Planet of the Blind

–in memory of Jarkko Laine

Pulls water from graves
Silence and issue

Rise within
Though it has no roots

Say what you like poems are fungi
The mushrooms of lapland

With their hydraulic psychedelias
Reindeer eat them

Only to wander about
Stoned out of their minds

Pulls water from graves
Silence and issue

Rise within it
Though it has no roots

Say what you like poems are like fungi
The mushrooms of lapland

With their hydraulic psychedlias
Reindeer eat them

Only to wander about
Stoned out of their minds

Like Diogenes the Cynic I throw excrement though it’s not real, just words, words and words. All I want is your attention, like the sad student who sat beside me in the Writer’s Workshop who pulled from his pocket a deck of “serial killer trading cards.” He ignored the poets in the room. He was fixated on Doo Doo Dahmer. That’s not me. I want you to have a better life than the one you’re forced to live so I toss words around like my drunk uncle who was a never do well plumber who’d throw hammers in the garage. “Anaphylactic”; “suborning”; “misieracordia”; “Stalinist suitcase”; “Mac & Cheese”–(you don’t pay extra for the insect parts.)

Diogenes threw real turds.

Some mornings for no reason at all I take a shovel into the yard and dig. Am I digging my grave? Or is this simple labor? My great grandfather was a wheelwright in old Finland. He built sleighs and baby coffins, dug his share of holes. As I dig my American neighbors pass, observe and say nothing.

Alright. Everything above is untrue, save for the great grandfather.

You wouldn’t catch me doing manual labor under any circumstances. I’m lazy. I bury things in these poems.

Memory Rain Wind the shovel untouched standing in its corner.

“One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always is, to think one sees peoples’ lives for them better than they see them for themselves. I always pay for it sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest.”

–Henry James

I hereby admit I’m meddlesome for I think I see the lives of others better than they see themselves and if this was my only offense I should be silent but the meddlesome are inclined to talk and that’s my problem. My damnable blather.

But before you give up on me let me add that I’m working on it.

**

What does “I’m working on it” mean?

Sharpening self-recognition mainly.

The meddlesome don’t like themselves.

They love gossip.

Gossip is mischief and bathed in insecurity.

**

The question I must ask is do I want optimism and idealism?

Being meddlesome doesn’t get you there.

A secondary question is how can you give advice if asked without the assumption of inherent superiority?

Henry James: “Even a loaded life might be easier when one had added a new necessity to it.”

**

Ah the new necessity, the human. Caring for others whether they’re in your family or not. Volunteerism. Listening to strangers. Rescuing animals.

James did not mean a “loaded life” to signify drunkenness.

**

When the great opera singer Enrico Caruso was very young and still unknown he summoned his courage and knocked on Giacomo Puccini’s door. He told the composer that he’d come to sing for him.

After he sang, Puccini said, “who sent you to me–God?”

Afterwards he composed operatic roles for Caruso. Puccini recognized the new necessity.

**

Caruso later joked that Puccini had eaten all the ducks in Italy. The man loved duck hunting. It’s good to tease your friends for if done with affection it’s a way of not taking yourself too seriously.

**

Thus endeth the sermon.

Don’t imagine your shoes are innocent. They know the moist, ineluctable whispers of the unconscious. And don’t imagine that just because pharmaceuticals have been pushed as the cure for depression there’s no such thing as the unconscious. Freud and Jung had it right and even your pharmacist knows it, knows it because his shoes are dark and moist. Even the dancing pump and the foam filled cross-fit shoes of leisure are filled with half starved archetypes. The murderer knows his shoes. The priest. The politician. I take no pleasure saying so, I”d prefer innocence encasing our precious feet.

In her novel “The Cold Song” Linn Ullman writes of Jenny, an aging socialite who’s preparing for a party in her honor:

“She looked at the shoes, paired up like well-behaved children on the floor by her bed. Such pretty shoes, the color of nectarines, from the sixties, she remembered the store where she had bought them.”

