Planet of the Blind

There are lines of poetry that once you’ve read them you’ll never get rid of. “The world is ugly and the people are sad” is one of them and it’s bugged me for almost forty years. I was an undergraduate when I first read the lines and if you’re a reader of American poetry you know they are by Wallace Stevens.

The lines represent a mood. Moods are to truth as armadillo meat is to–well, anything. It doesn’t matter that the world is beautiful and people are at least happy on occasion. Mood wins in poetry and the darker the better.

What would a poem which argues the world is glorious and people are, if not happy, at least capable of happiness sound like? It would sound like this:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

I’ll take Keats over Stevens any day. Why? Because the imagination insists the gloomy days have no noble nature. Because the sails of beauty can be slack or filled with wind but they break the monotony of gloom. (Sails and horses running will always do this.)

On the night Stevens wrote his lines someone was playing a banjo in New Haven and singing softly something the poet did not conceive of. And whether it was a spiritual or the blues or a song of the working classes doesn’t matter. The world was never ugly. Some people are occasionally sad, or cannot shake sadness and in any case saying so bears nuance and scruple neither of which are evident in Stevens’ original lines.

Stevens for all his capacities could be cheap, a thing you never find in Williams, the poet against whom he’s often positioned. Williams would tell us an old woman eating plums finds them good. I’ll take Williams and Keats and plums.

One is tempted to say appetite is everything. I know you know. I’m ravenous. The old stomach is cleaving to the backbone. With wings I’d be a raven like the one that flew over my house clutching a live snake in its beak. Now the raven is nature’s true hunger. With human beings appetite becomes voracity, greed, it’s entirely covetous. This is why real estate agents tell home sellers to bake cookies before potential buyers visit. Eat that house. And while you’re at it devour the tricycle in the yard.

The raven represents true hunger. Late capitalist hunger is something else unless you’re in poverty. The rich who are America’s decision makers only understand the desire to eat your Chevrolet. That’s where their appetites are centered. The children who suck on pebbles to get to sleep are nowhere in their minds. Literal hunger differs from hedge funder’s appetites. If this was a college classroom, right about now a student would raise her hand and say “professor where are you going with this?”

I know. Forgive me. It’s just that I’m seeing a new kind of American appetite, an edacity, a thing beyond desire or covetousness–a Thanatos driven wild fire quickened rage to eat anyone who stands in the way. I will chomp you and I’ll wash you down with milk and iodine or blood.

Once you’ve turned people you don’t favor into symbols they’re nothing more than the other industrial junk you’d like to eat, the swing set, the pony, the Mercedes Benz, the cash cow megalith shopping mall your neighbor invested in, the great post-modern dehumanized but entirely human hungriness. It’s like the prose Edda. Kill your enemy, drink from his skull.

That’s what I saw when the Trump fed Q-Anon Proud Boys and their molls attacked the Capitol. These were people who’d eat anything. Grandfather clocks. Settees. Dropped mittens. The faces of policemen. They were hoping like Piranha to eat the Speaker of the House. They’d eat anything before them. The new appetite is of course the old appetite, straight out of Jefferson Davis’ kitchen. It’s a racist hunger. “Here,” say the Proud Boys, “I’ll get down on all fours and eat the rug.”

And then they’ll eat you.

For years now I’ve been trying to convince people the world over that blindness is really nothing more than any other embodied characteristic like left handedness or shoe size. The obstacles to succeeding in this quest are many. The chief one is what I like to call “neuro-superstition” a panic rooted in our collective nervous systems. People with sight imagine blindness is a vast helplessness. As a guide dog traveler the number one question I’m asked by strangers—especially in airports—is: “will your dog protect you when you’re attacked?”

I’ll return to the dog in a moment but let’s think about this. The question supposes not being able to see renders one a walking victim. The assumption is that sight is a defense mechanism and the world is wildly dangerous. (People devoured by bears are not saved by their vision nor are pedestrians who are struck by cars while texting,) Seeing is believed to be a get out of jail free card, a talisman, the guarantor of welfare.

