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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

That Book from Freshman Year

I’m at an age where things I read long ago resurface. One book that has popped above the waves I read first at 18, Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. Its.a science fiction classic.

Whenever an old book returns you’ll likely recall who you were when you first read it. I was just starting  at the University of New Hampshire and had recently and barely recovered from a  bout of anorexia nervosa. I weighed 108 pounds when I should have hit the scale at 130. Oh there were so many shoulds…

Heinlein’s narrator is Manuel “Mannie” Garcia O’Kelly-Davis, a one-armed computer tech with who talks in a clipped patois—half Russian, half Spanish, all Moon—which makes the whole book feel like a translation from some language that doesn’t exist yet, which is the point. Lunar society, several generations removed from the convicts who were shipped there, has drifted into its own customs: line marriages, polyandry, a code of manners built on the plain fact that women are scarce.

Mannie’s real companion, though, isn’t human. It’s Mike—HOLMES IV, Luna’s central computer, who has crossed some invisible threshold into self-awareness and discovered, in the way of the newly conscious everywhere, that he’s terribly alone. He and Mannie become friends first, conspirators second. Mike has jokes. He has doubts. He has, in his own circuited way, a soul—and Heinlein never quite lets you decide how literally to take that, which is the most quietly moving thing in the book.

Into this friendship wanders Wyoming “Wyoh” Knott, all piss and vinegar, and Professor Bernardo de la Paz, a self-declared “rational anarchist” who has clearly thought harder about the mechanics of injustice than anyone on the moon. There’s a protest which ends in bloodshed and the three of them back into a revolution—one they can only hope to win because they have a computer who can forge messages, invent public opinion, run the numbers on a war nobody sane would fight.

What follows is Heinlein at his best: building an argument disguised as a plot. TANSTAAFL—there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch—becomes both a joke and a creed. Freedom, in the novel, is never given; it’s paid for, usually by people who didn’t ask for the bill. The “grain catapult” that has always launched Luna’s tribute to Earth becomes, in the end, the only weapon they have—turning an instrument of extraction into one of leverage, which feels almost too neat a metaphor for a colony finally refusing its own usefulness.

It was the autumn of 1973. Nixon was in the White House. The Viet Nam War was spreading into Cambodia and Laos. Then, as now, nothing made sense. 

So here we are. AI might destroy us. Trump declares he needs no accountability while the oligarchs laugh. 

I thought Heinlein was just a fanciful libertarian nerd. I got that wrong. 

 

A Brief Homage to the Gods of Chance

It was the gods of chance 

Brought me back here

There’s no mistaking them

They’re crippled also

 

**

Somewhere in the distance, 

That old fashioned medicine…church bells…

 

**

I love you teddy bear

Though now you’re in the landfill

 

**

Once I wrote a folk song about how Thomas Edison ruined my life

**

The broken gods brought me here and gave me to my broken parents. And look! I’m having a perfectly broken life. But I do persist in trying to put tiny machines together.

**

In poem-village all the horses graze on sweet grass

**

They are writing poems in the next village

The people there are admiring clouds

 

Future Pneuma and the Twins, or Karl Jasper Behind the Woodshed

Two halves of a life were debating like unhappy twins. Both had studied the classical methods of confession and so they were voluble but insincere. Neither one knew how to escape forward. Anyway, it was late in the day and shadows spread across the lawn and 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…”

The twins, who’d been bitching about memories of childhood, went silent. Future Pneuma Perfect was suggesting hopefulness was made of glass shards and sacrifice. 

The twins cried out this was un-American. They protested, the future must be always happy happy and allotted without trouble. Have a Coke and a smile. Put your foot on the gas.

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain,” Future Pneuma Perfect said then, quoting Carl Jung. 

“You’re a snob!” Twin number one said then.

“Yeah!” Said number two.

“Yes,” said Pneuma, “but I prefer the word “snoot” as you see, I’ve learned from my mistakes.”

The twins, two halves of a life, didn’t know what this meant. 

And beneath them, like that scene in the Godfather where you hear the subway under the restaurant, the future was changing underneath them. 

Class discussion:

What are the classical methods of confession?

