A Kind of Cuba.

Anderson, Erik

I am trying once more this morning to write about blindness, having failed so many times in recent months that I must now admit I have no idea what it is to be blind. My own blindness, if such it can be called, is to the nature of blindness. I have to feel my way through my subject by touch. The dominant sense will not suffice, but then it so rarely does, even for those of us who can see.

"Men are so blind that they even take pride in their blindness," Augustine writes, but he is speaking of blindness as a metaphor, much as, more than a millennium later, Jose Saramago imagines an epidemic of blindness, as pejorative a metaphor in his hands as in Augustine's. The connotations are so recurrently negative, one wonders what a blind man would make of it. The only parallel that comes to mind is that of blackness, which in its figurative sense is so often associated with doom and gloom that one would be forgiven for accusing the lexicon itself of racism. As for the lingual prejudice against blindness, the suggestion would seem to be that discernment decreases in step with sight, but there is equally the counter-tradition whereby the blind--Homer, Milton, Borges--are endowed with insight, and even Saramago admits that only in a world of the blind might things become as they truly are, not as our attentions would make them.

The poet Mary Ruefle gets at the problem another way. She tells the story of a blind woman who briefly regains her eyesight after an operation: "the bite-sized leaves and red shreds" of the lettuce terrify her, but after five days she lapses back into blindness, having had her mental image of the world, or at least the lettuce within it, definitively shattered. Also surprising, Ruefle writes, is the fact that the blind woman often travels while Ruefle, or the speaker of the poem, rarely travels at all. And yet, in her dreams, she continues, she often finds herself in Cuba, "walking among fronds with nothing to do / but watch red lizards climbing the wall." "Of course I have never been to Cuba," she writes, "but it remains a place / where I have never found it necessary / to alter my description of anything."

That the blind woman's experience does not correspond to her sight may be terrifying, but what is the shape of that terror? There is a certain shock to the real, and some artists might tell you it's their job to expose it. But the poem also presents a woman whose experience of Cuba in her sleep is rich and luxuriant, complete as is. For her, the world may be everything, but it also isn't everything. If it were, what use would there be for dreaming? What use would there be for art?

This question also haunts Wallace Stevens, who compares--in his own tropical poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West"--a song sung at a bar on the beach to the sound of the ocean. "She sang beyond the genius of the sea," he begins, setting apart at once the world and its art with that single word, beyond. Whereas the singer is "the single artificer of the world / In which she sang," "the dark voice of the sea," for Stevens, is "sound alone"--"meaningless plungings of water." There may be a world that is merely world, but the artist, like the dreamer, is not interested in what is not more than itself. Here, the very idea of art stands in opposition to sheer existence, as by its nature art always moves beyond that state of nothing other. "It was more than that," Stevens says, "more even than her voice, and ours." While one effect of art, or of a dream for that matter, may be that it heightens the world as we live it--a song can make the sea or sky, even love or shame, more acute--imagination may also be more real than reality. For the singer in Stevens's poem, anyway, imagination is reality. "[T]here never was a world" for her "[e]xcept the one she sang and, singing, made."

Many months ago now, as I was beginning to think about blindness, I heard a conversation between two blind men on the radio. The first, John Hull, refused to live what he called a life of nostalgia. If an image popped up in his mind, he would immediately extinguish it. Rather than picturing his wife's face, that is, he would focus on her perfume, the texture of her hand, her embrace. This, he felt, was more honest than the alternative, a world of remembered images that no longer conformed to his sensory reality. Besides, his wife was aging, and any memory of her face wouldn't do justice, or so he reasoned, to the woman guiding him along the platform and up the few stairs into the train.

Zoltan Torey, on the other hand, had never seen his wife's face and so was spared the pitfalls of remembering it. Unlike John Hull, however, such imagelessness wasn't a comfort, and he actively went about constructing her picture in his mind. He became convinced that this image matched her precisely, that by the power of his imagination alone he could construct the visual world his condition had denied him. This was more than consolation, he believed: it was a workable model of the world. And when some tiles came loose on his roof, he set out to prove it, climbing up a ladder to fix them. His neighbors thought he was insane, but for Zoltan there was no reason to think he couldn't act on what was true in his imagination.

It struck me so clearly as I listened that these two contradictory impulses--to attend to the world you've been given and to imagine a world you haven't--have almost everything to do, not only with the singer in Stevens's poem, but with why any of us make art in the first place. What precisely is it, after all, a man like John Hull--who resists, by circumstance and choice, not only red and black but large and bright--attends to? Senses, impressions--the very things out of which Zoltan Torey constructs his imaginary rooftops. I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live, writes Maggie Nelson, but which world is it one lives in, apart from longing? Does a person long for a world, or does she live in a world built from her longing, out of all she has lost?

