Planet of the Blind

To You, Dear Friends!

We wish you

  a year of

“Happies”!

CHEERS! ~ Connie and Steve

Graphic: Photo of glass of champaign sitting on white table cloth and surrounded by confetti.

Monkey Man sighted again

So.  I was enjoying my morning cup of coffee in solitude this morning while thumbing through the newspaper.  And guess what I found!  A photo on page B5 of Philip Fulkerson, also known as "Cosmo, Monkey Man and Humanzee".  Sitting on the bench next to him while waiting at the bus stop: his canine companion "Annie". 

And you thought Steve and I made that up!!!!!!

I did a little research and learned that for $30 I can purchase a copy of this photo, but copyright rules indicate I can't share it with you anyway, so I'll try this...follow THIS LINK and see if you can view the photo before it is archived.  It's not the photo in today's newspaper, but it's even better.  It's a great photo actually.  Turns out Monkey Man is a musician.  He wears  his mask "because he says his music alone won't draw a crowd".  Well he caught MY attention!

~ Connie

P.S. DARN!  I just discovered that the photo link I gave you didn't work.  So try this.  It'll only take a second (It's worth it!)
Go to: www.dispatch.com 
Click: Photo Store (see links running across top of page)
Search for photo using keywords: Philip Fulkerson, monkey man

I see no evidence of a "crowd" in this photo, but Annie looks to be an adoring fan.

"The Beloved"

The poet Pablo Neruda begins one of his later poems with the phrase: "I have seen other things, perhaps nothing..."  I have always liked this because of course my own experience of seeing has been provisional and difficult.  Like most blind people who have what is called "residual vision" I see shapes and colors and I hope to translate these sensations into sense or beauty as I go about my daily rounds.

As this year draws to an end and the talking heads on TV are predictably revisiting the public tragedies and the lurid celebrity gossip of 2006, I want to urge readers of this blog to buy and read a book length collection of poems by Gregory Orr entitled Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved.

The "book" is art of course.  It's also the body we long for.  It's also the place where love remains possible.  It is the supreme gift from the gods for human reason resides in the book.  Transcendence and immaterial vision lives in the book.  The realized eschatology of poetry is this body of consciousness.  This is what's meant by "the Beloved" and no, you won't find this on Fox news. (Here's hoping that this year Bill O'Reilly is replaced by a poetry show hosted by a beautiful elder like Donald Hall...)

If you are looking for poetry that explores the consciousness we have and the consciousness we long for, then this is the best book you can read as this year draws to its close.  This is a ritual reading.  Greg Orr is surely one of the finest poets of our age.

SK

Blogs sharing poems by Gegory Orr:

Total Depravity
tableau vivant
People of the Book

Thank you Ann Fox of The Charlotte Observer

Ann Fox teaches at Davidson College in North Carolina.

Thank you, Ann, for this warm, thoughtful review of Steve's book: Eavesdropping

Download review_the_charlotte_observer.doc

~ Connie

Road Trip

My children are on their first road trip together as I write this.  Tara (20+) and Ross (soon to be 18) are on their way from Ohio to New Jersey to visit their father for Christmas, an 8 1/2 hour trip.

Am I sitting on pins and needles?  Naaah.  Sure, I'll be relieved to hear they've made it safe and sound, but I'm a firm believer that worrying isn't going to impact their trip one way or the other, so I might as well not.  (The Cabernet Steve poured is helping.)  Tara's driven to and from the U of South Carolina several times now.  They'll be fine. 

It has not escaped me however, that we've entered a new era.  It feels a bit like the "Twilight Zone" and this will take some getting used to.  My kids couldn't stand being in the same room together this time last year.  I could barely tolerate it myself.  As for Steve?  Well, let's just say that Saint Stephen's Day (which happens to be today by the way) could just as well have been named in honor of MY Saint Stephen.  (Thank God for Saints, right Georgia?)

What a difference a year makes!  Ross has changed the most, but as we older and wiser folks know, it does take two.  I now regret not having taken a picture of the two of them together on their way out the door.  Today they - we - have reached a milestone in our lives.  I feel tired and rejuvenated at the same time. 

Is that even possible? 

And is it even possible that I have two children, aged 20 and almost 18?                                             

P.S.  I just spoke to Tara.  Approximately 200 miles to go.  Ross is doing a great job as "shotgun".  He's in charge of snacks.  They are laughing.  Still. 

Me?  I'm experiencing tears of relief.  It's the Cabernet I'm sure.

Graphic shows cartoon car, trunk and hood loaded down with luggage, driving off into the orange sunset. 

Season's Greetings

Steve and I wish you and your loved ones a beautiful Holiday Season and a New Year of Peace and Happiness.

~ Connie

Graphic shows a plain but beautiful round, purple Christmas ornament hanging from a snowy pine tree branch.

