Planet of the Blind

“It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.”

–Christopher Hitchens

When I was in my early twenties I had the opportunity to travel some, and I did. Travel is broadening of course, but it’s also difficult if you have a disability. In my case I was both seriously visually impaired and unable to discuss the matter. Walking in strange cities hunched over, feigning sight, playing with shadows. That was my shtick.

The problem with a shtick is that it does things to you on the inside. You know you’re dishonest. And walking along a big thoroughfare like Kurferstendam in Berlin you feel your dishonesty step by step. I remember walking with five or six young scholars, all Fulbrighters like myself. They were admiring the sights. I was pretending to admire the sights.

On the inside I was scarcely able to trust myself. In Berlin I thought of Goethe’s axiom: “Trust yourself, then you will know how to live.”

If you don’t know how to walk safely you’re not living. In my twenties I lived a pantomime of freedom. I’ve written a great deal about this. What I haven’t said, at least not precisely, is that hiding a disability is another disability—the first is physical, the second is self-administered through an abeyance to culture. The culture doesn’t like your abnormality and you ingest that dislike, much like those cattle in France who eat poisonous flowers in the autumn. And you get used to eating the damned flowers. Goethe again: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”

Giving up the flowers is the imagination. Do not, I repeat, do not eat the culture’s flowers.

Of course being “out” with a disability doesn’t save you. Oprah, etc. Being “out” means you’ve traded the shtick of passing, of invisibility, for adventitious and hourly discourses with opposition.

Yum yum! You’re not eating flowers. You’re in a Starbucks in the Newark airport eating a blueberry muffin and your guide dog eyes you and twelve other people, strangers all, are eyeing you because you’re significantly different and roving eyeballs enjoy novelty and you’re the novelty de jour. So even eating your muffin you’re a discourse of difference and sometimes the whole thing is silent—you hear the muffin going down your throat—and sometimes the thing becomes vocal as one of the strangers can’t resist and opens a conversation this way:

Stranger (business man type, with London Fog overcoat): “I knew a blind person once…”

(There’s nuance to this—he knew a blind guy in college, or a blind person who lived down the street.)

Sometimes the stranger asks me if I actually knew the aforementioned blind person because after all, shouldn’t all blind people know each other?

You’re chewing your muffin and thinking “what if I asked him if he knows all the other men wearing London Fog raincoats?”

Stranger man sees your blindness. His language is cultural. He sees your difference. He may be sincerely interested. But by definition he isn’t talking to you with full intelligence. And you think about the reasons why this should be so: his bad schooling, his parochial experiences with physical difference; years of bad movies and TV; a vaguely decent neo-Victorian sentimentality pulsing through his veins. But no matter, you’re now a figure of difference and now you must decide how to avoid the self-administered abeyance to culture that once upon a time marked your efforts to “pass” as a sighted person and which now, threaten you with the “flip side”—your role when “out” is to make physical abnormality seem like a snap. My muffin tastes like dark flowers. I take a sip of house blend. I chew.

Do you see how mediocre this is?

Now you’re in a fix. The stranger’s invitation to talk is also an invitation to participate in conversational pornography—“inspiration porn” whereby you, the disabled one, say moderately inspirational things. Or majorly inspirational things. Or the stranger says inspirational things, like, “I knew a blind guy once who could take apart a radio and put it back together.”

Dang.

I knew a blind guy who climbed a mountain. I knew a blind guy who went sky diving. Who caught more fish than the rest of us combined…

And you want to say—I knew a short guy once. I knew a short guy who could reach the peanut butter on the top shelf with a special device called a step-ladder. He was amazing. Really inspirational.

But you don’t because its easier to get out of the intrusive moment by being as mono-syllabic as possible. Or you use the dog as a ploy. I’ve got to go. The dog needs to go out.

And you walk around the bloody monolith of the airport feeling the trap of performativity. Your script is handed to you and you can tear it up if you wish. You could screw with the guy’s head and say:

Yeah all blind people know each other. We have psychic powers as the Greeks well knew.

