Eavesdropping in Venice

This is an excerpt from my book  “Eavesdropping” which is still available from W.W. Norton.

There’s optimism here, and its no accident…

“Letter from Venice”

I came to Venice precisely because I was blind. The palazzos boasted of sunlight and stood beside the Grand Canal like wedding cakes. Water slapped the boat and somewhere a window opened and I heard a songbird. I guessed it was a Jamaican bluebird. I’d heard him before. A year ago I was standing at the Dunn’s River Falls when a Jamaican minister took me by the hand. His palm was rough as a starfish. “Bluebirds sing all around here,” he said. “You listen you can hear them above the falls.” They were there, talking in the high, sunlit branches.

Now I heard them on the Grand Canal. Then a small girl laughed and a man sang in a baritone voice. I imagined they were on a balcony and waving at the tourists floating beneath them.

Venice has endless distractions for the listener. I’d come here, in part, to prove it. Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine translator of Plato, wrote: The world is just shapes and sounds. Ficino said that sound equals form. This poses a challenge—could I, for instance, listen to the accidental music of a place like Venice while my wife explored the architecture? Could I find corresponding pleasure in merely listening?

As luck would have it, my literary agent called while I was pondering this in the New York Public Library. “I have a boondoggle for you,” she said. “You can think of it as a romp.” What followed was so improbable I could only guess it must be true. A design firm in Milan wanted me to appear in a magazine ad for interior lighting. My memoir Planet of the Blind had been translated into Italian under the title Tutti i colori dei buio (All the Colors of Darkness). Now the Italians wanted me to pose beneath stylish lights and say: You can’t imagine how I see light. Of course my wife Connie and I and my guide dog Corky would be flown to Milan. All our expenses would be taken care of. Yes this was a boondoggle . . . Yes they could get us tickets to La Scala . . .

That night sitting in our kitchen Connie and I folded and spindled the journey. I worried about the tactlessness of appearing in an ad for interior lighting. Blindness is not a trifling subject. In my memoir I depict the effects of light and shade as being both shocking and oddly beautiful. My version of blindness still allows me to see colors and shapes, though they are often inexact and more than a little troubling. But forget the aesthetics of the thing: over seventy percent of the blind remain unemployed in the United States. As a blind person I knew it was essential to portray the dignity of physical difference. But I also remembered the American poet Theodore Roethke, who wrote: The eye, of course, is not enough. But the outer eye serves the inner, that’s the point. I decided that I liked the irony of the advertisement—You can’t imagine how I see light. This was about the inner eye. Roethke also said: Literalness is the devil’s weapon. We decided we would go. 

My own hearing had become careful and algebraic. If seeing is really an epicurean experience—if a stained glass window can take us higher like the Kama Sutra—then hearing has only its acquired nobility, sequenced and slow. I knew that I needed to go to Venice for “the Ficino Cure.” I had to wander in a delirium of sound in a vast city with no cars. I had to get lost there. Connie could go her own way. We’d meet in the evening at Harry’s Bar and she could tell me about San Zaccaria and I would tell her about getting lost while following the music of what happens.

First we would go to Milan. The lighting firm had retained the noted photographer Elliott Erwitt to photograph three blind artists. A Russian chess master and a concert pianist from Milan joined me in a villa on the outskirts of the city. Here we were: a crew of blind men who saw light with the inner eye. We were each in his way worried about the dignity of this enterprise. Each wondered if he’d made a mistake. We were upright and quiet. Eventually we were photographed in separate sessions and our paths never crossed again. We were free.

I was surprised by the odor of the stones. The Venetian mortar had a heady scent—the smell of galvanic particles, a chalky smell that was distinct from the ocean.

