Thor's Day: A blind man on seeing

Hugues de Montalembert

Seeing beyond

By Morris Dean

Sometimes, or maybe most of the time, I hardly see anything at all.
    This example is as good as any: My wife and I had lunch on our back porch yesterday. After we came in, she asked me whether I had noticed that there were new flowers in the vase in the middle of the table. (She knows me well; she knows that I need to have things brought to my attention or I won't see them at all.)
    No, I hadn't. And I would miss even more of the beauties of flower and plant growth in our garden and everywhere if my wife didn't often point them out to me.
    I need to be more observant. I need to notice things more. I need to look. Maybe I need to learn how to look, how to see.
    There are lessons on seeing in a short book I just read [listened to in recording], Invisible: A Memoir, by Hugues de Montalembert—a blind man. I'll tell you more about the author and his book in this coming Sunday's review. For now, know that he was a painter until burglars accosted him in his New York apartment in 1978 and one of them threw paint thinner in his face.
    And I'm dense enough when it comes to seeing, that I am probably going to have to read his hour-and-a-half book several times to learn anything that will stick....
    In this passage, he talks about seeing, both as looking and as creating a vision:

One day a friend of mine said, "How do you imagine my face"?
    I said, "What do you mean? I knew you before I lost my sight."
    And he said, "No, you didn't."
    I said, "But think, I swear I saw you."
    He said, "No, you never saw me."
    And I thought, Is he right?
    So we calculated, and he was right. But I know exactly how he looks.
    Yet I don't know if he looks like that.
    Vision is a creation.
    It's not just perception.
    I experiment with it all the time.
    When I walk in the street with somebody, I'll ask the person, what is there? Many people say: A wall, or they say a tree. But they don't see anything.
    If I walk with a friend of mine who is a painter who has the most acute eye I know, the walk with him in the street is a trip. I mean it's an adventure because he sees.
    He creates a vision and he gives it to me.

I think there is no reality in fact. What you see would be different from what your neighbor sees. So who has the reality?
    Again: Vision is a creation.
    That's why some people see and some people don't see.
    Much the way they hear music or they hear noise.
    I think people are like that with their eyes. They're not interested by what they see, and they don't really understand it.
    They use vision not to bump into a tree or fall into a ditch.
    This painter friend of mine, he said to paint is to see beyond.
    I think this is true not only of painting.
    To see is always to see beyond. To stand behind the appearance. There is a world behind the exact world.
    I want to convince people that the eyes of their soul can also see.

To see, one should liberate oneself from the immediate. Looking beyond opens the world to where beauty has become one with truth. The harmony of the invisible is always more beautiful than the one of the visible....[pp. 104-106]

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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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