Planet of the Blind

As a blind man I have lots of experience with being unwanted. I’d like to share with you some things I’ve learned. I know you think my kind are pitiful and fit only for cruel jokes. That’s OK. You can still profit (a word I know you like) from what I know.

Just think of this as “the art of the lame deal.”

BTW since you don’t like to read I’ll make this like a poem with lots of white spaces. (I know how much you like white spaces.)

1. First off admit you really are dislikable but remember this is never never for the reasons your detractors suppose. Donald you are weak in this area.
2. Per the above: every one of your critics says you have some kind of mental illness. Isn’t it ironic they think you’re in my group–fit for contempt and dismissal–when in fact you’re just an asshole? I’ll bet this hurts. After all no one ever said Roy Cohn was a nut job.
3. I’m disliked because being blind I need accommodations in workplaces and public spaces that aren’t set up for disability inclusion. I’m pretty much used to this. Again, per the above, you’re just an asshole.
4. You see when I’m treated with moderate or overt hostility I’m able to say “well they weren’t my friends before I asked for help and they’re not my friends now, so nothing has changed.” I move on.
5. Per the above I move on because I really do have friends and good colleagues.
6. Again, per the above, you’re just an asshole. Worse, you’re what the Buddhists call “a hungry ghost” as you’re desperately needy and unable to find satisfaction in this life. No soup for you.
7. Now being an asshole is not a disability no matter what the pundits say. And you’re a greedy fella which makes everyone reach for the diagnostic manual. That’s just silly.
8. Because I know what it’s like to be in rooms where they don’t like you I want to offer some advice.
9. Ask yourself just once in your life if you could be different. I’m blind. Can’t be different. Need accommodations in the work place. Often don’t get them. I complain. People don’t like this. They make me the problem. But I can change. For instance I pray for those who don’t like the disabled, put some Mozart on the stereo, think about beauty. You? You’ve never asked yourself the question above. Not once. If you could be different you’d be a contender.
10. Last point. It’s not too late to avoid being your father. Really. If you live an average life span in the US you’ve got maybe five years left. Join the disabled on the unemployment line and we’ll teach you how to smile.

To My Dead Ones

Forgive me. I’ve not written lately. This is the dried fig world where as you may remember there’s a general shriveling. Yesterday one of my still living friends telephoned to say a pipe beneath his house has broken and he has to dig through cement in his basement. Upstairs his children were laughing. In every group there’s the woman or man who has to go into the dark and dig. What digging do they do in heaven? Do you scoop ideas from starlight like Beethoven when he was old? Or do you sit perfectly still, good just arriving like mustard blossoms? Of course you understand I don’t really want to know. As with everyone still here it will be different for each of us. I like to imagine we’ll get to leave our shovels behind.

I Say I Can’t Go On, Then I Go On

If I say my neighbor is a lonely man
Who walks his lonesome dog
I think you’ll understand:
Twilight or dawn it’s the same.
We continue. No analogy.
We sit or stand.
Remember music.
I say my neighbor remembers music.
You know it doesn’t matter
If it’s jazz or Rimsky-Korsakov,
Strangely the mind
Has no judgment
Though later, like
The neighbor
Safely at home
Mind will think it has taste
But no matter–
The world “worlds”
And the cheap tune
That got you going
So long ago
Comes around again.

Robert Bly

Reading in Fall Rain

The fields are black once more.
The old restlessness is going.
I reach out with open arms
to pull in the black fields.

All morning rain has fallen
steadily on the roof.
I feel like a butterfly
joyful in its powerful cocoon.

*
I break off reading:
one of my bodies is gone!
It’s outdoors, walking
swiftly away in the rain!

I get up and look out.
Sure enough, I see
the rooster lifting his legs
high in the wet grass.

1.