From the deck of the vaporetto I saw a sack of feathers: tropical feathers, green pastels—then, in the fast-changing light, this became a lemon dessert, a tower of ice—my blindness identified palazzos and clouds through cataracts and damaged retinas and announced that pillows were falling from a great ship. In reality the ship was a church blocking the sun. The pillows were boats piled with produce. “My Venice,” it turned out, was a transparency, a slide that had been overexposed, or more properly, two slides that had been fitted neatly across my face. You can’t imagine how I see light! Like the poet Wallace Stevens, I was “catching tigers in red weather.” Some of the world’s most renowned architecture stood before me and I was staring at the protoplasm of microbiology.

I turned to Connie, who is a resolute admirer of sunsets; a café observer—thinking to ask “What’s that darkly groomed form over yonder?” but thought better of it for she was in a rapture of the quattrocento. And I, in turn, knew that I must find my own Venice because Marsilio Ficino had challenged me. The light about my head was incandescent, striking. It did not resolve into anything knowable. There was a kind of magnificence about this. I was passing through a prismatic cloud. Venice wore her mask of sea glass and I wore mine. I would dance with her. For music we’d take the ordinary buzz and din of the narrow passageways and canals.

After finding our hotel I made a solo foray into the Venetian alleys. I wasn’t exclusively alone since I was accompanied by Corky. Corky was companionable, and unfazed by strange cities. She was also large and handsome with a noble head. Before I’d gone two steps a passing woman remarked: “Cane guida! Bellissima!” I nodded on Corky’s behalf and then we sailed up a causeway—man and dog pushed by wind, each of us taking in the aromatic salts and musk of this place we’d never seen before. We turned left and Corky guided me through a medieval warren of slippery paving stones and jutting shops. She hugged the walls, evading a pack of schoolchildren shouting in French. I heard bells from a door, tourists speaking Japanese, and something heavy rolling on casters. The air was wet and cold. I heard caged birds from somewhere above and put out a hand. What was this, a morning glory trellis? I’d backed into a cul-de-sac, a fairy grot, a cave of waterweeds and acacia.

I was in equal parts a figure of struggle and peace; a walking lodestone of sorts. I touched my fingers to a cold window. A fine dust coated the glass. A light rain had begun falling, and since there was no one around I encouraged Corky to relieve herself there in the fairy grot. I stood listening. There were extraordinary songbirds calling from a second-story window. Laughter from above, a woman and a child . . . I couldn’t make out the words. Two poets . . . The lyrical push of ordinary Italian . . .

I had to slow down. If I was going to listen to Venice properly I needed to hear the cadences of the place. I needed to stand still. Again I thought of Theodore Roethke: A poet must be a good reporter; but he must be something a good deal more. Whitman called this loafing. I thought of Whitman observing the parade of humanity with lewd concentration. Walt had a good ear. He loved opera and knew how to sit perfectly still.

At home in New York, Corky and I raced up and down the streets at breakneck speeds. Guide dogs move fast through traffic. We sailed past the expensive couples on their Rollerblades and took the joggers in Central Park by surprise. It was obvious that here in Venice we didn’t need to rush anywhere. We could prevail over chaos by means of deliberation.

We trailed the sound of footsteps through a transverse intersection of alleys. Shop bells rang . . . someone opened a door . . . Corky followed a stranger into a shop and we found ourselves in a room full of hand-blown glass. We stood completely still. There was a deep silence. All eyes were watching us. I was certain that the shop’s owner was horrified—a blind man with only a dog for company had appeared amid the exquisite glass! We were literally “a bull in a china shop”!

Then there was a noise of little shoes—paper slippers—a tiny person was approaching . . . “Listen,” a woman said. I heard the hum of breath moving over glass—she was playing a glass flute! Wind and sunlight pressed through dark leaves. I was sweetly transfixed. This was a shy, unasked-for gift . . . She played the delicate pipe and I imagined leaps of light on water. A mind of grace is real and it comes by surprise, I thought. The shopkeeper showed me glass butterflies, a glass cricket, fish, a glass bird with wings outstretched . . .