Ullman knows. The shoes look pretty but they’re steeped by the drains and threads of the unconscious and they’re not well behaved children at all. And we know about those stores from the sixties don’t we?

**

Shoe, I have not loved you with my whole heart;
Truss, I fear you’re coming…

Emergence of old age.

Dante: “we call shaggy all words that are ornamental.”

Ornaments of this aging vulgar tongue…

Pray the noblest words alone remain in the sieve…

For Dante, language was new—it was his language, the juicy vernacular. English ain’t so new anymore. “Make it new, make it new,” he cries, waving his stick. That “he” is me.

Spoon me some glottal stops, shout me some noble ballate.

Had me a literary education. Learned about recitations charmingly delivered. But at night I kicked frozen turds on the icy street. In those days I talked to anyone. Fable fable.

Gettin’ old. Just want to rest my head on the bosom of moral philosophy. Ain’t that the way of it? Start and end with moldy books and sinister shoes.

**

Imelda Marcos had one thousand six hundred pairs of shoes and a lot of blood on her hands. The unconscious won’t let you “buy out.” As for those shoes, Imelda’s, they were telephones to the torture chambers.

**

I went to the shoe store and placed my feet in the measuring pans. My feet transmitted a sudden and stark message—“we feel shy down here; we’re under examination. Please get us back inside our shoes.” I wondered about this. The tragedy of it. “When,” I wondered, “had my feet learned to be timid?” “It’s the whole damn system” I told them. “Capitalism has taught you to feel incomplete.” But when your feet are farouche the whole body jumps that way. The temporal lobe said: “I too don’t wish to be known.”

I really wanted Mozart just then. Anything other than the grey neural distress that emanated from my feet and circled outward to the farthest ring of my skull. “Jesus,” I said, “you’re just buying some shoes.” But the temporal lobe said: “There’s no such thing as just. Would you just saw off your hand?” So I was forced to conclude, encouraged to conclude, the body’s anguish is like intense moonlight.

The shoe moment helped me recognize what my autistic friends already know. There’s no “me”—there are only the eager, bristling, dancing, component parts. Now ask yourself how you get through the day?

Oh my feet, you moth eaten grand seigneurs, keep talking. It’s OK.

You can have your shoes back even if they’re not without red dreams.

If we’re honest we see how our comfort works. Privilege recognition is a vital part of this but so is knowing where ease of habit must necessarily end. For instance, I’m blind and as I’ve traveled the world I’ve met thousands who turn awkward and even become tongue tied at the sight of a blind man who journeys largely on his own. I transform the comfort of others into “the place where ease of habit necessarily ends.” I never plan to do this.

White people who don’t see how their privilege sits atop their mental comfort will never grow.

Ableism isn’t distinct from racism or homophobia. It rests on the assumption that people not like yours are disturbing and you’ve the right to demean them. Or worse: consider the astounding statistics concerning police violence against the disabled, who of course, hail from every background. The story becomes tragic when the disabled are black:

“Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tanisha Anderson, Deborah Danner, Ezell Ford, Alfred Olango, and Keith Lamont Scott were all Black and tragically killed by police. They also have one other thing in common: they were all disabled.

As police brutality against Black people continues to be in the national spotlight, the reality of police violence against disabled people—especially Black people—is less-often discussed.”

(See: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/police-violence-disabled-black-americans)

Anti-racism and anti-ableism are also connected. I remember how, a couple of years ago, when I was trying to get a taxi in New York City, a driver raced away from me because I had a guide dog. This is illegal but try doing something about it. A second cab pulled up. The driver said: “Hop in!” As we drove I learned he was from Egypt and his daughter was deaf. He’d come to America for better accessibility and educational opportunities for her. We had a tremendous conversation.

