Planet of the Blind

If you’re a college professor and you want to get the attention of your students, especially on the first day of class, ask them to define a chair. (It doesn’t matter what the class is about, this works whether the subject is physics or post-modernism in literature.)

As philosophers will tell you, almost everything you say about “chair-ness” can be refuted. “It’s a piece of furniture for sitting.” So is a stool and a stool is not a chair. “It has a back.” So does a car seat and it’s not a chair.

The point is that good teaching requires contrarianism whether we’re talking about science or art. What’s wrong with what we’ve proposed? In the end we may conclude nothing is wrong but we will have engaged in rigorous thinking.

If all you want is confirmation bias—to imagine the world is precisely as you believe it to be, then a university education isn’t for you.

Trouble lies this way: professors who only know how to critique things may be themselves insufficiently contrarian, even as they think themselves, well, contrarian.

A few years back I heard an undergraduate announce that capitalism creates disability. It’s a compelling argument since the advent of the industrial revolution did in fact lead to the devaluation of disabled people. Unfit for life in the factories they were taken out of circulation if you will, assigned to asylums. Though this narrative is simplistic it’s not without merit.

No one taught this student to define a chair. Capitalism also produces amazing technologies that allow the disabled to thrive. (I’m blind and writing on a talking Mac computer.)

Capitalism has been horrible for all of us who hail from historically marginalized positions. In fact the marginalization is what makes colonialism and all forms of exploitation possible.

But defining a chair, one must ask, what about moral capitalism? Is capitalism static or does it evolve? If the latter is true then what’s your investment, your attraction, to believing that an economic system creates disability? As the writer Gore Vidal once said, politics is knowing who’s paying for your lunch. Who was the professor who taught the student in question that capitalism is the manufacturer of cripples?

What questions should we ask? I’m an admirer of Sarah Ahmed’s book “Living a Feminist Life” and here’s something I like:

“To live a feminist life is to make everything into something that is questionable. The question of how to live a feminist life is alive as a question as well as being a life question.”

What’s a chair? What’s a good life? What’s a moral life?

Questions are crucial. But here’s a question for disability culture: what can we make? It’s not easy to answer but the moral universe demands we ask it.

Back to the chair and what it is. The disabled remain unemployed in staggering numbers even as the technology which should allow them to work with dignity is now widely available.

New economies need to embrace living questions.

My maternal grandfather was a man who, fighting with capitalism and losing more than he ever won, managed, almost daily to outwit bitterness. In temperament he was split straight down the middle by two centuries. His “can do” optimism was of the late 19th century; his mechanical aptitude was a thing of the 20th. He built motor cars and motorcycles before World War I, first in Cleveland and then in Brockton, Massachusetts. By the time the war ended Henry Ford had put him out of business and his fortune was gone because he’d invested in the Russian Czarist government.

It’s not my intention to sentimentalize him. He was broke by the roaring twenties. He patented some gizmos that became integral to the manufacture of airplanes and so he hung on. He was able to keep a roof over his head and feed his family. And during the depression my mother remembered him saying over breakfast, “what can be done today?”

Again, without self-indulgence, it’s a good question. I ask it daily and this has helped me throughout my disabled life–for I’ve been unemployed, have lived in section 8 housing, have survived on social security disability, have been discriminated against in employment, and throughout it all, and without moist, David Copperfield-ish brio I’ve managed to think like William T.. Marsh, the oddest of men, who, often having next to nothing, saw each day as a potential adventure. He had white privilege, being Boston Irish. He had just enough residual dough to keep the wolves from his door, though once, a tax collector appeared and W.T. offered him a cocktail laced with dynamite–not enough to kill him, but just enough to send him home wiping his brow with a handkerchief. W. T. was rascally and he loved explosives but unlike contemporary white extremists who horde dynamite he didn’t have any grievances. “What can be done today?” His version of this question was optimistic.

Now grievances matter. Knowing how you’re being screwed is a survival skill to be sure. The man in question didn’t think in generalities however. For him, the tax collector didn’t represent the whole government. When he blew up a Western Union telegraph pole (dynamite again) he did it because it was a blight on the landscape–his. And when the telegraph men came around he said he’d never seen the pole and had no idea it was ever there. He didn’t shoot them. Nor did he offer them cocktails.

He didn’t believe in conspiracies. If times were hard they also offered opportunity. In this way he was creative and like all creatives he understood pessimism was his biggest enemy.

