Planet of the Blind

Lecturing of Orpheus

I like my students--always have, whether I was teaching at my undergraduate alma mater Hobart and William Smith or at The Ohio State University, or here at the University of Iowa. (The graduate students are a salon of sorts, members of an atelier, lucid and earnest and beautifully strange). Yes I like the undergrads. They are filled with admixtures of hope and cynicism, doubt and wonder; the ones who love literature anyway, they've got an imperial affliction, something invisible has gotten into them and they're wholly capable of visions.  

This morning we talked about the Orphic voice in poetry. We spoke in particular about Robert Duncan but we took detours into John Keats and we jumped far into the illud tempus and mythic rings of Carl Jung and German mysticism. All on a normal Thursday in late November as the leaves fell and the trees looked skeletal for winter.

We can choose to be Orpheus, to travel in the lands of myth and bring back musical life. We can choose our own stories. We can choose to love the best that's in spirituality. We can make songs and poems from the better histories of love. We can choose to be healthy. We spoke of these things. We talked together in an institutional brick building on the campus of a big state university about the living virgin and the words within words that make it still possible to dream. We had in short "the Humanities" and we were sublimely held in the wonder of myth.

I worry that in these times of budget cutting Orpheus will be the first to go.

This would be a mistake for as the poet Charles Simic has written: "The poet asks the philosopher in us to consider the world in its baffling presence."

That very act of consideration is what the education types call critical thinking.

The gods do not play. They make the conditions for our thinking.

True thinking rests in the ability to make of bewilderment a useful sequence of stories.

Well, that's how the morning went.

I would like the state legislature to know.

 

S.K.

Rejection Connection (The Writing Life)

 

Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

 

Even though I’ve never played sports, I used to love listening to David Citino, my advisor at Ohio State, talk sports, the way he saw poetry in the swing of a baseball bat, the way he described a final second touchdown. As my advisor, David gave me innumerable pep talks that could have come straight out of a locker room (if the locker room in question was one where poetry mattered). My favorite ended with a quote from Wayne Gretzky: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

I’ve been thinking about that quote often these past couple of weeks, as journal rejection letter after journal rejection letter has found its way into my mailbox. Rejections are an integral part of publishing poetry; everyone will tell you that. Well-known journals may publish less than 1% of the submissions they receive, which I imagine means I’m more likely to get struck by lightening and die in a plane crash on the same day than have them select my poems for publication. I know all this, but still, when a string of rejection letters comes my way, it becomes harder and harder to brush them off, it becomes harder and harder to keep sending out work.

Especially when there are so many ways to be rejected: the soulless statement on cardstock that could have been processed by robots, the handwritten note saying something to the effect of “your poems almost made it in this issue. Thanks anyway.” I’ve received a rejection letter in which the editor took the time to tell me my poems were all lists and he prefers poems that “say something.” Of course, there’s also the email rejection that I’ve opened first thing on a Saturday morning. And the rejection that appeared in my inbox less than 24 hours after I submitted my work. And the disemboweled rejection that was so torn up and stained it looked like the awfulness of my work personally affronted the reader.

Of course, every writer has these stories. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was initially rejected for publication (by Andre Gide). So was George Orwell’s Animal Farm (rejected by T.S. Eliot). For most of us, submitting to literary journals is at least sometimes an exercise in futility. But we spend the time and take the risk and pay the postage because sometimes we succeed.

In the past couple of months, I’ve been failing more than I’ve been succeeding. I keep thinking about Wayne Gretzky, of whom I know almost nothing aside from his quote. I keep thinking about David’s pep talks. So I keep folding my little poems in the mail and telling myself I’m taking the shot, I have to keep taking the shot. And eventually my shots will meet their mark again.

 

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

www.andreascarpino.com

Assorted Thoughts without Cashews

I must tell you betimes that I am no confectioner. I can cook a little bit. Once a decade I am roused to bake a pie. That pie is usually fit for my friends, who in turn are never forced to be polite. Living of course should seem a laugh but not a matter of forced sentiments. Can anything be worse than the mechanic speech of companions forcibly chomping on bad pie? Yes, perhaps some things are worse. The last administration for example. Now I am declining from my grand theme to the dingy details. Perhaps we should force feed the GOP with bad pie?

But as this brief post is a confection...

I felt humorless today. Humorless and hungry. I get this way when I'm vaguely dispirited. Alright, screw it, I get this way when I'm pissed off. The angrier I am, the hungrier. It's a wonder I'm not as big as Luciano Pavarotti. Clearly it's time to make a pie. A pie made from long struggles with mankind, the pie of continual straining. A pie of thunder and fighting. A fit supper for veteran's day. A fit supper for a nation fighting two wars it cannot win, declining all a day by refusing to pay for these foreign engagements. 

