a storm doesn’t go on all morning long
nor does a sudden shower all day
but where do these come from
from heaven and earth
and even heaven and earth
can’t keep at it for long
so how could human beings
make anything last (p.28)
Buddhist wit and conceptions of cosmology, selfhood, embodiment and knowledge have been particularly salvific and salving because both diseases were initially misdiagnosed, the celiac disease and soy allergy going under the name of “acute gastritis” for over seven years of incremental debilitation. Not even knowing how to say what was wrong and often in psychic distress and pain, I spent a lot of time with, in Zen scholar Charles Egan’s words, “Existence and void...mixed up” (p.161). Finally being able to name my conditions meant being able to treat them; treatment enabled me to begin to perceive clearly the emerging dynamic in my life between ability and disability, even though I couldn’t and still can’t control it. One thing for certain: the alleged boundary between ability and disability is as pernicious a fiction as the alleged boundary between mind and body in Western culture. “Real is not real,” the Yuan Dynasty monk Wujian Xiandu reminds us, “and not is not-not” (Egan: p.147).
Nonetheless, I’ve found that the more committed I am to an embodied consciousness, the more I find myself reckoning with contingency and paradox. This is a fact that even Western medicine is beginning to recognize—helped along by recent research in neuroscience. In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio R. Damasio asserts that “the self that endows our experience with subjectivity is not a central knower and inspector of everything that happens in our minds...mind arises[s] out of an organism rather than out of a disembodied brain” (pp.227-229). Damasio’s description of “The Body-Minded Brain” is remarkable for its congruence both with poststructuralist ideas concerning identity’s “always already” constructed quality as well as Buddhist notions of permanent flux and transformation: the representations your brain constructs to describe a situation, and the movements formulated as response to a situation, depend on mutual brain-body interactions. The brain constructs evolving representations of the body as it changes under chemical and neural influences. Some of those representations remain non-conscious, while others reach consciousness. At the same time, signals from the brain continue to flow to the body, some deliberately and some automatically, from brain quarters whose activities are never represented directly in consciousness. As a result, the body changes yet again, and the image you get of it changes accordingly (p.228). Since body and brain must act in concert continually to construct our interdependent sensations of consciousness and selfhood, Damasio argues, “we construct the mind of the moment”(p.229). Each time I read Damasio’s book, I’m struck by the profundity of this phrase, a radical claim that might seem more at home in a volume of Buddhist theology than in a mass-market paperback about neuroscience. In fact, each time I revisit Damasio’s phrase, I’m called back to Laozi:
best is a mind not made up
then that mind is everyone’s...
live in this world breathe it in breathe it out
let the world dissolve your mind
it and everything in it fixes upon your eye
and your ear and needs your mothering (p.59)
This is how my own ongoing embodiment has led and continues to lead to a poetics deeply indebted to “non-normative” somatic, physiological and cognitive processes as the basis for poetic forms, forms frequently engaged with classic texts from both Western and Eastern traditions of wisdom literature. All along my body has been its own book of wisdom, articulating far more about the terms of living than my mind can always be conscious of. And at this point, it has taught me at least one lasting lesson in poetics: I have to write from a place of uncertainty and flux, despite my deepest desire for certainty and stability, because the nature of things—both interior and exterior—is transience.
Okay. Sure. On those days when I walk with a minimum of pain and digest my food without incident, I do feel “temporarily able-bodied,” and I am grateful. But still those days when I’m unable to walk or digest my food without symptoms are totally impossible to accept with equanimity. Instead of assessing the situation and seeing it objectively as a part of a continuum of experience, mostly I am like Yongjue Yuanxian, the monk-poet of “Lying Meditation.” One of my favorite poems from the Ming Dynasty, it places its speaker deep in the struggle of distinguishing between what is and what seems to be, his consciousness intricated in the phenomenological, body-minded brain that we all share:
On my seven-foot rope bed
with arms bent, I sleep with the clouds.
Existence and void are mixed up;
Saints and sinner are cast away.