They Caged the Children at Night

Here's a disability issue for you -

This is front page news in Columbus, Ohio:  "Parents guilty of caging children"

"NORWALK, Ohio - The couple accused of forcing their adopted children to sleep in cheerily painted wire and wood cages are guilty of felony child endangering, a jury decided yesterday."

Oh, well at least those cages were painted "cheerily".  Imagine how all those "special needs" children would have felt had the cages not been so cheery.  Never mind the  locks.  Never mind the lack of  bedding.   Never mind the smell of urine.  By golly, those cages looked cheery!

"The parents said during the three week trial that they needed to keep some of the youngsters in enclosed beds rigged with alarms to protect them from their own dangerous behavior and stop them from wandering at night."

Cheerily painted cages = enclosed beds = crates.  Personally, I'm a strong believer in the use of crates when it comes to training a puppy.  But I draw the line when it comes to children.

"The Gravelles (Michael and Sharen) have said that they took on so many 'needy' children because no one else wanted them.  Prosecutors have suggested that the couple wanted so many special-needs youngsters because of the adoption and foster-care subsidies that accompanied them."

Appalling.  Reminds me of a 60 Minutes episode I saw years ago regarding puppy mills.

Read more:

Parents Behaving Badly
This Canadian
It Must Be Nice to Live in Fantasy Land
Toledoblade.com

I wonder, how many other children out there are in similar situations? 

I've not yet seen this subject discussed on disability related blogs.  Let's have a dialogue shall we?

~ Connie

Two photos: First shows man standing in room pointing to cages built to hold children.  They are brightly painted blue, green, orange...Second photo shows a row of dog pens with several dogs per pen with no room to run around.

Opposites Attract

See what I mean? 

This morning's thoughts from my "deep thinker" as per his earlier post:

"When I was in my twenties I was a psychoanalysis junkie.  I read through the collected works of Freud and Jung and all that arcane material from Princeton and then, heaven help me, I began reading ancient poetry."

When I was in my twenties I was training guide dogs, riding horses, and wind surfing.  I was acquiring a taste for beer while spending evenings with friends and dogs.

This morning Steve was writing his post about Holiday Dreams.

What were you thinking Connie?  You ask...

I was worrying.  Now that we have beautiful new wood floors in our kitchen and family room, I need to paint.   The walls look terrible.  And Maggie needs her toenails trimmed.  Two dogs down.  One to go...

~ Connie

Holiday Dreams

When I was in my twenties I was a psychoanalysis junkie.  I read through the collected works of Freud and Jung and all that arcane material from Princeton and then, heaven help me, I began reading ancient poetry.

The funniest thing Carl Jung ever wrote was that in his opinion James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was “the ultimate devotional book for the subconscious” since, in point of fact, Jung would fall asleep every time he began reading it.  He never did get through the book.

I liked reading that when I was twenty something, and I still like it.

I’ve never gotten all the way through “Moby Dick” though I did successfully manage “Trout Fishing in America”.

I still can’t get all the way through Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” though I did manage “Portrait of a Lady”.  I will never likely attempt “The Wings of the Dove”.

I have read most of Faulkner, but I prefer his notebooks.  What can I say?  Plot is just an excuse for more action and in the poly-tropic perversity of Faulkner’s world action is an afterthought.  Read “Sartoris”.

Anyway, I like dreaming and I’m not influenced directly by books or movies at bedtime.

I don’t for instance watch “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and dream about space aliens.  I don’t watch Kate Winslett and Leonardo run through flooding corridors on the Titanic and dream about weird foreplay.  Still I think Carl Jung was correct when he hypothesized that the human subconscious is aware of images and time that come before our respective personal memories.

This is why you can go to sleep in Muncie, Indiana, and dream about the horse tamers of Tuva.  And when you wake up and eat your Grape Nuts you have the odd sensation that you were dancing on your hind legs by moonlight and you may wonder about this while the sound of the Grape Nuts fills your head.  You say to yourself, while not quite remembering the dream, “well, I don’t have any hind legs.”  Then the cell phone rings and it’s the PTA calling to ask if you can sell lemonade at the junior varsity pole vaulting tryouts and you forget all about the dream.

Once, while I was visiting Austria, I sat up all night with the Austrian jazz legend, Otto Lechner.  Otto is blind and he’s a world traveler of a high order.  He told me about his trip to Tuva where he performed with the famous throat singers.  Otto told me that among other things, the throat singers of Tuva love smoking marijuana and dancing by moonlight.  We agreed that such activities are impossible to subtract from dreams.  We also agreed that dreams are, like music, purely mathematical.  I should add that we had this conversation inside a cave inside a mountain in the city of Graz.  Two blind guys talking dreams under a mountain…

So a couple of days ago we experienced the shortest day of the year.  Dreams are mathematical.  The shortest day of the year is always a factor of the “illud tempus” or “time before time” which means that if you feel funny at the solstice there’s a reason and it doesn’t have a thing to do with the PTA or the Dodge Boys or Holiday shopping.

