It’s been a year since I had a major heart attack. The surgery was brutal even as it was successful. When I was in intensive care I fell in and out of consciousness. One morning I woke to see a black bear walking past the glass wall separating my room from the external corridor. I asked for strawberries because that’s what the bear would have eaten. I believed in that bear.
Now, one full year has gone by. I’m still discussing things with the bear.
**
I recall Wordsworth:
“Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
‘This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain?’”
**
Two halves of a life were debating, rather bitterly, like unhappy twins. Both had studied the classical methods of confession so were voluble but insincere. Neither half knew how to escape forward. Anyway, it was late in the day when shadows spread across the lawn like symbols of past actions when the transitive life stood between them—one may call her “future pneuma perfect” though it scarcely matters for she can take care of herself.
“What,” she said, “causes you to think the past is definitely settled? Don’t you know it’s changing right now, beneath your feet?” “This is the future of resignation—patience, day-dreams, small plantings…”
**
My bear is F.P.P.—the future pneuma perfect is both in my head and out in front of me.
**
In turn I must ask “what does it mean when I say I’m after something?” And what does forgetting mean while going forward? And what the hell is forward? I’m Karl Jasper on methadone.
**
Once, when I was a college student, on a study abroad trip to the Greek islands, I rented a motor bike because my pals were doing it. Some of them knew I couldn’t see, or at least I imagined they knew, for I while paraded around without asking for help, I was halting and clumsy. But it was the late 70’s: no one had any language for disability and hey, I was an unlikely guy and so were we all. We rented our motorbikes on the island of Santorini—a dark crescent that rises steeply from the sea—it’s all that remains of a larger island that vanished in a volcanic flash in the 16th century BCE.
We rented the motorbikes in Fira from a man who was listening to a football match on the radio and who scarcely noticed us. He didn’t need to see our licenses, only required a credit card and we were off. I followed a boy named Roger who wore a red windbreaker. If I stayed very close I could track his jacket with my left eye. I saw his rectangle of red bobbing up and down. It was the flag in a bullfight. The sharp curves and severe hills of Santorini wound like a lethal high speed ribbon under my wheels. I swayed and dipped but I held that red flag in view, or imagined I did, and unlike my classmates, I saw nothing of the panoramic ocean or cliffside ruins, or pelicans crossing the road on foot.
Thank you Karl Jasper, I think…and thank you Bear.
**
So now I’m old and I still don’t know what its about. “It” which can be attached to the possessive but can also stay bound in itself like Hamlet’s nutshell.
Once, (again) on a trip to China with multiple artists, I was the only one to hit a ceremonial bell by throwing a coin.
Thank you Karl and Bear.
**
We children hid among trees and watched the old woman who we’d been told “had a lobotomy”and we saw her as a witch. We dug into our foxhole. She came out of her trailer home and swept her garden path with a broom. We were speechless, ambiguous little creatures in the presence of nameless adult suffering.
This is why memories in the middle of the night can’t be assuaged by TV. The sadness of others carries us. From moment to moment I get down on my knees and touch the ground with my hands. If forgiveness isn’t possible at least I can tap some Morse Code. Dear defenseless dead, do your teeth still chatter? Dear Bear…
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.
Planet of the Blind 