Planet of the Blind

Five days a week for forty years Uncle History went to the Glum Works at the edge of civilization and dusted the apparatus. I knew him in his last years after he’d retired. He liked nothing better than to smoke his pipe in the dark on the old porch. He seldom spoke but one fine night when the fireflies were rose from the cinnamon ferns he said: “to know the present you have to know the past; but no one wants to know the present; so I quit.”

I was always going to be this man,
This set of lungs,
(The goddesses tell me
In dreams) this man
Who on grey mornings
Is loved
His falling caught.

One of the pleasures of reading is the discovery of a superior voice, one you’ve been waiting for even if you’d no idea you’d been anticipating it. In my case the aesthetic affirmation comes from Virgil Thomson whose polemical essays on music and everything else are original and beautifully “unlike” as the best writing should be. Consider this little nugget from his essay “Our Island Home, or What It Feels Like to be a Musician”:

“Among the great techniques, music is all by itself, an auditory thing, the only purely auditory thing there is. It is comprehensible only to persons who can remember sounds. Trained or untrained in the practice of the art, these persons are correctly called “musical.” And their common faculty gives them access to a secret civilization completely impenetrable by outsiders.

The professional caste that administers this civilization is proud, dogmatic, insular. It divides up the rest of the world into possible customers and non-customers, or rather into two kinds of customers, the music-employers and the music-consumers, beyond whom lies a no man’s land wherein dwells everyone else. In no man’s land takes place one’s private life with friends and lovers, relatives, neighbors. Here live your childhood playmates, your enemies of the classroom, the soldiers of your regiment, your chums, girl-friends, wives, throw-aways, and the horrid little family next door.”

This is, if not sidesplittingly funny, arresting enough and if you, like me, labor at a university (or any other professionalized but provincial arena) you know all about the dogmatics of professionals and the “everyone else community” or no man’s (or woman’s) land of private life.
If you don’t buy records or books, you are, according to the professional caste, just another prole. Reader: I went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and all I can say is this is spot on. As for the horrid little family next door it’s probably safe to say everybody hates them.

What’s delightful about Thomson is his candor about the no man’s land. Musicians and composers can make perfect art if they don’t tire of their trades. But then:

“Private life, on the other hand, is beset by a thousand insoluble crises, from unrequited love to colds in the head. Nobody, literally nobody, knows how to avoid any of them. The Christian religion itself can only counsel patience and long-suffering. It is like a nightmare of being forced to execute at sight a score much too difficult for one’s training on an instrument nobody knows how to tune and before a public that isn’t listening anyway.”

Mark Twain couldn’t say it better. (See Twain’s vision of heaven where no angel can play its instrument….)

That’s a delicious pronoun reference—“it is like a nightmare” points of course to private life but it picks up magnet-like, the almost witless patience of the church.

The poet in me loves the following:

“Everything the poet does is desperate and excessive. He eats like a pig; he starves like a professional beauty; he tramps; he bums; he gets arrested; he steals; he absconds; he blackmails; he dopes; he acquires every known vice and incurable disease, not the least common of which is solitary dipsomania.

All this after twenty-five, to be sure. Up to that age he is learning his art. There is available a certain amount of disinterested subsidy for expansive lyrical poetry, the poetry of adolescence and early manhood. But nobody can make a grown-up career out of a facility for lyrical expansiveness. That kind of effusion is too intense, too intermittent. The mature nervous system won’t stand it. At about twenty-six, the poets start looking around for some subject-matter outside themselves, something that will justify sustained execution while deploying to advantage all their linguistic virtuosity.”

Thank you Virgil Thomson. Thank you!

I have tried to make a grown up career out of a facility for lyrical expansiveness. As for solitary dipsomania, well….

There’s a catbird outside my window. He sounds lonesome. That’s the thing: all of creation is aching from solitude and horniness.

Meanwhile I guide my life by dreams, inefficient as always, prone to depression, occasionally pressing my forehead on the wet lawn early. 

Meanwhile here are several true statements about my life:

Once, afraid of the Russian police, I pressed my face against a birch tree and cried.

Once, I lit my shoe on fire in a fleabag hotel.