George Bernard Shaw wrote: “a pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

My grandfather really didn’t hate anyone. And while I’ve no evidence that he ever read Oscar Wilde he’d have agreed “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

He wouldn’t understand contemporary American pessimism and its associated cults of grievance. He’d likely say to the Trump crowd, “go build something and shut up.”

But don’t build a wall, it ruins the view….

One of the best known literary quotes about the New Year comes from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Four Quartets”:

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.”

The invention of a new language is of course the ambition of poets.

Eliot meant well. He meant for us to recognize last year’s language didn’t get the job done–her words failed us. Surely a new voice will be better. Eliot was, among other things, a utopian fatalist. And Christian.

Is there a smattering of white privilege there? Yes, for if you hail from a historically marginalized background–if you’re black or queer or disabled or a woman or you’re all of these, if you’re a refugee, a child caged, you know that last year’s words were excellent. Black Lives Matter; Freedom Now; Me Too; Nothing About Us Without Us–these are the words we carried then and must carry now. And pronounce. Repeat.

I say old words are good words and they get the job done.

Here’s Susan Sontag:

“Kindness, kindness, kindness.

I want to make a New year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.”

I never inquired why my mother named me Stephen. She was an extravagant drunk and there were just too many other things to ask, like, “why did you set fire to our sofa?” Or: “why did you flush little fishy down the toilet?”

Anyway I’m named after a martyr. The word means “torture witness” and that’s that.

As for the new year, let it become itself without infliction.

Random thoughts as 2020 comes to a close.

**

Yes my mother was a drunk and often silent in the house. We always kept that silence, my sister and I, for we understood and felt adult sorrows much as dogs sense the unhappiness of their owners. Silence is always the giveaway in tragedy.

But a weird and wonderful change would come over my mother whenever she was on the telephone. It was a fifties phone: black, made of bake-light and of great density. It was heavy as a paving stone, squat as a porcupine and like an animal it sat in its corner in a nest of paper scraps and broken pencils. Because the phone was stationary my mother stood in the corner and leaned into the instrument and talked in earnest.

That was when she laughed.

While much of her day was spent in retreat, while she slept at midday with the curtains drawn, while she often scowled in her privacies, the horn offered her a district of hilarity. She swayed in the corner, elbows propped on formica and laughed.

In her laughter she was living and open.

I heard names—Doris, Anna, Sonya—the names were the governing order of the laughter.

I was busy whittling the points of pencils with a jackknife. Blind kid with knife working diligently in the adjoining room…and then a windstorm of laughter—high, musical, ascendant, open, rushing forward…

She laughed then listened, laughed again.

The laughter was like soap on the floor.

It was like the light at the end of the garden.

When she put the receiver back in its cradle she went absolutely silent.

I wanted the telephone.

It was a vessel.

There were people below decks.

When I was alone I picked up the heavy receiver. It was heavy as a hammer. I put it to my ear and heard the steady and flawless dial tone. It was like hearing a sound from beneath the house.

And I knew that if I waited a few moments the operator would speak.

She would tell me the time. Call me sweetie. Her voice, distilled from the darkness.

She was just a bit of the shy, unasked for sweetness of things.

**

Is it folly to imagine the best?

What would happen if I discovered folly and optimism are wings?

**

Here’s to the New Year with its starch and flute.

Here’s to no more shut ins.

No more “walking while black” or “shopping while autistic” and no more smug, dishonest lawn sigs proclaiming “all lives matter” which is the biggest social lie of them all.

No more martyrs.

I’ve so many wishes for the New Year.

Here’s the primary one: let people get the help they need, medical, financial, civic, educational, environmental.

Let this be a year of help.

If you’re alone and the tea cups
Give reproof as though
You’re the child
Who’s stolen a morsel
Then you’re the one.

A pollen of ashes
Comes through the window.
Music is restrained.
And there’s no shepherd,
No dispenser of dew;
No “maker.”

And yes the stars go on dissolving,
The day appears.
If there was something to say
You’d say it. Go ahead:

Play old recordings,
Victor 78’s, a tenor singing
As through a steam pipe—
His chipped off,
Alchemized voice.

Oh little one, I’m sorry.

