Stephen Kuusisto's Have Dog, Will Travel

A book about a blind man getting his first guide-dog? Why was I picking this up. It was on the Rapid Reads shelf at Petit Library and I had picked it up each of the last three times I had visited. Something about the cover, the title, the idea was grabbing me, but I resisted thinking it a light book while I was in the mood for something heavier. Something in that fourth time picking it up got me. Maybe it was Billy Collins' blurb, but probably it was me finally giving in to my instincts.

It was not a light book. Nor was it too heavy. It weighed in just right.

Kuusisto is a poet and writes prose like one. It is good prose with the occasional moments of poetic intrigue. A sentence is phrased in an odd way. Maybe it's broken, a fragment but placed just so. Whatever he has done, it works here and he led me through the story surely and firmly. A book about a blind man getting his first guide-dog? Hardly. It was the story of a man bonding with a partner, falling in love, becoming an independent man, alluding to the forces that had shaped him, and accepting grace. It is, simply put, a good book.

A few choice lines, but only a few. I found that I was reading more than harvesting. I was too involved in the story to stop and take note.

It seemed I had three problems. I was sad. I had to learn how to walk in a larger world. And I had to trust I could do this. (16)

There's an old Zen adage: if you want to get across the river, get across. (17)

Andy Warhol said: "As soon as you stop wanting something you get it." (23)

I'm hoping that these three work out for me. I'm sad at my job and need to learn how to go back out into the world of uncertainty. For that getting across, I just need to get across. And while I believe that I might get what I need when I stop wanting it, I also believe that working is true wanting and that work will get me there.

...my job is to dare to be in the world. (175)

Okay, that line has reshaped my life just a bit. Or maybe it has altered my trajectory by a tenth of a degree. Either way, I'm grateful for it.

Modesty is a requirement if you're walking a long way. (229)

This is a Zen koan. I'll be thinking about it for years.

I've ordered the rest of his prose from the library and will then move to his poetry. Maybe I might even write him a note since he lives right around the corner. I'm in proximity to good writers. How great is that?

Ready For Oliver Sacks

I've been looking for a way into reading Oliver Sacks.

When his last essays were published in The New York Times I was still learning to live with the sudden, abrupt death of my father. I knew that Sacks had been diagnosed, sentenced really, and that his death was imminent. My father's death was so recent, as if it was still happening again and again, I couldn't imagine delving into the last days of another man. There's a line in Hayden Carruth's great and wise poem "Regarding Chainsaws" that expressed all this better than I can:

...About then
I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I
don't feel so good about that neither. But my mother
was having her strokes then. I figured
one person coming apart was as much
as a man can stand. Then Stan was taken away
to the nursing home, and then he died.

My father had come apart and that was more than I could stand. Then Oliver Sacks was diagnosed, and then he died. His auto-biography On The Move came out and I heard all about it but couldn't get myself to read it. Through proximity on the calendar, his life and death had become too connected with the life and too soon death of my father.

All my life I've been around death. Dad was a funeral director and when I was ten he bought the funeral home in which I mostly grew up. That is, I spent most of my childhood there and I mostly, but not totally, grew up. The dead lay in their boxes in the funeral home which was connected by three separate doors to our house. The living were there too, both my family and the families of those who had lost their mother, father, and God help us their children. I helped Dad in the funeral home and sometimes closed the lids on the caskets before they were taken to the cemetery and buried or to the crematorium and incinerated.

That contact provided me with far less understanding of death than might be expected. I accepted the logic of it, but death lives mostly beyond the bounds of logic. My only real experience with the fullness of death was when, as a young man, I held my dog while the veterinarian put her down. It took far too long for her breathing to stop and her eyes never did close. Only when the vet said that she was gone did I allow myself to break down, staring into her brown eyes. Even then it was a halting and broken kind of grief that didn't heal me. It left me wanting, needing really, some way to get through.

