Testimonial of the Day

In this series I present descriptions of the lives of peoples with disabilities to celebrate their unique perspective on the world so that it can enrich the lives of all.

Below is an excerpt of a speech that Steven Kuusisto delivered in New York. Read the whole text here.

I became fascinated with this author after reading his book, Planet of the Blind. He writes beautifully about his experiences and this won’t be the last that I post on this blog.

“Not very long ago I heard a boy jumping on discarded bedsprings on a Chicago sidewalk.

He was making a stripped down music from solitude and trash. It was the song of a woodcutter’s axe in the empty woods. He saw me listening. He noticed my guide dog. He sensed an audience. He threw everything he had into making rare music with ruined steel coils and shoes. He was releasing invisible spirits into the morning air of Wabash Avenue. The music grew out of his blood. I’m guessing that if you’re a sighted person you’d have driven right on by. Or maybe you’d have crossed to the other side of the street if you had been walking there. But I heard the maddened dancing for five full minutes before moving on.

**

At first I thought the effect was obscene. He was simply calling out the furtive and metallic protests of forgotten trysts. I thought of a bordello in the wild west.

I laughed at the salty bravado of the performance. Then I saw flashes of light. The coils were rising and compressing in timed measures. My blind eyes could just make out the glint of his instruments. In turn I began to listen to what this dancer was really doing. The broken springs flashed like the undersides of leaves. I was like a sailor on a distant ship. I could see the maritime flash of his lantern. In turn I saw that his bed springs were tuned in harmony with the sky and the local trees. The dancer was saying all kinds of things. His feet were rattling and whistling. I’d never heard anything like this before.

The dancer was offering his ragged memories to the damp air of the street. I saw the sparks and heard the 16^th notes; the 8^th notes; the sparks of his dance dropped like stones from a bridge…

**

I was feeling lucky just then, alone with my guide dog, the two of us having been on an ordinary walk. A gold leaf was spinning down. A red maple leaf was floating on water. Flashes of sun ran across the June river. The dancer’s shoulders and hips dipped and high notes leapt all around him. He was dancing at the epicenter of the early light—that overcast sun that always hangs in the mornings above Lake Michigan.

Then he was in an island of trees. Low notes came suddenly, the notes were signifying a bent path.

The way forward was harder for some reason. The dance had taken a darker turn.

I could tell this was now a steep narrative. Somehow he’d figured out how to make the springs sound like a tuba. Then he made the metal groan like a cello. And then hammers were flying. Again there were sparks of light from the bed.

The high notes came like whale songs from some migratory coast. For a moment I thought about Marsilio Ficino, the Renaissance man of letters who remarked that "beauty is just shapes and sounds". Hearing the Chicago dancer move across the secret world of a homemade dance—a "found" dance—I thought that Ficino left out the weird and lovely human and animal volition that lives behind the shapes and sounds. I also realized again much as I did when I was a boy that when you stand still you can hear the unexpected music and sense the light that comes from living and walking in shadows.”