Once while walking on Fifth Avenue in New York City I asked two young men for directions to a nearby restaurant. I knew I was close. After they told me where it was one of them said: “How can you go anywhere? I’d stay home if I was blind.” The other wanted to know if the dog does all the thinking for me.

And there it is in a nutshell, the neuro-superstition. Once you’re blind you’re a victim. You’ll probably get eaten like a silly camper in a sleeping bag.

Sighted people think seeing is more than believing they imagine it’s thought itself. When someone asks if the dog does my thinking they’re convinced that without sight I can’t possibly process the world. In other words they think the blind live in a mineral blank. Not seeing is imagined to be like living inside a stone. Except of course we can be eaten. The sighted have a number of mixed metaphors about my kind.

In her excellent book “For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches From the World of the Blind.” Rosemary Mahoney writes: “The blind are no more or less otherworldly, stupid, evil, gloomy, pitiable or deceitful than the rest of us. It is only our ignorance that has cloaked them in these ridiculous garments.”

I agree with her but want to suggest that there’s something in the ophthalmic connection to the spinal column that connects seeing to self preservation which in turn stands at the root fear of the sighted. This flips quickly to: “can’t see, can’t think” which is interesting because it’s a fear based figure: not seeing is to be unable to move or move safely therefore it’s a physical hijacking and an abandonment of all reason.

Mahoney does a great job in her book of showing how real blind people successfully navigate the world using their other senses and critical thinking skills.

Americans fear blindness more than almost anything including hearing loss, heart disease and cancer.

Not long ago while traveling with the US State Department I spoke with blind children in Kazakstan. We were in a special school for the blind. I said what you’d expect, that the blind can achieve their dreams, that there’s nothing we can’t do in today’s world. Afterwards I wept. One boy’s mother said to me, “how will my son ever get out of this school? People are afraid to be near him.”

The blind persist. The sighted need to pay attention. We don’t live inside rocks and we think just as well as anyone else. It’s amazing to still be saying this in 2021.

Back to the dog. She follows my instructions. Her job is to evaluate whether they’re safe. She has a capacity for what the guide dog schools call “intelligent disobedience” which means she won’t step into harm’s way. I look after her, she looks after me. Which gets me to my final point. Blindness is never solitude in the frightful way the sighted imagine. We have friends canine and human. We live successfully in the world. If you shake my hand you won’t go blind. If you talk to me you might learn a few things about the art of listening.

In our time, this prepossessing era of vanities, this age of clowns and bullies, anti-intellectual, partisan without ideals one is tempted to throw coins down the nearest storm drain and have done with all expectation. I think of the Trump impeachment this way. The Democrats for all their failings cling to ideals and the GOP won’t have any of it. Jeffersonian idealism and a principled belief in the basic tenets of democracy are for chumps. You can see it written on Lindsey Graham’s face.

Trump is to democracy as feces to fudge but his defenders cry impeachment will destroy the legislative branch which is of course what he’s charged with attempting in the first place Have done with expectation, have done. And of course I can’t.

My favorite novel by Charles Dickens is Martin Chuzzlewit where you’ll find this marvelous passage:

“If I was a painter, and was to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?…I should want to draw it like a Bat, for its short-sightedness; like a Bantam. for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity; like an Ostrich, for putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it -‘ …’And like a Phoenix, for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices, and soaring up anew into the sky!”

Can today’s America spring from the ashes of its facts and vices?

This will depend on the staying power of progressive voters and in turn that will depend on their willingness to be disappointed and still turn out to vote again and again. Democrats are not good at the long haul. Republicans are always good at it.

As I watch GOP senators doodling on their note pads while insurrection is displayed for their benefit I’m reminded of another Chuzzlewit passage:

“The weather being hot, he had no cravat, and wore his shirt collar wide open; so that every time he spoke something was seen to twitch and jerk up in his throat, like the little hammers in a harpsichord when the notes are struck. Perhaps it was the Truth feebly endeavouring to leap to his lips. If so, it never reached them.”

Lindsey Graham anyone?

Of the long term and the GOP remember this quote from Chuzzlewit:

“My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.”

Democracy does demand something like respect and if it’s not esteem perhaps we can cal it approbation?

And yes what will our children’s children say?

