Emily Rose Cole | April 2020

NOTES

In the first chapter of his memoir Planet of the Blind, Stephen Kuusisto describes how he used to ride a bike as a child, despite his low vision. He begins this passage in the conditional: “I would conquer space by hurdling through it,” then switches to past tense, “I wore telescope glasses, suffered from crushing headaches, but still chose to ride a bicycle—with nothing more than adrenaline for assurance.” This shift sets the reader up for a memory, but in the next paragraph he switches tactics again, shifting the point of view from a close first person to a close second: “How do you ride a bicycle when you can’t see? You hold your head stiff like a flower and tilt toward the light. You think not at all about your chances—the sheer physicality of gutters and pavements. One submits to Holy Rule and spins ahead.” Close second, “you,” yields to a more formal, third-person “one” at the end, a flow of language patterning that suggests consistency even as it denies it. Like the younger Kuusisto, weaving around on his bicycle, the reader must trust Kuusisto’s lyricism, following his movements through time without a clear sense of where they might end up.

Kuusisto’s introduction of close second person soon gives way to a direct address to the reader: “Picture this,” he invites us, “A darkness rises. Is it a tree or a shadow? A shadow or a truck? The thrill of the high wire is the greatest wonder of the brain. There is, at the center of our skulls, a terrible glittering, a requiem of light.” Question and metaphor mix to imbue the reader with a sense of what it feels like to hurtle down the street on a bicycle with no sense of whether the shadows at the edge of one’s limited vision are trees or trucks, and the fluidity with which Kuusisto weaves in and out of tense and point of view infuses his writing with a kind of lyrical vertigo in which the reader inhabits both Kuusisto’s past and his present, his consciousness and their own. Without even a paragraph break, he plunges us suddenly back to his own voice, and into the present tense, even though his voice still seems to inhabit the realm of memory: “I lower my face to the cold handlebars and decide it’s a shadow, a hole in sunlight, and pedal straight through.” A page later, Kuusisto breaks from the memory and skips ahead to the future, while still speaking of the past: “I cycled from the age of ten until I was thirty. During my last decade it was occasional, more furtive, a headless activity like taking drugs. By my twenties, I knew it was injurious. As a child, I had only that graven need to resemble.” Here, Kuusisto introduces his own future self, speaking about how long it took to kick his bicycling habit and then working backwards through time, through his furtive, thirty-year-old self, to the twenty-something who should’ve known better, and back to the boy in the memory whose crash we just witnessed, drawn to danger by his “graven need to resemble.”

But then Kuusisto launches us suddenly backward into the past-present, uncovering where his younger self got the instrument of his past and future destruction: “Of course my mother gave me this bicycle in the first place, a gift made from her guilt. I love her for the gift of speed and remain angry because of it. Mine was a boyhood of thrills and nausea.” Despite the frequency of the mixing and matching of tenses and perspectives I just described, when I first read Planet of the Blind, it was this short paragraph that cued me in to the way that Kuusisto was using time. The paragraph begins in past tense with “my mother gave me,” indicating to us that this action took place in the past, but the next sentence shifts to the present—“I love her” but even in present tense, the verb “remain” suggests a speaker looking back from the future. The last sentence stays in this reflective past, sweeping up the whole of Kuusisto’s childhood into a “boyhood of thrills and nausea,” a reflection that seems to adhere more to Kuusisto’s current present than his past. In three sentences, Kuusisto’s lyric prose occupies three points in time at once—past, present, and future: time travel through the lyric mode.

In interviews, Kuusisto has said that his aim in writing so lyrically was to capture the experience of being partially sighted, to show his readers through image and sound and slippery time what his own experience was like. In one interview with disability scholar and activist Ralph James Savarse, Kuusisto says that “claiming disability… is for me to claim the lyric. In turn the lyric is a mode of poetry and prose that best resists the falsifications of narrative imprinting. If people with disabilities have been exiled by history, by the architectures of cities and the policy of the state, then the lyric and the ironic form of awareness are central to locating a more vital language. We claim disability by lyric impulse. And by lyric impulse we rearrange the terms of awareness.” Kuusisto’s lyricism does not just model for readers the feeling of being partially sighted; he also invokes lyricism as tool to “resist the falsifications of narrative imprinting” and “rearrange the terms of awareness.” Lyricism, in other words, resists the medical model of disability, and simultaneously resists the narratives imposed on disabled people by a society that exiles them. The lyric impulse writes around the societal norms that attempt to provide it with structure and refuses to comply.

I am not blind, but as a fellow disabled person, I think that Kuusisto’s lyrical style captures something more than just the feeling of partial-sightedness. His slippage through various states of time also mirrors the way many other disabled people experience time: as a fluid construct rather than a linear one. Disability scholars and activists call this “crip time.” Disability scholar and rhetorician Margaret Price defines crip time as “a flexible approach to normative time frames.” In other words, crip time is a method of approaching time as Kuusisto does: flexible instead of static, lyric instead of narrative. Just as the lyric impulse resists the structure of narrative, it also resists the structure of normative time.

*

The flexibility of crip time is not the same as the disordered rationality of nonlinear time. Even the word nonlinear suggests a line, even if it’s against the line, a nonline. Crip time, my time, is closer to poetry than to Pulp Fiction. Although it could be said that there is a certain lyricism to Tarantino’s style, nonlinear storytelling is not the same as lyricism—Pulp Fiction is still a narrative, though one whose plot is presented out of order. At the end, we understand that the parts fit together to form a coherent whole—still a narrative, but diced up and rearranged.

But my life, everyone’s life, still exists in a linear world. If it’s Monday and I’m waiting for something good to happen on Wednesday, I will still need to get through Tuesday, even if Tuesday feels lost to me because of brain fog or doctor’s appointments or extreme fatigue. The point is that this time will not be lost to everyone else. Without a time machine, there is no way to cut between the future and the past. In the day-to-day, we are all of us stuck in the linear mode, disabled or not.

And yet, in her lyric essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” Ellen Samuels asserts that “crip time is time travel.” She writes:

Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages… Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear.

For Samuels, normative time is linear, but crip bodies are not. We move in and out of normative time with the same jerky nonlinearity as the Tarantino movie I was so quick to disavow. We occupy the past and the future at once, we resist the “normative life stages” that society ascribes to us. Samuels is right—my body is at once old and young: I am a twenty-nine-year-old with the bladder of an eighty-year-old. Some days, I have the same mental acuity and memory recall that I’m used to. Others, my brain moves so slowly that it takes half an hour to compose a three-sentence email, or to remember the names of my thesis advisors. Yet, my time is not nonlinear—the rest of the world is still moving in a straight line. My time is lyrical. I am simultaneously both pre- and post-relapse.

*

In the opening of her groundbreaking polemic Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes that “everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.” Everyone, eventually, will become a citizen of both kingdoms, and to Sontag, there is no use in pretending that we don’t possess a “bad” passport as well as a “good” one. In her introduction, she critiques metaphor, writing,

My subject is not illness itself, but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—the healthiest way of being ill, is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is impossible to take up residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.

Throughout Illness as Metaphor, Sontag illustrates how metaphor is destructive, particularly for those who are ill. Metaphor lies to us, it grants generous room for stereotype, and allows patients to believe that they have brought illness upon themselves. And yet, it is also unavoidable: even as Sontag reaches for a metaphor to specify her terms—to be sick and to be well is like being a dual citizen of two kingdoms.

This is not a criticism of Sontag so much as a description of the failure of language. In fact, Sontag herself walked back her introduction in her AIDS and Its Metaphors, which she published ten years later. She calls her introduction to Illness as Metaphor a “brief hectic flourish of metaphor, in mock exorcism of the seductiveness of metaphorical thinking. Of course one cannot think without metaphors. But that does not mean there aren’t some metaphors we might well abstain from or try to retire.” It is not, then, a wholesale purification of metaphor that is needed, so much as an active resistance against its more lazy or sinister uses. Thoughtful people, particularly ill people, must be aware of our lurid and dangerous metaphoric landscape. But we can no more escape or fully resist metaphoric language any more than Sontag can. For better or for worse, language is as metaphoric as it is arbitrary. To deny ourselves metaphor is to deny ourselves communication at all.

In an essay about blindness, Georgina Kleege describes a snarky moment when Helen Keller footnotes the verb “see” in the phrase “I was taken to see a woman”: Keller writes, “The excellent proof-reader has put a query to my use of the word ‘see.’ If I had said ‘visit,’ he would have asked no questions, yet what does ‘visit’ mean but see (visitare)? Later I will try to defend myself for using as much of the English language as I have succeeded in learning.” Kleege elaborates on Keller’s point, saying that the footnote illustrates how Keller knows that “the more one knows about language the harder it is to find vocabulary that does not have some root in sighted or hearing experience. But, she argues, to deny her the use of seeing-hearing vocabulary would be to deny her the ability to communicate at all.” The proofreader quarrels with Keller on her “improper” use of the verb “see” and Keller responds (with some sass) that she’d rather have the metaphor, pointing out that if she were to excise the language and metaphors of the sighted and the hearing from her vocabulary, her sense of expression would be unfairly limited.

Until I got sick, I didn’t even realize how completely metaphorical language had saturated illness and disability. But it does. And now I do. But it’s telling that I was still tempted to write for my next sentence: “then I opened my eyes and saw that it was everywhere.” Which is exactly why Sontag warns sick people to guard against metaphor: it creeps in, even when you don’t mean for it to. Even when your project is to write about resisting it.

*

How easy it would be to make metaphor out of Kuusisto’s youthful bicycle riding. The poet in me knows how she wants to craft the sentence. She wants to draw a comparison between the feeling of living in crip time and the image of Kuusisto bumping over the gravel with only shadows to guide him. The disability scholar in me, the part who loves Sontag, balks at this—although not so much that she won’t allow me to make the comparison a sentence ago.

But this is exactly the problem. I know damage that metaphor does, and I reach for metaphors anyway. I want to say “I’m a poet, so I can’t help it” but this is not true. I can help it. I choose not to. My belief that metaphor can open avenues of empathy between people supersedes my desire to strip my language of metaphor, even when it is prudent to do so. I am trying to resist. I am trying to be better. I do my best to be aware of my metaphors and wield them with care. (I say wield as if they are weapons. They are, sometimes. Not always.) I try to purify my thinking, if not my speech, of metaphors that reinforce stereotypes about illness. I try hard not to make a metaphor out of my disabled friends or their illnesses. I try hard not to make a metaphor out of myself, even as I write poems about my own body and its sickness. Often I fail, and I don’t just fail: I refuse to comply with my own doctrine. I begin sentences that say “I reach for metaphor like a child who” and then delete them.

Is this language failing me, or am I simply failing to live up to my own ideals, and Sontag’s? Is my poet-self a danger to my disabled self? At what point does a resistance to metaphor become self-sabotage?

*

It’s finals week during the second year of my PhD program, the hardest semester of school I’ve ever experienced. I am at dinner with a close friend and I admit, ruefully, that I haven’t written anything today because I’ve been brain fogged. It’s not a technical term, the more common medical definition is brain fatigue, but both she and most people in the disabled community understand that it’s the colloquial name for a symptom of a variety of chronic illnesses—including my own Multiple Sclerosis—that boils down to an episode of mental confusion that results in poor memory recall, lack of focus, and decreased mental acuity. Generally, such episodes are associated with old age, and particularly with memory-degenerating illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease. But for an MS patient, brain fog can be a symptom that occurs during an MS relapse. At any moment, I could be pulled out of linear time and pushed forward decades. On days like this, I imagine my brain resting beneath a fuzzy crown of white, wispy hair. 

My friend knows me well enough to understand the basics of what this means, but over dinner she asks what it feels like. You don’t have to tell me, she says. She does not wish to make a spectacle out of my illness, but she wants to know how Multiple Sclerosis shapes my life on a deeper level than the little she already knows. She isn’t trying to pry, as so many people do when they discover that I am chronically, but for the most part invisibly, ill. I can tell that she’s trying to empathize. She wants a metaphor because she understands the world through metaphor, just as I do.

I almost tell her, quite accidentally, that brain fog feels like fog. It’s only then that I realize that brain fog is its own metaphor, both sign and signified. My friend is a poet too, but when I say brain fog, she reads it only as the name of the symptom, not as its description.

I hesitate, trying to reach beyond the metaphor of fog to something even more viscerally descriptive. It’s texture that I want, something thick and difficult to navigate. Fog is at least something that I could can find myself lost in, a physical sensation that I could push my way out of. But I think that brain fog is a metaphor of sight more than of texture, although it’s the texture of the slowness that I try to describe. Real fog is more difficult to see through than to move through, but I always think of brain fog in terms of kinetics; it feels more like a limiting of motion rather than a limiting of vision. It’s like thinking through molasses, I offer. It’s not enough, but at least the implication is right. Brain fogged, I feel as thick as molasses and as slow.

*

I still struggle when I teach my creative writing students about metaphor. They always come in knowing the basics. I ask them what is a metaphor and they dutifully respond that a metaphor is a comparison of two unlike things and then someone usually adds and if it uses “like” or “as,’’ then that’s a simile. They can define these comparisons as they have been taught, they can identify them in poems. But I’m still not certain how to teach them what makes a good metaphor, other than to show them examples. This semester I told my students that metaphors were a juxtaposition of difference that encourages the reader to make an association, but that wasn’t quite enough.

Different kinds of metaphors resonate with different students, but the one poem that I return to over and over to teach my Intro students is Jack Gilbert’s “Finding Something.” The poem opens with a surrealist gesture, then grounds us immediately in place and then goes on to describe, in painful detail, how the poem’s speaker takes care of his dying wife. These descriptions are straightforward, and the speaker describes how the speaker takes her

to a bucket in the corner of the high-ceilinged room
which is the best we can do for a chamberpot.
She will lean against my leg as she sits
so as not to fall over in her weakness.

In my experience, students typically grasp this much of what’s going on in the poem. They understand, generally, that the speaker’s wife is weak and dying and that the speaker does not know what to do about it beyond the little solace and help that he can offer. But it’s the first few lines and the last few that give them trouble, and that’s why I teach the poem in the first place:

How strange and fine to get so near to it.
The arches of her feet are like voices
of children calling in the grove of lemon trees,
where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.

Both at the beginning and at the end of the poem, Gilbert leans hard into surrealism, the moon becoming “horses in the tempered dark” and the arches of his wife’s feet an image of sound instead of sight, the doubled metaphor of the children’s voices and of the speaker’s heart, “helpless as crushed birds.” But what does it mean? The students ask me. They want to know what it is, and what the something is that has been found. Some students say grief or illness, and others argue that, no, Gilbert said it was “fine and strange” to be “near to it” so it can’t possibly be something so awful.

I watch them go in circles and when they demand an answer of me, the teacher, the one who’s supposed to know the concrete answers to these questions, I shake my head and tell them that any answer I could give them would be inadequate. That Jack Gilbert may have had an “it” in mind, but the point of the poem, at least as I read it, is that none of his metaphors come even close to the feeling that he is trying to describe, whether grief or pain or anything else. The metaphors Gilbert uses are some of my favorites in any poem; they are the standard by which I measure all others. And yet, the poem admits its failure in the first two lines: “I say moon is horses in the tempered dark / because horse is the closest I can get to it.” Gilbert never explains what it is, only that any metaphor he makes to reach it is unsuccessful. The three metaphors he gives us are as close as he, or we, can get.

After teaching this poem to my Intro students this semester, I told them, spontaneously, that metaphor happens when a writer reaches for something inexplicable. It is not just a comparison between two unlike things, but an attempt to describe one thing as another, an attempt to bring the inward outward, to make a feeling describable and therefore accessible by others. It’s not a perfect definition; really, it’s more of a theory of what metaphor does than of what one is. But for now, this is as close as I can get.

*

In his Savarese interview, Kuusisto suggests that metaphor isn’t just comparison but also an invocation of the surreal, a specific tool to work against narrative and its stereotypes. He references a passage in Planet of the Blind in which he says that his version of blindness is “like lying in your back in an ice cave and staring up at the cobalt sun. That’s both an analogy—blindness is “like” something else—but it’s also a surrealist association—for indeed blindness is also unlike anything we might say about it—in an optho-centric world, blindness is essentially unknowable to people.” Kuusisto doesn’t say outright that metaphor fails us, but the failure is heavily implied. Even in purposefully reaching for the surreal, Kuusisto admits that his metaphor is incomplete, that even as he grasps for something to compare his experience to, he fails because as much as blindness, to him, is like the ice cave, he acknowledges that blindness is also “unlike anything we might say about it” that the world of the blind is “essentially unknowable to people.” No matter how close we get to it, our metaphors will always fall short.

*

I don’t wish to suggest that using metaphor uncritically or without thought is not still dangerous and potentially harmful. The fact that metaphors will fail does not release us from the work of investigating them and deploying them carefully. Sontag argues that careful use of the metaphor is a matter of ethical importance: how we metaphorize something influences the way we, and others, conceive of a person, their qualities, and even their temperaments. When done with care, this sort of personal mythmaking can be useful, and offer us insight and empathy into someone else’s experience. When done lazily—or with the intent to cause harm, as seen so often in propaganda—a metaphor’s destructiveness can carry through centuries.

In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag traces the roots of the myth that illness begets creative genius. She explains that “melancholy… was the artist’s disease, according to the theory of the four humours. The melancholy character… was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart.” The disease was quickly associated with tuberculosis and became another variant of “the artist’s disease,” and tubercular artists Keats and Shelley were revered as more creative, more “apart” from the rest of their cohort specifically because of the illness. Tuberculosis as metaphor made their illness and their genius one in the same and, Sontag points out, “so well established was the cliché that connected TB and creativity that at the end of the twentieth century one critic suggested that it was the progressive disappearance of TB which accounted for the current decline of literature at the arts.” From a contemporary perspective, the pervasiveness of this myth, juxtaposed with the horror and bodily failure associated with TB, seems patently ridiculous. How could a critic possibly believe this myth so thoroughly as to imply that if only more people in the culture were sick with this illness, the culture’s art would be better?

Yet, Sontag insists that the fetishizing of tuberculosis is only the “next-to-last episode in the long career… of melancholy” and argues that as tuberculosis declined, we superimposed its metaphors onto mental illness, which Sontag calls “insanity,” instead: “The romantic view is that illness exacerbates consciousness. Once that illness was TB; now it is insanity that is thought to bring consciousness to a paroxysmic enlightenment.” One need not look far to see examples of how madness is romanticized in contemporary culture, particularly among artists. Suicide is particularly fetishized among artists of all kinds, from Hemingway to Plath to, more recently, cultural icons like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.

Such mythologies are rarely careful with their metaphors, and as a result, we end up with a population of artists, young and old, who would rather be brilliant than be well. These are the kinds of metaphors that I wish to interrogate and push back against in my own art. But if it is possible, it is to push back against one mythology without replacing it with another.

*

In my MFA, my classmates and I argued bitterly over what constituted a lyric poem. We agreed on very little, other than that narrative poems had a certain degree of story, and lyric ones moved associatively and were more like snapshots, capturing a time, place, or feeling. But even they included some narrative markers. So what was the line? Everyone had a different opinion, and none of us could clearly articulate the line. In a presentation once, my friends described a gradient between lyric and narrative. They made metaphor of it, drawing a line on the board and positioning the hamlet of Lyricville on one side and the metropolis of Narrativetown on the other. Any poem one writes exists on a spectrum between these two places, they told us. A poem, or a poet, is never wholly lyric or wholly narrative. Zeno’s arrow as applied to poetry: as hard as one tries, one can never quite reach the gates of one city or the other. 

This semester, on the Monday that I had planned to talk to my Introduction to Creative Writing students about the difference between lyric and narrative poetry, I had an MS attack that left my brain fuzzy and my body too fatigued to leave my bed. I had just cancelled class due to a conference the Friday before, but I obeyed the whims of my body and repurposed my in-person lesson plan to an online one. In that version of the class, I give them a loose list of lyric characteristics: its tendency toward personal revelation, its emphasis on image, rather than event, and, most importantly, its disconnected, associative quality. Since poetry generally operates in a space much friendlier to association than does prose, it’s difficult to tell, in poems, where lyricism ends and narrative begins. But it was important to me to teach my students this concept, to give them a sense of the difference, for one cannot really use a tool until they know how to recognize its shape. But as my MFA colleagues had noted years before, it’s a spectrum, not a cut-and-dried list.

I assigned my students three poems and tasked them with choosing which one was the purest lyric, which was the purest narrative, and which had elements of both. I asked them to qualify all three poems, and most sifted them into categories that I agreed with. Finding a mostly-narrative poem was easy (I used Gary Soto’s “Oranges”), but I had a harder time narrowing down a mostly-lyric poem. For this assignment, I chose one of my favorites from Richard Siken, “Detail of the Woods,” which ends like this:

From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.

I turned my back to the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.

Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.