I can’t tell you how to be you; how to sail the coast of your own comfort where the water turns shallow and you feel panic. I can’t tell anyone how to live or what to do. Honesty forbids it. I scarcely know how to live myself. But I do know this: being interested in others is the antidote to the discomforts which leverage suspicion and hostility.

Ever since I learned about Pablo Neruda’s disabled daughter and how he abandoned her I’ve felt revulsion toward the man. Then I saw his admission of rape in his memoir and felt more revulsion. Then I revisited his praise of Stalin…and so on as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would say.

Poets are infantile, self-absorbed, charming, and generally not upstanding citizens. That and a buck gets you a cup of Joe. Didn’t we resolve this with Pound? Poets are lousy neighbors but still we want them around.

Of course the solution was to put them in the academy that old flophouse for deviants.

**

So anyway, last night I dreamt I was young once more. I was taking a class at the University of Iowa’s “Writer’s Workshop” with the late Donald Justice, a poet of distinction who was my teacher in the late 1970’s. Don was flinty, how does one say it–he’d fillet his students. He saw himself as the bulwark of literary decency. He was often mean.

He made young students who deigned to study poetry writing flee his classroom in tears.

Then the “visiting poets” would come to town to read their poems and attend boozy parties in their honor. They too were mean.

**

The only kind poet I ever met during those years was Gary Snyder who showed genuine kindness to his audience and at the requisite party “leaned in” as they say, listening to what the silly but yearning graduate students had to say.

**

Some poets are like playground bullies. They declare their patch of sand and dare you to enter their imaginary sacred space.

In my dream I was again in a classroom with Donald Justice. Daylight was turning de Chirico green which meant a tornado was coming.

Suddenly Justice had a conductor’s baton and was waving it about. He said it was a poet’s job to conduct the storm.

Even in my dream I knew this was exquisite bullshit.

Thank God I woke up.

**

Don was a good poet, a Pulitzer Prize winner. He didn’t like young people.

I admire poets who take a genuine interest in young people.

I read poets who were never nice.

I don’t have to like an artist to know her or his merit.

Once, again, years ago I saw the poet May Sarton humiliate a young woman who dared to say she was interested in the connections between poetry and dance. Sarton looked the poor girl in the eye and said, “you my dear are a fake.”

So, heck, she didn’t like young people.

But she sure could write about being old.

**

Auden said famously: “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”

Do you understand? Kindness is a mixed feeling.

And it’s what’s required if you want to live among people.

I am like you, by turns terrified or resisting terror. Oh my ancestors I see what you were about. My great grandfather, a wheelwright in rural Finland built more than his share of baby coffins. He saw trees as signals of dark futures.

It is sobering and admissible to say it will never be any better. That it’s wrong is beside the point. Dark feelings have you by the throat. Who can argue with feelings?

I see what you were about Grand-Grand-Papa. It’s the argument with darkness makes tomorrow possible.

It’s the Finnish lullaby which was always a dirge.

**

Who can argue with feelings? What a foolish question. Even a house cat does it. It bites its tail.

Ah but the cat doesn’t worry about tomorrow.

It doesn’t have to examine the trees and think, “there’s a coffin in there.”

I don’t think I’d prefer the gritty phenomenology of the cat.

Still I’d like to reach back through history and tell my forebear: “some day the trees will just be trees, antibiotics are coming.”

**

In Finland they burn the dead winter grass.

“I like the dreams of the future, better than the history of the past.”

–Thomas Jefferson

Do you see? Tomorrow’s people will be more loving though you can’t suppose it. (Me)

It is hard to believe in better dreams. It takes more than a little work. Man Oh Man soul work is difficult.

White silence is violence is a phrase that invites soul work for white people. Growing is not easy.

America with its long history of torch light parades and hangings and white silences.

Little America with its redlining and its gated communities, having abandoned “we the people” as, well, inconvenient.

Damn right I like the dreams of the future.

At the end of his life Jefferson wrote:

“I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance….”

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…”

Thomas Jefferson would have loved that song.