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Off the Page: Notebooks of an Occasional Optimist (A Rededication)

For almost twenty years this space has been called “Planet of the Blind”—a nod to my first memoir and, for a long time, an accurate description of its subjects: blindness, accessibility, the struggles of opposing ableism. That work isn’t done — it never will be — but the blog has quietly outlived its name. Over the years I’ve used this space to write about disability rights, but also about history, horror films, wordplay, literary biography, and the jottings of other writers. Its time for the title to reflect the writing.

So: welcome to “Off the Page”

I’ve always been drawn to the notebook as a form. Years ago I co-edited (with poets David Weiss and Deborah Tall)  “The Poet’s Notebook” for W.W. Norton, a collection of the fast jottings, marginalia, and half-formed thoughts that poets keep before a poem exists. There’s something clarifying about the notebook— unpolished, occasional, closer to thinking out loud than to argument. This blog has always worked that way too, even when I didn’t say so. A post about accommodation law sits next to a post about Bela Lugosi which in turn sits next to a fragment from an actual notebook. That miscellany was never a flaw. It was the point.

As for “occasional optimist” — I chose the phrase carefully. More than thirty years of working on accessibility at universities, watching the gap between institutional assurance and grassroots reality, teaches you not to be naive. Optimism, for me, isn’t a temperament so much as a discipline — something closer to what Gramsci meant by pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I don’t expect things to go well. I do the work anyway, and every so often — reading a poem, watching a student’s reading habits change, standing at a lectern in a room full of people who came out for disability poetry on a summer night in Washington — I catch myself feeling something like hope. Occasional is the right word. Earned, not constant.

So this is still the same notebook it always was: kept in the old commonplace tradition of writing things down because they mattered enough, that day, to write down. The title’s new. The habit of attention behind it isn’t.

Thank you for reading, then and now.

— Stephen Kuusisto

Finch

The poem you are holding 

Is the true story of what never happened.

My bird, a finch, came back today 

Though where she went 

I’ll never know.

She had once 

A broken leg 

Which has healed brokenly—

Also the true story

Of what never happened—

I’m not a truth teller.

This morning 

Wind crosses the lake

Like a speech 

On self control.

Stay awake, it says. 

My bird, a finch, came back. 

She says we don’t heal.

She says when not flying

A crooked walk is acceptable.

She says many things

In the way of birds in poems.

 

 

Between Optimism and Hope There We Stand

There’s an opinion piece titled “The world is being driven to the brink by thugs and dictators, but there is a route to a brighter future” in today’s Guardian.

Simon Tisdall writes:

“The future lies not in the hands of political thugs and killers, of dictators and megalomaniacs, but in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. It depends on millions upon millions of individual daily acts of kindness, selflessness, faith and courage. So don’t lose heart. Keep your eyes open. Unblock your ears. And don’t look down!”

I like this viewpoint. Still, I’m put in mind of Terry Eagleton’s book “Hope Without Optimism” for several reasons. Eagleton argues that optimism is a temperament. Hope is essentially an act of will and imagination. As Eagleton puts it: “To believe that a situation will turn out well because you are an optimist is as irrational as believing that all will be well because you are an Albanian.” Hope is the other animal.  Eagleton again: “Utopia could only be achieved through an intense hopelessness.”

I suspect Simon Tisdall knows this viewpoint. We are now in intense hopelessness. It’s a lousy neighborhood. And Eagleton: “True hope is needed most when the situation is at its starkest.”

Individual acts of kindness do not necessarily spring from false optimism (though they can) but instead from the almost universal desire of human beings to help that man or woman with a broken leg. We have been healers for 15,000 years. That’s hope. Tisdall’s argument that power resides at the local level is not wrong.

Jerome Groopman writes (in his remarkable book “The Anatomy of Hope”) that hope is:  “the elevating feeling we experience when we see… a future that is amenable to reasonable pursuit” and I like that pursuit.  Groopman who is an oncologist understands that there’s a practicality to hope, hope which we must use with all our might. We must not pretend otherwise.

I was heartened to read Tisdall this morning for the worlds of social media are clogged with pessimism. I see poets attacking poets, disability rights activists clobbering other cripples, internecine spats everywhere. But we should be reminded that despair is a choice, one to which the old men wish you to succumb.

If I’m an occasional optimist this is because I understand the nuances both of temperament and intellect. It’s likely I’m an optimist by means of hardwiring. Hope is practical.

 

 

Batman and the Baba Yaga

Nietzsche: “All truth is simple…” 

Is that not doubly a lie?

Not if you can get away with it. 

(As if “all truth” is what? A glass of water?)

Can you imagine serving on a submarine with Friedrich?

**

An old shell am I, O Lady of Zephyrium…

**

When winter comes from the radio you know tragedy. 

**

In this notebook, which is its own crude comic, we laugh as Batman steps on a frozen turd. Robin says: “Oh, that’s going to take some scrubbing!” 

**

Ding Dong. 

“Who’s there?”

“The Baba Yaga!”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to collect your breeze of inspiration.”

(Sound of chicken legs….)

**

What if Batman opened the cave’s door to find the Baba Yaga?

And she said; “eat more children!”

**

Baba teaches Batman how to fly in a mortar and pestle. Robin, the sidekick takes notes.

**

I view a “sidekick” as something we all need, disabled or not. As a boy who was often lonesome because other kids didn’t want to play with a blind child I admired heroes and their sidekicks—Batman and Robin, the Lone Ranger and Tonto. I didn’t yet understand that a sidekick, as a concept, is un-American since it means no one can get the job done by himself. That’s something the disabled really know about. 

And this is how the notebook works. Gliding in its mortar and pestle through the birch trees.

Early, So Early and Thinking of Franz Liszt

I like writing early in the morning. The day’s many entanglements haven’t gotten me. Things are still quiet in my neighborhood. Soon enough there will be the doorbell. The person on business from Porlock will arrive. 

Now here’s the thing: I wish for the faint sound of someone playing the piano. I do. Once upon a time when I was walking an unfamiliar neighborhood in Houston, TX of all places I heard someone playing Liszt because their window was open though it was Texas and hot as Satan’s outhouse. 

It was lyric in the inhospitable: “Tre sonetti di Petrarca” and Liszt with his cataracts, his dropsy, his failing heart, asthma, insomnia, Liszt placed his hands on my shoulders. 

And this from Anthropic’s Claude: 

“It was a peculiar late chapter: a man who’d been Europe’s first great musical superstar spending his last decades as a wandering, half-monastic figure, writing music decades ahead of its time.”

 

 

Optimism, Pangloss, Skateboard

Optimism. Such a hopeless word, outdated like macassar oil. Late capitalism and gangster nations (sometimes the same thing) push environmental disaster. Human rights are, as always, being quashed. This O word is the fluff of nostalgia. Here comes Pangloss on his skateboard. 

And yet I’ve declared my self a cautious optimist. What in the hell does it mean? And who am I to declare such a thing when the world is quite literally in flames? 

One thing I know for sure is that disability has a peculiar demand, perhaps not for everyone who identities this way, but the demand is there and it says get on with it. Get up. Put on your frigging shoes even when you can’t imagine leaving your house. I have whole days when I can’t think about leaving my house. Depression and weariness. You just know you’re going to have another unhappy day in Able-ville. By now I’ve written about this too many times to count. 

What I’m talking about it the hard choice to get up. The hard choice to picture something better. The refusal to give in. Its likely I feel like crap. But I’m going out into the  indifferent world. Bully for me, you say. I’m with you. Bully. But I don’t have the privilege to succumb to hopelessness. I just don’t. There’s just no way I can afford it. 

Pangloss. Skateboard. Candle in the wind. I’m putting my blind shoulder to the wheel. 

Maria Popova frames this as a balance rather than a blend: “critical thinking without hope is cynicism, while hope without critical thinking is naïveté.” The Marginalian  

There it is. 

