Planet of the Blind

Freezing Drizzle

 

 

That's what the weather man calls it. Personally I like my drizzle lukewarm but there doesn't seem to be a menu option for that. The drizzle is a fact the way a marching band is a fact. There's not much you can do about it. You just have to absorb it.

What is freezing drizzle? It's "sleet light". It's failed snow. It's the weather of homesickness and furtive glances and abandoned machines.

I want to walk outside and shout: "Screw You Freezing Drizzle!" How hopeless the enterprise! The marching band is playing Broadway favorites. Its halftime in a very boring football game. The Marching Drizzlers can't hear a thing I say.

The Drizzle is a darkling phenomenologist. It says there is no "I" contingent with the self; it says that reality is naked and shapeless. Face it, its a boring professor.

It's a pain in the ass.

**

I appear to be decidedly "not" in a holiday mood. Capitalism has killed my seasonal sentiments. I'm despising Xmas music. I'm feeling like Sid Vicious. All I want to do is play a Sex Pistols record backwards and snarl in the crown of a freezing tree.

**

What's wrong with me? Why did I laugh yesterday when I heard that Macy's escalator caught fire in New York?

**

Drizzle laughs at our dreams of salvation.

Drizzle waves the blown trees in the gypsy's faces.

Drizzle gets inside us, like a dark membrane.

Sound of grind stones, sound of broken windows.

**

O the alter procession of the drizzle. Its sad boats filled with dried flowers...

**

Save your chestnuts on the open fire and Jack Frost nipping at your noses. I've got the king of drizzle here. He sings of the abyss and of people lost. He doesn't have a recording contract...

He is real and he says that he'd cold cock Santa Claus if he gets in the way...

 

S.K. 

Of Dumbo and Ganesh

 

A Swedish poet I know once said that dogs know more about darkness than we do and I thought that was true for I was twenty something when I heard the remark and when you're young and you hear something symbolic you tend to think you've heard truth. Dogs of course don't care at all about darkness--they're not delicate creatures, which is why their noses are machines of insubordinate, cognitive persistence. Dogs don't give a rat's ass about darkness and they don't care about manners. This is why I like them.

I blame urban life for making people sentimental about animals and that's a big story and there's not time today to delve into the matter but I'll argue that only city dwellers will go to a movie about anthropomorphized talking deer and only city dwellers will think that a flying elephant with ears for wings is worth paying to watch.

A friend in California called me the other night while he was out for a walk. He reported a Disney Dumbo was all lit up in someone's yard. I was immediately irascible. "If only it was Ganesh" I said, and then I went into a riff about why India is beating the snot out of America in economic terms--"they have Ganesh, we have Dumbo," I snarled.

This lead to a debate of sorts. Ganesh is both nurturing and tricky, has pockets of deception. Dumbo is just nice. People in India don't have to pretend they're nice all the time. Americans are stuck with this hopeless imperial sentimentality about themselves. The rest of the world thinks we're stupid.

Then my friend said: "But Dumbo has a soul, man. He has a soul."

That stopped my pepper pot tirade. I had to admit that my pal had me there. Dumbo is all loyalty, decency, steadfastness, and compensatory heart, for indeed all the other creatures make fun of his ears. I realized then that Dumbo is a "super crip"--a disabled person who overachieves. He's a sort of beneficent victim.

And so of course Dumbo is a perfect holiday ornament. Why the hell not?     

Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.

 

S.K. 

The Laws of Thought

 

George Boole's book concerning the laws of thought was published in 1844 and many have observed that the first inklings of the computer are to be found within its pages. In essence Boole observed that in algebraic terms every set has something in common with "the empty set"--a neat, paratactic formalism that later became known as "Boolean Algebra".

I remember taking a course on Boolean Algebra as a college sophomore and in that same semester I read and re-read James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake and somewhere in the midst of that concantenation of steam and mechanics I rose up and stopped being an indifferent youth. I saw that James Joyce was the counter-punch to Boole's idea and I sensed that Boole's thinking, if reduced to a social value, represented a narrowing of symbolic values--what I would later understand as the birth of statistics and the associated insurance industries and government sanctioned intelligence tests and so forth.

When you're 19 years old and wildly myopic and you've discovered that the ticking relays of Big Brother are traceable to the prior century you look for people with whom you can talk about the matter. I found a guy I'll call "Lars" because he looked like a Swede, tall, pale, vaguely blond, always wearing a shabby, wool overcoat. Lars liked to talk about ideas so we'd drink coffee and carry on until the small hours of the morning discussing the 19 century intersections of industrial and social institutions and the emergence of writers like Baudelaire and Whitman. I loved talking about ideas so much that I didn't notice that Lars was a malcontent. He was actually a kind of Nazi. He had German war trinkets in his dorm room and he even had a Luger in his desk. This was sufficiently disturbing to me that I began to avoid old Lars outside of the classes we took together. I saw that disliking the associated modern industrial applications of statistics in the development of a social order was not the same thing as a fidelity to reactionary nihilism. George Boole indeed! George Boole with his empty set balancing a proposition--dogs and men both experience fear. Dogs and men know no fear at all. And all those ticking relays.