Let’s dare to say reading—whether blind reading, autistic, deaf, fully sighted, up river, in the hold of a ship—let’s say the act is synchronous as the poet Robert Bly suggests; and let’s say that synchronicity has to do with the leveraging of words, the Archimedean words, for each noun is an object in the mind and chances are excellent that the reader was not thinking of a pearl handled walking stick before he encounters it in a sentence; and so this is a violence like all the violences of the psyche; we are betrayed in mind; changed; affirmed; perhaps allowed a revery; maybe sickened; occasionally tickled—but we are not in our usual frames when, as Bly suggests, we “break off” reading for now our mind is not what we supposed and moreover our bodies are transformed, and in the case above, the poet sees that one of his bodies is gone. Think of this: we have several bodies. Poets know this. Painters. Dancers. Jazz trumpeters. Why don’t the behaviorists who preach about autism understand this? I’ll suggest they read the wrong stuff.

One of my bodies is gone! Then Bly sees a rooster lifting his legs. The private day is now a public one. Nature is the book and the body. No sensible poet presumes to speak for nature.
One of my bodies is gone! The poet has written these words: “ecstatic blue stone” and the body I began the day “in” (some stoical, foolishly small and practical Lutheran grandmother’s body which I’ve inherited) that body is now holding the blue stone my father brought home from Beirut some sixty years ago—the evil eye—which I carried in my pocket for years to ward off schoolyard bullies who made fun of my blindness. The blue of that stone way joyful and it had no reaction to its putative name. We read things not for what we imagine them to be, but really reading, reading deeply, reading with our antennae out, we know the forgotten treasure colors in things and yes, one of our bodies has walked away to become springy in the grass.
If you’re alert enough all reading is asynchronous, multi-phasic, transmogrifying and inviting as it brings us into the unassuming world.

One of my bodies is gone! Once, walking alone in Venice with my guide dog, I played a game, reading the rough doors of strange houses as if they were Braille books, reading the happenstance aleatoric script of rain and wind. One or two strangers thought I was lost and offered to help. I told them I was reading books. They ran away. In their world I was a blind, crazy foreigner. Inside, where “the meanings are” as Emily Dickinson would say, I was hopping in the garden of particulate bodies, ones we can no longer see, but which have never left.

This is not, as you might suppose, just a fanciful way of being. I cannot see your face. I’m freed from the causal and casual inherent in every social encounter. I assure you I’m not in the least sentimental. I’m no Tiresias imbued with prophecy; no Finnish wizard who talks easily to the dead. I just read. And then, you guessed it, one of my bodies is gone!

Wallace Stevens said famously “reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.” I’d say this is true but Stevens is too proleptic—he imagines we can plan what the metaphor will do for us, or at least I take him that way. Escape is the wrong word. One of my bodies is gone! It left because I was reading and an agate perhaps a hundred years old found in a market in Lebanon took the morning time body away just as Bly says this happens.

One of my bodies is gone and there’s no normal reading. To believe so is to imagine reader reception is dis-embodied; cemented; too Latinate for the outdoors.

One of my bodies is gone! Which ones are left? Too many to count.

Here are the things I’m not saying. I do not believe in normative reading, hence, I don’t believe that yoga is a kind of schizophrenia—when one of my bodies is gone because I read about chasing tigers in red weather, then so be it, one of my bodies is gone and I’m the better for it. It will come home again though changed. All the multiple multi-form bodies are oceanic as is language itself.

I’m not saying as the great hermeneutical scholar of metaphor would say that you can find a rule or ruling class about the matter. You see, there’s a chicken walking away while hold your book in my hands.

One of my bodies is gone.

It rings like a bell in a far village.

I believe in reparations for Black citizens of the US.
I believe in the right of disabled people to live which means to be born.
I believe in a woman’s right to choose.
I believe in moral and ethical debates.
I don’t know how to solve every contradiction.
I am terrified and optimistic.
Can you understand this?
I don’t trust group think.
Like Groucho I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.
I believe in whales.
Really. That’s not a throwaway line.
I don’t believe in throwaway lines.
Is that a contradiction?

**

Poor Groucho. He once had diner with T.S. Eliot. He was hoping to have a serious discussion about literature. Eliot wanted to talk about comedy. Who needed “what” more?

