“Blindness is not darkness; it is a form of solitude.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, “August 25, 1983” in his Shakespeare’s Memory
The unsentimental view from earliest history judges blindness to be a curse or punishment. The view is represented in an anecdote related in the Gospel of John (9, 1-23), wherein Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man, born into the condition of blindness, a man “born blind.” The disciples ask Jesus: “Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus replies: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned… but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
This reply is designed to set the scene for a miracle showcasing the divinity of Jesus, but,in fact, exemplifies an essential biblical notion of God. The passage suggests the arbitrariness and capriciousness of Yahweh that Kierkegaard observes in the command to Abraham to kill his son, as much as in the divine attitude toward the treatment of the suffering Job. Accursedness is arbitrary punishment.
In the biblical Book of Tobit, the protagonist Tobit is blinded even while performing a good deed, burying the dead – but the dead man was proscribed by the authorities. For this God punishes Tobit, blinding him. After winding moral lessons, Tobit’s eyesight is restored – not by God but by a sympathetic angel.
When the French-born explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) visited the Himalaya Mountains in an early twentieth-century search for hermits, she encountered one old hermit who revealed that his vision was nearly gone. The explorer asked what he would do. When I am blind, he replied matter-of-factly, then I will die. No sense that blindness was exceptional, a curse, or a punishment.
Blind characters in literature have often been presented as a foil to and contrast with the sighted, conjuring contrasting images of wisdom preserved (in the sighted) and wisdom lost (in the blind). In the Oedipus plays of Sophocles, the hapless Oedipus blinds himself in tortuous guilt over his twin crimes of murder and incest. The blinding of the Earl of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear is presented as a metaphor, blindness considered to be a lack of discernment, a lack of insight, literslly a lack of sight. Even today one can speak of a foolish blunderer as “blind.” The English novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902) cound writein his Hudibras that: “A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog, but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.”
Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear merely completes the presentation of the man lacking judgment, therefore “blind.” Butler uses physical blindness as a foil to psychological or spiritual incapacity. Later, Kierkegaard’s notion of faith would be summed up as “blind faith,” or a leap, avoiding the real ramifications of physical blindness or the ubiquitously pernicious metaphor.
The famous author of the ancient Greek epic ballads The Iliad and The Odyssey is the well-known blind bard Homer. While even his existence can be questioned, why is “Homer” presented as blind at all? Perhaps an allusion in The Odyssey to a blind poet Demodokus suggests the identity of the anonymous Homer, but as likely it is the assumed fulsome character of the blind, attuned to voices and moods, assigned by fate to a secret insight, makes blindness here an attractive literary device, adding to the skill of the author Homer’s talent for lyric song and prodigious memory. Here blindness is an ironic gift, salvaging, even redeeming, the blind from curse.
We know less of the reaction of early and familiar historical figures to being left blind. We know the famous for their redeeming intelligence, less for their curse or what they thought of their blindness. Galileo (1564-1642) suffered from a mucocoele in one eye and progressive glaucoma leading to blindness. The fate of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is tragic, based on the era’s wide-spread practice of “cataract couching.” Bach underwent the surgery on both eyes by a traveling surgeon. The surgeon destroyed not only the presumed cataracts and the lenses, but inevitably much of the eye structure, provoking copious bleeding, and blindness. Bach was left in agonizing pain for days before he died.
The notion of blindness as punishment, reverberating through the centuries, is addressed by the English poet John Milton(1608-1674), who was blind by his fifties from glaucoma or cataracts. In “Sonnet 19,” the poet laments the loss of his eyesight more for the loss of the creativity that would have led to composing so many more literary works. In the poem Patience replies:
“God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Nor was blindness a complete solitude for Milton. He was not isolated from his work nor from his circle of colleagues. Indeed, Milton wrote his masterful Paradise Lost after losing his sight. He happily enjoyed the attentiveness of many amanuenses.
In our time, similarly, the blind Argentinian short story writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) enjoyed the company of many literati, functioning as a public intellectual. He was even named director of the National Library of Argentina in 1955, the very year of his definitive blindness. His mother, who lived to the age of 91, dutifully transcribed her son’s stories and essays for publication throughout her life. Like Milton, Borges thrived as a creative figure.