"What about the children," you ask?  "Surely you don't want them to eat such fare? I mean, for the Love of God!"

I say the kiddies should eat a baby version of this struggle pie. Theirs should be spun like cotton candy from the weight of sky and cloud. The sooner they start eating global warming the better.

Let's add corrupt, unsubstantiated news; final innocence; desks and computers, (curse on those who use both PCs and Macs); dull cigarettes; pity; hieratic ambitions; new music; digital anything; the unsounded depths of Wall Street; proxy protesters; loud celebrities; druids, (yes, even druids, though of course by druids I mean the whole New Age crowd); cosmopolitan sympathies; rural nightfall; sweethearts; neighbors; alien sighs of the bourgeoisie; muses; wine and wine drinkers; the decaying woods; the immortal desolation of organized religion; old kettles, old bottles, old bones, old rags...

Things being various, how 'bout some pie?

Here's pie for the thin lipped arms merchants; for all the snakes in the gardens...

Blood pays dearly for the recipe.

The pie of real estate and of commodities is only moderately satisfactory.

Do they eat this pie on the dead ground of heaven?

Are they figuring out the pie in China?

Do not go gentle into that good pie.

But here's to a good pie, eaten fairly, sagaciously, a blueprint pie of hope and of communitarian lives...

Here's to pie in the high fields, pie set before young and old, green or golden...

No more pie like dust or bleak twigs.

No more pie the scheme of generations...

How easy after this to make a real pie.

 

S.K.

Andre Breton and the Haycock

 

 

The peasants are erecting statues of hay

Because the scattered clouds are a spotted disc

Because hopelessness breathes a blue film

Because the foot of nature kicks their asses--

O radiance trembling in the bones of my hands  

O Wedding-Guest!

The cathedral will never be finished in time

Read and repeat as needed

 

S.K.

Cleanliness is Next to Love

 

by Laura Castle

We've all heard the phrase, "Cleanliness is Next to Godliness." I don't know about that, but it is certainly next to self-respect and comfort!  Having grown up with filth so disgusting that visitors to my childhood home muttered "filthy pigs, how can anyone live like this?" as they fled, I am intensely aware of the difference a reasonably clean home makes in every area of life--the reaction of others to us, how we feel about ourselves, our level of comfort and even our safety.

In homes with children, a filthy house is considered to be child neglect. Filth contributes to disease, cleanliness promotes health. As children, my brothers and sisters and I had severe, recurring boils which our father would worsen by popping and squeezing as we screamed in pain. I am sure these boils resulted from the bacteria in our filthy home.  When I was ten years old, I went almost a full year without taking a bath, because I could not bear to get into the stopped-up filthy tub with decaying bugs floating on top. I remember the shame and horror I felt, knowing that children were supposed to bathe every day, yet being unable to force myself into the horrible tub. This combined with a terror of being trapped in the bathroom with a father who had no sense of privacy (our bathroom door did not fully close, much less lock) made me a dirty, unkempt little girl indeed. My parents did not notice or care that I did not bathe, but I was bullied unmercifully in school because of my appearance (and probably my smell).

For years into my  adulthood, I carried on the pattern of filth that I grew up with - dirty dishes and spills all over the kitchen, unwashed clothes covering the floor,  cockroaches as big as a man's thumb swarming through the house. Let's not even go into how my bathroom looked. I lived alone as no one could bear to room with me. But, as depression and anxiety forced me to look for ways to heal myself, I discovered the miracle of cleanliness in my late twenties. One day, inspired by a book, I spent the entire day scrubbing, washing, straightening, dusting and organizing. By the end of the day, my home was clean enough that a visitor could walk in without disgust. That day began a new life for me as I discovered the joy and pride that cleanliness can bring.

Over the years, I have accumulated housekeeping tips from books, videos and websites. My housekeeping has continued to improve as I learned, for example, that bugs love to congregate under refrigerators and ovens looking for crumbs, so I move these appliances frequently to keep the critters away.

The safety aspect of a clean home is particularly vital when there are children present or any kind of disability in a family member. As the wife of a man with walking and balance problems, I have learned the importance of keeping floors clean, uncluttered and dry. . . And yes, Paul takes an equal share in the housework and this column is intended just as much for men as for women.

Attention to cleanliness is such a lovely aspect of self-care and, in my case anyway. a better antidote to anxiety and depression than any pill I could ever take.These devastating  emotions are caused by a feeling of not having control over our lives. But the way we keep our home is one area in which we do have total control. No, a house does not stay clean, especially when there are children and pets present, but it can always be made clean again.
I have learned that cleanliness is so much more than just the absence of filth. It is a comfort, a haven, a safety net, and most of all, a way of showing love for ourselves and others. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go wash this morning's breakfast dishes!

 

Laura Castle lives in Florida and writes on issues of child abuse. She is a frequent commentator on POTB.

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.