Paris in My Eyes

I remember Roland Barthes’ description of Paris after a flood and his sense of astonishment, a wonder so unbidden as to have dazzled a boy. The familiar streets were gone, replaced by nothing more than water and reflections of the sky. Buildings leaned or stood as they always had but with a fiercer or softer air about them. The boy who was Barthes saw visions wherever he turned.

As a visually impaired person this dislocation of solid and liquid images is the daily material of a life. I don’t say  an artistic life or a philosophical one–I find I can’t make distinctions and I veer sidelong in a long shadow walking fast holding my breath waiting to see when the shadow will end and light will course around my head and shoulders. I burst out of a cloud and into a stream. I wash like a spindrift driven fish onto a reef of vari-colored lights I can’t explain.

As Walter Cronkite used to say: “And that’s the way it is.” I am in and out of churchly shade and light. I’m not thinking about it much. I’m not captured by street advertising or passing strangers. I’m suspended in a strain of a thousand wonders, boyish, open, trusting, fast, aware that when the shapes and sounds of raw beauty are about us nothing in the steadfast world is or ever will be the same.

The trick then is to be happy in your astonishments which are also limitations.

Paris will never again be the flooded Paris in quite that way and Barthes would have to demand his astonishments from ideas. Blindness has hundreds of vexations but oddly it still triggers motile cadmium blues and fingerling darts of light that are weird and as they are unasked for, they’re a gift.

S.K.     

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto