The photo above was taken by the University of Iowa and like most images of blind persons you will discern if you look closely that I am in effect looking at nothing. I’m doing a good job of it. This is because I am a poet and as Wallace Stevens once famously said, poets are concerned with “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” I am looking at the nothing that “is” and with all due respect to Bill Clinton, there is really only one meaning to “is” and its a transitive meaning–or to put the matter more directly: even a blind person knows that not seeing is a form of seeing. I am seeing expectations and ideas. All ideas are “in vitro” and they are “the nothing that is” and I am about to become the father of an idea in this photo.
Go find a family snapshot–the one where you have those red eyes as you stare at your birthday cake back in 1965. You are about to become the father or mother of an idea. Your face has a wilful suspension about its features, a matter that’s hard to describe but there it is. You are captured in a moment of belief in possibilities. You are temporarily freed from disappointments. You think the future might be better than the past even if the past is nothing more than life as it was lived just five minutes ago.
Five minutes ago you were playing a game called “pinch and ouch” with your cousin and it wasn’t going so well. Or perhaps (as in the photo above) you were a grown up in the photograph and accordingly you were having a stupid meeting five minutes ago and that meeting was entitled “pinch and ouch” and you know darned well that the secret of enduring such moments has to do with the preservation of the soul. And now someone has taken a photo of you and Lo! you still believe in something though it can’t be seen exactly. The articles of belief are always inexact and rich like flying horses and bread that floats on the water and doors that open in mid air.
Pinch and ouch is behind you. Just look.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 