1844 was the year in which Samuel Morse sent the first electrical telegram from the U.S. Capitol to a district railway office in Baltimore, Maryland saying "What Hath God Wrought?" Tick tick tick with the relays.

1844 was the year in which Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx met for the first time in Paris.

In 1844 Gustav Erik Pasch invents the safety match. Charles Goodyear vulcanized rubber. Britain produces three million tons of iron.

All the seeds of world war one are planted.

And Friedrich Nietzsche was born that year.

Tick tick tick go the relays.

And so reading George Boole was a bit like sitting on the dark side of a railroad car. I decided to change my seat. Avoid Lars. Read books. Read books.

 

S.K.

The Racing of Infidelity

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

 

I want to start with a disclaimer: I don’t know anything about Tiger Woods. I don’t own a television and am pretty sure I’ve never watched a golf game in my life. I barely understand the rules of miniature golf. Before the events of the past couple weeks, I’m not sure I would have recognized Tiger Woods if he were standing next to me at the grocery store. But when a series of white women start appearing on the news saying they’ve had an affair with a man of Color, I start to get suspicious.

Woods has, of course, admitted to infidelity, and for that fact, I feel very bad for his wife.

But I also wonder why woman after woman has come forward in this public way, at this moment in time. Since some of the alleged liaisons go back years, clearly at least some of the women with whom Woods had affairs could have said something publicly much earlier than the previous three weeks. So why now, all of a sudden, hire an attorney and start making public statements to gossip magazines? Why now, disclose text messages and other sordid details of your affair? There’s something in this public outing for each woman, or they wouldn’t be coming forward in this way. Is it just the prospect of fame or financial gain, a book deal down the road or television appearances?

That may be part of it, but I wonder if it also doesn’t have something to do with Woods’ race. White America likes to see a Black man falter, after all, and the fact that his alleged mistresses to date have all been white weighs heavily on the complex and conflicted history white women and Black men have shared in the United States for hundreds of years. Black men have been lynched, remember, for even being suspected of wanting a relationship with a white woman. White women have felt betrayed as Black men were granted access to the patriarchy. I can’t help but wonder how this long and fraught history is playing out in the public’s fascination of Wood’s downfall, or how it may be weighing somewhere deep in the minds of the women who are coming forward.

Are these women excited by the possibility of being involved in this taking-down of a successful and wealthy man of Color? Americans like to watch a Black man “put in his place.” Especially by a white woman. Especially through sex. Are his former mistresses playing into that? Do they see this moment as their opportunity to wield one of the only powers they have, the power of their sexuality?

Again, I don’t know anything at all about Tiger Woods or his wife or what may or have happened in their relationship. But I hope that we’re interested because of something far less sinister than our historically fraught race relations—love of gossip, maybe, love of seeing our heroes fail, demonstrate their weaknesses. And I would like to believe the women coming forward now are only doing so out of a desire for fame or financial gain. But in the United States, doesn’t race inform everything? Even the moments we choose to remain silent and the moments we choose publicity? Even infidelity?

 

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

www.andreascarpino.com

News Flash: New Study Finds that Humankind Still in Middle Ages

 

I have a neighbor who believes in eternal damnation. He thinks about 14th century cosmology while running his snow blower. He'd beat his wife and children but he doesn't want any trouble. He seldom speaks. He wears a New York Yankees cap though he lives in Iowa. Sometimes when its very cold he wears an Elmer Fud cap with the ear flaps.

One of my students collects serial killer trading cards. He is, of course, Lutheran. He doesn't need to go to church. He has the cards. They work for him. Inevitably he shuffles the deck when he can't sleep. I made that up. He probably keeps them in a little homemade box.

The children of the new Middle Ages fret and cry until they are put to work.

The hopeful continue to get up early.

Unlike the original dark ages there's not enough silence to go around. People wear head phones, ear buds, skull candy, or talk obsessively into portable phones.

Nature continues to loosen everything: door frames, rubber belts, strings of instruments...

Some people remain Gnostics and keep about them a vague sense of Paradise.

When the air rests the snow rests.

Words are disappearing all over the world.

You can see landscapes in the faces of strangers.

This would be a good moment for humor.

The Grim Reaper slips on a frozen turd and almost drops his scythe. (That was a howler in the old Middle Ages.)

