Planet of the Blind

What all Dogs Know

 

Image: Steve Kuusisto with "Vidal" (a handsome yellow Labrador)--his second dog from Guiding Eyes for the Blind:

 

I don’t want to be a celebrity. I just want to be my dog. Ipse dixit. 

 

When we hug dogs and smell their fur we’re fully realized. Then we drift back into reason and dogs see we’ve gone to a far room. Empathy matters then. Dogs know we’ve entered a fearful place in a crystal palace of abstractions. They touch our knees. They live only in amazement.

   

I don’t know as much about amazement as I should. D.H. Lawrence wrote:

 

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience

is considered. 

So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it 

the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth

and the insistence of the sun. 

 

I understand a dog’s amazement in our company is indeed mystic but only insofar as we consider it. 

 

I walked up the pale green avenue—7th avenue in New York—end of day, my great guide dog working to keep us safe, working us toward the postulate of arrival, the grandest of things, a task accomplished, going where we had to go. 

 

I was grieving for my father who had died only a month before. Grief is impossible to maintain so we engage it in small gasps. I saw my father was on an aerial bridge, high in the fading light, the span without end. My father had nowhere to go. And outside a monolithic computer store I began weeping. And my guide dog stopped, turned, saw me stricken, rose up on her hind legs and gently washed my face. I, who could not reason clearly, was being guided in more than one way. My father’s bridge vanished. I heard his laughter. “Beauty,” says the dog, “is very strong.”

 

We have to let the dogs in. Consider what they know. 

 

  

 

     

Why I'm a Crippled Poet

I am a poet who’s blind—I’m also short, dyspeptic, and addicted to savory treats. I feel better for having said so. This is, after all, national poetry month. 

 

Not long ago I attended a writing conference. A poet who has MS said she didn’t want to be a “wheelchair poet” by which (one presumes) she meant she didn't want her writing to be viewed through the lens of disability. Expanding this, I imagine she wouldn't want to be a black poet, a lesbian poet, or a really tall poet. In her view, poetry should be the product of an ex cathedra pronouncement—with a stroke of the pen we can erase all the nagging identity markers of humanity. 

 

Its possible to have a disability and live your life pretending you don’t have one. Plenty of people have done so. But getting away with this charade in literary terms means the imagination has been suborned—bribed—you’ve tricked yourself into thinking there’s a pot of gold that will be yours but only if there isn’t a hint of physical difference in your work. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor: “All the poets are strong, good looking, and above average.” 

 

Forget that our nation’s greatest poet Emily Dickinson had rod-cone dystrophy and couldn’t see in sunlight; forget Walt Whitman’s stroke; ignore bi-polar depression in the case of Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell;  dismiss Alexander Pope’s spinal disease—I’m sorry this is a long list—Sylvia Plath; Hart Crane; Ann Sexton; Allen Ginsberg; William Carlos Williams; forget them all. Disability doesn’t belong in poetry. God help you if you let it in—the critics will dismiss you from the poetry pantheon IN A FLASH since “great” poetry comes from the grandest of all human resources—the dis-embodied mind. (Picture it as a Star Trek arrangement, a brain in a plexiglass case with wires emanating from it.) 

 

When I went to college in the 1970’s English majors were introduced to “New Criticism”—and though this approach to literature was already fading by the time I graduated—poetry world still has a “New Criticism Hangover”. New Criticism argued the study of literature required no knowledge about the writer behind the work. The shaping of words, the wit, the poet’s irony, his literary allusions—these were all you had to know to discern meaning—or as I came to call it—the “soft, chewy center” of a poem. 

 

Back then everyone was still under the sway of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland”. We were instructed to read it as a compendium of allusions and to critique it as an allegory of modern exhaustion. No one (and I mean no one) raised his or her hand and said: “Wasn’t Eliot’s wife in a madhouse when he wrote this; and wasn’t he clinically depressed at the time?” We simply talked about the quest for the Holy Grail and the “objective correlative” and, if we were out to impress the prof, we looked up everything in the original Greek.

