Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Steveland Morris

Nostalgia attack tonight, and what’s crushing is that it shouldn’t be nostalgia: I can go for years without listening to the amazing Stevie Wonder, but then, suddenly, he’s back on the turntable — Lord, he’s good! I believe, I believe! Here’re some of the lyrics for Love’s in Need of Love Today, the opener on Songs in the Key of Life (1976):

Good morn or evening friends
Here’s your friendly announcer
I have serious news to pass on to every*body
What I’m about to say
Could mean the world’s disaster
Could change your joy and laughter to tears and pain

Oh that
Love’s in need of love today
(etc.)…

And even though Stevie Wonder has been blind almost since birth, he sees what matters. Ebony Eyes:

She’s a girl that can’t be beat
Born and raised on ghetto streets
She’s a devastating beauty
A pretty girl with ebony eyes

Regardless of his own physical blindness, he knows that eyes aren’t just for looking, but for being seen and felt in some beyond-visual way. Stevie Wonder describes a window into the soul which is open in darkness and light, and out of which streams a force only an idiot would deny.

Jorge Luis Borges went blind in later middle age. At the time that Borges was going completely blind, he was named director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. I think in those times — just last century — people must have had time to have things read to them. We don’t have that kind of time anymore, and people instead play a CD. Or else it’s a question of economics, not time. Borges probably never had to do yardwork or housework, or the laundry, shopping, and cooking, whereas today it’s becoming more difficult even to find men who aren’t burdened by these chores. All that stuff, in previous epochs taken care of by the hired help (i.e., probably you and I in past incarnations, ha-ha) significantly cuts into your “creative” time. Now we can have our shiny new CDs, but we have to keep them clean ourselves.

Sorry, couldn’t write the big opus, was too busy polishing the gadgets. Anyways….

In his essay “Blindness,” Borges cites Oscar Wilde, who suggested that the Greeks made up the notion that Homer was blind “in order to emphasize that poetry must be aural, not visual. (…) We may believe that Homer never existed, but that the Greeks imagined him as blind in order to insist on the fact that poetry is, above all, music; that poetry is, above all, the lyre; that the visual can or cannot exist in a poet. And about Milton, Borges notes: “Milton has a sonnet in which he speaks of his blindness. There is a line one can tell was written by a blind man. When he has to describe the world, he says, ‘In this dark world and wide.’”

Stevie Wonder ranges all over a world that is dark and wide. I need to find him more often. And I wonder whether today a blind person would be made the director of a library.

Jailtime for truants

So much for Canada’s liberalism. Two Ontario girls, both 15 years old, face jail time for …truancy from school. Un-be-f* * * ng-lievable. (My two kids haven’t gone to jail, er, I mean school, since June 2000, so naturally I’m biased.) If a 15-year-old is skipping school to the point that her authoritarian dimwit parents are willing to put her in jail, I say there’s something wrong with authority, with parents, with school, with society. Just my humble opinion of course.

The more privatized US has private boot camp for “kids like this,” but here in Canada, it seems the state lends a hand.

The two girls would be better advised to add these books to their reading list. Their parents, however, might already be too ossified in the head to learn new tricks.