When it became clear to Borges, anyway, that he had "lost the beloved world of appearances" and would never fully regain his sight, he began a study of Anglo-Saxon, and the rich aural world of its poetry replaced the vivid reds and blacks all around him. Out of this new consciousness, he dictated poems line by line, and his blindness became an instrument that, as a writer, he harnessed. Blindness became a gift: that he might "make from the miserable circumstances of [his life] things that are eternal or aspire to be."

An artist, in other words, may be a person who has lost the world. A person who has, in some sense, become blind to it. I, too, am someone who tries, through his work, to create (or reconstruct) a world from the straitened circumstances of my life--narrowed both by my own limitations (there are always more than one would hope) and by my death, which is always right around the corner, even if it's years away. Art produces, perhaps as its primary function, an elaborate version of these losses that is at the same time more attenuated. You hang up one kind of accuracy in favor of another, and it is, to borrow a description, as if the scene "occurs just above the surface of things, in a place where evidence becomes so light that it dissolves."

For the dentist in a Roberto Bolano story, however, it's a mistake to think that art is one thing and life another. We convince ourselves that our lives are less significant, and so less deserving of attention than our art, but we have it backwards according to him: art, he says, "is the story of a life in all its particularity ... the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular" What's more, the dentist argues, there's something almost mystical about not just living one's life to the full but making art out of that intensity. This is "the secret story," he says, "the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day."

And maybe it's true that you cannot safely divide your body from your body of work, or that to do so may only be possible from a privileged position. The idea that you are not your work speaks to me of class distinctions, after all, of those who have the leisure to identify themselves with something other than their labor. But one must also say it, head held as high as one's able: guilty as charged. Art may be no exemption from life, but it is an exception to it, by its very nature both a product of living and that which is extruded from a life. Art is moved matter, and though it may move one to any number of ends, though it may rouse the mind and quicken the heart, it is not animate.

Put another way, the world is either outside of us or else there is no outside. The internal world is either embedded in our biology, awaiting some diligent scientist to uncover it, or the internal world is all that there is, our most profound social and genetic inheritance.

For Stevens, when the song ends and he turns back towards the town, it appears that the outside has been colonized by the inside, that it has been enchanted by it, and in ending the poem he returns to a sentiment he uncovered years earlier in writing of a jar placed on top of a hill, thereby creating the wilderness around it. For Stevens, there was no outside until we invented one, which could only mean that blindness is a condition that may not originate in the mind but is dependent upon it. If you didn't have a mind, you couldn't have a world, visual or not. Here blindness shows itself to be not simply a physical or metaphorical condition, but an epistemic one.

Six months have passed since I began this essay in a car speeding north through Hartford. A big storm had blown through the day before, and there was snow plowed up along the sides of the highway. There was the same chill in the air that had regularly driven Stevens south, to the other pole of his existence. Since that time, I have added and removed many paragraphs, scraped away the remnants of various dead-ends I didn't recognize as such at the time. In my blindness, I begin again to finish what I've started, to assail my subject once more, which now takes the shape of a scene from Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces in which the blind screenwriter, Harry Caine, stands over his assistant as he reconstructs a pile of torn pictures. The shot is painterly, with shreds of images covering the full surface of the coffee table, like a mosaic. The moment is charged with Harry's shattered identity: at the time the photos were taken he had gone by his given name, Mateo Blanco. He had been a director then, and the woman with him in the photos, Lena, was the star in his last film. She died in the same accident that robbed Mateo of his sight, transforming him into Harry Caine.

The practical dilemma is also the metaphorical one: the world is worse than a puzzle, it's a jumbled mess. And though we may succeed at reconstructing certain portions of it, the lines of fissure persist, as there is only so much we can see. For Harry, the predicament is magnified by the fact that he cannot see the images on the table in front of him but is instead their walking embodiment. He is fissure in the form of a man: he writes for films he'll never see.

But there are so many films here. There's Mateo's last, which recreates Almodovar's breakthrough, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. There's the documentary about the making of Mateo's film, shot by the sinister son of Lena's jilted ex-lover, Ernesto. There are the films on Harry Caine's shelves: Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin, Fanny & Alexander, Eight and a Half. And there's Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows, the very film they're looking for when, near the end of Broken Embraces, Harry hears the soundtrack from his own film, Girls and Suitcases, on TV!

When he decides then and there to re-edit the whole thing, it matters immensely--both for Harry and for this essay--that he will do so in the dark, comparing the pitches of various takes. What he knows, he must intuit from his actors' voices. He will play his world by ear. But then the important thing is not to see the work but to see it to its completion. You have to finish a film, he tells his young friend, even if you finish it blindly.