BLINDNESS

-      “I’ll never forget your voice!

-      And I’ll never forget your face!”

This short exchange of words hit me like an uppercut the first time I heard it and still does each time I read it again.

Where is the strength of this dialogue? How can it be that sharp, so threatening? Why does it smash my face that way?

I have been racking my brain over and over again since then, trying to find an explanation for my Cartesian mind and I think that the context is the key.

Unaware of it, these sentences could as well be lovers words, whispered to somebody’s ear. But it is not the case. It is a threat, a real threat.

They belong to the script of “Blindness” – from José Saramago (1998 Nobel Prize for Literature) novel – a very poignant book and a very rough movie… who talks about the responsibility to have eyes when others have lost them.

But let’s come back to the meaning of the sentences. Let’s start with “face”; a means of identification. It is easier, for me at least, to remember a face rather than a voice, but hold on a second, they do not mention the verb “remember” they use the verb “forget” instead. So which one is stronger: to remember or to forget? They are antonyms; the first one has to power to memory, the second one loses the remembrance.

What about the word “voice”? What about a sound? A voice is easy to imitate. Identification is doubtlessly more powerful than a sound, and what if the two characters of the dialogue are both blind? What if we rewrite the sentences that way:

-      “I will always remember your voice!

-      And I will always remember your face!”

The threat is still here, and knowing we are talking about blind people who have problems to identify, it is easier to understand where the threat comes from.

The oddness is that the blind will not express themselves this way.

How can they use an expression referring to sight and identification such as: “I will never forget your face!”

Let me tell you something; I am a shortsighted woman, a really shortsighted one, and consequently it might be a bit easier to me to imagine how terrifying blindness can be, not only for people who are born blind but also for those you can go blind.

Darkness! I imagine blindness as a lack of light, thus dark. But what if it is a white blindness, like being blinded by a light, an exorbitant light, something as white as milk?

And what if everybody around you goes blind? Unthinkable! And what if you are the only one who can see? Terrifying! The only one sentenced to see when nobody else can.

Close your eyes and imagine the thing: no more faces, no more colors, no difference between day and night, the lost of time notion, the impossibility to find things, not only objects but intangible things such as to find one’s way, the difficulty to move with thousand obstacles in your way, your hands and your voice being your only tools. That is my description of a nightmare!

In my own opinion the threat, here, comes from the word “face”: our face is what makes us different from one another, it is our own identification. The blind can only imagine faces as a sighted person can see them; no way to hide even quiet and in silence, the weird sensation of being observed and weak.

So let me put an end to that post with the lyrics of Alan Parsons’ Projects:

I am the eye in the sky, looking at you
I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules,
Dealing with fools
I can cheat you blind
And I don’t need to see anymore
To know that I can read your mind”.