imagination – Planet of the Blind

Oh, the Poor Sighted People, etc.

I will tell you how to be blind but only when first you tell me how it is to be sighted. You will tell me what you see which has very little to do with the matter. You cannot help yourself. To see, seeing is this sail turning before the wind, this nearly transparent orchid. When your thoughts turn atavistic your vision has much to do with being a prey animal for humans have a great deal in common with horses.

So by turns, given this is what you believe about sight—that it is the sum of its contexts and each “peep” stands for something universal—you must believe the absence of sight is nothing more than a mineral blank.

You think there’s a tribe called “the blind” and we are pulling off a sinister trick by our very attempt to live in the world. You want to ask: “how can you live if you can’t see?” You know you want to ask it. A famous fiction writer once asked me during a job interview: “How can you write so clearly if you can’t see?” Translation: “How exactly are you fooling us? Maybe you can see? In any event you must be dishonest.”

Blindness is dishonesty to many sighted. If I can be called “blind” you can be called “sighted” though I prefer mis-sighted for you. In any event you believe you’re the sum of your sights however poorly apprehended.

Yes, you see as through a glass darkly. Most of you know it and are afraid. “Why if I lost my little peephole it would be like death itself.”

The blind are, to the poorly apprehended, the walking dead.

Yes. The blind are zombies to the P.A. kids.

Yes. The poorly apprehended are just kids.

Children who believe they’re the sum of their toys.

Seeing is toy collection.

Wouldn’t life without toys be impossible?

You’d have to be a zombie.

Not long ago while visiting a famous arts colony I heard a notable writer say that henceforth the famous arts colony would no longer be blind and poor when it comes to appreciating outlier forms of art. He said it twice during a formal speech.

And there I was with my guide dog. I’ve spent the last thirty years writing six books which argue that blindness is a rich way of knowing.

I was insulted and remain so. Yet this is business as usual for the poorly apprehended who can’t describe sight but imagine they know it thoroughly and think the blind are among the sighted “on sufferance” and yes, we make the P.A. tribe nervous by our very appearance.

I share with my black and LGBTQIA pals and all my foreign friends a capacity to make the poorly apprehended nervous. All of us are believed to be “here on sufferance” but there’s something especially dishonest about the blind, the lame, the halt.

The dishonest thing is that you, the sighted, unable to tell me what vision means, and only able to describe your toys, you fascinations as it were, the majority of you have no spiritual center. Without this you can’t imagine the glory of life itself. You think sight seeing is the secret to living.

And if you believe this, then you also must believe that language isn’t much of a thing.

My answer to the famous writer who wanted to know how I could write about the world with clarity was simple: all nouns are images. Horse. Battleship. Rose bush.

All I have to do is jot down a noun and voila! I saw what you saw little dude.

Or: of course I didn’t see it. But according to neurological findings, neither did you.

ABOUT: Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger

Of Book Tours, Antonio Gramsci, and the Unmade Bed

A friend, characterizing a mutual friend said: “he has a mind like an unmade bed” and trust me that’s how I’m feeling. Of the unmade bed I recall an episode of the television version of “The Odd Couple” when Felix discovers a half eaten submarine sandwich in Oscar Madison’s bed. Oscar didn’t say it, but I will: “detritus ye will always have with ye” though one must surely admit when his defenses are down. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate.

This isn’t listlessness. It’s not the blues. (Though I know I’ve got them—a blind guy’s slumgullion of concerns from genetic testing of fetuses (rooting out probable disabled babies, think eugenics 2.0) to the race baiting narratives of American cleanliness espoused by the United States government and increasingly large parts of the industrialized world (Reich 4.0).
Or I worry about your mentally ill brother, child, mother, especially if they’re a person of color, for they’ll likely wind up dead or in jail in our clotted, Dickensian nation. Meanwhile the eroding middle class watches the Kardashians.

OK. Sorry. But when you’re an unmade bed, well, you become that man who natters on the bus. Some mornings I’m a single dendritic spark away from either mumbling or ranting.
My unmade bed is starting to smolder.

I’ve been on a lovely book tour which has taken me to Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Calistoga, Denver, Richmond, and upstate New York. Talking with old acquaintances and new friends is a cleansing experience. I always meet good people on the road.

Check box: I’ve been talking to excellent human beings.

Check box: In Denver I got an Uber ride from a man who lectured me about the “end times” for twenty five minutes. He touched my hair. Said: “you’re already one of the saved. God loves you.”

Check: It’s raining in the airplane burial ground, as my friend Jim Crenner once wrote.

Crumbs from the bed…Marx was right about 40% of the time.

Bed: Antonio Gramsci was right about 80% of the time.

The above assertions are not incompatible.

Check: I’ve lately had several graduate students who don’t like to read and when pushed turn deflective and mean spirited. These are the children of “no child left behind” who’ve been trained for a decade to take tests. Confronted by the prose of Salman Rushdie they look at first perplexed, than hostile.

Crumb: The students mentioned believe they’re commodified, neutralized, oppressed, etc. according to their respective identities. They won’t read for strength. They believe ideology is strength. In this way they’re no more sophisticated than Donald Trump.

It’s a very hard time to be a professor.

Crumb: last night I realized for the 41,000th time that baseball won’t save me.