You could eat the flower arrangements on the table.

You could tell him you’re a misanthrope and urge him to go away.

But the best of you is empathetic.

What you say has become more refined over the years.

I don’t talk about blindness. There are agencies for that. Let’s talk about neutrinos.

—In memory of Marvin Bell

Because countless shadows populate this world

And because children like me leave finger prints

On windows you are given the speaker’s staff

And because the other sides of men and women

Rank their inhibitions and because the stone

Contracts with evening you are given the staff

And you hold it close and still so its a sun dial

In the midst of confusion its a marine instrument

You are given the speaker’s staff yes

Ex nihilo a song starts slowly you have it

Because you were steady and knew

When your turn would come

And would hold counsel because

Without actually knowing because

The rains arrive on time because

Because a free man like no one else

Once upon a time, back in the 1840’s Charles Dickens wrote to his friend William Macready that America was a “low, coarse, and mean nation” and moreover the United States was “driven by a herd of rascals…Pah! I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I travelled in America.”

Some of Dickens contempt for the former colonies was mercenary: American publishers refused to pay him royalties on his books sold in the US. There’s nothing like being cheated to effectively stir the pot of enmity, and Dickens, for all his virtues, was no exception when it came to fashioning willfully clouded judgments. (One thinks of his master-slave hostility to the people of India or his support of torture in Jamaica.)

It’s easy to kick a democracy, especially one that purports to be a classless society. It’s always been a piece of cake to misunderstand America. After all, the United States routinely seems to bear Dickens out. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is as low, coarse, and mean an affair as we’ve seen since the 18th century—yet these characteristics have always been present, not only in our politics, but in how we talk about them. In 1856 Walt Whitman wrote in an essay about the Pierce, Fillmore, and Buchanan administrations and said the presidency itself had become beastly:

“History is to record these two Presidencies as so far our topmost warning and shame. Never were publicly displayed more deformed, mediocre, sniveling, unreliable, false- hearted men! … The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States. The cushions of the Presidency are nothing but filth and blood.”

Our “topmost warning and shame” is a terrific phrase since it encapsulates the chief liability as well as the virtuous wager confronting any man or woman who assumes America’s highest office, which is it’s absolute visibility. If one prefers wit to truculence one can do no better than H.L. Mencken who said:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Our nation’s political life has always been concerned primarily with what we do as opposed to what we say. Nixon correctly understood this and dubbed his voters “the silent majority” in 1968 a year that is still unsurpassed for violent rhetoric and brutality in the village square.

America’s words are circumstantially low, coarse, and mean. Where else in the world can people behave this way? We’re entitled to be low, coarse, and mean. Americans are also perfectionists: visionary, celebratory, and affirming. Even as Whitman wrote the passage above he also wrote:

SAUNTERING the pavement or riding the
country by-road, here then are faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity,
ideality,
The spiritual prescient face—the always welcome,
common, benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces
of natural lawyers and judges, broad at the
back-top,
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the
brows—the shaved blanched faces of ortho-
dox citizens,
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s
face,
The ugly face of some beautiful soul, the hand-
some detested or despised face,
The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face
of the mother of many children,
The face of an amour, the face of veneration,
The face as of a dream…

We don’t have so much guidance to rely on when it comes to assessing and cataloguing the worst in us—we’re either anguished or panicked in the face of it. What is surreptitious in the American psyche is also foundational—slavery, religious intolerance, xenophobia, so present are these building blocks of our national DNA we’re caught repressing them, then admitting their corrosive effects when they flash on the giant outdoor movie screen of our political theater. Trump is an instructive figure, as vituperative and ugly as any of our worst public figures from Andrew Jackson to Joseph McCarthy or Trump. What matters finally is whether we choose to think of this nation like Dickens or Whitman.