Don’t say there are no things at all:
A bright mirror floats alone in the sky. (Egan: p.161)
5 poems from
THE EMPTY FORM GOES ALL THE WAY TO HEAVEN
afternoon
clarity arrives
brief virtue
cloud cover
alters symmetry’s
trellis and shadow
classic image
two late T’ang dishes
one flowering
one empty
illness asks
as though it were
an aesthetic choice
will it be mind
or body emptied
first brief
clarity before
a day’s gray
scale study
old tin tub
soapy water
tilts over
its rim hits
linoleum
nice image
for nausea
washing hot
one end
to the other
I remember
my mother
poured warm
water over
how small
my body
has become
again
western window
eastern window
sickbed between
illness shares
its few virtues
with art pain
as anomalous
as imagination
in not being “of”
or “for” anything
even language
lacks the quality
of their solitude
pure process
like art illness is
mostly the mystery
of why one window
opens slowly
why one window
remains locked
hours without
words I can’t
form space
contour can’t
hold anything
interior my body
never empties
of what it has
to do ache
wavers in the tin
tub where also I
bobbed for apples
until my face hurt
and hunger can’t
urge me a child
sitting in snow
to open my mouth
language returns
like Li Ho
on his donkey
wrote one line
per scrap he’d bag
and shake out
at day’s end
to make human
and earthen one
horizon poetry
sum of patience
forged in heat
loose barb
tip broken
cracked red
it sliced through
flesh once
Ona Gritz
A CONSCIOUS DECISION
I know why you write about me so much,” my son, Ethan, said to me once. “It’s because I’m so important to you.”
Writing has been a natural response to parenting for me; a kind of over
flow. In poems, I’ve sought the perfect word to describe the particular blonde of Ethan’s hair. Honey-colored, I wrote, because, as it changes with the seasons, his hair takes on the various hues of that thick, sweet stuff lined up in jars. I’ve attempted to describe the still, not-yet animated face I glimpsed in the birthroom mirror seconds before he woke to the world. Calm as milk in its cup. I’ve written about the rifle he used at summer camp. How the hand that once lay splayed on my chest as he nursed has held an actual weapon. He’s a teenager now, but recently I drafted a poem in which I witnessed his tentative first steps, noting anew how they mirrored my own palsied walk.
My palsied walk. Disability is another subject that frequents my poems, but not because it compels me the way motherhood does. Writing about it has been more a conscious decision than a matter of inspiration.
When I was a child, there was a brown paper grocery bag kept on the floor of my closet, on the left-hand side toward the back. Inside was a single shoe, ankle high with a leather strap above the laces, and a hole near the ankle where a leg brace attached. The brace was a thin metal pole with a leather cuff that buckled near my knee. I had to wear this contraption while I slept. Heavy and stiff, it got caught in my blankets and sometimes caused bruises on my knees. Though I understood that what I had was cerebral palsy, I thought of that shoe as my disability. More precisely, I thought of it as my secret inner ugliness. After all, it was kept hidden and mentioned only in private as my mother helped me put on at night.
My cerebral palsy is relatively mild. I lack fine motor skills in my right hand, but learned early to compensate with my capable left. It’s nothing, I was told. I walk as though favoring a sore foot. Barely noticeable, people said. These comments were meant to be compliments. I was lucky, it seemed, because I wasn’t too different. Because I could more or less pass.
True, there were times I was forced to face my limitations—coming upon a winding staircase with no banister—walking down a slick, icy street to get home. But mostly when I thought about having cerebral palsy, what I focused on was how people saw me. It pained me to think that someone might not find me pretty because of my uneven legs and awkward gait. I didn’t know then that worrying over such things is a kind of luxury. My quirky walk gets me where I’m going. I can speak clearly, cook, shop, clean and use my good mind to read, teach and write. Scarcely hampered by it, I saw disability as primarily a cosmetic issue. That changed when, in my thirty-fourth year, I took on a job that was, in many ways, beyond my physical abilities.
The following tasks are near to impossible when you lack fine motor skills in one hand, and when your gait is less than steady: Positioning a newborn to nurse at your breast. Safely bathing that newborn. Swaddling him. Walking while holding him. Opening a refrigerator while holding him. Eating while holding him. Drinking while holding him. Preparing a meal while holding him. Answering a phone while holding him. Climbing stairs while holding him. Descending stairs while holding him. Pushing a stroller while holding him. Lifting a stroller onto or off of a bus. Lifting a stroller onto or off of a train. Keeping pace with a fast crawling baby. Keeping pace with a fast running toddler...
I’ve had cerebral palsy since the day I was born, but it wasn’t until my son was born that I truly experienced disability.
The first morning after I brought Ethan home from the hospital, I cried to a friend that he wailed every time I put him down.
