”
A few moments later, as they ascended into heaven, the writer saw row upon row of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they, too, were whipped with thorny lashes by demons.
“Hey,” the writer said, “this is just as bad as hell.”
“Oh, no it’s not,” St Peter replied, “here your work gets published!””

Meanwhile I’m in mind of the old piece from The Onion about the pros and cons of “stand up” desks:

“Standing desks are becoming more popular in workplaces where employees would otherwise sit all day, but not everyone thinks a standing desk is right for them. The Onion looks at the pros and cons of using a standing desk.

PRO
Improves ability to talk about having a standing desk
Encourages more natural spinal curvature while staring at screen for eight continuous hours
Increases blood flow to your feet, where your best thinking is done
One step closer toward the ultimate dream of flying desks
Easy way to create illusion you actually give a sh*t about work

CON
Could wind up forgetting how to sit entirely
Might be happier not knowing how difficult it has become for you to stand up for longer than 30 minutes
More visible target for office shooter
Eliminates satisfaction of leaning back in your chair with your hands behind your head after sending a killer email
You’ll still eventually die.”

The dream was filled with broken dishes and a prevailing sense that a nameless but terrible enemy was coming.

I’m praying for refugees everywhere.

As Jung would remind us, our dreams ain’t always about ourselves.

This morning I unfolded the flower
That is my heart but I must tell you
I was thinking of something else
A boyhood house which was
In fact quite small
So it equaled me—
It was a garment
And one put it on.
I say, ambition
Is lovely, the light
Of the mind is like tea
In a glass
And it is mystic
In this strange room
And rain with its proficiency
Makes one dreamy.
I love you, my heart
Oh heart.

How lucky I was
When as a boy
I lived more alone
Than others
And there was no one
To tell me why.

Even now I stay up late
Sending instructions to strangers.