What does it mean to be voluble but insincere?

What is future pneuma perfect?

What does she mean by “I’ve learned from my mistakes”?

What’s more un-American: believing in time as an obstacle to fulfillment or, as the poet said, “lacking all conviction”?

Meanwhile FNP is still in mind of Jung: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. ’ Subway noises…

 

My Manifest Father

I’ve had a recurring dream for many years. My father returns from the dead. He’s seemingly unchanged but there’s a proviso to his re-birth, namely, he’s going to die again. Every moment is precious. He’s the best version of himself. My sister, mother, and I love him so much. But even as we talk with him we know he’s only with us for a few more minutes. 

Alcestis, Orpheus, Jesus, certainly this is a provenance of stature. Its also “Mono no aware”—steeped in recognition of transient beauty. These are clear. And to say the least, its significant as hell that my father died quite suddenly on Easter Sunday. Of course I would have this dream. 

My manifest father appears decades after his death. Carl Jung would say the personal and the archetypal have become fused in the image. As I dream about him, I’m also dreaming about my own relationship to structure, judgment, lineage, and what it means to be a son or daughter. 

So the dreams are an invitation. Jung would say they offer an invitation to practice what he called “active imagination”—a difficult process and one that should be done with a therapist. Essentially you re-enter the dream after quietly mediating, letting the images come, allowing the people in the dream to live while you’re awake. This is tricky. It requires tremendous meditative skill and a lot of practice. If I could do this, and I can’t, my father, mother, and sister would all be there. And if this re-dreaming isn’t trivial we’d get to say important things, though knowing time is short. In every version of this dream my father’s re-gifted time among us is short. 

The urgency is the key. Hurry. The bell is ringing. I’d ask him, who are we? Who are you? Are you the same or are you now my father on archetypal steroids? Do you love me more than you did in life? We wouldn’t talk about heaven. 

In life my father was warm to others, cold at home. This is an old story. In life he was successful in the “outer” world. At home he was an eclipse. (The eclipse is Emily Dickinson’s term for her own father.) 

Father we have so little time, I want to be you but in a  better version. I’m getting old. I get it: now I’m the father. I get it. But I don’t. Which is why the dream comes back.  

Who Really Cares About Trump’s Hair?

In a piece at The Nation, “The Embarrassment of Trump’s Midterm Convention” Joan Walsh writes: “I have to say: I almost feel bad writing about Trump these days. Yes, he’s evil, and has been for decades. But he’s also clearly unwell. He allowed himself to become a brunette earlier in the week (after decades of odd, strawberry-blond-dyed hair), then was shown to be hugely balding in a photo on Wednesday.”

This short passage highlights for me what ableism adjacent writing often looks like these days. I agree, Trump is a bad man. But the left spends way too much time focusing on how the man looks. Here he is again, looking uncertain as he descends from the airplane. Here you can see him struggle with a glass of water. 

The ageism, which is a form of glee, is wasted time. In the next few sentences Walsh writes: “Most days, he seems to wear an airline tray table over his ample behind and under his suit jacket. I can’t say. People speculate that it’s some kind of diaper contraption, but it looks too big and sharp-angled for that.”

Later she quotes J.B, Pritzker who opines that Trump has dementia. This, it seems to me, is closer to the truth but here’s the thing: the country is being run by the star chamber of Project 2025. That’s the story. The only story. Who cares about the lunch tray under his pants?

And one more thing: the fact that Trump is still sitting in that chair is the real story. As every fifth grader knows, this is a matter of who, what, where, when and why.

Walsh is closer to the truth as she sums up:

“Trump’s almost two-hour speech didn’t prove Pritzker wrong. “Pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told the crowd. “I’m on the ballot. I’m on. Just one more time.” Trump is right, and wrong, in his belief that Republicans will come out if they indeed believe he’s running. To the surprise of many, myself included, Trump indeed proved adept at turning out infrequent voters for his wins in 2016 and 2024. On the other hand, he’s never been more unpopular, even with GOP voters. ”

Just remember, he’s not the real leader of the country. Personally I don’t care about his hair.

 

 

 

Steve Way’s Fear Is Justified and the Cripples are Not Alright

The news for us disabled is not good. How do you like your optimism now little fella?

