Read Online A Closed Book by Gilbert Adair - Free Book Online Page A

‘see’ nevertheless. What it is that I see may be ‘nothing’ – I am blind, after all – but that ‘nothing’ is, paradoxically, by no means beyond my powers of description. I see nothing, yet, amazingly, I am able to describe that nothing. The world for me, the world of sightlessness, has become a sombre and coarsely textured plaid as devoid of light as I imagine deep space must be and yet somehow, also like deep space, penetrable. And, I repeat, I really do see it. There would seem to exist a profound and immemorial impulse, in that part of my face where my eyes used to be, to ‘look out’ at the world, an impulse that, even when I no longer have eyes, does not then spread indiscriminately to the rest of my face. It is still with my missing eyes, exclusivelywith them, that I ‘see nothing’. I still turn my head to greet someone, not merely in unthinking obeisance to the weary conventions of jejune social intercourse but also as though, even eyeless, I remain subject to an instinctual and atavistic seeing reflex. In short, I continue to ‘see’ the same plaid, the same deep space, because as a human being I cannot not see it; because seeing is a function of the organism even when the organs themselves have been removed. I
have
to see, whether such is my active intention or not. It is an itch which scratches itself, an itch comparable to that which makes amputees fret over their missing limbs. For there is, seemingly, what might be called an etiquette of amputation, an Emily Postish list of dos and don’ts where the physically impaired are concerned, mostly don’ts, of course. Thus, one should not sit on an amputee’s bed at the exact spot where his leg would normally be, one should not violate the air space of his missing arm, etc.
    â€˜â€œThe question is more general, however, than that posed by blindness alone. In my own past, whenever an optician or ophthalmologist trained a pencil torch on my eye, or whenever I myself chanced to rub too hard and long on my eyeball, I seemed to catch sight of – well, what precisely? The retina? The eyeball’s inner surface? Its outer surface? Whichever: cratered, cicatrized,
lunar
, as red and rawly textured as the skin of ascrawny day-old nestling, as biliously opaque as a gaudy glass paperweight, the sight of it was deeply disquieting. It reminded me of the earth’s primaeval convulsions in the
Sacre du Printemps
sequence of Walt Disney’s
Fantasia
. It reminded me, above all, that the eyes are two parts of the body, are
things
, units that can be lost, cracked, broken, that, as I well know, can be disjoined from the head and held, even rolled around, in the palm of the hand. From ‘inside’ my head it never occurred to me, unless I happened to ‘think of it’, that I had in reality two eyes, not one. From inside I was a human Cyclops; my Cyclops eye, as I perceived it, was both the spectator and screen of the world; the world, as I confronted and controlled it – I mean, attempted to control it – was in a tangible sense inside the eye (remove the eye and you also remove the world). The eye, then, was finally just that gaudy glass paperweight which I mention above, save that, instead of a nostalgic little Christmassy vista (soft snow falls if you hold it upside-down), what it contained was the world itself.
    â€˜â€œBut was I really ‘seeing’ it, was I really seeing my own eye? How can an eye manage to see itself? See inwardly or, so to speak, self-referentially? Even way back then, I was myopic, even then I saw the external world only with glasses. Yet, miraculously, I could see this lunar surface just as sharply as would anyonepossessed of normal vision. What was it, though, that I saw it
with
? With, doubtless, that instinctual and atavistic seeing reflex that I have already referred to and that ultimately transcends the possession of one’s very