Planet of the Blind

By now so much has been written about Donald Trump I think what can I add? Just this: hearing him I recognize the voice of someone who’s in terrible pain and in turn will do anything to pass it to you.

The former KGB (now Russia’s ruling elite) discerned racism was America’s biggest weakness, first, in the 1950’s, imagining it as a propaganda tool in the Cold War; later as a means of domestic subversion. Make no mistake–though Putin didn’t “groom” Trump as some would have it, he knew he’d hit the jackpot when Trump fell into heavy Russian debt. Trump would be superhuman if he didn’t feel rage at being a puppet.

His racism “saves” him–it’s the thing he knows best and the more he blames dark people for every deleterious thing he can imagine, the more of Putin’s work he’s doing.

In this way he’s not a man of opinion, he’s a robotic Putin viceroy of bile who can perfectly divide a vulnerable, multi-cultural nation.

Ironically it’s our very multiculturalism that’s our biggest strength.

Thus endeth the sermon.

My friend Jarkko who’s vanished in the two dimensional heaven favored by pagan Scandinavians wrote once about a lonesome birthday, a childhood recollection, comic books and pop records on a cheap gramophone….something about the joy of it.

I can’t find his poem anymore. There were attic windows I think. Mansard windows maybe. Some attics have portholes. It doesn’t matter. Jarkko was alone, light seeping like watery milk in the orphanage.

In this poem, which is its own crude comic, we laugh as Batman steps on a giant frozen turd. Robin says: “Oh, that’s going to take some scrubbing!”

—for Ralph Savarese

When I was a grad student in poetry writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop back in the Jimmy Carter era, before mobile phones, I used to wander all day lost in my thoughts like a baby version of Rousseau. I liked people better than Rousseau but that’s another story. Nor am I nostalgic when I say that having whole days, weeks, months when you could walk around without emails, e-calendars, texts, or phone calls was paradise. And though I couldn’t see the future I understood my liberation. Here as best I can reconstruct it is an average morning spent in Iowa City before iPhones, computers, pagers, or anything else that ice picks the mind. I admit it’s a story of privilege. I had the opportunity to live this way.

Wake up. Look at crows in the ruined garden outside my apartment. Though legally blind I know they’re crows. Either that or they’re giant animate raisins leaping for joy or in hunger. Wonder if joy and hunger are related. Promise to finish reading “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun. Drink coffee on front porch.

Stand at bathroom mirror for at least fifteen minutes. Should I shave off my beard or not? I don’t like my face. Understand that I don’t like either option. Think about Nikolai Gogol. Imagine having an enormous mobile nose as a companion. Think that might be OK. Conclude that cutting off the beard will take too much time. Reckon I need to go outside right away. Hope the imaginary Gogol nose will follow.

Late September in Iowa City. Leaves falling. Walk upon them. Smell them. Fruit spoiling. Wind. First sweater day. I’m twenty four and refuse to wear colors. Grey is not a color, I’ve decided. Blue jeans, hole in knee, Adidas tennis shoes, white. Head south on Linn Street toward downtown. Zero notion where I’m going. Gogol’s nose hasn’t followed. Decide to get coffee. Head to diner. Lean on counter. Overhear two farmers wearing caps that say “Blue Seal Feeds” discussing Randy Newman’s hit song “Short People.” One likes it, the other is affronted by it. I think: “curses on both short and tall people.” I do not say it.

Spend the next hour walking in circles around the town. As far as I know I do not meet people who know me. I’m too blind to identify passersby.

In the autumn of 1978 I’m very caught up thinking about the subconscious. More of Jung, less of Freud. I believe it’s possible to fall asleep and share a dream with someone in Tashkent. Stand for a moment outside a farmer dude barber shop. Think about Isadora Duncan and Sergei Esinen. Wonder if they met through synchronous dreaming. They lived briefly in Tashkent.

Head to public library. Old, homely, granitic friend. Know I’m unlikely to meet irritating fellow graduate students there.