Today I’m packing up my playing cards,
Trusting less to chance
Like the old man I’m becoming,
Rejecting new novels
In favor of Tolstoy,
Weeping openly on the streets,
Shutting my blind man’s ears
To the talking wristwatch,
Grieving now with certainty.
I’m saying no more foolery.
I’m writing to St. Sophia.
I know she’s the marriage
Of heart and wisdom.
I look up to her.
I know what they did to her daughters.
Some days I lie in the near field
And spread my arms. Once
Many years ago during
A lonesome winter I tried
In vain to write a poem
In her honor. I was earnest
And the thing turned out
Like a nursery rhyme
But because it was for her
I didn’t throw it away.
I still have it in a box.
There’s nothing wrong with naïveté
Though I don’t say it out loud.
Or I do, but only in the right hour
As when I’m tired and bowed
By injustices and I need
Something like the first flower
I brought home for my mother.
We are in fact that simple.
I hereby admit I know very little.
I prefer to think there’s another life to come.
Easy. Memory. Rain. Spring.

Last Night I Dreamt of an Old Friend

And the light was soft
And he was happy
And a cat walked into the room
And the light was soft
And he was happy
And there were many books

**

You can get away with lots of thing—but dreams follow you home.
Old happy friend, you with your good bookshelf. Good old dream archive.

**

There was, as I now recall some discussion about the Bodleian Library.

I’m trivia minded even in dreams. I mentioned Thomas Bodley’s fortune came from his wife whose first husband (deceased) made his money in pilchers.

**

Friends. Dreams. Books. Herring adrift in the stacks.

Birds

What with saints behind every bush
Parcheesi neighborhoods of dusk

The architects and solid masters
Of gloom ladling out

Potions to make us weep
Father how lucky you were

Dying like that
Falling with the Times

In your arms.
This day of light

Of yellow houses
Where everything

Seems here
I wonder

If your underworld
Is rich with birds?

It takes a long time to make a human being what with star dust and hydrogen, a back story 14 billion years old, and your mother half unsuspecting. You know what I’m going to say next: it takes a second to kill someone. Then grief goes back to the stars rising like mustard blossoms which only the gods can see. Animals see it too. They try desperately to love us anyway.

Meanwhile hereabouts, grim tools on a workbench. Meaningless telephone numbers on scraps of paper. The holiday blues inside every object.

The homeless sleep with rolled up newspapers under their shirts.

I said above it takes a second to kill someone but really where the homeless are concerned it takes just a little longer.

**

Pandemic television commercials with Santa Claus. Send presents. Keep the economy rolling. The massive heartlessness of the greased economy.

Yes, I’m not feeling festive.

**

Here’s wishing everyone restorative justice.

“There’s a shovel inside the shovel” wrote the poet Jim Crenner and you know it’s true the way you know there are ghosts in the water well. Just the same, you know DNA’s base pairs are connected by hydrogen bonds. You understand this is true also. So you walk about knowing truth depends on more than feelings and intuitions. This capacity for nuance and scruple is of course what distinguishes you from stupid people. I don’t like the word stupid–it’s been used against me as a disabled fella. The big, strapping able-bodied make fun of my people. Stupid is the first thing they say about us. But sometimes I have to use the “S” word. I can’t help it. Here’s a bit of doggerel about Prez 45…

It’s easy to be stupid, just take a tip from me,
Imagine you’re the president in Washington DC
You poke and pinch “the women” and snarl
At foreign types, brag about your winning
And eat just what you like—being stupid’s
Not so hard if all you have’s contempt
And a big fat squad of yes men
Who say you are exempt.

**

And from a notebook:

Of course I read books
Stupid rock and roll

Amusement park graffiti
All the while

That moon picked my pockets
Parents weren’t helpful

**

Yes, “stupid” means “mentally slow, lacking ordinary activity of mind, dull, inane,” from French stupide…

Connected to stupor.

When I use the word I know this.

Why then do I feel I can use it and yet I have a deep revulsion for the “R” word?

What is it makes me think there’s a distinction?

Is it enough to say sometimes the victimized need to reclaim the language of their oppression?

By using it do I give the word more energy, like offering my blood to Dracula?

Dracula was stupid.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” (Albert Einstein)

What Jesus really meant: “the stupid ye will always have with ye, but I ain’t gonna be around here forever…”

I feel so guilty, using the “S” word.

OK

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

I won’t use stupid anymore. I’m gonna say, “that’s a thought plug.” “You’re a thought-plug.”

“Thought Plugger! Coyote’s after you!”

Etc.