 

The New Criticism Hangover stipulates you mustn’t admit your complaining, belching, limping, loudly breathing, dis-articulated, lumbering body into poems. You may only lampoon or parody “other bodies” but this should be reserved for pathos or other symbolic distancing effects. 

Many of America’s leading poets do this—blindness represents profound isolation; deafness is simply a metaphor for lack of knowledge; deformity is nothing more than a Grand Guignol effect. If you write like a poet who has NCH you must never hint you have a body of your own. 

 

Of course there are messy feminist poets with their leaking womanly poems; and black poets with their jazzy outrages; but the New Critics Hangover School is uncomfortable with all that stuff. 

 

The “wheelchair poet” remark is part of this heritage—its a highly conscious position—to sequester the outlier body; to keep it in its sarcophagus; to tighten down all the screws. 

 

Me? I’m a messy “wheelchair poet” in the broadest sense. I’m demanding too. I cause trouble in public spaces. I’ll make you move your stone lions if they block the damned sidewalk. I’ll demand you provide me with a trash can at the Hilton so I can pick up my dog’s shit. If you don’t bring me the can, I’ll leave the shit right here. I’m loud. I’m really loud. I like hip-hop. I like Mahler symphonies and I turn them way up. I’m a poet who not only admits the defective body into literature—I think the imagination is starving for what that damned body knows. I happen to be blind. What do I know? I know things like this: 

 

 

“Only Bread, Only Light”

 

At times the blind see light,

And that moment is the Sistine ceiling,

 

Grace among buildings—no one asks

For it, no one asks.

 

After all, this is solitude,

Daylight’s finger,

 

Blake’s angel

Parting willow leaves.

 

I should know better.

Get with the business

 

Of walking the lovely, satisfied,

Indifferent weather —

 

Bread baking

On Arthur Avenue

 

This first warm day of June.

I stand on the corner

 

For priceless seconds.

Now everything to me falls shadow.”

 

Excerpt From: Stephen Kuusisto. “Only Bread, Only Light.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/1017I.l             

 

 

 

Did I mention William Blake? He had a disability too. 

 

Disability and the Radial Republic

US Postage stamp honoring guide dogs, picturing Morris Frank and his pioneering American guide dog Buddy, a German Shepherd. Beneath them it says: “Seeing For Me"

 

 

 

I haven’t been posting on my blog lately. Sometimes the limbed life of physical difference is overwhelming and one feels a temptation to lie down in the long ditch of sadness. The largest psychiatric hospital in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail. Veterans with disabilities  since 9/11 face extraordinary obstacles to employment. Rehabilitation services for all persons with disabilities are underfunded. 70% of the disabled remain unemployed in the US. Only one quarter of matriculating college students with disabilities actually graduates. Long standing charities like guide dog schools are experiencing a general decline in philanthropic donations—Baby Boomers and their children aren’t as generous as “The Greatest Generation” it seems. 

Meanwhile the toxic and shrill bloviating of politicians like Paul Ryan (who argue social programs are the root of America’s financial problems) helps to convince Americans that generosity and fairness are nearly unpatriotic—and would this were not so—for giving hard working and ambitious people with disabilities a shot at the American Dream ought to be deeply carved on the entablatures of our public buildings. 

 

What do I mean by a “radial republic”? Many things of course but principally a renewal of the social contract—our American contract which has grown stronger after every war and which has assured veterans with disabilities will be properly assisted, treated, educated, and welcomed. What do I mean by a radial republic? As we nurture disabled vets we assist all Americans with disabilities. Many people know I’m a guide dog user but I’m willing to bet that most of my readers don’t know that guide dogs (or “Seeing-Eye Dogs” as they’re sometimes called in the US in homage to North America’s first guide dog school which is named “The Seeing-Eye”) are the product of rehabilitation work in Germany at the end of WW I. 