If you think at all about Evelyn Waugh (a long shot these days perhaps) you may remember this from “Vile Bodies”–
“There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

No one has written a history of despair as for instance we have the history of the pencil but it may be time. It would of necessity require nuance as there’s despair itself and “near despair” which has a shred of value as the late Christopher Hitchens pointed out in his “Letters to a Young Contrarian”–

“… The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage rather than resignation. In a sense, with the back to the wall and no exit but death or acceptance, the options narrow to one. There can even be something liberating in this realization.” [Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 86–87]

I was in mind of Hitchens quote while listening to Amanda Gorman read her inaugural poem last week. She wrote it in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol and her poem is a cry for heartened daring amid darkness visible and we’re all lucky to have heard it.

**

Tyrants “dine out” on despair of course. Warmongers and merchants of death bank on it. Collective despair is a manufactured thing and differs from the organic sorrow of a single man or woman. In the Nietzschian sense consciousness is despair and that’s a fact like candy or coconuts. So be it.

Weaponized despair is a vast subject but at its core it depends of fraud.

The poet Kenneth Rexroth spoke of it this way:

“Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.”

More of Rexroth:

“The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done…Children are affected too — there is a deliberate appeal to them — you see, children have very primitive emotional possibilities which do not normally function except in the nightmares of Freudians. Television is designed to arouse the most perverse, sadistic, acquisitive drives. I mean, a child’s television program is a real vision of hell, and it’s only because we are so used to these things that we pass them over. If any of the people who have had visions of hell, like Virgil or Dante or Homer, were to see these things it would scare them into fits.”

Discontent, avariciousness, screwed up desires, hatred of the body, disdain for your neighbors, whimpering rage in the basement, all are products, commodities, and lovingkindness and whatever it is we mean by higher consciousness must resist this at every moment. You’ll burn a lot of mental calories resisting despair and demoralization.

**

As despair is being manufactured it employs symbolic human beings: people of color, the disabled, the elderly, and proclaims them representative of hopelessness. “Disability” means unable to work. Pauper-hood.

Best to work with near-despair and change costumes hourly.

I must say I’ve been distressed beyond measure by the rebarbative snootiness of some poets on social media who’ve pronounced Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem lacking in the requisite qualities to be real poetry. Of course this is nothing new–the history of literature overflows with canonical disdain–Ovid didn’t like Sappho; Emerson aside almost everyone despised Whitman. The troll army employs the same time honored disapproval used against Allen Ginsberg: Gorman’s poem is simply prose, too stagey, lacking in literary seriousness. Reading this claptrap I’ve come to the conclusion this is why poets can’t have nice things.

I loved her poem and was thrilled by her rhapsodic incantatory weaving of darkness and light.

The racism and sexism behind the pallid critiques of Gorman are obvious but less obvious perhaps is the notional idea that the MFA driven (and now Ph.D driven) “academy” gets to decide what poetry is, which is of course a social lie, to borrow the poet Kenneth Rexroth’s term. Here’s Rexroth:

“Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.”

Yes and then there’s this:

“There is an unending series of sayings which are taught at your mother’s knee and in school, and they simply are not true. And all sensible men know this, of course.”

And sensible women and lovers of poetry. I do not welcome the MFA crowd governing joy, hopes and the widening of poetry’s reach.

You Come Too

I’m working my magic outside this downtrodden hotel
Signaling to the good strangers of Tallinn

Who’ll know me by my upright faith
And my blind man’s stick—snow now

In everyone’s hair; songs on lips;
Tattered Christ in the telephone wires;

Stepping out as they say
Inviolable, tight, alive

In the cold, and though I can’t see it
Lights come on

In the fairy tale shops
And independent of religion

Or science, who do I think
Can follow along?

