Atheists don't experience god/s, the blind don't
experience light. Is the experience of god ... or light ... necessary to the
human experience? Without either experience, is a person less human, less
knowledgable? Is it possible that without the common experience of other people,
atheists ... or the blind ... might know something that others don't?
Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color,
and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there
is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snow--a colorless,
all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick 1851
on Seeing ... and atheism
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie Dillard
1974 chapter 2 Seeing pp. 26-33
Oh, it's mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other.
It's one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign.
But I can't see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into
the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no
bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing
something. Galileo thought comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile
ground: since we are certain that they're not, we can look at what our scientists
have been saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming, castellated
cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date
palms have our caravans always passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest
of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and
hunger. I turn from the window. I'm blind as a bat, sensing only from every
direction the echo of my own thin cries.
I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight.
When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged
across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who
had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such
cases; the histories are fascinating. Many doctors had tested their patients'
sense perceptions and ideas of space both before and after the operations. The
vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden's
opinion, no idea of space whatsoever. Form, distance, and size were so many
meaningless syllables. A patient "had no idea of depth, confusing it with
roundness." Before the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a
sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it
correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the
patient without letting him touch them; now he had no due whatsoever what he was
seeing. One patient called lemonade "square" because it pricked on his tongue as
a square shape pricked on the touch of his hands. Of another postoperative
patient, the doctor writes,
"I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow
limits which she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked
her to show me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set
her two index-fingers a few inches apart." Other doctors reported their patients'
own statements to similar effect. "The room he was in ... he knew to be but part
of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger";
"Those who are blind from birth ... have no real conception of height or
distance. A house that is a mile away is thought of as nearby, but requiring the
taking of a lot of steps. ...
The elevator that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical
distance than does the train of horizontal."
For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: "The
girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we
are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of
brightness." Again, "I asked the patient what he could see; he answered that he
saw an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and
in motion. He could not distinguish objects." Another patient saw "nothing but a
confusion of forms and colours." When a newly sighted girl saw photographs and
paintings, she asked, "'Why to they put those dark marks all over them?' 'Those
aren't dark marks,' her mother explained, 'those are shadows. That is one of the
ways the eye knows that things have shape. If it were not for shadows many things
would look flat' 'Well, that's how things do look,' Joan answered. 'Everything
looks flat with dark patches.'"
But it is the patients' concepts of space that are most revealing. One patient,
according to his doctor, "practiced his vision in a strange fashion; thus he
takes off one of his boots, throws it some way off in front of him, and then
attempts to gauge the distance at which it lies; he takes a few steps towards the
boot and tries to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and
gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it." "But even at this stage,
after three weeks' experience of seeing," von Senden goes on, " 'space,' as he
conceives it, ends with visual space, i.e., with colour-patches that happen to
bound his view. He does not yet have the notion that a larger object (a chair)
can mask a smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be present even
though it is not directly seen."
In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are
pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the
rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. Soon after his operation a patient
"generally bumps into one of these colour-patches and observes them to be
substantial, since they resist him as tactual objects do. In walking about it
also strikes him -- or can if he pays attention -- that he is continually passing
in between the colours he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part
of it then steadily disappears from view; and that in spite of this, however he
twists and turns whether entering the room from the door, for example, or
returning back to it -- he always has a visual space in front of him Thus he
gradually comes to realize that there is also a space behind him, which he does
not see."
The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves overwhelming for many
patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous
size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly
manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people
all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A
disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go
over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. "The child
can see, but will not make use of his sight. Only when pressed can he with
difficulty be brought to look at objects in his neighbourhood; but more than a
foot away it is impossible to bestir him to the necessary effort." Of a
twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, "Her unfortunate father, who had
hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts
her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to
a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by dosing
her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness." A
fifteen-year-old boy, who was also in love with a girl at the asylum for the
blind, finally blurted out, "No, really, I can't stand it any more; I want to be
sent back to the asylum again. If things aren't altered, I'll tear my eyes out."
Some do learn to see, especially the young ones. But it changes their lives. One
doctor comments on "the rapid and complete loss of that striking and wonderful
serenity which is characteristic only of those who have never yet seen." A blind
man who learns to see is ashamed of his old habits. He dresses up, grooms
himself, and tries to make a good impression. While he was blind he was
indifferent to objects unless they were edible; now, "a sifting of values sets in
... his thoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and some few of the patients are
thereby led into dissimulation, envy, theft and fraud."
On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how
dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is "something
bright and then holes." Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, "It is dark,
blue and shiny. ... It isn't smooth, it has bumps and hollows." A little girl
visits a garden. "She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to
answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking
hold of it, and then as 'the tree with the lights in it.' " Some delight in their
sight and give themselves over to the visual world. Of a patient just after her
bandages were removed, her doctor writes, "The first things to attract her
attention were her own hands; she looked at them very closely, moved them
repeatedly to and fro, bent and stretched the fingers, and seemed greatly
astonished at the sight." One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that "men
do not really look like trees at all," and astounded to discover that her every
visitor had an utterly different face. Finally, a twenty-two-year-old girl was
dazzled by the world's brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at
the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any
objects, but, "the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the
more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment
overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: 'Oh God! How beautiful!'"
I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was summer;
the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning,
color-patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot.
All day long I walked among shifting color-patches that parted before me like the
Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back. Some
patches swelled ant loomed, while others vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted
at random over the whole dazzling sweep. But I couldn't sustain the illusion of
flatness. I've been around for too long. Form is condemned to an eternal danse
macabre with meaning: I couldn't unpeach the peaches. Nor can I remember ever
having seen without understanding; the color-patches of infancy are lost. My
brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. I'm told I reached for the moon;
many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them;
they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distances which unrolled and
stretched before me like a plain. The moon rocketed away. I live now in a world
of shadows that shape and distance color, a world where space makes a kind of
terrible sense. What gnosticism is this, and what physics? The fluttering patch I
saw in my nursery window -- silver and green and shape-shifting blue is gone; a row
of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn. That humming
oblong creature pale as light that stole along the walls of my room at night,
stretching exhilaratingly around the corners, is gone, too, gone the night I ate
of the bittersweet fruit, put two and two together and puckered forever my brain.
Martin Buber tells this tale: "Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi
Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the
darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light.
'Yes,' said Rabbi Elimelekh, 'in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don't see
these things any more.'"
Why didn't someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the
start, when they still didn't know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see
color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names.
The scales would drop from my eyes; I'd see trees like men walking; I'd run down
the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping.
Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my
attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. It is, as Ruskin
says, "not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen."
My eyes alone can't solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show, with
increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then
a big triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle. I have
to say the words, describe what I'm seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, I'd be
likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I
have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It's not that
I'm observant; it's just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange
place, I'll never know what's happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I
need a radio.
When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I
study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days
when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won't show and the
microscope's mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man
would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife
claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.
But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this
way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing
is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a
camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I
walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my
own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous
observer.
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