I sailed alone while blind through a thunderstorm.

Rode an elevator with Melvin Laird, told him I loved his “war thing.”

Was sneezed on by an elephant.

Hit a Chinese bell with a coin when none of my sighted friends could do it.

Had a soulful moment with a donkey in Galway.

Beat a French chess champion who overturned the board.

Held Enrico Caruso’s saddle shoes.

At its core “ableism” is discrimination or prejudice against the disabled. It’s steeped in the prevailing assumption that non-disabled bodies are inherently superior. I’ve lived with the “A Word” all my days and in my mid-sixties I see how I’ve been worn down by it. (Everything wears us down but ableism is so unrelenting and pervasive it’s like gravity.)

**

As Ibram X. Kendri puts it: “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”

**

I once told a group of disability studies professors that they weren’t sufficiently devoted to accessibility for the blind. Just about all of the 60 people in attendance had eyesight.

This view was not greeted with enthusiasm. Even within the disability community you’ll find closed gates.

**

All hail the eyes. If the blind can’t fully participate that’s “on them” for at least we allowed them in the room.

I think the blind aren’t fully welcome in the academy. Let me add, if you squawk about it you’ll be judged and not kindly. I’ve been told if my behavior was better I might get the access I need. Try that on, little fella!

**

Which brings me back to ableism which demotes you to little fella, little lady, kiddo, “special” and always gets away with it.

**

Recite to yourself a psalm or sonnet. Name all the players on the 1969 New York Mets. Just don’t do what I’ve done when my spirit has failed—don’t tell the poor sods what cattle they are—and trust me, as a crippled activist you’ll face colluders, quislings, prevaricators, and worse, and I’m merely saying, don’t let your outrage with the boring quotidian be your first move. I tell you I’ve made that mistake. As a blind child I was told I didn’t belong so often, so routinely, by so many boors that my half-sainted skin is pocked with the scars of custom and you better believe this is why I think highly of myself, for as of today I’ve never hit anyone, never kicked a dog, though I’ve slobbered and spit when confronted by meagre conventions and the unwritten rules of ableism. Yes! Think highly of yourself! Try like hell not to hate the unpleasant and despicable apparatchiks. When all else fails, tell them off. But don’t do it just because you’re stupefied.

Here concludes the sermon. Except for this. Disabled lives are in peril all over the world. Anger beats boredom but it seldom promotes effective change. Wits do. Crawling up the Capitol’s steps will do it. Standing up for those who don’t have voices or opportunities will always do it. But never contempt. Please don’t be like me when I’m weak and in a state of high offense. And then, stay unintimidated.

I’ve been writing this blog for quite a long time now. Blogging is “so last decade” and is the equivalent (if you’ll allow me a mixed metaphor) of black socks with shorts. It’s a dad thing.

All the sharp online communicators have moved to podcasting or video.

And here I am plodding along in the slow lane.

I should say that I’ve tried to master the software of podcasting but it’s not blind friendly. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s very hard. Garage Band, Sound Cloud and the like are extremely visual and if you use a screen reading program as I do it’s virtually impossible.

Still in the slow lane.

Now since no one gets paid much if anything to “blog” why do it?

For me the answer lies in the outlier worlds of disability.

**

From Aristophanes onward the imaginative life has been synonymous with dissatisfaction, contrarianism, and what for lack of a better term I’ll call productive distemper.

When I got my first guide dog I discovered that moving through public spaces required this very quality.

My dog and I were contrary by our existences. Riding the 4 train in New York City a burly man said: “I don’t know why they let you service dog people go everywhere. The fucking subway should be a dog free zone!”

He might have been speaking the thoughts of many for all I knew. And for all I knew he may have been bitten by a dog when he was a child. (It’s a game I have, imagining the adults I encounter, all wearing signs that declare their childhood traumas—in place of name badges at cocktail parties.)

And so I looked at burly man and said: “When I’m elected President everyone gets his or her own subway.” Then added: “My dog doesn’t like riding with you either.”

Of course I knew my dog didn’t care about burly man. But if we were representative of others’ dissatisfactions, then we were entitled to volley back. And over time I came to call this ‘productive distemper”.