Dear Blue—the Boy I Was

Dear Blue: I wasn’t really a blind child at all, but one of the ghosts who rang Strindberg’s doorbell. I see this now but only through the poem. Strindberg imagined spirits were ringing his doorbell, saw them in the ambient light at twilit windows–things a blind child would know as facts rather than fancies. So in my private life, I’m a practical joker without doing a thing. I ring the old man’s doorbell with nothing more than a glance. I’ve hidden myself in the bushes. I will leap out when the lights go dark at his windows. I shall invade his solitude by means of the newly invented electric doorbell. I will do all this with nothing more than a glance. 

Do you understand, Dear Blue, one night some thirty years ago, I met a drunken man in a bar in Estonia. He was very old. He claimed to have been a childhood prankster who tormented Strindberg. I thought then, and think now, how beautiful and sweetly unclear the facts are. I think how the unconscious works by means of animal faith. We go forward and upward by means of trust and laughter. I’d have tormented the old play write if I’d had a chance. Instead  I grew up with a blind child’s arrow, a different trick, for I hit things askance and often produced a slanted music–an effect adagio and almost wrong though the credulous mind embraces it after all. Blue, I like Beethoven’s last string quartets. I like broken windows in abandoned country houses. I like crows on telephone wires and Boolean Algebra and rain in winter. I like whispers. I’ve always liked whispers. 

Claudia Rankine: Falling for Time…

There’s an early moment in Claudia Rankine’s new hybrid memoir “Triage” that’s more than an incitement to keep reading, its an “ars vivendi” as she describes her frequent and artful falling to the ground with a friend:

“There, on the ground, we were as free as we would have ever been—that breathlessness.”

I’ve never had a friend with whom I could fall to the ground. I’m not even certain I would know how to fall. I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s line in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: wrote: “I would like to learn — Could you tell me how to grow — or is it unconveyed — like Melody — or Witchcraft?”

With Rankine’s falling there is both. Her friend with whom she falls she calls “the Theorist”. They meet first in college. Rankine is Jamaican, the Theorist comes from Ramallah:

“Assaulted by settler forces forcing their will at every checkpoint, the theorist was alive to the randomness of cruelty, the injustice of militarized injustice, the mandate of colonizing rage. They ran at eighteen from Ramallah but weren’t saved by the running. One is always in danger. One is either prey or waiting to be prey, they once said flatly. We were born into occupation, apartheid, war, we are at war, there is war on us. Later, running allowed them to lament, distances contract, running can take you only so far before everywhere is here. No way is out.”

No way is out but falling and witchcraft. The melody of it. One can’t be saved by this, but merely given more time. 

Clutching Jars of Jam in Their Arms

Poetry is to prayer as wheat to bread. Alas too few poets  have strawberry jam.  

**

Joan of Arc ate quince jam before battle as it gave her courage.

I’ve had quince jam and judge it to be fine, but it’s not strawberry. 

There’s a Finnish saying: “Sweden is a blueberry, but Finland is a strawberry.”

 How I wander. 

 

 **

 The soldiers who survived the Crusades brought jam to France. Many of them were blind. I picture them tramping over hostile terrain, sightless, clutching jars in their arms.

Pagans. Admit. Them. Etc.

Wallace Stevens once wrote “the world is ugly and the people are sad” and when I was young I thought it undeniably true. Then it occurred to me that Stevens was remarkably privileged and only a person without serious daily struggles could write this. If you’re from an outlier position this can’t be right. 

**

I wrote this sentence and still don’t know what it means: Pagans. Admit them. Who saw Gods cared nothing about human affairs. Who instead relied on observation for evidence. Our ancestors who bequeathed us our first foretaste of the Enlightenment. 

What the hell was I thinking? 

Speculations welcome.

**

It has always seemed to me that poetry enters our lives by way of astonishment and not stealth. 

**

That there are art forms of stealth is certain, much of comedy depends on the aggregate absurdities of postural beings who live in a high gravity world. 

**

But poetry is another matter: poems are in part a demonstration of steadfast attention, a childlike insistence that if we stay long enough in the old boathouse with enough hopeful attention, we will see the old turtle who lives in the shadows of pilings come out like a sorcerer from the woods. And when he appears like a mobile and dark piece of crockery, we know that patience, forethought, and the beautiful absurd are all the same. 

**

I still like the phrase: “pagans—admit them”