Planet of the Blind

In last night’s dream Freud slumped against a wall and warned it could all sink deeper and I said “fair enough” so we slipped below into the industrial kitchen of a ruined asylum. It looked like a storm had blown through. The old switch board stood like an ox but with a hundred wires. I asked the good doctor: “What is it about the “soul” that it needs prepositions?”

**

Of or from the soul constitute our relational understanding, our separateness, for souls are always understood as being transitive extracorporeal rhetorics. Sometimes we get silly and say “Come Soul clap your hands,” by which we mean, “c’mon, say something” as if perhaps, in a final reduction, the soul is like a horse counting numbers with its hoof.

**

Surely “of or from” the soul will always be easier to say than “with” as soulful accompaniment is mystic and evades phenomenology—with the soul is like the hue of heaven, unfounded and pious. Now I’m on this humorless path because I believe in the soul—that green force of the sea—and because hugging it, loving it, turning with it, it’s impossible to tell who is my teacher. I am “with” for certain.

**

When the soul is kidding it says it’s sad. When it’s having a riotously good time it listens for oncoming rain. Wind blows darkness against your cheek. Soul is admiring.

So I wake this way.

My soul was convinced that it loved me. In my life I sat in the grass, knitting it a failed sweater.

Sometimes we get silly and say “Come Soul try this on.”

**

In the dream Freud and I talked into the dead telephones.

Note: this is dedicated to the rebarbative and noisy figure of Christoper Ruffo…

No one gets a mega-theric prescription for happiness in America no matter the nonsense we’re forced to swallow. We’re not going to be unhappy! We’re told happiness is our calling! Happy happy!

But where’s the magic document, the one from the doctor? It turns out the doctor isn’t happy either. Only in the USA can a vast population be inculcated to believe in false happiness because it’s our duty–and meanwhile the corporate deciders are doing everything possible to screw us.

Enter right wing hysteria over critical race theory. Rather than confront our national shame about brutal and structural discrimination and all its atrocities, let’s scream that the “woke” people are going to steal, wait for it, steal our non-existent happiness! Aha! It’s just what I suspected! White Privilege is dependent on being willfully, nay aggressively opposed to both conscience and consciousness. Wasn’t it Carl Jung who said achieving consciousness is painful? Screw that, cry the Republicans, let’s have happy happy and a side order of happy.

Notebook: “Ding-an-sich”

Kant’s term: “Thing-in-itself”

1.

Though I’m blind, yes, I go to art museums, often with my dog, many days just the two of us, and passersby are astonished—more by my presence than the paintings. “Why would a blind person wander the art museum?” they wonder, as if sight was all of life. They’ve no idea I’m listening to them. I follow and eavesdrop. The public can’t hold its tongue, especially in the museum. “Look darling, that’s a Jackson Pollock,” says a mother to her son, who must be about four. “They used to give brushes to monkeys and let them do whatever they wanted!”

2.

One thing is like another until it isn’t—a pine doesn’t resemble a coffin though as a boy I saw men inside each tree, my way to be less alone, talking as if I could force resemblance.

3.

D.H. Lawrence: “Moby Dick, the Great White Whale, tore off Ahab’s leg at the knee, when Ahab was attacking him. Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a lot more besides.”

4.

I often read far into the night. Last evening—early morning really—I found myself thinking about the word “equivocation” which emerged in Shakespeare’s time and is an early modern neologism—to half speak, parallel speak, hedge speak. The word itself is a barometer of how literacy affected the public nerve. Once people could read they could engage in irony. To equivocate became a crime in some cases as Shakespeare knew. Talking at cross purposes was a newfangled thing. Oh people had always been liars. But equivocation was unique—a conspiracy within the self if you will. Shakespeare’s late plays are concerned with this. Dr. Faustus perfects the matter later.

5.

Olav Hauge:

“Don’t give me the whole truth,
don’t give me the sea for my thirst,
don’t give me the sky when I ask for light,
but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote
as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing
and the wind a grain of salt.”

“You’re getting on my nerves,” cried Uncle Sam. “You’re supposed to love me no matter what!”

“Well,” said the children, “we hate your jokes.”

“What jokes? All I do is talk about the American Dream!”

“Exactly,” the children said as they rode away on their motor scooters which resembled insects.

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.

I remember how my late friend, the disability activist and scholar Bill Peace was attending a conference at Yale University. The event was about bio-ethics. Bill was a wheelchair user and he had a sudden cardiac emergency. He was taken to Yale Hospital where, believe it or not, he was shunted to a corner of the emergency room and left alone for 7 hours.

Bill died two years ago in yet another instance of medical neglect. He was in his early fifties.

I’m thinking of him on this Fourth of July. I know he wouldn’t mind my employing him as a device in the literary sense since his dying came as a direct result of medical neglect driven by ableism. He represents in his passing a national disgrace: our nearly wholesale indifference to the disability community in matters of healthcare.

So today while the able bodied stuff themselves with hot dogs I am taking time to say that until health care is a right in this country no one is free.