When my father died, I never really cried or got to any release of all that terrible pressure, much as I tried. Grief didn't consume me so much as rise up around my body like a black fog, an almost liquid through which I found it difficult but not impossible to move. I wanted it to be worse. I wanted to break down, but grief didn't disable me other than when I was alone at Wegmans. There, for some reason, I pushed the cart haphazardly, walking across the whole store to frozen foods for one item, remembering something I needed to get in produce all the way back. I walked the length and breadth of that store in a tunneled fog, the periphery of my vision lost, my way forward clouded. It was as if Wegmans was a kind of purgatory.

It became the space where I was no longer in a world without my father but neither was I gone from the world of my wife, children, and family. I was between. For months I visited Wegmans by myself to be lost there for an hour, crossing and recrossing the store as if looking for something or mapping it for some kind of crossing. I visited Dad. I wondered about the nature of life. I bought bananas, frozen pizza, and six-packs of beer.

It's been almost a year since Wegmans has felt like anything but a grocery store. It has been three and a half years since my father died. It's just three years since Oliver Sacks died, and today I borrowed a slim library book containing four of his essays. Gratitude it is called and I am grateful for having read it, for still thinking of my father dearly but no longer with such a burden of sorrow and loss, and for the idea that I may finally be ready to hear more from Oliver Sacks. I'm ready to hear what he might have to tell me about living, a business in which I'm still occupied even as he and Dad have moved on from that into what I can't even begin to imagine.

The Right Direction

On Friday, a kid left our school. The kid was a handful, often challenging, usually draining, really loud or completely withdrawn, a bundle of nerves. At the end of the day, after the kid had said a final goodbye, a few of us stood in the hall talking. It was mostly rehashing old complaints and expressing relief to be free of the kid. I stood thinking that this was the kind of kid for which our school is designed. As they talked I felt a courseness developing within me.

Thoreau wrote:

As I go through the fields, endeavoring to recover my tone and sanity and to perceive things truly and simply again, after...dealing with the most commonplace and worldly-minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as if I had committed suicide in a sense." (The Journal, pg. 80)

I left the group and went into my classroom and be alone. I'm not sure I recovered my tone or sanity, but it was a step in the right direction.

I noticed again how often the right direction is away from the crowd and trivial affairs.

Michiko Kakutani's The Death Of Truth

Overall, this was a pretty tough book. We elected something worse than a buffoon. We voted to dissolve most of what is good about our country. We didn't vote to make America great but to make America into something other than a democratic republic. We succumbed to trickery and a demagogue playing to our worst instincts and we are all suffering for it now.

Kakutani is a tremendous writer. Her prose is beautiful. This felt a bit too much like a book report or graduate thesis. I would have preferred to have just heard more from her, but it's still good to be aware.

Oh, one other thing: this confirms my decision to leave social media. That's a lot of what got us into all this trouble.

A few salient passages:

The tendency of Americans to focus, myopically, on their self-pursuits--sometimes to the neglect of their civic responsibilities--is not exactly new. In Democracy in America, written more than a century and a half before people started using Facebook and Instagram to post selfies and the internet was sorting us into silos of like-minded souls, Alexis de Tocqueville noted Americans' tendency to withdraw into "small private societies, united together by similitude of conditions, habits, and customs," in order "to indulge themselves in the enjoyments of private life." He worried that this self-absorption would diminish a sense of duty to the larger community, opening way for a kind of soft depostism on the part of the nation's rules--power that does not tyrannize, but "compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people" to the point where they are "reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." This was one possible cost of a materialistic society, he predicted, where people became so focused on procuring "the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives" that they neglect their responsibilities as citizens; it was difficult to conceive, he wrote, how such people who "have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed." (64-65, emphasis mine)

"With Google personalized for everyone," the internet activist Eli Pariser wrote in his book, The Filter Bubble, "the query 'stem cells' might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and activists who oppose it. 'Proof of climate change' might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil company executive. In polls, a huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they're increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click." (116-117)

The nihilism in Washington is both an echo and a cause of more widespread feelings: a reflection of a growing loss of faith in institutions and a loss of respect for both the rule of law and everyday norms and traditions; a symptom of our loss of civility, our growing inability to have respectful debates with people who have opinions different from our own; and our growing unwillingness to give others the benefit of the doubt, room for an honest mistake, the courtesy of a hearing. (155)