Planet of the Blind

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.

This morning on seventh avenue
A woman cried on the sidewalk—
She wept into a paper bag.
I walked by not wanting to get involved
Which is violence also.
There are not enough perfections.
At first I thought I shouldn’t write this.
We call it ‘virtue signaling’
As if ardor and hope are vain
And poems are vain.
I wash my fingers in cold water
And think of Rachmaninoff who,
Learning he was dying,
Went to his study, shut the door
And said farewell to his hands.
Perhaps there’ll be music where we’re going.

Last night I dreamt I was making balloon animals in a windstorm. I love the unconscious. Later the storm turned horribly intense. The unconscious has a limited sense of humor.

Meanwhile, it’s important to know what you love— especially the small things. I love the morning song from Peer Gynt, hot soup in winter, the sound of distant dogs barking at night, jazz piano any time.

Of course I love people, my wife, stepchildren, family, old friends, two horses in particular. But I talk about them all the time. I seldom say “I love that barn mouse.”

Back to the ballon animals. I love that barn mouse.

**

Oh America! Your swimming grows weaker and weaker, and the whale, just as Melville predicted…

**

Long ago I thought suede shoes were stylish—not the Chet Atkins variety, but the “Hush Puppy” kind, the beige ones. I was 13 and those were some good shoes. I say so without nostalgia.

Of the Hush Puppies I recall after you wore them for a day or two they tended to stink. I remember my father saying: “Your shoes smell like dead rats.” “How do you know what dead rats smell like?” I asked him. “I was in WWII,” he said.

I tried washing the shoes with dish soap and a rag. This ruined the suede and made them smell like the beauty parlor where my mother went for her “permanents” which were sinister since she was a drug addict and lacquered hair meant there’d be a burning sofa in the near future.

BTW I could never get my father to talk about the war. He fought in the Pacific. There were lots of rats.

**

It’s god’s trick, making me sadder as I grow older.

**

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine, or idealism.” (Carl Jung)

Idealism is how I get out of bed. And it’s likely going to pull my strings until the end.

What’s the balloon animal for that?

Last night I went to a jazz club in New York City and it was way too loud for my guide dog Caitlyn. She tried. She lay at my feet. But when a particularly hot squeal from the saxophone hit the room she stood up and I saw it was time to go. We left early. When you have a service animal you must be willing to compromise and know you’re not just you. Plenty of blind folks don’t want guide dogs in their lives for this very reason. Me? I’d rather have a creature who looks out for me in traffic and whose sweet life I have to reckon. A white cane is fine for everyone else. I gain a lot by caring for my canine companion. And really the jazz wasn’t that great. It sounded like an amplified fight in a lobster trap.

**

The above passage is okay as far as it goes. But if my dog wanted to visit a shit pile would I compromise, saying, well sometimes I have to admit I’m not just me?

**

Enough! We look after each other. And not all jazz is equal.

**

When you say you’re somebody think of your dog and subtract the ambitious fealties to super-ego which have held you hostage to pure life.

Let’s celebrate what for lack of a better term one might call the optimistic imagination as practiced by wretches. I’m in mind of G.K. Chesterton’s assessment of Dickens, that he was: “delighted at the same moment that he was desperate. The two opposite things existed in him simultaneously, and each in its full strength. His soul was not a mixed colour like grey and purple, caused by no component colour being quite itself. His soul was like a shot silk of black and crimson, a shot silk of misery and joy.”

Yes optimism for the wretch is a dyer’s art but it must be farcical in its hope. (Think Shakespeare’s Bottom.) One must be ridiculous in the boot black factory. (Dickens-Chaplin.) This is the thing, likely a tee shirt slogan: we hope in misery. As for the literary imagination printed ideas are invariably sad even when they propose optimism and no honest writer can ignore it. What did J.P. Morgan’s library smell like in 1902? Short answer? The vapors of sorrow.

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. This is comedy as it’s lived but not necessarily admired. Moliere:

“The comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.”

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. Almost no one who’s lived through a high school production of The Man of La Mancha has not done this.

Comic irony is when you recognize the impostors beyond their appearances on stage. The characters in Tartuffe are at every holiday party. They creep through the workplace. Confidence men, hypocrites, exceptionally vain head cases, the credulous, and all who make their living feigning virtue. Ah, nature’s bounty indeed!

By living Moliere I reside in kayfab—I know the world may be better or worse than this adoption, but I can bear my illusions for not to live in Tartuffe would be, at least for me, unsupportable. Comedic representation is healthier than plodding credulity and more philosophical since incongruity is the mainspring for understanding the irrational. If you’re following me, you’ll say my proscenium of custom if it’s all Moliere, all Shakespeare, all the time, is a matter that must by necessity make me unreasonable. I prefer this to any conversation with the human resources crowd or political canvasers or god help me, professors at a conference. I’d gladly sip the milk of custom and spit it in a potted plant than talk to Orgon or Tartuffe. Contradiction isn’t a customary beverage. It’s milk and iodine and it’s healthier for you than any drink Madame Pernelle will offer.

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.”

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.

That’s optimism as comedy. Not as a vehicle for pratfalls or put downs, but discernment and the vanity of hope.

Hope is comedy. The sadness of the world is irrational. This is how I live. I think of Auden’s line: “All we are not stares back at what we are.” If an empowered disability identity is “out” and on the street it’s ironies are inherently complicated by the acculturated language of normalcy. This is both a signature subject for performance theory and disability studies. It is also the seed bed of literary consciousness. Watch out! The crip writers are comics.

You can tell the difference between a star and a man because the man has teeth. Against the heavens there are always teeth. The dawn, the most important of all, well, it’s toothless also. Please stop kidding. You certainly love your teeth. But again closing your eyes there’s just a memory of the Milky Way, all those broken windows.

**

Bus Going Somewhere (True Story)

A woman, a stranger, a person entirely unaccustomed to the blind
Leaned close, rustling something in her hands I knew not what
And said: “I’d have to kill myself if I was you.” I think she had flowers.
She kneaded the cellophane, breathed hard. “Oh I already did that,,” I said. “I used to be you in the far flung spindrift galaxy
Called the Black Eye. I rode a bus with hot house flowers And hey diddle diddle one day I couldn’t take it anymore
So now I’m a blind man beside you on a boppity bumpity bus.”
Yes in case you’re wondering, I smiled. She got off at the next stop.

**

Fragments:

“A dear child has many names.”

Finnish proverb. Dear child. Iris.
Buttercup. Mockingbird.
Mouse behind a chanterelle.

Who cares the clouds are low?
See how the grass waves?
Throw open the doors.

**

A strange proficiency in evidence
Look for it among people you don’t know
That’s kind of “the work” of Christ

**

Listening to the radio for company:

I might have been another man
Climbing stairs
To a different tune—
A black underworld between stations

**

Maybe I got it wrong and the stars do have teeth. And they have voices like coarse children.

Nietzsche: “All truth is simple…”

Is that not doubly a lie?

Not if you can get away with it.
(As if “all truth” is what? A glass of water?)

Can you imagine serving on a submarine with Friedrich?

**

An old shell am I, O Lady of Zephyrium…

**

When winter comes from the radio you know tragedy.

**

In this notebook, which is its own crude comic, we laugh as Batman steps on a fat frozen turd. Robin says: “Oh, that’s going to take some scrubbing!”

**

OK. Meanwhile:

I want the owl’s peace…

Hunger over for the day

Gibbous moon

Sleep…but not yet…

**

Ding Dong.

“Who’s there?”

“The Baba Yaba!”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to collect your breeze of inspiration.”

(Sound of chicken legs….)

Thoughts one has during a respiratory pandemic.

**

Poem discarded:

Walking Around

Did I know this? Blind strolling
Through Houston passing
An open window (who knew
Windows can be open
In the Texas summer?)
And a piano and someone
Playing it
And Franz Liszt the composer.
I have to ask
Did I know?
Lyric in the inhospitable.
“Tre sonetti di Petrarca”
Broadens
From a house
I cannot see.
And Liszt with his cataracts
His dropsy, a failing heart
Asthma, insomnia
Places his performer’s hands
On my shoulders.

Solo Dancing

Crippled kid, all body.
All body.
Think of that.

We manage so much without the poets
As for instance washing our hair
Or listening to houses—

It’s all a lark this living.
Me? I see and do not see
As blind people do.

Yellow bird I don’t know
What you are—this morning
Early, you were here

Poised like a dream face.
Though nothing in your life concerned me
I touched the window.

Life continues this way.
Many years ago
I met a shaman in Lapland.

He smelled like smoke
Though he did not smoke.
No poems for a hundred miles.

I spent the winter of 1977 reading Nietschze and though I was merely 22 I understood I was in the presence of an unattractive mind. It was stuff like this that did it:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

I wrote “bullshit” in the margin. I understood already that primitive sophistry wasn’t for me.

Schlegel was better: “In actual life every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.”

It snowed for days. I huddled in a Vermont cabin and wrote poems, read copiously and talked to my cat.

That season was the beginning of the adult Stephen.

**

Disability vs. the Wide World

Childhood: I remember those Finnish houses with their tall white tile ovens—they stood in the corners of rooms like spies. Adults of course believe these things give a home character. This is the difference. Some days the horror of adult life is enough to drive one under the bed. My little boy, the one who became me, knew those stoves stood between wakefulness and dream. And years later, when I was in college and reading Edgar Poe, I felt the hypnogogia as he called it, and saw that disability was in fact the tell tale heart—the life that goes on under the floor; the life that’s been operated on; the one on the tip of your tongue but never uttered.

Here’s the thing: there are days when you don’t want to go outside. The adult world is filled with stove makers. You stay home and drink tea. You think about all the creepy doctors. The spies.

You think about all kinds of things. You promise to get strong presently. By the afternoon you’re ready to go outside. You take your indignant, nail studded wheelchair, guide dog, hobby horse and go to the grocery. And though all the customers and employees stare at you, stare as if you’re the skeleton in a morality play, you roll or walk a most strange course straight for the olives with pimentos. Lord knows, sometimes happiness slowly crawls into you.