 

Halfway through the First World War a German physician, Dr. Gerhard Stalling introduced a blind veteran to his pet dog. The two men were in a hospital garden when Stalling was suddenly called away. When he came back the soldier whose name is now lost, was laughing as the dog licked his hands. Stalling saw dogs might be trained to guide the blind. The war had produced an astonishing number of blind veterans. The total number of wounded from the first world war remains unknown but during the four and a half years of the conflict 230 soldiers died every hour. 11% of France’s entire population was killed. The ten month Battle of Verdun in 1916 caused over a million casualties. Chlorine and mustard gas killed nearly 90,000 troops and left one and a quarter million men permanently disabled. Blindness was a common result of gas warfare and one of John Singer Sargent’s most famous paintings (“Gassed” 1919) depicts a ragged line of soldiers, their eyes bandaged, all the men walking in a line, each man’s hand on the shoulder of the man before him—with two sighted men in the lead. The sky is yellow above a field of corpses. 

 

Trench warfare included working dogs. Germany employed 30,000 dogs in the field and their work was divided according to need. Sentry dogs were used on patrols. They were taught to give warning when a stranger entered a secure area. Scout dogs were also used. Their job was more refined—they accompanied soldiers on reconnaissance and had to keep quiet. They could detect the enemy at a distance of a 1000 yards, “scenting” and pointing. 

 

Casualty or 'Mercy' dogs, also known as 'Sanitatshunde' were trained to find wounded or dying soldiers in the heat of battle. They carried medical supplies on their backs. The wounded could use the supplies if they were able, or they could count on the Mercy Dog to wait with them as they died.

 

Dogs also ran long distances across battle fields carrying messages, often during artillery attacks. The heroism of working dogs was well known on all sides. The Germans employed 30,000 dogs during the war. British and French forces had approximately 20,000 dogs in the field.    

 

The guide dog was a consequence of war. Because dogs had proved themselves capable of miraculous work under the worst battle conditions ever seen, it was clear to Stalling war dogs could be trained to help the blind navigate post-war streets which were suddenly filled with automobiles. With a small group of military dog handlers Stalling began training dogs for blind soldiers. Old photos show trainers and veterans working with German Shepherds, all the men wearing peaked hats and long wool coats. In addition to harnesses the dogs wore tunics bearing the Red Cross logo—the insignia of the battle field “mercy” dog.   

 

Stallings idea captivated the public’s imagination. An official guide dog school opened in in Oldenberg in 1916. The sight of veterans and dogs working in traffic was powerful and seemed natural. In popular imagination blind people had always been accompanied by dogs: a first century mural in Roman Herculaneum depicts a blind man with his dog.  A 19th century woodcut from the United States shows a blind man from Boston being lead by a dog and crossing the Commons. Such pairings were likely the products of serendipity—the blind and their dogs forged relationships by necessity. The history of blindness is filled with sorrow. Before reforms like Social Security and organized rehabilitation services were created in the 20th century, the blind often begged for food and shelter—some played musical instruments—many wandered searching for compassion. Dogs helped ease their loneliness and offered untrained navigational assistance.    

  

Sometimes I like to joke by saying the guide dog is the only good thing every invented by the German Army. This may be true. But what is true is that rehabilitation programs for disabled veterans impact the broader republic. Nowadays when an autist, or a deaf person is accompanied by a trained service dog we can and should give thanks to Dr. Stalling. And in turn we should be seeking with all our Republic’s strength to carry on the difficult work of lifelong optimism that disability rehabilitation and education calls for. 

 

I’m not fond of the term “wounded warrior” precisely because disability isn’t a wound—it may heal in some dimensions, but in others it will always be present. A commitment to people with disabilities in general and to veterans in particular means understanding the full arc of life. The radial republic means giving people with disabilities and equal shot at education, travel, vacation, family, housing, medicine, you name it. 

 

Making this happen benefits all.

 

 

Thank you to The Huffington Post

I'd like to thank The Huffington Post for allowing me the privilege of being an occasional guest blogger.  I am honored to have this opportunity.

In this post titled Dogs on the Playing Field I discuss the role of professionally trained service dogs serving people with disabilites in the U.S. today and ask (and answer) this question: ...even 23 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and 70+ years since the introduction of guide dogs in the U.S. life in public isn't always friendly. Lately it seems more unfriendly than at any time since the late 1930s when the blind had to fight for the right to enter a store or ride a public bus. What's going on?