Well what can you say? Socks in the dryer vanish. I’ve a theory they all wind up in Switzerland. I try not to dwell on it. There are so many other things to obsess about. Big things. Real issues. Global warming. Racism. The plight of the disabled. Ah but those socks.

Like Pablo Neruda I believe socks are tokens of love as well as comfort. When socks disappear a bit of the soul goes with them. This is not a small thing. Not at all.

When a sock disappears a man or woman, a child, secretly feels as if a kitten is gone.

No one talks about it. There are no conferences at the United Nations.

And the Swiss, those louche and disreputable hoarders, well they can’t disguise their role in this with cuckoo clocks.

Why do I know the Swiss are the ones?

Because no other nation in the world can keep secrets.

If the British had those socks they’d be lording it over us.

If the Chinese had them they’d find a way to monetize the matter just like Americans.

If the Italians had them they’d declare a festival.

I hesitate to think about the French. But whatever they’d do they’d do in public.

Under the Matterhorn lie the soul-socks of the world, nested in frozen edelweiss, guarded by Bernese Mountain Dogs.

One of the lasting things about studying disability and its history is there are so many things you can’t unsee. Jean Jacques Rousseau had a ghastly urethra and couldn’t urinate or did so without forewarning. It wasn’t his opinions that caused him to be a detested house guest.

Disability is everywhere once you learn to look for it. Or not. Let’s say you weren’t searching. You’d no interest in Alexander Graham Bell’s wife Mabel who was deaf and you’d no curiosity about “the why” of the telephone–that it was intended as a hearing aid of sorts. What does it mean to find this out?

I’m no fan of those posters you see, the ones that say “did you know these people had invisible disabilities?” But I do like knowing disability is customary.

Which is the point: it’s part of nature, part of us. And it’s a prominent part of us. Which in turn means that discomfort with disability is nothing more than a discomfort with humanity and the world itself.

I wish bigots would just get to the point: “we hate the world.”

Disney makes plenty of money off of this.

I know my disabled face interferes with their horizons.

Enrico Caruso was rumored to be the only surviving child out of 18 siblings, a story that wasn’t true but which suggests how miraculous his voice was. It must surely be a miracle. The tenor was Moses, a divine gift floating up from the slums of Naples, This is how we like our artists: improbable with upbringings impossibly dark.

Now a voice out of the night. Now he’s singing as the clock winds down. And the gramophone also. He sustains three minutes of life on a spinning disk.

Before Caruso and the record player life was all shovels and customary filth.

Then there was opera. In the rudest huts. Verdi in the small towns. We shouldn’t underestimate this, the import of it, the glory. When I was that blind kid in the attic hearing “Vesti la giubba” I was exactly like the farmer and the farmer’s wife with their mail order machine and for whom such a thing was preternatural. We’ve forgotten what this was like after a hundred years of popular culture. Caruso was a voice from a cloud.

“And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him.”

Maybe the tenor wasn’t Christ. But for millions across the dirty world he’d do just fine.

All those who believe I’m homeless—blind as I am
Walking with my stick or dog—
That woman in Boston who prayed for me
Who ran off when I offered to pray for her,
What’s wrong with a cripple’s prayer?

In London a girl cried “poor Dearie”
And thrust coins in my hands.
In Cleveland a red faced man
Followed me block after block
Proposing to help…better I thought

Than the alternatives—
The asylum; the work houses.
In general the poets of my nation
See the blind as an existential blank.
But tired of standing for nothing

I sing down Broadway
The sweet, manifold syllables
Of William Yeats—
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind…

One may say “you can get away with only so much” and not be far wrong. It’s the narrative idiom whether you’re a fabulist or a scout leader. It’s applicable to state secrecy, demagoguery, lurid pornography and all war crimes. Sex trafficking brings these matters together without fail and this is the focus of much of contemporary Scandinavian Noir as the cops become unwitting moral agents. Criminals sell girls and boys and downtrodden policemen and women appear and say: “you can get away with only so much.” For a brief time good citizens everywhere are reassured.

While there are other topics in Scandinavian Noir sex crimes are a primary feature for many reasons. Number one can be summed up with Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin: “I can see Russia from my house!” (How about Mister Rodgers? “Can you say Russia, Russia, Russia?”)