Borges is perhaps the most articulate describer of blindness. He sympathized with those who lost their sight suddenly, without a transition. He tells us that he knew he would one day lose his sight, as had his father, his paternal grandmother, and his great-grandfather, all of whom suffered cataracts. After multiple eye surgeries in youth, Borges had lost vision in one eye and the vision in his other eye continued to deteriorate. In 1955, while walking with friends in Buenos Aires, he tripped and fell, rising to discover himself blind, due to retinal detachment. But Borges never rued his blindness, writing once that “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument, everything has been given for an end.” He adds that “If a blind man thinks this way, he is saved. Blindness is a gift.” And Borges was accommodating, recognizing all who had helped him along the way. “Blindness has made me feel surrounded by the kindness of others. People always feel good will toward the blind.” Borges, like Milton, left a poem of benign sentiment concerning blindness, titled “On His Blindness.”
In the fullness of the years, like it or not,
a luminous mist surrounds me, unvarying,
that breaks things down into a single thing,
colorless, formless. Almost into a thought.
The elemental, vast night and the day
teeming with people have become that fog
of constant, tentative light that does not flag,
and lies in wait at dawn. I longed to see
just once a human face. Unknown to me
the closed encyclopedia, the sweet play
in volumes I can do no more than hold,
the tiny soaring birds, the moons of gold.
Others have the world, for better or worse;
I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse.
Those born blind are seldom remembered, unless, like Milton or Borges, they overcome their blindness to excel in another venture. Yet there are wuch exemplars. The social reformer and activist Helen Keller (1880-1968), became blind before two years of age, and deaf as well, due to diphtheria. The famous Spanish classical composer Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) suffered the same fate of diphtheria at age three. Rodrigo also surmounted his incapacity to enjoy a career in composition, among his works the popularly-received “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Like Milton, Rodrigo enjoyed the strong support of family and creative colleagues. Another well-received musical figure is the contemporary opera and pop singer Andrea Bocelli (b. 1958), who lost much of his eyesight from congenital cataracts, and become blind in youth from a sport accident.
Controvertialist and artist-writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was afflicted by a pituitary tumor that incapacitated his optic nerve. The artist lost his command of color in 1937, and was completely blind in 1951. He acknowledged the event in the short story “The Sea Mists of Winter,” the title describing his eyesight. Like Borges, his blindness culminated in misty greens and blues, not blackness or profound darkness. Lewis completed several additional books with the help of transcribers and editors.
Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is famous for his original diction, invented vocabulary, made-up sound words, and run-on phrases. His characters and subplots were often pursuing dead-end and tortuous self-reflections. Joyce is the character Stephen Dedalus, suggestively called the “blind stripling” in his novels Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By age thirty Joyce was blind. He had from youth undergone multiple surgeries for eye inflammation (leading to anterior uveitis), for iridectomies for closed-angle glaucoma, and for removal of cataracts. Today, these and many of Joyce’s other non-ocular medical symptoms such as abscesses, partial paralysis, and psychological instabilities — plus Joyce’s use of prescription Galyl, an arsenic-phosphorus drug with debilitating eye effects — point to syphilis as the cause of his blindness. Joyce himself acknowledged an understanding of his blindness (and all his other maladies) as curse or punishment.
American cartoonist and humorist James Thurber (1894-1961) was popularized by his contributions to The New Yorker magazine. As a child of seven he was playing with an older brother who had just acquired a bow and arrow set — and shot an arrow towards James, blinding his right eye. Inflammation spread to the left eye, leading to significant loss of vision. As an adult plagued by diminishing vision, Thurber consulted a New York eye surgeon who diagnosed cataracts and iritis (uveitus), pursuing both failed surgeries successively, reducing Thurber’s vision to about seven percent. Perhaps Thurber’s vivid imagination was due in part to the visual hallucinations experienced by victims of Charles Bonnet syndrome. Towards the end of his life Thurber expressed to friends the notion that his blindness was perhaps after all a punishment for mocking other with his humor and sarcasm.
Erasmus wrote that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In a short story with a similar title, H. G.Wells (1866-1946) extrapolated the saying to try to reproduce in fiction the logic in a “real” setting. Wells only deepened the paradox. For among the blind, no one is king. And among the half-blind and among kings, none has sight. Nor can a pretender share the curse or fate – nor dare to empathize with a curse. Blindness remains a solitude.