Drift through stacks smelling books. Can read some of them when the print is large enough.

They have a large print edition of Stendahl’s The Red and the Black‌

Check it out and though its big as a Manhattan phone book I carry it with me on my walk.

Now I’m like a man with a votive pillow. The Stendahl pillow.

I walk up Clinton Street with a supersized edition.

Locate public bench. Sit. Business school students wearing cheap suits scuttle past.

I’ve been out of my house for two whole hours and no one has bothered me.

Several leaves do a dans Russe. Wonder who killed Esinen. Or did he really hang himself?

Time for a cigarette.

Time for spontaneous laughter. I laugh at nothing apparent.

Decide to walk beside river.

It’s a day.

One can read uninterrupted.

I keep a journal.

Write a few lines about the unconscious, Isadora Duncan’s love of the Greeks, think of her in a canoe telling Sergei to “strophe, strophe!”

How lovely the days before the constant dings and chimes.

So I came across the quote from Jean Genet: “Treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing.” I’m wondering what it means.

I think I know what it means, you know? Out of pain comes art. More specifically perhaps, we achieve pain through vagabondage, that wonderful French word for the criminalization of not fitting in, and for which they throw you in the slammer.

Still, treachery is an interesting word. It means treasonable or perfidious conduct. Genet means for us to understand this is larger than the individual. Everyone should sing in rage.

BTW Edmund White’s book on Genet is brilliant.

**

I wrote a poem last week in which there’s a line that reads: “Mumsy go poof!”

My mother was an alcoholic and by turns violent or needy.

It took me years to write that line.

Along with it is a Genet-esque willingness to exorcise shit heads of every stripe.

I’m for vagabonds but not vainglorious academics or shiv pushing polemical dirt bags who tell you how you should be disabled, how you should be queer, how you should tie your fucking shoes.

Grew up with that shit.

Poof.

**

I read “Querelle” when I was in college. Genet was the first writer to communicate to me the idea that waves and violence are co-efficient in human barbarity. Formerly the sea was just the sea.

**

Nothing is just the sea.

This is privacy turned out like a pocket, this business of blogging, podcasting, running one’s flag of dispositions up the flagpole of public consumption. Some of it is risible. Some of it is rage. Occasionally the author doesn’t know the difference.

I know the diff. But I’m going to say this anyway: The murder of Breonna Taylor is not going to go away in the minds of all citizens who care about human rights. I’m outraged. The system of white supremacy that’s run this nation into the ground and which Trump is effecting to make permanent through election intimidation–that stinking, oozing, soul crushing system is either the death knell of our nation or an alarm for its rebirth.

I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to utter the phrase “law and order’ in the absence of true equality, in a nation without racial justice.

And here I am, isolated, hiding from a virus, shaking my fist.

Ibram X. Kendi writes in “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.”:

“When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination. Committed to this antiracist idea of group equality, I was able to self-critique, discover, and shed the racist ideas I had consumed over my lifetime while I uncovered and exposed the racist ideas that others have produced over the lifetime of America. I know that readers truly committed to racial equality will join me on this journey of interrogating and shedding our racist ideas.”

No one is immune to racist inheritances.

But everyone can shed bad ideas.

Here’s a bad idea: shooting black people while entering their homes by mistake. Then, in broad daylight, announcing it’s OK.

I am of god, a god-thing, a sort of man-clay-godish thing but you’ll have to excuse me now, I’m going into an American shop.
Long ago when I was new to the market, wheeled in a stroller, I thought the shining goods must mean there’s divinity about, even though I’d no concept of it. Now it’s just the bloody monolith of store, as the poet Anselm Hollo once said.

“They ain’t no god in these canned beans!” I want to shout.

Of course I don’t shout in the supermarket. I hardly say a thing.

That’s how you know you’ve been winnowed and shrunk.

You also know all the beautiful fruits and vegetables are the products of severe exploitation. Some days I think it would be better to eat my own arms off than partake of the quasi slave labor produce.