Today it is very cold. I think I will go down to the library and warm my hands on the afterglow of histories.

 

S.K.

American Love

 

 

The photo above is of a painting of Increase Mather whose Puritan ghost still haunts the American psyche as surely as bubble gum sticks to your sister's hair--or your brother's hair--or the noggin of your best friend if, just perhaps, you were an only child. Increase Mather would have frowned at bubble gum and he would have frowned at your sister's hair. It is entirely possible that the only happy moment of Increase Mather's life was when he died of bladder failure. (That he died of bladder failure is true but we can't prove "the smile".)   

A Puritan ghost haunts every American relationship. It doesn't matter if you're straight or gay; single; married; divorced; or still in your latency. (Wasn't it Woody Allen who said he never had a latency period?)

Poor Tiger Woods. Driven by vanity and lust he was. A fallen man he is. And now, Lo and Behold, here comes the ghost of Increase to tell him that he'll never get to heaven because his very lust is the proof in the pudding that he's not among the elect. Tiger is going to hell. And he was always going to go there. There wasn't anything he could have done about the matter. Don't you dare smile.

Once when I was vacationing at a resort in Jamaica I told a friendly groundskeeper that there was no such thing as the devil. (The man had just climbed a palm tree for me, and procured a coconut, had opened it so I could drink the milk. He'd seen my blind man's white cane. He had wanted to help me somehow. He'd said that drinking from a coconut keeps away the devil.)  "There's no such thing as the devil," I'd said, taking the coconut. "Oh, oh, don't say that Mon!" he'd said, backing away and waving his machete at the clouds. "The devil, he everywhere."

The Puritan ghost believes that the devil is part of the "elect or non-elect" spiritual delivery system. And if you think you can't argue with that, you're right. In fact the only way you can win an argument with Puritans is by kicking them out of your country as the British did. And how thankful the Brits continue to feel about their ancestor's wisdom each and every day.

Young America didn't of course kick the Puritans out. We tried our best to ignore them but they got the upper hand with the school systems and the water supply and that's that.

Of course hell doesn't exist except in the public squares where Puritan ghosts carry on--talkative, hypocritical, afflicting projective evaluations of Mr. Woods' downfall.

Why didn't Thomas Jefferson kick the Puritans out?

 

S.K. 

Home Fires

Today's New York Times carries a reprinted post from Home Fires, a blog that carries writing by military men and women who have recently returned to the U.S. from foreign deployments. The writer of the Times piece is a fellow named Roman Skaskiw and his description of the mind numbing bureaucracy that precedes a battlefield deployment is so darkly funny that I was in fact reminded of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I was further delighted to discover tht Mr. Skaskiw lives in Iowa City. Perhaps I will meet him one of these days. Happy reading!

 

S.K.

Talking with Lance Mannion

   

 

 

I spoke early this morning with Mr. Mannion who is currently revisiting the films of the late director Robert Altman. We laughed about one of Altman's oddest flicks, his film adaptation of the comic strip "Popeye" starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall as Popeye and Olive Oyl. Lance, ever discerning, observed that aside from the movie's general oddness, it's chief failing resides in the script's reliance on a plot that's essentially extrinsic to the variorum life of the comic strip that inspired the undertaking. Now I confess to occasional abstruse thoughts, for instance I wonder if the world of post-industrial economics would ever have been possible without John Maynard Keynes' general theory of employment, interest, and money--which is a long way of saying that sometimes I'm looking for someone to blame for our current mess and if it isn't Keynes its going to be some other poor bastard as I sit in my study and practice my kama sutra of umbrage. But the fact that Popeye the film stinks owing to Jules Feiffer's infidelity to the Sunday comics is an example of perspicacity gone wild and I'm in awe. And all this time I thought it was just a dumb movie.

"It sure is a complex woild, ain't it Olive? Ca-ca-ca-ca-ca-ca! Deviated septum cleared up yet Olive?"

 

S.K. 

A Largely Lonely Triumph: Disability and Contemporary Higher Education

 

I have lately been reading "Helen Keller: A Life" by Dorothy Herrmann. The following passage jumped out at me:

It was largely a lonely triumph. As the twenty-year-old Helen soon discovered, college was not the "romantic lyceum" that she had envisioned. At Radcliffe, which had been forced to accept her as a student, she was more profoundly aware than ever before of her blindness and deafness. Only one of her classmates knew the manual finger language. Another girl had learned to write Braille, copying as a present Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, but Helen never heard from her after graduation. The other students tried to be friendly whenever they saw her at a local lunchroom, and according to Helen, "Miss Sullivan spelled their bright chatter into my hand." But she was painfully aware of the gulf between them, even though her classmates tried to bridge the gap by such lavish, awkward gestures as buying her a Boston terrier, which she promptly named Phiz. Presumably the dog would compensate her for what they were either too timid or too busy to give and what she secretly longed for: "the warm, living touch of a friendly hand."