“I can’t even fix myself a bowl of cornflakes!”
My friend, a mother of two, laughed like it was all too familiar. “Don’t worry,” she assured me. “Moms get used to doing things with one hand.”
What she didn’t understand was that the one hand I had that was capable of pouring cereal and milk, of using a spoon, was the same one hand that could safely prop an infant’s head. Hardly anyone knew this about me, and I found that fact frightening. Faced with caring for my baby and myself, I no longer wanted to pass as able-bodied. I wanted to be looked at squarely, limitations and all, so I could get the practical advice and physical help I needed. For that to happen, I had to take my disability out from the bottom of the closet and claim it. My great discovery was that it felt good to open up. To say, Actually, it’s not “nothing,”it’s this and begin to describe—first in conversation, and soon after, in poems—what it’s like to live in my particular body.
Hemiplegia
Left, my bright half, gets all of it...
soft sharp prickly wet lined.
But press your head against my right shoulder,
I sense weight but no warmth. Your cheek,
to my right touch, stubble free,
whether or not you shave.
Under my right fingers your silver hair
holds no silk, nor can I feel it part
into single strands. I’ll tell you
how I know you in the dark.
Left whispers the details.
Right listens and believes.
No
The nurses shaped us into positions.
Cradle hold, football hold. My hands
couldn’t take you to the right place.
Cerebral palsy I mumbled, apology,
explanation. As though those experts
of the body didn’t already know.
Finally, they propped cushions around us.
Your lips touched my breast
but instead of suckling, you dozed.
This had the nurses worried.
I worried how I’d feed you alone.
That night, your wail woke me.
I scooped you up, found the nurse’s bell.
When a new one came, I shyly
explained the pillows, the palsy.
“No,” she said coolly and I stared.
“No. That baby needs sleep not milk.”
I tried again: “he’s hungry.”
Shaking her head, she left our room.
I attempted the football hold.
The cradle. Tried setting up pillows
then sitting between them. They fell.
Keeping you in my arms, I paced, I sang.
We cried in unison, both of us
so helpless, so desperately new.
Prologue
A beach block gets so quiet
with the season over,
the ocean louder.
Year-rounders grow restless.
Neighbors flirt and my father
who worked nights, the only man
around on those long afternoons.
Getting home later, missing supper,
spitting out words that made
my mother shut the window
against that salt, that cold.
You don’t know where I been,
he’d bluster. You don’t know
where I go—until she folded inside
where I was folded,
another unknown, forming.
She believed this caused
my cerebral palsy. Water
takes the shape of its container,
and we are mostly water.
Because You Can’t See My Photographs
I seek out the past in voices, pulling you over
to speak with men whose words are edged
with my father’s New Yorkese, or to hear songs
I listened to in his finned blue car. Sometimes,
I name shapes to convey what I mean. Bowl
for the feeling of standing surrounded by
mountains as a teen, torpedo for the rounded
point my pregnant belly made a decade before
we met. Once, I placed a friend’s infant on your lap,
telling you my son had been heavier than she,
that his scalp smelled like sleep lingering in sheets.
I have box after box of pictures, curled rectangles
that are blank to you. Still if you could travel
back to the schoolyard in Queens where I played
as a child, I trust you’d recognize the girl I was,
you who tease her laugh from me so easily.
We Are Everywhere
The first one I see, on Bleeker,
has a rigid leg that traces half moons
as she moves. The next, spotted on
Houston, uses crutches to swing
her whole self forward, a leap
for each of her boyfriend’s strides.
Right now, a woman with auburn hair
and a gypsy skirt waits for the light
in a motorized chair. The walk sign
flashes green and, magnetized, I follow,
willing her to notice I’m kin.
Stephen Kuusisto
DIGRESSIONS ON POETRY, PROSE
AND A LINGONBERRY BUSH
Poetry differs from other forms of expression in two essential ways: it does not aspire to tell the literal truth and it can get at the truth with unreliable methods. Or to put it another way: you can glean the truth from a poem but the process is quasi-occult, like reading the entrails of birds. The Roman Legion always did this before setting out on a campaign. It’s possible that by reading avian intestines the Romans bought themselves some extra time to hang around the capital and that, in turn, this would have improved the morale of the troops. Such is the incalculable power of art—even those who do not care about it can derive benefits from living in an artistic culture. But I digress.
Beauty Is a Verb Page 16