I am grateful to The Huffington Post for allowing me the use of their platform to explore this issue.  You would "make my day" by stopping by and sharing THIS POST with your social circles.  Thank you!

Photo: author Steve Kuusisto being guided by yellow Labrador, guide dog "Corky", circa 1995.

Dog Schmooze

Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“ has just been released. Listen to Steve read "Letter to Borges in His Parlor" in this fireside reading via YouTube. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled What a Dog Can Do. Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com

NPR: Unfit to Write About Disability

There's a piece by Chana Joffee-Walt on NPR's website entitled "Unfit for Work: the Startling Rise of Disability in America" which is so ill informed about its subject it reminds me of one of those Ronald Reagan stump speeches. Driven by anecdote rather than cultural analysis, her thesis is simple: the number of unemployed Americans receiving disability benefits has skyrocketed over the past twenty years. She intimates without fully declaring it, that there's a vast social "scam" taking place--in the absence of good middle class jobs, and following the "end welfare as we know it" enterprise, poor people simply decline into aches and pains, thereby getting themselves declared unfit for work.

Alas, Joffee-Walt hasn't done her homework, a matter that may be inapparent to many of NPR's readers, just as Reagan's audiences were unaware that behind the curtain the Gipper believed "facts were stupid things" and was untroubled by any and all of the misrepresentations of social programs that propelled his candidacy for president. Such arguments depend on pathos rather than facts. Joffee-Walt fails to address the biggest fact in the room, that disability is a social construction even more than a medical category, and in turn the artificial architectural and physical constraints marshaled against people with disabilities are both products of history and the industrial revolution. One wishes she had bothered to read Lennard J. Davis' essay "Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century". Disability is entirely economic and has been so since the move to industrial models of labor. Those who cannot work in the factory were labeled "disabled" and that model of human economic utility largely continues to this day. Reasonable accommodations are the solution for workers whose physical capacities decline but as any seasoned person with a disability who has managed to remain in the workforce knows, obtaining accommodations is often so difficult, so humiliating, so Kafka-esque, most people give up.

70% of the blind remain unemployed in the United States, many of whom might well be able to work with the proper accommodations but employers don't want to provide accommodations fearing the expense, though in point of fact most workplace accommodations are relatively inexpensive. Think of a laborer, someone who is required to lift boxes. He suffers a ruptured disc. He can't lift boxes. Perhaps he could be retrained to work with software. Most businesses resist this kind of accommodation, preferring medical and social determinations that are no more sophisticated than those the Victorians had.

Another way to say this is that a nation that believes in work is also a nation that believes in accommodations. Joffee-Waitt misses this dynamic and ongoing dialectic and fails to illuminate the true nature of disability and joblessness. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“ has just been released. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled What a Dog Can Do. Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com

United Airlines Casually Violates Air Carrier Access Act, Blames Blind Man

Yesterday while flying United Airlines Flight 882 from Portland, OR to Chicago, I was given an inaccessible seat. It was the middle seat in a three seat row, where, under the seats in front of me I discovered a set of metal stanchions, which, in turn made it impossible for me to get my guide dog safely underneath the seat--hence, out of the foot space shared with other passengers. Then, the airline stuck two people on either side of me.They asked me to get up so a non-English speaking passenger could get all the way in to the window seat. I complained and said they should reseat me where I could actually sit. They in turn looked at me as if I might be some kind of half human cockroach. The airplane was a Boeing 757 which has bulkhead seats in an exit row. People with disabilities are barred from sitting in an exit row. First class was full. Under the Air Carrier Access Act, my right to fly safely and in comfort is not up for grabs. But what really bothers me, even a day later was the easy dismissal of my situation by the United flight attendants. I learned from a fellow passenger that the crew even managed to gossip about me--was I some kind of cranky man? United, your record in this area has not been good for a long time. You embarrassed yourselves yesterday. But you had a full flight, didn't you? 