**

I told a friend yesterday I would write a poem. I didn’t.
I walked around my house in circles and fretted.

**

Groucho had a crappy childhood and guess what? He didn’t inflict it on you.

**

Here’s the poem I’d have written yesterday:

You are the One

If you think you’re alone under the heavens
If you have been betrayed
If after years you no longer like certain fruits
If you’re too young for nostalgia or too old for anything else
If you identify with the movie monster
If you drink from the faucet
If your best conversations are with animals

**

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

Tolstoy

I know you are the marriage of heart and wisdom. I look up to you. I know what they did to your daughters. Some days I lie in the near field and spread my arms and weep. Once many years ago during a lonesome winter I tried in vain to write a poem in your honor. I was terribly earnest and the thing turned out like a nursery rhyme written by Tolstoy but because it was for you I didn’t throw it away. I still have it in a box. There’s nothing wrong with naïveté I tell myself though I don’t admit it out loud. Or I do, but only in the right hour as when I’m tired and bowed down by the 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 imagine there’s another life to come. Simple. Memory. Rain. Spring.

A Good Friend Has Gone Back to the Cosmos

Meanwhile down here winter birds peck the frozen leaves and someone who looks like me has turned up in a news photo about mistaken identity and crime and good old Rachmaninoff is playing on the radio. The clock is like an indifferent house cat.

I hope when my time comes I’ll be able to say farewell to my hands.

**

“Music is enough for a whole lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” Rachmaninoff

**

Green feathers in memory—transatlantic shipboard, 1958, old woman’s hat.
What’s winter for? To remember ocean going hats…

**

Snow, apple branches, the neighborhood quiet.
A good friend has gone back to the cosmos.

Exalt.

Trace the music with your fingers while you can.

Well hang it all Robert Browning I can’t find my scrofulous French novels!

Dag Nabbit, Ludwig VB, your piano concertos are too darned beautiful!

**

The little boy me, blind and alone, used to put his head inside the works of a grandfather clock.

**

“how sad and bad and mad it was – but then, how it was sweet”
― Robert Browning

**

Elegy

Washing birds is the work of the gods
They’ve been at it some thirty thousand years
One may reasonably believe
Birds were not clean
Before rain gods came
I stand before a plate glass window
Drinking coffee from a paper cup
Many of my friends are gone
Leaves whirl under a streetlamp
Death’s butterflies
I’ve a hymn in mind
Called I Must be Home by Now…

**

“Take away love and our earth is a tomb.”
― Robert Browning

**

Beethoven invented Ragtime.

I have a good friend who likes to remind me that everything I write would be better if there was a serial killer in it. Poems, essays, blog posts, what have you. “Just add slaughter,” he says.

You can count on your friends.

Now I don’t know about you but as for me I’m not much interested in serial killers. I mean, yes, I don’t like them. Let’s get that out of the way. But America’s fascination with the whole subject bothers the heck out of me. Every minute spent watching a serial killer movie or TV show means someone isn’t reading about Leonardo da Vinci or the history of slavery–anything for god’s sake.

While Americans are busy with serial killer trading cards the collective imagination and intelligence of the nation plummets which speaks to the true definition of the term.

BTW all the serial killers on TV are portrayed as mentally ill. Did you know that the mentally ill are far less violent than everyone else? Huh?

Take that Mr. TV Executive.
Take that Stephe King, Dick Wolf, Netflix, etc.

To let the blind in your shop
Whereas they’ll enter
Wherefore they’ll touch things
Whereby deep in merchandise
Olfactory stuff will occur
(Somatosensory tickles
From a feathered hat
Will be a raincloud inside out)
There’ll be a scent of roses
Though no one is dead
Though the Braille of ordinary
Dangles from hooks
Though your mother
Is long in her grave
She won’t be part of the sale
For my people are not occult
We feel love in our sleeves
Hear the spine’s dorsal horn
I don’t care what you sell