For the next hour I walked by ear. I broke the rules for the proper use of a dog guide by issuing vague directions, letting Corky wander aimlessly. Together we got good and lost. I tracked the sounds of bells and a scattering of wings and guessed that I’d arrived at St. Mark’s Square. It was good not knowing where I was. The sun had come out and a balloon seller walked about in slow circles—maybe he had seeds for the birds instead of balloons. He had a litany of amiable phrases drawn from a dozen languages but none of the words revealed what he was selling. He had a sack of coins that I imagined was hanging from his belt. The coins and the rhythm of his walk were strophe and antistrophe. He sang to the far corners of the square. “Hello! Hello! Beautiful! Beautiful! Willkommen! Tervetuloa!” Coins slapped against his belt.

“Are you all right?” The voice was British. Yes, I’d managed to find my way to St. Mark’s Square. And Corky was standing stoically amidst thousands of pigeons. The tourists were photographing her.

Apparently a significant number of nuns were snapping our picture. Once the Englishman mentioned it I heard their cameras clicking. I told the Englishman that I was walking and listening with no true destination. He called to his wife. “These two have no idea where they’re going,” he said. “I mean he’s just walking about and listening!” She asked if she could have my photograph. I let them take my picture and then I told them that I must run—it was time to feed the dog.

The sun was setting. I stopped on a bridge and stood for a time. A gondola slipped beneath us, the plash of its rudder sounded like the tail of a pheasant in the grass. I imagined the gondolier was going home to his wife and children. It was twilight and cold. If he looked back he’d see me leaning on the bridge and talking to myself. He wouldn’t see the dog, just a man wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses.

Twenty years ago at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop I read philosophy like a halfhearted gardener. I sat under willows and read parts of Kant and Hegel. Now the gondola’s hull was slapping the surface of the canal; the noise echoed under the bridge. Two women hurried past in the growing darkness; I could hear them admiring the dog in German. Guesswork and understanding create a knowing man, I thought. The subjectivity of Kant . . . Why go anywhere when you can’t see? Is it because the spirit of man and the world of form are identical? Because even with eyes shut my spirit and the narrow alleys of Venice were one and the same?

I listened.

Walked.

Jazz piano drifted from somewhere. There was a nightclub nearby.

I walked some more.

The Venetians had more caged birds than any other people.

Then I was in a working-class district. The windows of the apartments were open to spring rain. Radios and televisions played from building after building. There was a clatter of dishes . . . I heard a tinny stereo playing the Rolling Stones—“Jumping Jack Flash” . . . From still another window I heard the voices of two men arguing. Wild laughter from a woman, a mezzo-soprano . . . The odd grace of being was in that laugh because the men stopped—then laughed along with her . . . They were laughing because twelve moons circled Jupiter . . . Because one of them had forgotten his left from his right . . .

Hearing poetry starts the psychological mechanism of prayer.

The phrase was Roethke’s.

I sat alone in a tiny neighborhood park.

I was amazed at how quiet Venice suddenly was.

It was a city of wind . . .

Someone lowered a flag. There was the unmistakable sound of pulleys. It was time to walk.

Something strange was happening to me. I was surprisingly happy. Why not? I’d been drifting through the unfamiliar atmosphere with only the wind for a map. Was this what happened to sighted people as they wandered in churches and museums?

Corky stopped while I located a flight of steps with my foot. In the distance I heard a crowd. They were still far off. They made a strange buzz. I thought of Samson working his mill.

It appeared that I’d emerged from the vatic silence into a scene of great confusion. I wondered briefly if I’d walked onto a movie set because hundreds of people were shouting in a chorus. I had found my way into the middle of a street protest and I was completely ignorant about what was going on—I was Candide walking among the Bulgarians. Women were shouting. Gunshots rang out. No, they were firecrackers. Corky continued working and guided me through a knot of humanity as if we were in New York at rush hour. She pushed past a group of men who were banging trash can lids. I supposed that the look on my face suggested my incomprehension because someone tapped me on the arm and said: “It’s a protest. The hotel workers are going on strike!” There were more firecrackers and then there were police whistles. There was a palpable feeling of anger mixed with hilarity. This was street theater and not a riot. We turned a corner and moved quickly away. I wanted to turn and wave but Corky was going at a good clip.