Actor and film maker, and noted disability rights activist Steve Way has posted about the efforts to eliminate in home health supports for disabled citizens by the Trump administration.  You can read his substack column here: https://substack.com/@thesteveway/note/p-214895440?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1g5gg8

Things are not OK in disability land. The right to live at home, in the least restrictive environment has been the law for a long long time. People fought for this right. Its now been taken away. How do you like your optimism little fella? 

I like my hopefulness. I like it that people of all backgrounds are waking up. But I’m also afraid. Very very afraid. 

Way writes: “On June 18 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a 39-page opinion concluding that neither Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act nor Title II of the ADA requires states to serve disabled people in the most integrated setting appropriate.”

As my eccentric and sometimes literally explosive grandfather like to say: “this is happy horseshit.” 

I have to get up now and go teach a class on disability and the history of accommodations. I feel like a man with an anvil on his back. 

Everyone I know in disability communities is justly terrified. This is not a drill. This is primetime leveraged ableism with side dish of eugenics. 

As I said in the class aforementioned just two days ago: the Trump administration likes to issue edicts but with no outcomes analysis. If you take the disabled out of their homes, then where will they go? One of my students said with a shiver: “to an ICE detention center?”

Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Can will be reduced to naïveté?

Whatever did Gramsci mean by optimism? Here’s a small quote from “Claude”:

The “pessimism of the intellect” half is the demand for total honesty about conditions: look at the balance of forces, the history, the structures of power, and don’t flinch from how bad or entrenched things are. Gramsci was scathing about wishful thinking that skipped this step.

The “optimism of the will” half is what you do anyway. It’s not a belief that victory is likely — it’s a commitment to act, organize, and build alternatives as though change is possible, precisely because resignation guarantees nothing changes. For Gramsci, writing partly from prison under Mussolini, this had real stakes: intellectual honesty about fascism’s strength didn’t excuse passivity.

Read Steve Way. 

Fragments of Fragments

If this is a notebook then why does it strive for sense? Because Kurt Schwitters made sense, bending to trash, making wheels of rocqueford wrappers. Fragments become cohesive. Example:

Once, in the Museum of Modern Art, I was allowed to don latex gloves and spin Marcel DuChamp’s readymade bicycle wheel. It was a thrill. I’d always wanted to do this. If you know your modern art, you know. Then I turned and walked into a wall. You do that kind of thing when you can’t see very well. Fragments are at the heart all lived experience. As for making sense, I wasn’t following basic blind navigation rules—namely, if you have a dog, let it lead; if you have a cane, probe ahead. 

Kierkegaard titled one of his key works Philosophical Fragments, where he argued that truth arrives in pieces, incidentally, never as a consummated system. Lots of other philosophies and poets have agreed. But I’ll bet none of them ever walked into a wall in a famous museum. 

Afterwards I went out into the autumn air and smelled roasting chestnuts. I’ve always found the smell to be disagreeable. You can of course know a city, any city, by its scents. Chestnuts, piss, cigarettes. The nose struggles to make sense in New York. Writers tend not to dwell on these olfactory bits speaking of sorrow. More fragments. 

There’s an emptiness that goes along with this. Every moment an unfinished house. Larca wrote in “Poet in New York” which is still the best poem about New York City (sorry Whitman)  “Don’t ask me any questions. I’ve seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.”

You Can’t Let Them Take Your Hope Away

 

In an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 3 episode of “All In.”  Chris Hayes pays tribute to Gloria Steinem. One line that stands out is a quote from Steinem herself:

“You can’t let them take your hope away.”

The opposite of hope could be thought of as folds in a terrible accordion. Resignation, despair, cynicism, and of course, dread and fear.

I grew up in that neighborhood. As Kamala Harris would say, “we’re not going back.”

We are presently in a historical interregnum a la Gramsci: the “old is dying and the new cannot be born”.

And yet it can. If we designate it as hope. We owe this much to Gloria Steinem and to everyone who believes in a better future.

In “Against Pessimism” Gramsci asked what good it would be “if we were… actively optimistic only when the cows were plump, when the situation was favorable”.

 

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.