How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you?
Well, that would depend on why they couldn’t see me. “Those who have eyes, but cannot see.” Many have stood beside or before me, looked into my eyes, as I looked into theirs, and never saw me. “The most difficult role in the play is that of the fool,” said Don Quixote, “for he who would play the fool must never be one. So many people saw me deliberately playing the role of the fool and forgot the above quote. They also forgot what Antonio Machado wrote: “The eye you see is not an eye because you see it, it is an eye because it sees you.” And there you have it: why would I bother describing myself to people of that ilk, so stupid and blind with their own limited wisdom, that they couldn’t see me anyway.
Keenan’s Well, by Seamus Heaney, is a wonderful poem. It tells us about Rosie Keenan, his blind from birth neighbor, who played the piano and sang all day. She let them touch her books, like books of wallpaper, and feel the letters of braille by means of which she was able to read. They allowed her to touch their faces with her oh-so-sensitive fingers, and she said she saw them, as well as knowing them by their voices. When he read her a poem about Keenan’s well, she told him that she, blind from birth, ‘could see the sun shining at the bottom of it now.”
How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you? I wouldn’t waste my time and energy trying to do so.
rogermoorepoet 