There comes a moment when the meeting breaks up and the faculty is done with the formal business. The department chair doesn’t have a gavel but he waves a sheaf of papers and thanks everyone for coming. This is when it always happens: the faculty locks eyes collectively and start talking. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in this warp of ophto-centrism but it’s a routine fact of life. I’m on the “outs” unable to join a conversation. I sit for a time at the edge of the room and listen to the admixture of talkers—a vocal arrangement that’s part driven by familiarity and part by the myriad disasters of the super-ego; part collective relief now the official business is over, part diminuendo of sorts—like cocktail party chatter, a kind of spoken card play. Bridge.
My disability can produce routine states of loneliness. I’m unable to join the room though my only problem is seeing or not seeing. Sighted people are neurologically wired to look into one another’s eyes. Then, liking or not liking what they see there, they talk like espresso drinkers.
Instantly I feel a wash of loneliness. It’s the kind of loneliness one finds in certain poems by Lorca. Paths overgrown with brush appear. The heart feels it is a little island in the infinite. Worse: I’m thrown back into a childhood experience of solitude. I’m once more that blind kid living at the end of the dead end road.
This happens at the end of an ordinary meeting. It happens at the conclusion of a public assembly when the audience gathers in the aisles or in the foyer to talk about the ceremonies. It happens at the intermission at the concert hall.
I’m used to this. I’m not without the correspondent balances of brain jazz and. tom foolery that define the inner life.
But it’s lonely for whole moments. I will never be able to do anything about this. I can’t get up from my seat and walk into a cluster of unidentifiable people—elbow my way into a klatch of talkers. Nor can I just sit there at the edges of the talk. So I get up and walk outside with my dog.
Yes this is a small sadness. It has no serious relationship to large sadness which is grievous and virtually unendurable. I’d say what I’m talking about belongs in a category of miniature isolations like the ones that the elderly know or the parents of teenagers who are deemed ignorant and superfluous by their once loving children.
My father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He used to say “upward and onward” when far down in his inner life he was suffused with this condition I’m now calling the miniature pony of solo despond.
We just get on with it.
We keep our powder dry. We save our complaints for something big.
I’ve always loved the joke about the parents who have a son who after the age of 2 when most kids start speaking remains strangely silent. They take the boy to doctor after doctor. The specialists say there’s nothing wrong with the boy. Meanwhile he doesn’t speak. Until one day when he’s around 8 years old he says suddenly “The toast is burned!” His mother drops to her knees, grabs his hands, says: “Oh you can talk! You can! Thank God! Tell me, why did you never say anything before?” The boy looks at his mother and says: “There wasn’t anything wrong until just now.”
SK
Planet of the Blind 