Aristophanes said: “Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.”

“Corky,” I said, “stupid lasts forever.”

**

So as I say, I’ve been blogging for years and while I write about human rights issues broadly, I’m often pushed back to blindness. Pushed back is the right phrase for as any person with a disability will tell you, there are too many moments when your physical difference is managed poorly by the temporarily abled people you work with or meet. Once I was lifted by three men while I was vacationing in Jamaica. They grabbed me and hoisted me into the air. All of them were well meaning: their goal was to place me securely in a boat. The blind man needs help. We’ll give it to him. I smiled. “Its a cultural thing,” I told myself. Their intentions were good. The trouble is that lots of well meaning actions by non-disabled people are simultaneously demeaning. Those helpful beach guys saw my blindness as something akin to what I’ve come to call “trouble luggage” which is the ultimate pejorative objectification of disability. My friends who travel with wheelchairs know all about this, especially when they’re flying. The airlines view disability (all disability) as trouble luggage. It’s rare for a disabled person to have a good day when traveling. You can joke if you like by saying its rare for anyone to have a good day when traveling but trust me, the demeaning and objectifying experiences of disabled passengers are so consistent and so humiliating they far outstrip the lukewarm unhappiness of non-disabled travelers.

Boarding a plane not long ago with my guide dog by my side, the flight attendant said: “That dog doesn’t have a blue blanket, it can’t come on the plane.”

I’ve flown (quite literally) hundreds of thousands of miles with my guide dogs. I’ve heard lots of oddball things from travel professionals. (Guide dogs are allowed on all public transportation). But this was the first time I’d been hit with the “blue blanket” “trouble luggage” scenario. And those who know me know I’m seldom speechless but standing in the doorway of the airplane I was momentarily flummoxed.

For one thing, “blue blanket” (for me) brings to mind the famous and hilarious scene in Mel Brooks’ classic comedy film “The Producers” where Gene Wilder, playing the role of Leo Bloom a downtrodden accountant, finds himself swept up in a nefarious and illegal money making scheme in the company of Zero Mostel (playing the role of Max Bialystok, a corrupt Broadway producer). Bloome has a fetish object, a childhood remnant, a blue blanket, which he pulls from his suit-coat pocket and rubs against his face when he feels that Bialystok is bullying him. Bialystok steals the blanket which of course produces comic hysteria from Bloom. “My blanket, my blanket, give me my blanket…” Etc. And so the flight attendant was telling me I couldn’t get on the plane because my dog didn’t have a blue blanket.

“Guide dogs don’t have blue blankets,” I said. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Oh no,” she said. “That dog has to have a blue blanket or it cant’ come on the plane.”
“Ah,” I said. “You know when guide dogs are in training as puppies they wear blue blankets, maybe you’re thinking of that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But you can’t come on the plane.”
Civil rights veterans know this trick. You just sit down. I sat in the nearest seat. I tucked my dog under my feet.
“You’ll have to get a supervisor,” I said.
She stormed off the plane and up the jetway. Civilization was stopped. People with oversized suitcases began piling onto the aircraft without a flight attendant. But I was the supreme piece of trouble luggage.

And of course the attendant reappeared and said nothing more to me. Someone told her it was OK. Her silence suggested she’d been dressed down or patronized. That’s the thing: disability “trouble luggage” always leads to abjection and misunderstanding. The commuter airline had not trained its flight attendants. I needed Leo Bloom’s blanket.
I’m fond of pointing out blindness is a low incidence disability. It’s highly likely most sighted people (which is to say, most people) won’t come into contact with a blind person. If you’re blind and you travel you must always reflect on your ambassadorship—you’re the official representative of the country of blindness, yes you, standing right there in a jetway with your dog and your backpack loaded with dog food and an iPad.
So I come back to blindness all the time. The days won’t let me forget it. At a cocktail party a woman says to my wife, who is not blind, “Oh you dress him so well.” Try enjoying your foie gras after that.

“It takes a busload of faith to get by,” Lou Reed said. What will the next moments bring? How will I maintain my equanimity? Everyone has to ask these questions but blindness intensifies their frequency.

“What will he be having?” says the waitress, looking directly at my wife.

