Always I write about the boy, not out of innocence, but because he is me and not me and the not me is where the advantages of irony can be found. I like knowing this. The boy always loved hieroglyphs. Once the boy spent a day believing he was an Ibis. In school they made fun of him for being blind. The Ibis was better. People who dismiss mythology probably don’t understand the nature of personal suffering. Hercules and the Hydra together make a child. The clear sunlight and the boy searching for mushrooms. He was all alone in the woods. He did not play with toy soldiers. He played with the life around him, the miniature “up close” creatures that let him in. “They are me and not me,” he thought. “That also means I am not me.” Long before there was a disability rights movement he knew he wasn’t any one thing. Later in college he read Emerson and he admired “Self Reliance” and: “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.” Secrets came to him then. He lay face down on the frozen pond and knew there was ice under the ice but the fish could move there. And there were private crickets inside his sleeves. He could talk sideways to living things. That boy is me and not me. The man cannot spend his day face down with the ice fish though often he would like to do this. The poor man must workaday workaday in the steep hours feeling the tensile struggle to retain his innocence and curiosity. If he has irony its in the service of protection. The boy ran away; the man carries the woods with him. And the man knows why this isn’t sentimental at all. He also rescues crickets whenever he can.
Planet of the Blind 