Russia has pushed a lucrative global enterprise in human trafficking for over twenty years. For Scandinavia and much of Western Europe the brutal realities of trafficking and sexual exploitation are in the news daily. (They’re also evident in the United States–think of the story of Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots who was caught in a botched but utterly revealing “sting” in a Florida spa.)

According to the Borgen Report which details global poverty and its effects: “Russia only has one law that criminalizes human trafficking. Russia passed the law in 2003 under President Vladimir Putin but it does nothing other than label human trafficking illegal. Meanwhile, all the other countries previously part of the Soviet Union have passed over 100 laws against human trafficking. The lack of strong legislation makes it more difficult to arrest, incriminate and convict perpetrators of human trafficking in Russia.”

Putin’s Russia is a worldwide criminal enterprise. The export of captive refugees is an industry. Moreover it’s a mob business which means the bosses are specialists when it comes to local recruitment–pimps and pushers must be cultivated whether we’re talking about Reykjavik or Rouvanemi. Scandinavian noir is therefore often concerned with the lives of local youth and battered elders who, despite the virtues of the Nordic social safety net are almost existentially poor in spirit. In this way all northern noir partakes of some of the chief elements of medieval morality plays.

This means Scandic-noir is allegorical. Protagonists (cops) follow tangled paths (the journey for truth and salvation) while meeting temptations, sin in many guises, and death with or without costumes. The cop is Everyman who struggles to make a good accounting of himself before the eye of God and is frequently abandoned by his untrue friends (Kinship, Beauty, Strength, etc.). His only salvation lies in his Good Deeds.
This means of course that the reader or viewer of the tale must take the role of God and that’s where the intimacy happens. In the troubled 21st century the popularity of this sub-genre rests in your desire to be Yahweh or Christ and while you were thinking you wanted only to know what happened to Vanger’s daughter you were actually sweating out the Ten Commandments.

It’s what you do that counts more than what you profess. When we stand before God, the morality play tells us, the big guy will only care about your mortal deeds. In one of the best known morality plays, entitled “Everyman” we find these classic lines:

“Doctor: This moral men may have in mind;
Ye hearers, take it of worth, old and young,
And forsake pride, for he deceiveth you in the end,
And remember Beauty, Five-wits, Strength, and Discretion,
They all at last do Everyman forsake,
Save his Good-Deeds, there doth he take.
But beware, and they be small
Before God, he hath no help at all.
None excuse may be there for Everyman.”

This is why there’s often no help at all for our Scandinavian policemen and women. God knew what he was doing to them. Or we did.

I want to be careful. What was it Emily Dickinson said? “Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted.” I desire my ghosts to be instructive, fail though they may. We try.

If it’s true we create ghosts to haunt ourselves and this is likely I think, then what constitutes a furtherance by which we mean improvement? The house that tries to be haunted must need something. Of course it needs a good scare. A shakeup. We know all ghosts (whether they wish us good or ill) flit against custom.

Salman Rushdie who I admire beyond easy measure said “Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.” Custom is certainly the house of unfinished biz. Hamlet, The Turn of the Screw, Banquo’s ghost, Christmas Past, all speak to the injustices and corruptions of whatever we mean by “getting on with it.”

Emily Dickinson saw the ghost as muse much as Stephen King does though she thought harder about art. Stephen King writes turgid morality plays, Dickinson writes lyric philosophy.

Still the house that tries to be haunted aims for something, several somethings in fact.

First we must admit the ghosts we chase we’ll never catch. Ghosts pursue us. This is unfair but that’s how nature works. And yes nature abhors a vacuum but it loves ghouls.

I’ve always said Henrik Ibsen was the first psychoanalyst and not Josef Breuer and certainly not Freud. Ibsen wrote: “It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.”

Think of attenuated dead ideas attached to every man or woman like lamprey eels.

Where did my instructive ghost go? Well Ibsen is one. I’d say my great great grandfather who was a wheelwright and made infant coffins and sleighs is in me. He’s certainly there whenever I say its a nice day because he says “for now” and for me the easy customs are no longer so easy.

Which is the good work of ghosties.