Storytelling
is important to me. It’s where I find meaning in the world, sharing stories
with friends and getting to know strangers by their incantations. Within
stories, I may escape my Self and experience life in someone else’s skin, as
though I had crawled beneath it and looked out from behind their eyes.
The more
important I find it, the more I question it. Why must experience be
inextricably bound with eyesight? Poets tritely invoke the metaphor that the
eyes are the windows to the soul. Despite our poorly evolved eyes, we humans
invest a great deal of our being in our ability to see, even though many of us
don’t have perfect vision. In fact, I wear corrective lenses as I write this to
you. Images provoke, excite, anger, arouse, and delight us just as fast as new
images appear.
Consider
then, the blind. Do they not have a portal to experiencing the world as we do,
a sense of looking out and our reciprocal sense of look back in, as the
metaphor indicates?
Recently
I lost sight in one eye. I was terrified, trying to come to terms with the
sudden deprivation of my most cherished sense, thinking it was forever. I tried
to take comfort in the blind storytellers who made their mark by substituting a
profound, inner vision for their lack of physical sight. James Joyce struggled
for many years with severe discomfort and vision-loss in one eye. John Milton
went blind as he advanced in age and had to recite Paradise Lost to his daughter from the dark depths of his mind
instead of writing it. Homer, though legendary, was supposedly blind. As a Cyclops,
I was in good company. In fact, Odin, a chief god in the Norse tradition,
sacrificed an eye for a tiny sip from a well that imparted knowledge. Odin wasn’t
greedy; he only tasted a few drops of Mimir’s well in order to gain a little
wisdom about the knowledge he was accruing from his exploration of the world.
He bought that bit of wisdom with his eye. He bought it so he would understand
the importance of knowledge, the power of recognizing his own ignorance and
continuing to seek truth.
Yet, I
did not want this deformity. That would be insane. No one would ask to lose
their sight in order to find a more substantial, inner vision, would they?
Milton tried to justify it, after he
had gone blind. As a human being he had a need to apply meaning to his
experience, and I love that about him. He was storytelling. From his point of
view, God had chosen him to “see” a light divine and illuminate for his captives
the state of being, to justify the ways of God to man. Even though he certainly
failed, we lovers of literature benefit from his over-reaching goal. What a
failure! I would fail a million times to come close to the genius of Paradise Lost, but I wouldn't ask to be
blind.
Let me
explain. I somehow scratched the cornea of my left eye, rendering me unable to
see and in such severe pain that I repeatedly wept for relief, pain I wouldn't wish on my enemies. I went to the ER in tragic condition, and as I sat in
triage, still unaware of the cause of my pain and blindness, fear took me and
made me understand that I was about to find out whether I would be blind
forever or just in temporarily excruciating pain. I cried. Not just once, but
several times during my examination, I cried. Because of the pain, because of
the possibility of blindness, because I felt completely vulnerable before a
healthy young doctor, I cried.
Here is
where it gets weird. I have a tattoo of Odin that has been left unfinished for
over two years. A few weeks ago, I made an appointment with an artist to have
it finished. The flat, unfinished Odin on my arm had been left too long,
staring out with his one eye, looking weak, powerless to affect his world. The
day after making the appointment, I lost my eyesight. This image that I had
fixed on my skin as a significant story of sacrifice and pain in the pursuit of
knowledge now mocked me in an all-too literal way.
Okay,
Odin. You win. Again. My eyesight has been restored, and I know it’s time for
me to suspend the physical scarring I have enjoyed for the past year and resume
the search. Sure, I have scars that tell stories, and I will tell you where I
got them. But in order to tell you something meaningful, it is my duty to seek
truth and wisdom in my world. That is storytelling. That is love. So let me
tell you what I see …
