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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

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”

Grieving while Remaining Optimistic

I have always read James Baldwin with admiration both for his superb style but also because as a child of the church he never gave up on hope despite the brutalities of American Jim Crow and its many afterbirths. One of Baldwin’s observations sticks with me:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
This observation exceeds my meager capacity for summary. It’s simply too profound. And true. But if you want a pithy rejoinder here’s a line by the poet James Wright:
“I’ll be damned, you’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”
So here’s a semi-Horatian chestnut:
Optimism has nothing to do with sentimentality.
This is better in the original Latin. But of you can’t look it up because the ancients didn’t recognize hopefulness. It was Leibniz who first coughed it up. (I love Voltaire’s version of him in “Candide”—Pangloss claiming this is the best of all possible worlds even as the Bulgarians keep reappearing to torch the town and steal the women.
I’ve always loved Whitman’s optimism but I’m more persuaded by Baldwin.

Hope is Also the Plucked Chicken

Both Moliere and Shakespeare grew up watching morality plays, fables whose stock characters were invariably named God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. Because they lived during the first flowering of public literacy they understood the indispensable healthiness of word flipping. Talk about nature’s bounty! Words were no longer merely to be received and absorbed. Can you imagine the joy of a 17th century adolescent forced to watch Everyman or The Second Shepherd’s Play, as he substituted Satan, Life, Neighbor, Sin, Second Rate Demons, Ignorance, Ugliness, Gossip, and Basic Human Weakness for the stock characters of religious drama? Of course you can. Almost no one who’s lived through a high school production of The Man of La Mancha has not done this.

One can do this with lines of poetry. Hope may be the thing with feathers but its also nubby like a plucked chicken. I don’t know about you but this is a good game for me. Optimism doesn’t have to be perfect. It can be homely. There are many jokes about this. The classic goes like this:

Three guys are walking down the sidewalk when they spot something in their path. Bob crouches down for a closer look.

“Looks like shit,” he says.

His friend leans in and sniffs it.

“Yeah. Smells like shit too.”

The third guy isn’t convinced. He pokes it with a stick, then touches it.

“Feels like shit.”

Finally, just to be totally sure, one of them tastes it.

“Yep. Tastes like shit too. I think it must be shit.”

Bob nods. “Yeah. Good thing we didn’t step in it.”

A useful form of hope is encoded in this. Its a hard life. But look. We didn’t step on the turd. BTW I like to imagine Fred Astaire dancing on poop. Such things help me. Anyway the trouble for millions of us is that optimism has been taken over by the self help industry Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that the war between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands was like watching two bald men fighting over a comb. 

I like to think of the bald man who still buys a comb.  

What’s Your Hobby?

My maternal grandmother was the Mrs. Havisham of dynamite. Twice a year she’d go to the Laconia, New Hampshire Police Department to remind the cops she had 200 crates of TNT in her cellar, and twice a year they patronized her with “yes, yes,” and “dear, dear” and “there, there” and that would be the end of it. But one day she brought a box of decaying dynamite sticks into the station, plunked it on the desk and said, “My husband loved dynamite, and he left me a house crammed with the stuff, and he’s been gone a long time, Christ, for all I know he’s in Dynamiter’s Heaven. But dynamite decays God dammit, and the whole house is going to blow the next time somebody rings the doorbell!” 

It was the doorbell that got their attention. 

My grandfather was a mad dynamiter. He loved TNT and he’d travel far and wide in rural New Hampshire to find things he could blow up. For a time he had some money and he’d buy abandoned houses in the middle of nowhere and reduce them to matchsticks. He blew up a telephone pole—when the phone people came he swore he’d never seen it. He exploded boats, cars, barns, even an outhouse. Rather than digging a new hole and moving the thing he just stuck dynamite down the hole. He blew human waste for a quarter of a mile. My mother remembered that there was a toilet seat up in the limb of a tree. 

What’s your hobby? Do you have one? I hear hobbies are making a comeback. Dynamite isn’t a traditional leisure activity.