Check: I don’t care for popular music of any kind.

Ort. (Everyone’s favorite crossword bit)—scientists now believe outer space is filled with carbon molecules which they describe as “grease”—it means we’re essentially living in a vast kitchen drain.

Speck: The poet Donald Hall just passed. He was a good man on balance.

Note: I’m reading Dr King’s Refrigerator by Charles Johnson. Also: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.

Speck: the thing about a book tour is you see with sufficient comic irony you’re not terribly important in the grand scheme.

Ort: I once introduced myself to the folk singer Utah Philips. Told him I was an anarchist at heart. He gave me a withering look. It said: “I’m the only god damned anarchist you little shit!”

What was it James Tate said? “No longer the perpetual search for an air conditioned friend….”

My step children are struggling to stay in the middle class.

I’ve a friend who’s lost his health insurance and has no job.

He doesn’t have the leisure for a mind like an unmade bed.

Like most halfway ethical beings I feel guilty.

Is sharing the unmade bed the best thing a writer can do?

That’s mostly what creative writing programs are all about.

The Finnish communist poet Pentti Saarikoski said: “I want to be the kind of poet who builds houses for people….”

Saarikoski was just kidding of course. The way poets do. He never built a house for anyone.

Is the unmade bed a place of ambition or escape. Is it both?

This is the point: I want to create unmade beds for everyone.

Check: we’d take turns being servants. The unmade bed mustn’t be class reserved.

What the hell am I talking about?

I fear for the life of imagination; what we used to call the life of the mind.

A student came to me not long ago and said he wanted to be a writer. Then he told me he hated reading.

I want to be a painter but I hate paint.

I’d like to cultivate my mind but not today.

Gramsci: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger

Disability, Expectation, and a Just a Whiff of Episcopalianism

“I expect color to be used against me,” writes John Edgar Wideman in the closing story of his latest collection American Histories. “Amen,” I think, early, the sun not up, reading alone with my talking computer. Race is the first they “they” see—the predatory “they” ruthless, short tempered and ubiquitous—good God is it everywhere. And the sun not up, alone, I want to reach through circuits and virtual pages and shake Wideman’s hand.

Each of us does her or his or they own dance with the expectation of disadvantage in advance. If you’re black, or Latinx, or queer, or disabled you are far more likely to live this on a daily basis. Not likely. I take that back. One does. What was I thinking?

I expect disability to be used against me.

Long ago I read a definition of resentment which I can’t attribute or source: resentment is drinking poison and waiting for others to die.

I not only expect but know disability will be used against me so how do I escape the poison-resentment-complex? Or “we”—how do we do it? Black, queer, neurodivergent, women in male dominated professions, in my case blind at a university that has poor support services for the disabled and more than passing hostility?

I don’t like poison. It tastes like wormwood and iodine. Trust me I know what it tastes like.

When I’m home alone, after a day of discriminatory treatment, being told to shut up, etc., I think, as I’m sure Wideman must, “I’m a good guy; I’m funny; I like people, why is this happening to me?”

That’s the effect of the poison. Swallowing it you fall into false consciousness, a false expectation about others. You think they’re supposed to change and you’re dying inside and the ableist, racist, homophobic people go on happily about their business. As Auden says famously in his poem Musee des Beaux Arts—suffering is unnoticed by the privileged. He says it better. Read the poem.

The key to having a good life when you know your difference is going to be used against you, perhaps in a minute, perhaps later this afternoon is mysterious and there are few prescriptions in tablet form or in holy books that are proper anodynes. I love the psalms. I adore Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Shit, I’m an Episcopalian. I have whole passages of the New Testament memorized. I love Christ not for his suffering but his transcendence of it. He’s both the king of those who are mocked and of those who persist in love. But I’ll admit it: most days Jesus is too mystical for me when I’m struggling disabled in a hostile world.

I expect disability to be used against me.

It’s that word “expect” that’s the killer.

Expect is related to spectacles. It comes from Latin “to look out”.

Later it comes to mean imagining things that will happen. Somewhere in the 16th century the word transitioned from “fact” (to see what’s coming) to fiction—one of the pejorative dynamics of imagination, suspecting things will happen because they’ve happened in the past. I often tell creative writing students only ten percent of imagination is worthwhile. That estimation may be generous.

This is the poison of imagination. I expect the next bad thing. Ungoverned this becomes depression. The depressed imagination sees everything in the world as equal and equally bad.

Wideman’s literary character is correct: race will be used against him. Finding love in the face of this is the most difficult challenge of all. We can invent machines that defy gravity but so far no machine has defied hate.

I like to think they’re working on this at MIT—maybe something like an aluminum spaghetti colander with wires sticking out that you wear on your head and with a flip of the switch voila hate disappears and water turns into chablis.

As far as I know—not far of course—is the only machine that can zap hate is the imagination which we’re currently under utilizing. Like the oft repeated maxim that we only use ten percent of our brains, we simply fail most days to push our imaginations toward loving others.

I expect to be disliked. It’s a certainty. This is the story of Christ. It’s the story of my neighbor.

I expect to be more loving. Will start today.

I expect to spit. (Expectorate)

“I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.” (Malevich, Essays on Art)

Aim carefully.

Read John Edgar Wideman.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound.org

(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger