Auto-Graphein or ‘The Blind Man’s Pencil’: Notes on the Making of a Poem
Stephen Kuusisto and Petra Kuppers [1]
The dialogic essay combines Stephen Kuusisto’s lyrical, poetic, and analytical responses to a photograph of a blind man on the streets of Manhattan with a commentary by Petra Kuppers. Informed by disability studies, it is an experimental essay about poetry that plays with the boundaries of literature and criticism, juxtaposing prose and poetry in an endeavour to release the blind man from his old vestments.
Introduction
Disability Studies is more than just a new subject area, an additional category of identity politics, a political claim. “Disability” is not only a lived experience of individuality and difference, but it is also the hidden term, the shadow, behind many emancipatory politics. As Douglas Baynton and others have shown, disability is adduced to many groups – women, black people, immigrants, gay people. To be one of them is to be weak, damaged, not whole, unhealthy, sickly, and inferior. And when identity struggle becomes about rhetorically claiming strength, wholeness, and a righteous place at the table of the mainstream, disability’s “natural” negative meanings are reinforced again and again. To align with the cripple: that is not a politics much embraced in Western libratory discourse (although it is interesting to note that this is a metaphor familiar from religious framings). Yet the most radical project of disability studies is not only to show how deeply disability is woven into our shared cultural fabric, but also to offer ways forward, towards aesthetics that do not merely reproduce any master’s voice, but that show the beauty in the irregular, the pied, aesthetics that willfully play with language’s location on the limits of personal embodiment and social construction. “Weak” discourses, penetrated by others, interdependent, abandoned on the page, letters standing bereft and proud at the same time, in isolation and communication with other languages, histories and cultures: poetry has, as part of its arsenal, meaning-making functions that can illuminate poesis: the blooming of words from one body to the next, and onwards towards a community that always recedes.
In this experimental essay, Stephen and I will play with the boundaries of literature and criticism, and the form of our experiment is informed by our shared position within disability culture. Metaphors of modernity’s isolation often center on the disabled figure – and in Stephen’s lyrical essay, this figure will shift in and out of the background, taking on heft and weight at one moment, receding into language practice and discursive space the next. Where is the blind man located?
A First: Auto-Graphein or ‘The Blind Man’s Pencil’
1.
In a photograph: a blind man in Manhattan is centered expertly in a rush hour throng. He walks against the crowd. Commuters wearing trench coats appear to be rushing straight at him as if they might raise him in the air.
He wears a sign around his neck.
“There but for the grace of god go I,”the sign says. And then: “I am blind. Buy my pencils.”
The block lettering contains both logos and pathos. Every letter is intended to be perfectly straight.
Did the blind man make the sign alone or did someone help him?
The letters are so straight, surely he had help.
Ah, but no, he must have drawn the sign himself because the personal pronoun has fallen away from the declarative sentence about god and misfortune.
The man was concentrating on the faultlessness of his letters and so he ran out of room. He has written: “There but for the grace of god go.”
The “I”has fallen to the line below.
It stands on the left margin, perfect, Doric, superbly isolated.
Then the sign maker went on: “Buy my pencils.”
2.
By selling pencils and concurrently misplacing his own pronoun, the blind man has enacted a compound performance. He has both written and erased himself.
The Christian disclaimer about good fortune makes us examine the sign again.
We undergo the blind man’s disappearance even while we acknowledge our good fortune.
When we look again we see the blind man’s face is entirely in shadow.
Should we buy a pencil from this man, we will carry away in our pockets the instrument both of the man’s undoing and of his completion.
3.
Auto-bio-graphein equals self plus ‘life experience’ plus writing.
The blind man’s street performance is not a self disclosing script. That is, the real autobiographical act was the creation of the sign ‘off camera.’
Auto-graphein occurs when the blind man arrives on the sidewalk with pencils forlornly arranged in a cup.
He cannot write. He does not know where to place the “I” of autobiography.
His street performance says he’s merely a self ‘acted upon’—the self arranged alongside the useless instruments of writing.
Therefore the pencils he sells are fetishized. He cannot use them for their intended purpose.
Selling objects he cannot use (objects that, presumably, sighted people might want) the blind man generates a moment of abject exchange.
In this way the blind man escapes charity.
4.
Auto-graphein, writing that refuses to disclose the life behind it, creates a chain reaction of symbols.
He sells useless pencils, instruments which have prospective value to all those who can read his sign.
The pencil was the first widely distributed commodity of the industrial age. Therefore the man is unfit for the factory. He may have lost his sight there. He sells the very material object that represents his economic helplessness.
5.
The reaction of each commuter who reads the sign will depend on her or his interpretation of the self-consciousness or lack thereof that stands behind the placing of a single pronoun.
If the blind man misplaced the “I” that follows “there but for the grace of god go,” then his hidden life, the off camera life has simply been withheld, an act of omission that is willful and therefore “literary.”
If the man did not create the sign then he does not possess even the rudiments of literacy. His inner eye is blind. He carries lettering drawn by an unseen Other—an act which must necessarily produce horror.
6.
The sign pre-exists the man.
The lost pronoun is recovered though just barely. This circumstance also pre-exists the man.
His appearance on the ordinary street is founded on the principle of auto-graphein—surely he cannot write his life?
We shall buy his pencils.
7.
After long deliberation I find I want to write a poem about this man.
A Second: To a Blind Man Selling Pencils: New York City
And then, others arrived:
Eyes first, surveyors, important men,
Men who wore the flag—runners,
Who fill the streets in every town.
They carried sacks like thieves.
Every day such men feel their blood rise:
It uses them, returns them to the avenues
And I alone discovered them, one by one.
I was of the provinces. I was reflected
In their eyes like a fire.
Some men possess the color of origin—
The blind man is amaranth, aman-word of sorts,
A word that will be mistaken on earth.
Still I
Saluted the closed world
Without its consent,
Cross the water of streets
And raised a sign
Unreadable as the moon.
My plea had the whiteness
Of things that have no use in life
And the words were
Nothing more than a scar
That someone must have given me.
Why then did your name appear
Like the marks of a wheel
In this unyielding light?
A Third: Commentary on a Poem on a Page
Stephen’s essay revolves, in my reading, around a dance between two emplacements: a man in the city, a still point in the moving throng; and a pen moving, writing into stillness. And at the meeting point between the two, a poem emerges: “To a Blind Man Selling Pencils: New York City.” I read this poem here as an open field, reaching out to historical readings of being in the city, to sensory overload and sensory isolation, to the old meanings of “the blind man,” whether savant, seer or beggar, and the new meanings we can create together, in disability culture.[2]
What I hear in the poem’s lines is energy surging, cresting, falling away, all around the one figure, the blind man – amaranth, rare flower, eternal hue, a figure as much as a living being: someone caught as a historical trope of modernity’s alienation as much as a person living a life of rich sense data.
The poem speaks to me of different ways of knowing the world: “eyes first, surveyors”: a fragmented city life of runners, haste (and I hear Benjaminian ideas of the hyper-mobile, disconnected flaneur as well as Edgar Allan Poe’s disoriented man of the crowd in these lines). There is alienation and dislocation in the ‘thieves’ and in “feeling their blood rise”: too much pressure, too much definition from without, “in every town”: a mass being, not an owned and inhabited form of bodily being in the city. The city “uses them, returns them to the avenues”: and while I know that the word avenue is perfectly acceptable in the English language, the choice of the French term transports me to the European arcade, quite different in its steely glint from the U.S. shopping mall.
Against this onslaught of worker ants, runners, “important men” who have no distinguishing mark, stands the “I alone”: “And I alone discovered them, one by one.” The poem halts in its tracks, steps more slowly in this line, gives gravitas to the naming of the “I alone.” It is the privilege of the “I” to explore what surrounds it “one by one”: a different kind of discovering, of knowing people, those “others.” This “I” “was of the provinces”–again, a historical framing nudges me, as I hear modernity’s other, still vestigially available to the countryside in Benjamin’s time, in the time of the blind storyteller in the city. And the other meaning, biblical sounds, also swing in my ear as I listen. This ritardando, this slowing down, continues in “In their eyes like a fire”: I hear again more ancient sounds than the glistening mirror city, “eyes first”: while the image is a visual one, the sound patterns paint for me the oratory of a preacher, “like a fire” of the prophet, the one who walks differently in their midst.
That temporal dislocation I hear again in the next line, organized around that lovely word, “amaranth”: “possess” speaks to me of possession, of a different kind of other-directedness, not the business of office life, but of a wider arc. And the “color of origin”: a color that signals beyond the here and now, beyond visual sense data, to a mythical or archaic conception of senses and their ability to perceive. For amaranth is “a word that will be mistaken on earth”: sense data are treacherous, other realms play into reception and hermeneutics, and words are only fragments: “aman-word of sorts.”
The “I” sets itself in contradistinction to the world, these otherworldly touches creating different spheres: a closed world (the ancient spheres, semi-permeable globes that arch above the earth) and the “I.” They are separated by a gulf or water that distinguishes, but across which one can salute, or which one can cross. But the action of crossing or saluting might be unreadable, “as the moon”: in this, I hear the glittering sun town in relation, in touch, with the mysteries of the night. The sign is “raised”: again, the poem’s flow which gives me sensations of rising and cresting finds expression in the words, and in ways that echo the tidal influence of heavenly bodies.
“My plea had the whiteness”: white cane, white eyes (the stereotypicalised milky eyes of blind men in literature), but also the whiteness of no word on the page (or the sign): a white sign, pointing to communications that “have no use in life.” For these: “words were/Nothing more than a scar”: words are placeholders here, material acts rather than merely communicative devices. Words, masses, the general: the distinction between self and other crumbles here for me, as “words” become the objects of attention, and language’s problematic ability to shore up singularity becomes apparent. In the word, a body scars into meaning, accretes density, and yet also falls apart, leaves its lived experience in the sound patterns of breath, in the citation of older meanings that make up a word’s life.
But not all language is merely implicated in repetition: there are singular words, names, like the singular unreachable plant that “amaranth” names: In this sign of language, something appears that seems beyond the page’s ability to inscribe or leave off: a name that is on a journey, in movement, and appears, “Like the marks of a wheel / In this unyielding light?” The marks of a wheel: the everyday of city life and the numinous seem to hover together in that phrase, as the wheel also speaks to me of a cosmic wheel, a still point, a nub, the separation of center and periphery, a wheel that remains endless, endless in the unyielding light.
The lines on the cardboard move in and out of focus for me as I read the poem against Stephen’s preceding essay: language presses in, erases and erects the “I” in the hubbub of modernity’s thronging. Pens, and their ability to write across the borders of experience, offer a tentative place on a page.
A Forth: Stephen Kuusisto Replies
Poetry is the art of intelligent dislocations and, as Petra points out, a lyric response to the narrative positioning of the blind man is necessary if we are ever going to see him as a citizen. By its very definition, “citizenship” is the right to individual freedom and psychological autonomy. The photographer’s version of the blind man’s street performance cannot suggest anything more than a primitive framing of the disabled man’s predicament. The photograph is essentially a further semiotic imprisonment of a figure who is already abject.
The aim of my prose is twofold: I wish to reclaim the “framing” of the blind man’s street performance by interrogating the cultural and historical meanings that surround his sign. Additionally I want to propose that the autobiographical pronoun is too cryptic to be personal. Whenever the “I” is impersonal we are being mislead. Without autobiography the citizen becomes either a statistic or an advertisement.
In either case the blind man is enacted by others and he performs the spectacle of illiteracy for his economic survival. I am aware that this is both a desperate activity and a form of cultural commodification. The blind man sells the apparent instruments of literacy that he presumably cannot use. One wishes to ask, how is this performance still possible some two hundred years after Diderot?
This question became the incitement for the poem. The lyric poem stems from an intellectual or emotional crisis and it invariably makes something new out of fragments. In the poem our blind man speaks the names that precede the sign he carries in the photograph. Poetry asks us to look at names again and again.
As a blind man who walks with a guide dog I am aware that my appearance on the street is surrounded by old names, unexamined words, Latinate signifiers that serve only to disguise my provinces of poetry and discovery. By placing prose and the poem side by side my goal is to release the blind man from his old vestments.
A Fifth: No Conclusion
Spokes in a wheel: our writing falls into shards, towards a center, away from it. There is a tension between prose and poetry, between the line and the paragraph, between the words that bind the disabled figure into discourse and release her and him into experience. Or is that, bind into experience and release into discourse? Taking flight in modernity, rooted in place? To find a space within these tensions: that is the reader’s labor, weaving a path around the figures Stephen and I positioned on these pages.
Notes
[1] Stephen Kuusisto, Department of English, Ohio State University, and Dr. Petra Kuppers, Department of English, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
[2] See Poe, Benjamin, and also of interest might be Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament, in which the kaleidoscopic gaze on the modern city becomes the core actor. In relation to disability studies, I enjoy employing the flaneur tactically to think disruption in the urban space, and in my book Disability and Contemporary Performance, I introduce a minor figure in Baudelaire’s Paris, the turtle walker, as a figure through which to think disability arts seduction: a different pace, habit and visual event in the city.
Works Cited
Baynton, Douglas C. "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History." The New Disability History: American Perspectives. Ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New York: New York UP, 2001. 33-57.
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Verso, 1997.
Kuppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Trans. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” Tales of Mystery and Imagination. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1912. 101-9.
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