Mourning My Lost Dark as a Blind Artist

For me, distinctions between light and dark have dissolved as my blindness has worsened. I do not experience blindness as darkness or blackness.

This is A Blind Writer’s Notebook, a monthly column by M. Leona Godin about her experiences as a writer and the monolithic trope of blindness.

The first time I realized I didn’t need lights on anymore was about a year ago. I stepped out of the shower, dried off, and then moved to shut off the light before leaving the bathroom. The switch was down, never having been turned on. I felt startled and strangely ashamed. I was now that blind person who sighted people would find doing things in the dark—washing dishes, writing, sewing, things they could never think to do without light.

Why this bothers me is hard to explain. Perhaps it is because I am so sensitive to the stereotype that blind people inhabit a dark world. If not for the discomfort of my sighted companions, dark rooms might offer some comfort. I continue to turn the lights on, even if it makes me acutely aware of the asymmetry: They can see me, while I can’t see them.

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For me, distinctions between light and dark have dissolved as my blindness has worsened. If I walk outside into a brightly lit day, I might exclaim, “It’s so bright!” but night never penetrates. Sometimes I can still put a bit of light from the visible world—a lamp or sunlit window—into one of the cracks in the far periphery of my destroyed retinas, but mostly my visionscape offers gentle hallucinations—Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which Oliver Sacks discusses at length in Hallucinations—undulating over a vibrating, pixelated snow fuzz, often with a wash of color. Sometimes my world is neon pink, at other times electric blue or teal, but it is never black.

I am not alone in not experiencing blindness as darkness or blackness. In his essay “Blindness,” Jorge Luis Borges flamboyantly declared, “Milton’s blindness was voluntary”—meaning it was part of the program of becoming a great poet. Borges’s own blindness then initiated him into the extraordinary lineage of the blind bard, which also includes James Joyce. All of these great men (no women mentioned) stepped into the mythical footsteps of Homer, and wrote great things from places of full or partial blindness. Borges described his incomplete blindness thus:

One of the colors that the blind—or at least this blind man—do not see is black; another is red. Le rouge et le noir are the colors denied us. I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind. I wanted to lie down in darkness. The world of the blind is not the night that people imagine.

For the author of Paradise Lost, celebrant of “holy light,” and creator of the sublime phrase “darkness visible”—from which this essay adapted its title—blindness was also complex. In a letter to his friend, Milton described his vision loss:

But I must not omit that, while considerable sight still remained, when I would first go to bed and lie on one side or the other, abundant light would dart from my closed eyes; then, as sight daily diminished, colors proportionately darker would burst forth with violence and a sort of crash from within; but now, pure black, marked as if with extinguished or ashy light, and as if interwoven with it, pours forth. Yet the mist which always hovers before my eyes both night and day seems always to be approaching white rather than black; and upon the eyes turning, it admits a minute quantity of light as if through a crack.

It’s hard to imagine this “pure black” that approaches white as anything other than a paradox, akin to the darkness visible of Hell, unless you interpret that pure black as metaphorical loss of the visible world. The pure black that is more like white and even more like ashy greyness is the veil that dropped before Milton’s eyes. I understand this from my own experience as a covering over of the visible world, through which occasional bits of light peep through.

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Blindness is represented as such an unsupportable calamity on the one hand, and so symbolic on the other, that sometimes I hardly know how to conceptualize my own vision loss.

In the fabric of our language, sight is linked with knowledge and understanding. We inherited this connection from the Ancient Greeks, whose word for “to see” (idein) gives us the word idea. It’s no wonder, then, that sight’s opposite would also take on weighty associations. The Greeks were so obsessed with the idea that sight equals knowledge and blindness equals ignorance that they reversed it, turning the blind man into the poet-prophet (Homer, Tiresias, Oedipus), giving him transcendent vision—more valuable than physical sight, which often distracts one from true insight. The blind prophet is so foundational that one is still hard-pressed to read a book of science fiction or fantasy without finding one. From the Dune series to Red Moon, blind people are there to tell the sighted what’s what.

On the other hand, the derogatory and thoughtless use of the word blind is so common—blind ideology, blind love, blind rage, blind drunk, etc.—that one does not often pause to consider the effect this slur may have on actual blind people.

In her 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag points out that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Though I do not agree with Sontag that metaphorical thinking with regard to a personal calamity is absolutely detrimental to contending with it, I do think that metaphors must be balanced with realities. As with illness, so too with blindness: We can “hardly take up residence” in the non-normal kingdom “unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped”—and in the case of blindness, the landscaping has been done, almost exclusively, by sighted people, who tend to paint it in terms of a monolithic darkness: night = dark = black = blind.

In Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon, the blind fortune teller and the half-blind lycan leader, who people say “could see things with his dead eye that others could not,” enforces ideas of blind prophetic vision. Being privy to information beyond physical sight seems intimately bound with themes of the impossibility of always seeing danger manifest on the surface. Still, I’m guessing you don’t have to be blind to be a bit over the blind seer gimmick that has been part of Western culture, high and low, for a couple thousand years. But the blind seer does not mitigate the literal representations of blindness as darkness, as in this passage describing the emotional state of one of Red Moon’s protagonists, Claire:

She hates how poisonous she has become in her thinking. But these past two days, since she received the package, she has felt her vision blacken at times to a level only the blind would comprehend. Everything seems overwhelmingly dark, as if her side of the world has spun away from the sun and paused in its orbit.

I do not know this blackness, and I doubt one born blind would know it, either: black and white, light and dark, exist only as opposites. The world of the blind is not dark, not black; it is not even the opposite of sight. Blind people are not thinking, all the time, “oh my gosh, I am blind!” but sometimes it seems as if that is all the sighted see in us. As if being blind, while significant, were the only distinguishing factor of our lives; as if we were not also women and men, young and old, possessing different skin colors and ethnicities, with identities as nuanced and multiplicitous as the incremental notches between blindness and sight.

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Stephen Kuusisto opens his 1998 memoir Planet of the Blind with this striking set of images:

Blindness is often perceived by the sighted as an either/or condition: One sees or does not see. But often a blind person experiences a series of veils: I stare at the world through smeared and broken window panes. Ahead of me the shapes and colors suggest the sails of Tristan’s ship or an elephant’s ear floating in air, though in reality it is a middle-aged man in a London Fog raincoat that billows behind him in the April wind. He is like the great dead Greeks in Homer’s descriptions of the underworld. In the heliographic distortions of sunlight or dusk, everyone I meet is crossing Charon’s river.

And if I were to say that this is fundamentally true, that we are all passing from the realms of the living to those of the dead, is that not also to say that we are all passing from the realms of the sighted to those of the blind? Is the passing, a slow crossing, not also interesting?

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Symptoms of my eye disease that manifested when I was fourteen included a tiny missing bit in the center of my retina and poor night vision. The summer I turned fifteen, I was sitting with a group of friends, drinking beers on the roof of a big box of a mini-mall that stood on Geary Street in the inner avenues of San Francisco. It was tall for that neighborhood, perhaps fifty or sixty feet high. The only thing that rivaled it in size (though it far surpassed it in beauty) was the mausoleum strangely sitting in a little green garden behind the mall, with its neoclassical dome and fluted columns, hidden from the street. Earlier, while there was still the light of the afternoon, my boyfriend had dumped me. Now night had fallen, and I’d grown sadder.

My bad night vision usually made me cling to the light of the day, and rely on my friends after dark, but drinking actually helped me see a little better and of course gave me courage, so I was determined this night to take myself down the series of ladders and levels to the alley of the Mexican restaurant that gave us illicit access to these heights.

This same boyfriend, earlier in our short-lived romance, had spent hours trying to show me constellations. “Okay, you see the corner of that building?” “Yes.” “You see that streetlight?” “Yes.” “Good. The tail of the Little Dipper hangs right between. Can you see it?” “No,” I had told him, laughing. Without that bit of central vision, stars did not constellate for me; they clustered and twinkled, but offered no dippers or bears. “Can you see the moon?” Yes, I could see the moon with my peripheral vision. I think that night it had hung as a crescent above the playground where we sat, poised to make out. Even now, I believe I can still see a full moon, or at least its brightness, if I put it in one of those cracks still left to me. No more stars, though.

The endless questions about what I could see and not see had made me wonder if he’d ever kiss me. He finally did. And now, three months later, it was over. I walked to the edge of the roof, intending to tackle the trek down to street level, but thought I’d have a smoke and screw up my courage first, and let a couple tears fall. Finally, I was ready, but just as I was making the move to scoot my butt off the edge, to put my feet on the next roof below, two boys—friends, but not close ones—came and sat on either side of me, strangely near. “Hey,” they said. I smoked another cigarette with them. They made me laugh and asked where I was going. I told them I was going home, and they informed me that this was not the way.

As so often happened in my days of visual impairment, knowledge, like booze, helped my brain see. Suddenly the little garden resolved itself out of the blackness with the mausoleum dome shimmering like the surface of a planet, and I realized that I was not on the correct side to go down; that if I had scooted over, it would have been into nothing. I might have slipped silently into death or many crushed bones before even knowing what had happened, or I might have realized in that terrible freefall and screamed; either way, everyone would have thought I had done it on purpose, a pathetic attempt to end my life for a boy. But it would have only been that I had stepped in my sadness to the wrong side, the wrong darkness. I hadn’t seen the danger until it had passed. That precarious position on the edge of the dark scared me—how vulnerable I’d been! The dark had not been my friend. But then, it had been an entirely different dark.