Planet of the Blind

Max Cleland and the Forever War of the Mind

Max Cleland's New York Times op ed of November 6 speaks with candor and bravery about the terrible scourge of war and the facts of post traumatic stress. I will not endeavor to reprise Sen. Cleland's discerning argument except to say that wars never end and America in its fervor for war as a Hollywood production never seems to imagine the human cost. And costs change just as medical technology and skill change. What I mean by this is that we can now save grievously wounded soldiers on the battlefield who formerly would have died--we can treat poly-trauma as its now being called; but we cannot follow through effectively, cannot treat the psychological effects of physical trauma. I will argue that a Puritan culture cannot conceive of the mind as a part of the body. Puritan culture imagines the mind as a moral field, a battlefield if you will. In this terrible figurative topography its "mind over matter" that counts. PTSD is a failure of the will. In this figurative topography "true soldiers" never stray. I'm tempted to write "etcetera" in a kind of Kurt Vonnegut-esque manner. "And so on."

Two years ago I wrote the following poem after thinking about these issues and I dedicated it to Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. I was teaching Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at the time. Enough said?

 

Ode to Victor Frankenstein

You did it: you made a brother, a child.

You made a kind of mule—

A poor man’s mule

With watery eyes.

You built him so he would follow;

You made him lonely;

Gave him you;

Perfect in the giving:

No language;

Forests of veins;

Knees and ears; art

Of lost walking

Without destination.

And when you ran

You gave him division;

So even his new life

Was old.

 

 

S.K.

Disability as Wild Spirit

We should say, those of us who traffic in the analysis of disabilities, and moreover in the analysis of the symbolism of disabling illnesses, that the premise that disability is a means of intellectual strength is not broadly understood.

A body challenged is in symbolic terms conceived as a trembling and despoiled ruin so that the able bodied read disability with the grayness of fear. Meanwhile people with disabilities persist in writing narratives of overcoming "the affliction" in terms that perpetuate the oozy despoilments of the broken body. Seldom do we see disability conceived as wild spirit, the attainment of alternate speed. I believe that disability must be understood as epistemology, philosophy, as poetry.

As William Empson once wrote in his poem "To an Old Lady": "Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet/Revere; do not presume to think her wasted."

But let's look beyond reactive figures. Let us suppose the old lady knows something?

Suppose that blindness, deafness, autism, the ague, suppose it was suddenly rich, spawning roses and snows of the mind.

The blind man was incorrigibly mathematical. He understood a great deal about the sunlight in the garden which hardens and grows cold. He did not need to beg for pardon.

The deaf woman was never aimless and alone. In silence she saw (or felt) the arbitrary qualities of the architecture. No one asked her for advice.

Disability is soundlessly incompatible with the "too much talk" of able bodied minutes.

The able bodied sense their values blurred when pausing even minutely to think of altered bodies. Figurative bodies are epistemological engines burgeoning all around us and miscast as prisons.

The broken body was suddenly rich and its half vision was a long flowing net of gold.

 

S.K.

Writing in the Schools, Day 1

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

 

This is Ms. Andrea, Ms. Goodman said. She’s a poet. The fifth graders gasped. Some looked at me and smiled. Usually, Americans shift uncomfortably and look at their feet when you mention poetry. But as an official Writer in the Schools, my job for the next six weeks is to be a poet and to help Ms. Goodman’s class write poetry. So I told them I love words. That I think words matter. That when we tell a friend we love her, that matters, and when we tell a friend we hate him, that matters too.

They understood, I think. So I read a poem that plays with language. We talked about rhyming, alliteration, assonance. I was careful when I said the word “assonance” and they were careful when they said it too. Then I asked them to work with a partner to write their own poems. They didn’t hesitate. Immediately, the room was filled with laughter and talking and rhyming sounds. I walked around the classroom so they could show me their work. Ms. Goodman did the same, spelled out words for them when they didn’t know the spelling, pushed them to write more.

And I was amazed at how liberated they were. Ask a college classroom to write a poem on the spot and again, that shifting occurs, the air in the room vanishes. Adults don’t think we can turn on creativity. We want to be inspired, to wait for that moment when the muse whispers in our ears. But here was a classroom of fifth graders working away, playing with words, writing a poem with their friends, without waiting around for inspiration to appear. Of course, the poetry they wrote in class won’t win any big awards. But is that the point of writing? Ms. Goodman’s fifth graders wrote because I asked them to, and when I asked them to share what they had done for the class to hear, their hands shot into the air. Group by group, the students read their work out loud for everyone else to hear. They listened carefully and chose their favorite lines from another group’s poem. They were practically jumping out of their seats.

Now this was just Day 1 of a six-week project. Eventually, they’ll get tired of me and my writing exercises. Students always do, if you give them enough time. But even if just for one day, they were filled with excitement, with joy at reading and writing, at simply playing with language and words, letting sounds roll around in their mouths and then roll onto the page.

At the end of class, Ms. Goodman clapped her hands. I’ll have them type all of their poems and we can collect them in a book, she said. She was excited. I am too. The students gasped, remember, when she told them I write poetry. I guess it’s not every day you meet someone who calls herself a poet. But at the end of our first hour, I had hope, again, for American poetry. Here was a classroom of fifth graders excited about poetry, writing their own poems and liking it. Just because I asked them to, each had turned into a poet. And loved it.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Wrong World Right

 

 

By Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay

Austin, Texas

 

To think about it November holds many kinds of possibilities.

One such possibility is the manifestation of my long held wish. It is a wish of the sky turning green or at least peacock blue for those who still hold a conservative outlook.

It is no doubt that the sky had the opportunity to remain blue since the days of Adam. Blue and blue. Only blue.

Its like a world filled with typical people and only typical people. The world needed some changes. Thus came with a fresh air – a generation of Autistic people so that the world wouldn't be so same and so always Right and so boring.

And so in my wish, the sky too needs a repainting for a change.

I could have proposed an ox blood red but I think I wouldn't find many supporters to back my message or wish. The yellow sun shining through an ox blood sky could be a perfect sight to look around this November to begin with. Perhaps the sunset can have a blue sky for the Right reasons!

That can give the weather scientists many possibilities to do their research on. For every research aims to make the Wrong world Right.

 

Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay is the author of The Mind Tree, one of the best memoirs about the inner life we know of. It's also about autism. He lives and writes from his home in Austin, Texas. 

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning but Really About a Dog

 

The poem with this title is of course John Donne's, the 16th century British poet whose faith in the redemptive power of Christ made him one of the greatest religious poets of the English language. Donne believed in life everlasting. In turn he could write of death's abandonment: Our two souls therefore, which are one,/Though I must go, endure not yet/A breach, but an expansion/Like gold to airy thinness beat.

According to Christianity life eternal leaves no one behind. And yet, and yet, oh how the pain of separation haunts us all. How I miss my friends and my parents. And how I miss my guide dogs who have gone to their graves. Would that I could feel all the losses as an expansion--a wider soul and not a breach.

You too, eh?

And walking this morning all disheveled in the fine autumn sun I found I was grieving for the loss of our black Labrador Roscoe who has been gone now for a year and some months. It was his ardor for the spectacle of life, his soul really, that I was grieving over. I'd give anything to hear his hilarious big Lab bark.  And how silly this must sound in a time of terrible losses; in a time of war and poverty. 

Silly man. Silly old grieving dog owner lamenting his poor estate.     

When I worked for Guiding Eyes for the Blind in New York I used to lead grieving sessions for blind people whose guide dogs had died.  What did I know? I would ask myself this question over and over again. "How can I console anyone?" "What is the true shape of suffering?" We would sit in a circle, five or six blind people with our boxes of tissues and we'd talk about anything at all. Talking is the first order of business--that is, just get started. Even though your heart is broken, even though the grief is fresh and green, start talking. And talk we did.

Our guide dogs had saved our lives. They had been present for us in our every moment of waking, working, loving, traveling, heck, "being" and now we were alone and bereft of all that heartfelt steadiness of canine companionship. There we were, sitting in a circle among the untrustworthy bipeds. Forget that we all had blindness in common. We're human and half crazy because of it, unlike our good dogs, oh those good dogs.

I remember one night a woman said: "God only gives us the burdens we can carry." Some nodded ascent. (Yes, blind people know when other people are nodding.)

Just then I found I couldn't nod. In fact I couldn't say a thing.       

Being a poet and all, I remembered lines by Robert Herrick, another 16th century British poet: Bid me to weep, and I will weep/While I have eyes to see:/And, having none, yet I will keep/A heart to weep for thee.

I suppose that was my way of agreeing with the woman. My job is to weep. My job right now is to weep for thee. My job is to weep for the dog I have loved. To weep with all my heart. For the heart and soul are eternal only in love. And God Almighty love is hard. But who would not have love command every part of her life?

Isn't that what our dogs teach us?

These dogs who transfuse our doubts into joys?

Didn't we after all learn a thing or two from these dogs?

And so today I am sad, still missing old Roscoe, old Corky, Dear Old Vidal.

But the dogs say, rise and put on your foliage and sing.

That's what they say. These dogs.

 

S.K.

Invisible Hat

 

Some days I have the wrong invisible hat on; takes half the day or more to feel its presence; then to know I'm under the darkling influence or giddy spree of wrong hat--like a man under a spell, the wrong hat. Corporation tee shirt; politico fabric softener; fulsome and hopeless William Tell idealist hat with feather; stupid Sherlock Holmes. So many wrong hats. Today's was too hopeful. Some kind of Dickensian hat. Thought maybe the world was perfectible with the right stories. Wrong hat. Need something more Toistoi-ish--revenant, tight, obscuring far vision, Russian pessimism in its sweat band, the hat of all 7 brothers; that's probably the correct hat on a day of dumb meetings where zilch gets accomplished and you feel the resources of inner life dripping away like--well never mind. Enough to say I'd started the day with a big fat goofy hat stitched from William Blake and Louis Armstrong and mid-day the hat was garish as the hind quarters of a baboon. That's the way it is, Mr. Cronkite. I wonder if Walter Cronkite ever felt the wrong hat blues, mid day, rushing in or out of CBS? All those years ago when news was still news...Nowadays all the tv people have the wrong hats and they don't give a rat's ass. They'd wear a toilet seat if it got them in front of the camera. Suspect that's a film test over at Fox...This world of ours, its fleeting sorrows, its hats, the shores of the heart and soul; please try on a hat; try on a new hat...Hat for moonrise; for the coming day...tomorrow's electricity, hat like a wave in sleep; hat of the sustained mind...      