I wondered if Connie was viewing the paintings of Titian and Tintoretto. Maybe she was drifting in a gondola around Santa Maria della Salute. Me? I was lost. A great baroque weather vane turned before me. Venice—“queen of the seas”—her jewelry and clouds attracting me at random . . .

The next morning I listened on the Bridge of Sighs to the conversations of tourists.

Gondolas floated beneath the bridge.

Leaning at the rail, I overheard a woman talking about her dentist.

“Honest to God!” she said. “You’d think a dentist with his reputation would have noticed by now!”

I wanted to hear the rest, but the Bridge of Sighs swallowed her story.

“It’s true!” said a man in another boat. “Just look at the way she dresses!”

“Vitamins,” said a different man.

“It’s just schoolbook Latin,” a woman said.

“The great excitement of Manzoni when Napoleon died,” said another woman.

No one noticed the bridge.

“Catherine of Siena,” said a man.

“I fully intend to catch up with it!” said a woman.

There were gondolas with nothing but laughing people.

Was it the influence of Disney?

This was the Bridge of Sighs!

The doges of Venice marched their subjects across this span to the waiting prison where they most certainly died from starvation and torture. Later the Austrians marched the Venetians over this same bridge when the Austro-Hungarian Empire owned Venice during the nineteenth century. One can only imagine the Austrians and their efficient cruelties . . .

The gondolas slipped by and the tourists talked in floating zones of contentment.

The gondoliers had completely given up on their traditional role as tour guides. They worked their tillers in silence.

“She was a glowing bridesmaid,” said a woman.

There were limits to how much listening I could do without the consoling balance of visual description. Connie took me to the Church of St. Mark’s to see the mosaics and I listened as she described the strands of gold finer than hair that were woven through the marble floor.

The tesserae of the mosaic were smaller than chipped diamonds or the microscopic slices of platinum inside Rolex watches.

Connie’s voice had a respectful softness. She was a guest. As a result she conveyed her appreciation for the things she saw.

We stood in the great church amidst a billion inlaid fragments of glass, marble, and tile.

Later we drifted through the city. Connie described the Rialto Bridge. With its baroque foppishness it looked temporary—as if it was erected for a wedding.

We saw Mozart’s louvered window. The building was in the dark even at midday.

We saw a canal that had been dammed at both ends and then drained. Men were working at the foundations of a sinking palazzo with what appeared to be rubber mallets.

We noticed a horse on a thin bridge, improbable as an onion atop the queen’s crown.

Three men wearing black tuxedos waved from a motorboat.

We drifted around the Church of Santa Maria della Salute. Gulls rose and fell against a backdrop of dark Adriatic clouds.

Lights appeared at the tall windows of the monastery.

We sat above the Grand Canal and sipped wine. The Venetian dusk called the bleached whiteness out of the stones. I talked about listening as a variation of sight-seeing. Connie was a professional trainer of guide dogs. Accordingly she knew a good deal about the art of hearing. More than once while training her dogs she assumed the role of a blind person by walking blind-folded through the streets of New York. As Huck Finn would say, “she has sand.”

My Olympiad was to find aesthetic pleasure among the riches of the baroque with little or no visual help. The trouble with this plan was glaringly obvious—the sounds of a place were products of random nature—they were happenings of luck and factors of wind. Boats turned at their moorings. There was music from their chains. A window slid open because a little boy saw a calico cat on a ledge—the cat who got away last night—and now the boy was calling softly. This was the mysterious aleatoric work of the hourglass. But no listener could ever hear in the wind the exquisite formal arrangements of architecture. For this I would always require help. And something more—a nobility of descriptive engagement from my wife and from my friends . . .”