They see me walking with my stick
And like a sway of curtains
I hear the assumptions—
That I’ve been admitted by mistake
Or must be lost
Surely poems require sight?

Screw Homer; who reads Milton?
Big time poets know blindness
Stands for something something—
Didn’t Rilke touch on it—
A blind man lead by a gray woman
And lost forever in infancies?

That blind girl who writes verses—
She must be a bird
Something something
Half related to language
Her poems like feathers
Or yarrow stalks.

“How do you write so clearly
If you can’t see?”
“How do you read?”
“Would you have been a writer
If you had sight?”
“Can you see me at all?”

After swimming I scrambled from the Aegean up a steep rock wall and was the only one who didn’t get stung by the sea urchins.
Later in a shoreside taverna I ate sea urchin gonads. They tasted like blood and molasses.
Aristotle thought the sea urchin’s mouth resembled a small lantern.
No one has ever put the sea urchin and big band music in the same sentence before now.

They don’t like you, the other kids in the seventh grade. Back then you figured this was largely OK. After all they were lumpy and smelled bad. Trouble was, they started pushing you down stairs, bashing your head into lockers. You were the disabled kid in the big junior high school and it was 1967.

I knew, listening with everything I had that crickets would materialize inside me. Later I discovered Lorca, his line: “the little boy went looking for his voice/the king of the crickets had it…”

Yes. The cricket king. A little boy with his thick spectacles.

If it’s grief you’re after then poetry is your place. And poetry is a place. As he approached the end of his life James Tate named it “the government lake.” While embodied grief and poetry grief are not precisely the same lets say poetry is dark tourism.

**

Three years into guide dog life I saw that the village square is filled with Tennessee Williams characters, Blanches and Stanleys whose hearts are so busted they’ll think nothing about approaching a blind man to talk about the deaths of their pets. And I saw behind these stories of doggie demise were divorces, run away children, job losses, car accidents, so that I wanted to weep for our strangeness. This is a high gravity world.

**

As a poet this wasn’t big news to me. About suffering they were never wrong the Old Masters. Not only is it always occurring, but we’re invited to look away. Unless that is, you go absolutely every place with a dog. On the airplane. In the shopping mall. Riding escalators. Then all bets are off. A guide dog user becomes a mark. In effect I became a walking minister. A circuit rider. My Finnish grandfather was a Lutheran pastor who preached to immigrant congregations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. I saw my guide dog was my Model T Ford. The common street was our patch of souls.

**

I’m irreverent. But I couldn’t laugh at the unbidden, constant sadnesses of happenstance people. And I couldn’t let them dominate me as the price of listening or allow them to ruin my days. Her dog had been poisoned. His dog lived to be fifteen but succumbed to joint disease. Her dog got stolen. His was shot by hunters. You’re just sipping coffee. You’re sitting on a bench. The sorrowing comes to you like birds.

**

Grief land in poetry differs from grief in the public square because our brains make maps–neuro-synaptic fetishized memory-habit-charts. Grief in the mind is like every ghost story you’ve ever read–every thought we have about the past is a revenant trick. Go ahead, write them down those miseries, the sorrow has outraced you and is already occupying your future memories.

**

This is why I prefer the dark tourism of poetry: the blackbird whistling or just after. In poetry’s haunted house they are the same.

In poetry’s haunted house self-contempt appears swollen and cartoonish. Routine sorrow becomes collectivized, atavistic. James Tate writes in a prose poem called “The Visiting Doctor”:

“This afternoon about half past four I was sitting at my
desk when somebody knocked on my door. I got up to answer it
when my leg crumbled beneath me. I tried to stand, but it was
as if my one leg were made of silly putty. Finally, with the
help of the arms of the couch, I pulled myself up and yelled at
the door, “Come in, the door’s unlocked.” The door opened
slowly and there stood a little man in a doctor’s uniform.
“You rang?” he said. “Well, not exactly,” I said. “Yes, but
you need me. Am I right?” he said. “Yes, I suppose I do,”
I said. “Well, then, let’s get right to work. It’s your left
leg, am I right?” he said. “Yes, it’s my left leg,” I said.
“Well, I’m afraid we’ll have to saw it off,” he said. “No,
please don’t. You haven’t even looked at it,” I said. “I
heard you fall. I know the sound. It’s no good anymore,”
he said.”

Excerpt From: James Tate. “The Government Lake.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-government-lake/id1434290871

**

When, as I do, you travel everywhere with a guide dog public space becomes a confessional of sorts. It’s a rare day when a stranger doesn’t approach to say, “I had a dog like that once, but he died,” or, “Labradors, they’re the best dogs in the world, but mine’s dead.” The first time this happened I was a newbie guide dog user, alone, in the Pittsburgh airport, and a woman said, “I had a dog like that once, but someone poisoned it.” She had an overpowering minty odor and kept snapping her fingers. My dog and I ran away from her.

I feel safer beside the government lake.