 

S.K.

Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Screen

From The Inclusion Daily Express:

Consultant Suggested Institution Stop Reporting So Many Of Its Problems
(Des Moines Register)
November 3, 2009
DES MOINES, IOWA-- [Excerpt] A consultant at a state-run home for the disabled recently proposed that the facility limit reporting resident-care problems to state and federal regulators.

Records obtained by The Des Moines Register show that consultant Judith Johnston also suggested workers at Glenwood Resource Center stop placing detailed reports in residents' files, since doing so increased "the opportunity for discovery" by the agencies that oversee the home.

"It seems as if the whole thrust of this effort was to cover up these incidents so that the agencies authorized to provide oversight would be kept at arm's length," said Sylvia Piper, executive director of Iowa Protection and Advocacy. "That is a huge concern."

In her weekly reports to DHS administrators, Johnston repeatedly expressed concern that Glenwood employees were going beyond what the law required in reporting "incidents" - a word used to describe real and perceived problems with resident care - to state inspectors.

Another problem, she wrote, was that copies of the home's detailed incident reports were being included in the individual residents' case files where other agencies could see them.

Entire article:
Glenwood urged to limit reports
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2009/red/1103b.htm
Related:
Deaths in Iowa's Institutions (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/institutions/ia/iowa.htm

Who Speaks for Us? We Do.

 

Excerpt from The Inclusion Daily Express:

People With Autism Speak Out Against Autism Speaks
(The HillTop)
November 2, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC-- [Excerpt] Detached from the sea of walkers at the annual Walk Now for Autism Speaks fundraiser in D.C., was a group of about 15 autistic individuals who stood protesting.

Against the backdrop of the Washington monument, they chanted “Autism Speaks doesn’t speak for us,” and “Autistic people speak. Are you listening?”

Ari Ne’eman, founder and president of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), led the protestors. Contrary to the mission of Autism Speaks, Ne’eman and members of ASAN allege that the organization is actually exploiting the autistic community instead of helping it.

“I saw that all too often, autistic people are kept out of the public policy discussion about us and decisions are put forward that don’t fit with our needs and don’t relate to what we want,” said Ne’eman, who, along with the other members of ASAN, is autistic.

Entire article:
Autistic Plea Less Pity
http://www.thehilltoponline.com/autistic-plea-less-pity-1.2046862
Related:
Autism Walk on National Mall Stirs Controversy (WJLA)
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/1009/674094.html

Zoo

Once while visiting the Chicago zoo I saw a very old man who was blind for he had a white cane and he was leaning close to the plate glass at the lion's display. He was making faces at the lions, grand faces, grotesque faces like someone who could hide his appearance behind a Venetian mask. The lions for their part saw the man's evident incomprehensibility as just another form of light. Don't underestimate the power of a wall. That was one of my earliest lessons in art.

 

S.K.  

Iowa Coach Sells Soul to Devil

 

 

 

Iowa City

The University of Iowa ’s football team had an inexplicable turnaround on Saturday in their game against Indiana. Despite lackluster play and numerous mistakes, Iowa had a supernatural comeback against the Hoosiers, all after an instant replay ruling overturned an obvious Indiana  touchdown late in the 3^rd quarter. Fans at Kinnick Stadium watched as Iowa picked off a pass that actually hung in the air like a piñata, then saw hyper reality take over as the Hawkeyes scored 28  points in the game’s final 15 minutes. “Something happened,” said Ernest Dumpster, a honey dipper from Dubuque . “That was some weird shit, and believe me, I know shit.”

The explanation has to do with Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz who, according to insiders who asked to remain unnamed, sold his soul to the Devil during a television timeout late in the 3^rd quarter. Ferentz was unavailable for comment but a team insider said that a cloven hooved, humpbacked and be-horned goat-like creature with a face like former U.S. President Bill Clinton was seen escorting Ferentz into a gray van with just minutes remaining in the timeout.

Dag Darkling, a professor at Union Theological Seminary says that the game’s final score, Iowa 42 and Indiana 24 is the proof of Satanic forces being involved. “42” can be added into six, and so can 24, so that’s 66 and Iowa had five interceptions and a fumble so that’s another 6. And everybody knows what that means.”

“It’s the Devil’s odor that’s a real giveaway, he smells like burning glee,” said Darkling.