I have never been able to sufficiently explain what I love so much about these lines. They, like the rest of the poem, follow their own internal logic, a series of disconnected statements juxtaposed against another with little context or connective tissue which is, I believe, about as purely lyrical as a poet can get. The poem itself “turns [its] back to the story.” It refuses narrative, forcing the reader to make whatever sense of it she will. Typically, I don’t like this sort of move in poetry. I love narrative and find it, generally, more accessible than the lyric mode, since the constant jumping from image to image, timeframe to timeframe, requires a different sort of attention than does the familiar narrative arc typified by Aristotle’s three unities (time, place, and action). But Siken’s lyricism, and Kuusisto’s and Gilbert’s and Samuels’, give me just enough information to let go of worrying about what it means and focus instead on what the lyricism is reaching toward.

My favorite line of the poem is the last line, although I have been in enough poetry workshops to recognize that the sudden presence of the ambiguous “you” likely raises hackles among many poets. Perhaps if I had workshopped this poem, it would’ve raised mine. But in this poem, it doesn’t. I love the separation between the “you” and the body and the layering that occurs from the poem’s landscape. Siken’s poem suggests a world, though dreamworld, where my consciousness can be separate from my body, and this is a world that appealed to me even before my illness announced itself.

I am afraid of everything. I’ve always been that way, I am constantly anxious, constantly planning ahead, constantly anticipating disaster. I like the idea that my body could occupy a separate space from that consciousness, that my body could never have been afraid of anything, even though my consciousness was and is. This is the beauty of a poem, the beauty of the lyric. Like Kuusisto’s memories that spin simultaneously through three time periods, Siken’s lyricism allows a body to be separate from its owner, for fear to take place in one vessel, but not the other. Through lyricism, these writers not only push back against narrative, but embrace the doubleness of occupying more than one space at a time.

*

Not all disabled people embrace lyricism the way Kuusisto does. In a review of Planet of the Blind, the visual artist Sargy Mann acknowledges that his experience of being blind is different than Kuusisto’s, writing that “my own blindness came to me when I was 50 and is therefore in a context of remembered normality.” I find it lovely that, despite the lament implied in the phrase “remembered normality,” Mann describes his own blindness as something that “came to him” something that was given, rather than the more colloquial metaphor of his sight being taken away. However, Mann’s quarrel is not necessarily with Kuusisto’s blindness. Though it’s clear that Mann has some empathy for what he calls “the relative chaos of [Kuusisto’s] experience,” the bulk of his critique rests with Kuusisto’s use of lyricism. Mann gripes that

[Kuusisto] writes using poetic imagery very freely… I found that my continued questioning of his means of expression led me to an unwanted and ungenerous questioning of what was being said… the prose style of the last section is quite different and reflects very clearly a different state of being. The poetic mode is abandoned for a more ordinary use of language which I find more readable, clear, and precise.

What I find most interesting about this review is how much this basis of critique has in common with my intro to creative writing students’ frustration with Jack Gilbert or, for that matter, with Siken, whose lyricism they often find less impressive than I do. They, like Mann, are impatient for fixed meaning. They see lyricism as a barrier trying to keep them out. Though he doesn’t use this term, I suspect that Mann interprets Kuusisto’s lyricism as a barrier to accessibility; the prose section at the very end is, to him, far more readable and understandable. Which is to say, the prose section is more traditionally narrative; its prosaic nature doesn’t work against convention in the same way that the lyricism does.

What Mann’s review does not mention, however, is that this choice to structure the first section of the book lyrically and the second section prosaically is intentional. If Kuusisto’s lyricism is meant to capture the feeling of his blindness, the prose style in part two, when he gets a guide dog and begins to accept his blindness, captures the shift in both his consciousness regarding his disability and the new ease with which he can move through his day-to-day life. “The lyric mode,” Kuusisto says in his Savarse interview, “is concerned with momentum rather than certainty. This is the gnomon of lyric consciousness: darkness can be navigated. The claiming of disability is the successful transition from static language into the language of momentum.” This tension between certainty and momentum is modeled beautifully in the structure of the memoir. The same associative nature that Mann dislikes for leading him to “unwanted and ungenerous questioning” is the same style that gives the first section of the memoir its momentum, whereas the prose section is clearer, yes, but also slower. Reading his interview, I couldn’t help but imagine young Kuusisto on his bike, hurdling into a darkness he must navigate by feel and faith. Is this, too, what the lyric mode feels like to him? Again, I reach out to make metaphor, this time out of the lyric mode itself. Does it resist me, or encourage me to do so? I cannot tell. Perhaps it does both.

*

I don’t know why I want so badly to describe “it,”—how it feels to think of time as both lyric and narrative at once. The world designed for abled bodies operates linearly, narratively: abled people move through their days without their bodies skipping ahead of them, breaking down before their narratives say that they should. Meanwhile, crip time pushes me further and further down the spectrum of lyricism—my body feels as if it occupies the lyric more than that narrative—yet I cannot choose to fully leave the narrative. I must still move through Tuesday to get to Wednesday, and my life still adheres to certain linear goals: I must complete coursework before I take qualifying exams, I must pass my exams before my dissertation year, I must complete a dissertation before I graduate. But the way I achieve these goals is lyrical, associative. I try to mete out my major projects, like this essay, during days when my brain isn’t molasses-heavy, but I fear lack of completion. I never know when such heaviness will strike.

Some days I move backwards, and some days forwards. I negotiate what Samuels calls the “brokenness” of crip time, which “requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world.” Like Siken’s severing of the “you” from the body, illness requires me to separate, with great care, my body from its metaphors. And yet, I cannot rid myself of metaphor, though I am trying to be better at choosing the metaphors I make with more care and consciousness. The truth is, I do not want to purify myself of metaphorical thinking. How else would I write poetry? How else would I try to explain what it feels like to occupy so many spaces at once?

*

In part two of Planet of the Blind, in the section in prose, the section that is decidedly less lyrical, Kuusisto attempts to describe the feeling of getting a guide dog after living all of his childhood and much of his adult life without one. Tellingly, he tries to resist metaphor in a way that the previous section embraces: “There is no analogy to getting a guide dog,” he asserts confidently. But then, the very next sentence, he reaches for simile: “I feel as if my hands have been waiting for this, as if I’ve touched something central in the life of an ancestor. The sureness of the handle is like picking up the first chestnut all over again.” This immediate, reflexive reach for lyrical comparison reveals the necessity of metaphor better than any other way I can think to show it. The poet wants to insist that “there is no analogy” but also “feel[s] as if.” Kuusisto initially disavows analogy because he knows that the comparison will fail. He knows that it’s not enough, there is no metaphor to describe the feeling he wants to describe. And yet, he tries anyway. He must. It is the only way to get close.

Sontag is right that metaphors and the mythologies perpetuated by an ableist society can be infinitely destructive, but that does not mean that all metaphors are inherently so. We should resist those metaphors that harm us, mythologize us, and make us into a monolith. But let us not resist the urge to reach. Let us give ourselves permission say “chestnut” and “ice cave” and “cobalt sun” and “horses in the tempered dark.” Let us reach for the right words to describe our bodies and their trials. We will fail in our descriptions. Language itself will fail. Language is not enough. But let us admit, at least, that metaphor is the closest we will get to it.

Notes

1. Kuusisto, Stephen, Planet of the Blind (New York: Delta, 1998), p. 8.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 9.
6. Ibid.
7. Kuusisto, Stephen, “Lyric Anger and the Vitrola in the Attic: An Interview with Stephen Kuusisto,” interview by Ralph James Saverese, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 3, no 2, 2009: p. 205.
8. Price, Margaret, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), p. 62.
9. Samuels, Ellen, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3, (2017): p. 1.
10. Ibid.
11. Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1978), p. 1.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid, p. 93.
14. Kleege, Georgina, “Blindness and Visual Culture,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis (NY: Routledge, 2006), p. 394.
15. Ibid, p. 395.
16. Gilbert, Jack, The Great Fires (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994), p. 12.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Kuusisto, Stephen, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 3, no 2, 2009:  p.196.
20. Sontag, Susan,  p. 32. 
21. Ibid, pp. 32–33.
22. Ibid, p. 32.
23. Ibid, p. 36.
24. Siken, Richard, War of the Foxes (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2015), p. 38.
25. Mann, Sargy. “Review of Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto,” The Spectator, 28 February 1998, p. 280.
26. Ibid.
27. Kuusisto, Stephen, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 3, no 2, 2009: p. 205.
28. Samuels, Ellen, Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3, (2017): p. 1.
29. Kuusisto, Stephen, Planet of the Blind, p. 165.