The next morning Connie spotted a motor launch piled high with boxes of Jaffa oranges. The boat was in the hands of a single man who believed that with mind over matter he could squeeze his cargo beneath a miniature bridge. Connie described him as he drove his tower of crates into a mousehole. There was a groan, then a splintering of wood. The people atop the bridge broke into rowdy laughter. Salty, colorful words boomed back and forth. One man shouted: “The bridge is too slight for such a thing. Back up!” All the while the reckless captain worked feverishly to break the logjam. He kicked at crates of oranges and three of them tumbled into the canal where they bobbed like deck chairs thrown from a stricken ship. Now the crowd on the bridge shouted more instructions. “You need additional weight! We’ll come down!” Four stout men climbed over the railing of the bridge and dropped into the flimsy motor launch. They lay down on top of the crates. They were willing the boat to sink lower. The captain prodded the ceiling of the bridge with his skinny arms. “If the canal rises they’ll be stuck in there “said Connie. “I wonder if the Venetian water patrol carries the Jaws of Life?”

We watched as five men laughed their way under a bridge. Heft and hilarity were their only tools of navigation.

Had I been walking alone I would have missed this splendid moment. The predominance of the eye—that old magician! How he snaps us to attention whenever he discovers chaos. A friend calls on the phone and says: “I just saw the damnedest thing! A white cloth seemed to be dancing by itself under the trees. For a minute I thought it was a ghost. When I looked again I saw it was a squirrel with a man’s handkerchief in its mouth.”

The “willing suspension of disbelief” is the very faith of poetry, as Coleridge said. But it’s also a prime ingredient in the gleam of the eye. I don’t think it really matters whose eyes are gleaming. As long as my companion is a talkative enthusiast of the odd apparition, everything will be okay. I can know the world by proxy.

Walking in Venice in long, slow circles, I realized that sound is to shape as thirst is to hunger. Ficino understood the nature of the meal.

Dear Marsilio Ficino,

I travel with my wife. And yes, she sees better than 20/20. Ted Williams, the baseball player, also had 20/10 sight. In his heyday with the Boston Red Sox he saw the stitches on a fastball. Connie sees blackbirds flick their wings in the corn of southern Ohio. She drives at seventy miles per hour and notices red squirrels, pheasants, bob-headed quail, Arabian horses . . . Handmade signs for Ohio Swiss cheese, sausage, fresh dill pickles . . . In Venice she spots the unhistorical shops selling faux zebra hides—“in case you need to cover your piano,” she says . . . And the shop displaying handmade women’s shoes, but only for the left foot, a specialty trade . . .

And yes, dear Ficino, Connie reads me the menus in comic Italian, and the waiters look on with contempt—but their scorn turns to dismay when I tell them we’re only ordering for the dog. And in turn we walk the palazzos with Corky heeling beside us and I see the interiors that Connie sees, hear her voice among the dazzling arches and feel that I have stepped through a thin wall of sleep into someone else’s dream. And this is all right. Why not? We train all our days in the geometry of self so as not to get lost. Why not get lost in someone else’s wonder?

On our last morning in Venice I went out alone. The air was bluish in my retinas . . . Trees clicked in a small park. A frenzied Pekinese followed me. He barked like a motorized winch in need of oil. He was a stray. There were strays all over Venice. Once, I thought, they lived in the palaces. 

I walked. It was early and shopkeepers swept and launches delivered goods. Once more I was in no remarkable spot, I was merely standing beside a weathered door. I pressed my palms against the wood. It was rough as pumice, or the barnacled hull of a New England dory. Sometimes I believe that beneath the rutted surfaces of wood I can feel the grain, the pith of the tree. This was a black oak from Macedonia. In my mind’s eye I could see where it stood on a great estate— saw the picnickers beneath it, some five hundred years ago.

–This material may be protected by copyright.

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoir Planet of the Blind.