Thirty years ago when I was in college we talked about Dr. Rorschach’s famous test. Our professor held ink blots printed on card stock. He resembled someone trying to sell magazine subscriptions. “What do you see?” he said, as if the mystery was deep, so deep that no singular mortal could furnish even a weak answer.
Ah but we were the last students of “the sixties” and accordingly we were by turns truculent and irreverent. One guy shouted that the figure before us looked like shit. “We all know its shit,” he said. “Freud said everything’s shit: money is shit, death is shit. So its just shit.”
We laughed. The professor laughed. He was kind of hip. He was an ageing athlete. “Okay,” he said. “Its shit. But what kind of shit?”
“Well,” said a woman who was famous for stealing the U.S. flag from the college’s flag pole, often in broad daylight. “Its like the shit of Mad King George III–we’re just peering into a 20th century version of the chamber pot.”
That pretty well ended the discussion. The professor became self-consciously engaged in defending 20th century psychology and back in those days if you were over 30 and forced to defend something you were toast. Those were uncomplicated times.
We were amateur phenomenologists back then.
But I took a walk this morning with my guide dog Nira. As I said yesterday my left eye has been restored from total blindness to a simulacrum of sight and as we strolled down the sidewalk birds were rising out of the grass –birds that were difficult to identify and which I may never be able to name–birds that flew like red and black ink blots and rose and rose before us as we went.
Unnamed though they might be, the flickering of wings gave up small sparks of reflected sunlight. One incognito bird was half gold, half the green of the tropics before she vanished in the branches of a sycamore.
I laughed then. Thought of Rorschach. Thought of the professor now dead who had hoped to teach us that some shit is worth something more than casual analysis.
“Those bird, NIra,” I said, “those birds are some lively, psychedelic shit.”
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 