Sixteen years ago I wrote a memoir about growing up blind titled Planet of the Blind. The book continues to sell because it provides a rare glimpse into the complex and thrilling elements of beauty that the blind often perceive. Everyone realizes beauty but the idea that the blind are capable of being discerning esthetes remains vaguely foreign to most sighted people. After all, blindness is thought of as a complete blankness, a mineral state, something like the life of Ariel imprisoned inside a tree.
Then there’s this: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re eyes don’t work, what could you possibly know? A woman approached me once as I was entering the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. She saw my guide dog. She said: “Why go to a museum if you can’t see?”
I’ve learned to call these kinds of sighted questions, “blind envy” since the unguarded and moist subtext is “what does the blind man know that I don’t know?” If the sighted fear blindness, imagining its a mineral blank, they also suspect we’re onto something. The blind are Tiresias, the seer whose sight was stolen by the gods but was compensated with the gift of prophecy. These old figurations still haunt us—we’re either helpless or brilliant but whatever the case we’re probably deficient when it comes to beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Its the eyes, stupid.
The sighted think music is OK for the blind. Its probably the right thing for us. What else would Stevie Wonder or Blind Lemon do with their lives? No joke. Throughout history the blind have been familiar as musical beggars. Pete Seeger’s recording of “The Blind Fiddler” is haunting and it sends a shiver down my back every time I hear it. We were beggars who played music long before we were recognized for having authentic talent, and in the old days, in the age of begging (which is not over in many corners of the globe) it was often thought that if we had any talent it was a miracle, a gift from God. “Blind Tom” the 19th century American slave child piano prodigy comes to mind. He performed as a “miracle” and while we like to think we’re beyond that, many talented blind people will tell you such a position is optimistic.
“How do you dream if you can’t see?” “How do you write about the world if you can’t see?” And most obviously, “How do you enjoy art if you can’t see?”
Pablo Picasso said: “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” At the core of sighted ideas of blindness is the unrelenting misapprehension that blindness is an obstacle to thinking. Another way to say this is that thinking is seeing.
I’ve always like the community poets as opposed to the garret-only poets. Thinking is seeing but its also generosity. Generous thinking means a great deal to blind people who love art. If I can’t see a painting I can see it through my sighted friend’s eyes; moreover I can admire that friend’s poetry of description. Blind people do have friends. We go to the museum with them. Professor Georgina Kleege of the University of California at Berkeley, who is herself blind, and a writer and scholar on disability history and the arts, describes an experience she had with blind people at the Guggenheim Museum in New York:
Several years ago I introduced a group of visitors with low vision and blindness to an art work by the contemporary artist, Angela Bulloch. Her Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus.12 (2008) is composed of a round framework about twenty five feet in diameter, fitted with LEDs to simulate a night sky. The piece was installed in the glass dome of the Guggenheim Museum, some ninety feet above where we were standing. After I described the work, the group engaged in lively dialogue about other details and their own observations. A new visitor, who had been blind from birth, was quiet during this interaction, so eventually I turned to her and asked what she thought. She said, “I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the night sky.”
Art is a field. We enter it and we’re both individually and collectively suffused with a renewed sense of the mystery of life. Art is not what we say it is. It’s always just beyond our narrations. And as any astronomer will tell you, no one has ever seen the night sky. We see versions. All sighted viewers are allowed to see versions. Your eyes permit you to see a subjective Platonic and imperfect model of something ineffable and delightfully strange.
When I was a little kid I said to my very Lutheran Finnish grandmother: “I wouldn’t want to be God.” “Why?” she asked. “Because I like surprises.” I said.
I love other people’s descriptions of art. They are, in no small measure, how I know the world. Sometimes when I get up close to a painting or photograph I can see elements of it. I love the tricks of perspective and light. But quite often I prefer my smart friend’s version. I like the poetry of others.
And someone hands you a description and you, in turn, make another ambient, turning, mobile sentence.
There’s no Tiresias involved.
Planet of the Blind 