So I shop at organic places.

This means I’m privileged.

God seems further away by the hour.

And who am I, you might ask, complaining, while living in a land of comparative abundance?

Just trying to reinstall the sacred in the canned goods aisle.

And who am I, you might ask, to take upon himself such a thing?

I’m just a very old child.

Merleau-Ponty was much occupied by the phenomenon called “phantom limb”–it made him almost nuts. Do we retain a sense of the perfect body that haunts us? Is that perfect body a Platonic ideal? Does the body have any say in this? Is this a matter of the soul?

Reading him you want to say “sometimes a phantom limb is just a phantom limb. Have a phantom cigar my friend.”

Here’s Mzerleau-Ponty:

“Why can the memories recalled to the one-armed man cause the phantom arm to appear? The phantom arm is not a recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now, folded over his chest, with no hint of its belonging to the past. Nor can we suppose that the image of an arm, wandering through consciousness, has joined itself to the stump: for then it would not be a ‘phantom’, but a renascent perception. The phantom arm must be that same arm, lacerated by shell splinters, its visible substance burned or rotted somewhere, which appears to haunt the present body without being absorbed into it. The imaginary arm is, then, like repressed experience, a former present which cannot decide to recede into the past.”

This is phenomenology as infantilization. Someday when I’m less tired I might tackle this. In the meantime I say as a disabled writer: us cripples don’t sit around fantasizing about wandering arms, not even in our subconscious. As for the idea of the former present which cannot decide to recede into the past let us suppose time is not concerned with volition, that what we say about it might be, but where the loss of limbs is concerned there’s no repression at all.

Non-disabled writers are such dears. They believe the body and its breakage is like losing lollipops. Bless their little hearts.

In the republic’s attic where Hawthorne’s ghost licks flecks of cheese from its fingers we remember the history of American exterminations and eugenics. From the Cherokee to Tuskegee, from Carrie Buck to hysterectomies under ICE America has built itself a monolith of human rights calamities.

During the first weeks of COVID isolation I took it upon myself to read two books about Nazi doctors. Both detail the hyper-cruelties of science gone wrong in the hands of psychotic men, but what was worse–for there’s always something worse when talking about Nazis, was the staggering indifference of all the other doctors. I’m guessing that when we get to the bottom of the ICE hysterectomies story we’ll find there was plenty of collegial shrugging going on.

“Experimenting on women? That’s his department. I only pull healthy teeth.”

In case you’re wondering, the two books were Robert J. Lifton’s “Nazi Doctors” and “Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death” by David Marwell.

1.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Walk the dog of course. Say hello to the maple tree I pretend is my friend. I know, Basho, nothing in nature is my pal. I should celebrate this.

Because I love Bach more than I can say I tend not to write about the matter.

Lines from Lars Gustafsson:

And so I’m alone with the screeching gulls
Who’re are no concern of mine…

Which of course means a man has memories…

Robert Frost said famously: “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

5.

Went out in a rowboat at night, blind though I am, and drifted under stars. How would I get back to my spot of shore? Trust lovesickness.

In heaven Piglet and Pooh were still blind.
“I guess that afterlife recovery story was just nonsense,” said Pooh.
“Grope!” said Piglet.
Pooh stumbled into an angel. It was different than he’d supposed: stingray flat and without wings. He knew it was an angel without wings because it said so.
“Do not be afraid!” it said. “I am a two dimensional angel without wings.”
“Wow!” said Piglet.
“What happened to you?” asked Pooh.
“This ain’t Anglican afterlife,” said the Angel. “This is cartoon character Valhalla.”
“Wow!” said Piglet.
“Why are we still blind?” asked Pooh.
“The only one here who can see is Odin,” said the Angel, “and he’s got one eye so he has no depth perception.”
“Wow!” said Piglet.
“What happens now?” asked Pooh.
“We’re going to the ribbon factory,” the angel said, then added, “the blind do well there.”