In Scandinavia where my forebears came from they used to burn the furniture and all the demonized household objects when the shortest day came around.  You know, getting rid of the bed that three successive children died in.  Burning the sleigh that overturned and killed grandpa…

But of course you can’t have a cathartic bonfire without lots of drinking and dancing.

Okay, so back to dreams…

I wake each morning during the Holidays and feel that while I was asleep I have been riding around the world on a horse.  Pegassus is not just an image or a logo for the Mobil Oil Corporation.

I have been flying in the dark.

A million of our ancestors felt this too.

This is why the three wise men looked to the sky.  They felt as if they’d been flying.  They couldn’t remember the dream exactly.  There were stars and there were living bodies above and below.  There was something going on that was intrinsic to light and language and the wise men were looking up and trying to remember what had been going on in their dreams.

I wake up during the solstice and feel the nostalgia for the dream.  And I feel curiously unsettled. Robert Bly puts the feeling this way:

When I wake, I hear sheep eating apple peels just
outside the screen.  The trees are heavy, soaked, cold,
and hushed, the sun just rising.  All seems calm, and
yet somewhere inside I am not calm.  We live in
wooden buildings made of two-by-fours, making the
landscape nervous for a hundred miles.

So I eat my grape nuts and reflect that I am wrapped in the reassuring and mildly unnerving dreamscapes of this blue planet.

I wake up later in the winter.

I walk around and I can’t explain the dreams.

SK

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

I love the last post Steve wrote: Bus Stop, Columbus, OH because to me, it so clearly demonstrates the difference between Steve and I.  One of the differences anyway.

I'm driving along in city traffic when I see a man sitting on a bench, his old dog curled up beside him.  The man happens to be wearing a gorilla mask with rainbow colored hair.  It's December 21st.  I snicker, describe what I see to Steve and say "what do you suppose that's about?"  Neither one of us was feeling particularly communicative that morning and so not much else was said.  Now we all know what was swirling around inside Steve's head, thanks to his post. 

Ask Steve "what 'cha thinking?" and that is the kind of response you'll get.  Me?  I'm thinking about the bills that need to be paid.  Or I'm doing a mental inventory, pulling together ingredients we might  have in the cupboard, since I forgot to pull dinner out of the freezer.  What uninspired dinner can I come up with before I have to run off for bell choir practice?  (I really need to visit the Bibliochef's blog, Cooking With Ideas, more often.)  Steve writes poetry.  I sort socks.  Steve asks me what I'm thinking and I grumble: why can't anyone else in this family use socks lox?

Sometimes I kid myself and think well Steve has time for all these thoughts because he's not visually distracted.  What else is he going to do but think deep thoughts while I'm watching for traffic and errant gorillas?   But that's not it  I know.   Lance Mannion thinks like Steve, and Lance is as sighted as I am.  I wonder what thoughts would have been swirling around in his head had he seen this pink and purple haired gorilla sitting there quietly on the bench.  Lance?  What 'cha thinking?  Me, I'm thinking the dogs need grooming and the poop needs scooping.  I'm sure Lance would be too, if he had a dog.  Instead he thinks deep thoughts.

In my defense, I did have time for one quick thought regarding that gorilla and his dog before I was so rudely cut off by another driver.  (See what I mean?  I'd been visually stimulated and was now managing a mild case of road rage while Steve was deep in thought over "a missing character from Kurt Vonnegut's 'Breakfast of Champions' ".) 

Back to my thought.  OK, it's not deep.  But I was marveling at how odd and at the same time, how very sweet that scene was.  This was a drive-by so I can't speak for accuracy, but this is what I saw in my mind's eye.  There were other people standing around and waiting as well.  The dog was older.  A mixed beagle type.  He was curled up in a ball on the center of the bench and looked to be in a deep sleep, the kind of deep sleep you find homeless people in cardboard boxes in.  It looked as if gorilla and dog had been there a while.  Fortunately it was an unseasonably warm December morning.  His gorilla friend was stage right, sitting comfortably on the end of the bench, legs crossed.  He was looking off to his left, as if waiting for the bus that might not ever come.  He looked as content as any rainbow haired gorilla could look under the circumstances.  It was his right hand, resting gently on the sleeping dog's back that really caught my eye.  This kind gorilla was not in any hurry.  He looked as if he was willing to sit there quietly on that bench for as long as his little dog needed.  I'll bet the gorilla had no intention of catching a bus.  He was just letting the sleeping dog lie...