So I blog.

This poem is filled with rage
Yet underneath
There’s blood soaked sand.
The alchemy of terror
Is in grains
And I hear it
From the basement.
“You must have such good hearing
Since you’re blind.”
The God of sand
Is transforming me.
Look, some of the creatures
Are getting away.

These are low places
Where as a boy I lay
Eyes close to dirt
And now
Small refuges
Kept in mind

It doesn’t matter
Execution is the chariot
Of genius as Blake said—
Here’s a place to weep
Storm-talk
Continuing above

I’ve always liked the word avail. What does it avail you? The wondrous Online Etymology Dictionary tells the tale: “avail (v.) c. 1300, availen, “to help (someone), assist; benefit, be profitable to; be for the advantage of; have force or efficacy, serve for a purpose,” apparently an Anglo-French compound of Old French a- “to” (see ad-) vaill-, present stem of valoir “be worth,” from Latin valere “be strong, be worth” (from PIE root *wal- “to be strong”). Related: Availed; availing. As a noun, from c. 1400.”

With a little fine tuning one can see benefit and profit tied to purpose. I’ve always wanted an “availian party” rather than current political and economic customs.

Valoir: be of worth.

Meanwhile I placed roses on Karl Marx’s tomb some years back but I also put them at George Eliot’s mausoleum for I think she was of the greater good in the old French way.

**

Now availing also means to have a center, and if it’s not spiritual it comes close. Helping you helps me.

This is hard for sighted people to do when thinking of the blind.

Not long ago while visiting a famous arts colony I heard a notable writer say that henceforth the famous arts colony would no longer be “blind and poor” when it comes to appreciating outlier forms of art. He said it twice during a formal speech.

And there I was with my guide dog. I’ve spent the last thirty years writing six books which argue blindness is a rich way of knowing.

I was insulted and remain so. Yet this is business as usual for the sighted who can’t describe seeing imagine they know it thoroughly and think the blind are among them “on sufferance” and yes, we make them nervous by our very appearance.

I share with my Black, Indigenous and LGBTQT brothers and sisters and all my foreign friends the capacity to make dominators nervous. All of us are thought to be “here on sufferance” and yet there’s something especially dishonest about the blind, the lame, the halt.

The dishonest thing is that the sighted, unable to tell me what vision means, and only able to describe their toys and fascinations as it were, the majority of them have no availing center. Without this they can’t imagine the glory of life itself. You think sight seeing is the secret to living.

And if they believe this, then they also must believe that language isn’t much of a thing.

I can’t tell you how to live or what to do. That’s freedom. Beware those who imagine otherwise.

One should especially be wary of those who would monetize telling you what to do.

**

“I’d like to have dinner with Emily Dickinson,” says a poet. Another says “Walt Whitman,” and so forth. I’ve always wanted to spend an evening with Thomas Paine. How could you not enjoy conversing with this man?

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

**

Then there’s Christopher Hitchens:

“If I search my own life for instances of good or fine behavior I am not overwhelmed by an excess of choice.”

**

“… Civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient.” (Hitchens also.)

Curses on the left and the right for canceling the inconvenient.

**

I’ve this blog about disability, about poetry, politics, really an exophthalmic notebook and lately I haven’t been writing much. I’m chilled. I’m walking around and absolutely chilled.

**

You see, the church of my childhood asks “what does God demand of you now?” As a boy, a blind kid, the question terrified me. Sometimes I hid in the closet where my parents hung the winter coats in portmanteaus. I pushed into the back.

**

The world wasn’t friendly. God was impatient. And yes it was cold in that closet. My childhood house still stands. I haven’t been there in years. But you see where I’m going—every locale is again that place, potentially, maybe because of an ideo-motor effect, a trance in my backbone, a tip of the head. It doesn’t matter. William James would tell us it’s always cold in there—in vertebrae, among the moth balls.

**

Final aria:

When I was four I ran away from my parents and got happily lost in Helsinki.

I lived on a constantly turning electrostatic wheel of inventions.

I loved Kaivopuisto Park and chased leaves even though I couldn’t see them.

I was high above the Baltic among leaves and gulls.