I dreamt last night about blindness and phenomenology, really, and there were dirty socks on the floor and on there was a table with a broken radio but anyway, I was talking to a blind writer who in waking life I know only fleetingly as he lives in a far land and we’ve only met once but anyway he was explaining that motion and facts are co-determinate. “All facts are in motion,” he said. And because it was a dream the two of us were in the bathroom I used when I was in high school, the same bathroom where once my sister threw the siamese cat into the bathtub when I was in it, bathing as it were, and certainly there were facts just then. I don’t know what’s weirder, the bathroom setting, facts as motion, a quasi-phenomenological discussion as it were, but anyway, after my friend said it, I said “ah, blind gain.”

Blindness is a fact when we’re in motion. At rest it’s whatever precedes fact. It was a fine dream.

I say motion precedes facts. Just as stardust will.

I was walking my guide dog in the snow
And we were good

I was breathing as a healthy man
In through the nose

Out through the mouth
It’s hilarious to be a living thing

Though many books say otherwise
We’re all of us the rustic world

Merry expressives talking out loud
On the day I was born

I wasn’t expected to live more
Than a few hours

My twin brother died straight away
We were two pound infants in rural America

In general terms I think anyone
Who pretends disability is easy

Is fundamentally dishonest
In the blindness world

Which is heavily impacted by charity
We have countless stories of heroic

And strenuous accomplishments
I love accomplishments

In winter there’s one stark
Morning presses dullness down—

Best to know it, good to know
Say what’s coming…here

I let you in, no sun today
In through the nose

At the end of the world the humans were arguing about pain and pornography, that is, who had it worse. Almost no one was speaking for the animals. “Well,” said the old elephant, “that’s the problem with their poetry.”

**

Last night in a dream I was singing three line songs in the woods. One had something to do with flies from the horse’s perspective. Oh, and the melodies!

**

Teaching nonfiction it’s important to emphasize its thrilling ironies: Prokofiev and Stalin dying on the same night.

The string quartet who played beside Stalin’s coffin wept–for Prokofiev.

Tears mostly tell the truth.

**

Poets customarily ask if poetry has a practical impact and often come up despairing. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden said, and he was right if happening is carpentry, which is what the question is about–in essence it asks why can’t poetry be a blueprint? The late Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski once wrote he’d like to be the sort of poet whose songs call trees and stones forward, that he might build houses for people. The line is about as far as one can get from Auden–even as the wish may be unachievable it musters intention. In this way the line is ridiculous.

Saarikoski knows it. Ambition, intent, and their failure together frame the insistence poetry must carve a plan, however utopian. Poetry makes nothing discernible happen but it’s blueprint is, much like Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, enticingly clear. Poetry can be concerned with the potential city–an urban romanticism surely, but one yielding a realized eschatology, as Kenneth Rexroth once said of “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman’s Manhattan offers a vision of what America could be, or may still become, a harmonious, loving, broad minded portion of the Earth, elect and free. Whitman insisted spiritual and civic life, a life equally enacted of mind and body will simultaneously propose and affirm true democratic love.

Makes nothing happen? Turn to the the walking stones. Tell them.

Oh Schubert you are such a bother for you were perfect. Even as you died. You went out listening to Beethoven’s string quarter #14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Your friend Holt commented: “The King of Harmony has sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing.” Never mind the syphilis, the mercury poisoning, the blackened teeth. The best I can say is “never mind” like the barn owl—“the moon is perfect, never mind” and never mind getting lost in perfection.

This is how it’s done. The clocks may or may not be sad. Leaving the world in C-sharp minor.

E is the only major in C-sharp minor, but you can’t leave on E alone. Departure requires several dark feathers.

**

When I was a boy I thought I heard a voice coming from inside a window. Just a small auditory hallucination on a slow summer day. Here’s to conversant glass in an old house.

**

When I play Schubert on the hi fi I’m calling him on the Schubert phone.

**

I know so little and so I’m uncomfortable. I should know more about the stars and the gods of other ages. I should certainly know more about card games.

**

Now. Schubert insists on the river flowing out of now. This is the core of what the critics in their heavy boots call “Romanticism.”

**

Here’s to the Schubert singing windows and the Schubert rivers.

**

I’m not important. What a relief.