For the second exercise, Simon showed us a photo to get us started. I’ll try to post the photo here soon, but for now I can describe it: it was black and white, high contrast, dark, moody. A bald man in a shadowy basement, stringy, pale. Wrapped around his head and face were what looked like tefillin straps. They covered his eyes and maybe his mouth. He was wearing something on a chain around his neck, thin and rectangular.
I wrote:
Losing my sight is something I think about sometimes, I suspect more often than other people. It terrifies me. I think about how almost everything I do, all day every day, involves my eyes. Writing, reading, working, playing, cooking. Is it just because of who I am – what my interests are, what I do with my time? Would the idea of blindness be less threatening if I were a musician, a ceramicist, a therapist – if I did something that didn’t require seeing?
Am I missing out on some greater sensory world out there because I don’t use my other senses nearly as much? Is there a world of sound or texture outside of my own that is all around me, to which I’m blinded by my sight?
And why do I think about this so much? It seems a little weird, I think. I think, I think – there’s the problem. Always thinking. I could use a little more doing in my day.
It’s usually late at night, when my eyes are red and dry, and I can feel the burning edges of my eyelids grating across my corneas with each slow laborious blink, that my thoughts turn to those eyes and how much I rely on them. I suppose it’s healthy, maybe it’s a kind of a mental immune system – it usually makes me go to sleep, or at least put in some eye drops or take out my contacts. But it can’t be just that.