Disability Rights and Education in the Election Season

The latest report from the Department of Education on disability rights enforcement and guarantees is out and can be read in an accessible pdf at:

http://www2.ed.gov/documents/news/section-504.pdf

 

In this election season it's useful to remember the infamous moment during the primaries when Texas governor Rick Perry announced that if he became president "three departments of government would be gone of the first day". Of course everyone remembers that he couldn't remember the three he was planning to eliminate, a gaffe that ruined his campaign, but how many remember that "Education" was a department he did remember? My point (such as it is) is that MItt Romney if elected will pick up that cudgel despite his declaration during Wednesday's debate that he cares about education and about children with disabilities. Don't you believe it! 

The Morning Coffee Bioethics Blues

It’s early and this promises to be a long day. I have to fly to New York tonight where I’ll be speaking in the morning to high school guidance counselors about the honors program I direct at Syracuse University. It’s early though. I can still pack, walk my dogs, finish some business. The mind enjoys its small compensations. 

 

The mind likes coffee. The mind does not like contemporary bioethicists who subborn people with disabilities into categories of further abjection. Peter Singer and his posse. 

If you parse the thinking of the Singerites down to its minimalist acorn their thinking is that medicine is aimed at curing people, not assuring people the most dignified and diverse lives possible. Why am i thinking about this? It’s early and this promises to be a long day. I will likely be treated poorly by New York City taxi drivers, maybe airline personnel. My disability marks me as a sub-caste and there’s no getting around it. And American academics hold the same prejudices. The mind likes coffee. 

 

Last night I was explaining to my stepson how metaphorical thinking contributes to human manners of inequality. I told him that we think imagination is a terrific moral force, but in fact it’s equally primitive and awful--a thought he hadn’t quite allowed himself. My point was that symbolic thinking will kill us if we don’t master it. Just call me Ernst Cassirer. 

 

The utilitarian idea that good lives are those that are flawless, or can be made so is tied to the industrial revolution--good lives are lives that can be devoted to the factories. 

 

The mind likes coffee. 

 

Clearly I haven’t had enough this morning. 

 

Of Peter Singer:

 

 

“In an interview with The Independent newspaper in England, Singer said he would definitely kill a disabled newborn baby.

He indicated he would do so "if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole."

http://www.lifenews.com/2006/09/12/bio-1766/

 

 

 

Watch Out! A Blind Man Has Entered Your Shop!

I apologize for bringing my guide dog into your store. I apologize for needing your help. And I’m sorry you must point me in the right direction. I understand your day is precious. I know you were having a perfect meditation before I entered your establishment--you were navigating the circle within the circle, the dances of the gods known only to Proclus. And now, here I am, the walking manifestation of decay, a perilous figure from a lost battle. 

So much happens in the hubbub of the city, bells and parades, and then a blind man walks into your shop. You poor sonofabitch! Watch out! It might be catching! 

Yes, you should think of me as the soft breeze of calamity. 

Meanwhile, what am I up to? I want to buy a book at Barnes & Noble, but I’m told I can’t come in. I want to buy some batteries at the computer store on 6th avenue and Lo! I’m told I can’t come in. I want to take a taxi, and you guessed it, I can’t get in. 

Let’s review: books, batteries, and a business meeting. Not bad for a man who symbolizes malevolent fate! 

 

 

Thinking About Disability, Just After Lunch

"In most circumstances, disease is not an inevitable outcome of a single event occurring at a point in time but generally a probabilistic result of many events, each impinging on the organism at separate times and each producing its own sequence of biological reactions. The sum total of these events produces sufficient discomfort to the person to be recognized as illness....

 

Although the ultimate tissue reaction that has clinical expression may be the same in different persons, suggesting a uniform illness and, by extension, a disease entity in its own right, each person nevertheless probably has a unique and separate illness by virtue of the probability that no one else has the same combination and permutation of antecedents and their time relations. In this sense, every disease consists of multiple diseases; in this sense, too, there are no diseases but only sick people."

 

W. Jeffrey Fessel, MD

 

In this sense too, there are no disabilities but only physical life in relation to time. Taken this way disability is simply an analogy to the multiple dynamics of entropy, for which, at present there are no solutions.