And here's another revealing passage:

Of Helen's professors, only one, William Allan Neilson, who later became the president of Smith College, took the time to master the manual finger language so he could communicate directly with her. As Arthur Gilman was closely associated with the college, she and Annie were politely ignored by the rest of the faculty and administration, including the autocratic Agnes Irwin, the dean of Radcliffe, and the august Dr. Charles W. Eliot, the head of Harvard.

The snub did not surprise Annie, who was still furious about the plot at the Cambridge School to separate her from Helen. "I would much prefer to have people despise me as they certainly would if they guessed how full of distrust and contempt my heart is towards my fellow beings," she wrote to Hitz. "I know it pains you to hear me speak in this way and doubtless it will hurt you still more to have me write it: but I want you to know just how detestable I am. I find people hateful and I hate them. Mr. Gilman seemed to me a fair specimen of our noble race. . . ."

"Radcliffe did not desire Helen Keller as a student," Dean Irwin later explained to an interviewer. "It was necessary that all instruction should reach her through Miss Sullivan, and this necessity presented difficulties. They were overcome and all went well if not easily."

Helen was wounded whenever her classmates passed her on the stairs and in the lecture halls without a sign of acknowledgment. Most of her teachers were "impersonal as Victrolas," she recollected years later, and "the professor is as remote as if he were talking through a telephone."

**

I have a recurring sense that the realities of campus life for people with disabilities may not have changed much when it comes to what we nowadays call "inclusiveness" in higher education. We have laws of course, and assistive technologies, and surely we do better at providing reading materials in alternative formats. Yet for all that I think that at far too many colleges and universities in these United States one will find that where disability is concerned the faculty and administrators are still "impersonal as Victrolas". One need only visit the web site LD Online for an overview of the struggles that students with learning disabilities have faced and continue to face as they struggle to gain accommodations in the classroom. Or one can visit the U.S. Department of Justice page and see findings against American colleges and universities. See in particular Duke University but also Chatham University or University of Michigan or Swarthmore College or Colorado College or Millikin University or University of Chicago--each of these cases of discrimination against students or staff with disabilities is fairly representative of the landscape in post-secondary education--what we might call the "Autocracy of the Victrola" if you will. And if you believe (as I surely do) that these problems start earlier, you can visit the DOJ's web pages on school district discrimination settlements.

The issue of inclusion for people with disabilities in higher ed is a matter of culture: far too many colleges and universities fail to imagine that people with disabilities represent a cultural movement. (Let's leave aside for the moment the powerful statistical urgencies represented by the finding that nearly 10 per cent of matriculating freshmen are self-identifying as having a disability.)

A cultural understanding of disability means at its very core that students or staff with disabilities are our children, our sisters, daughters, sons, fathers and mothers, our veterans, our colleagues. But it means more than that: an academic or curricular awareness of disability means that our nation's institutions of higher learning will finally sense that what they "do" they do for all and with no oppositional and expensive and demeaning hand wringing. Such a position requires that disability services and academic culture--matters of curricular planning and cultural diversity be wedded as they should be.

In the meantime there are autocratic talking machines aplenty. One senses their steady banishment to the attics of history. Those of us who labor in higher education should do all we can to grease the skids.

 

S.K.

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A Landscape, My Desk

 

The photograph above was taken two days ago. It is a simple photo depicting my desk in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Several pages of an essay are spread across the desk and there's a pair of wire framed reading glasses and a red felt tipped pen atop the scattered pages. There's a glasses case with a lens cleaning cloth and a manila envelope with a door key. There's nothing remarkable about this photograph: its just a professor's desk. And yet to me this photo is utterly remarkable because I took it myself. And yes, I was reading those pages with those reading glasses and I was writing comments in the margins. I am only one small man and I am the bearer of one small life and surely this is a wide world with a billion narratives of joy or by turns of terrible injustice. Yet I like to think that getting some usable vision back means that others will also have their vision restored. I say this not because blindness is a bad thing--far from it, for indeed I've been writing for over a decade now about the ways that blindness functions as a form of epistemology--all disabilities offer the normative world riches of mental diversity. I have said so and will continue to say it. Yet for all that I can say that seeing, even if its not quite perfect (residual vision, low vision, call it what you will) is a marvel and working as I do with the University of Iowa's College of Ophthalmology I know that the cures for many kinds of blindness are very near. Perhaps we are living in dark times. But then again perhaps not. Some days I think it takes greater daring to say "perhaps not". So this is the landscape from my desk today in winter as a semester draws to a conclusion here in Iowa City.

 

S.K.