Friday, March 14, 2008

"And poor old Homer blind, blind as a bat"

An Op Ed in today's New York Times provides a different perspective on the downfall of Eliot Spitzer and the subsequent rise of David Paterson, the blind, African American Lieutenant Governor suddenly thrust into the spotlight The mainstream media has largely mined the incident for all its salacious details regarding Spitzer and "Kristen," reviving a kind of news tabloidism not seen since the mid-nineties, but Stephen Kuusisto here gives us our first real view of Paterson and attempts to discuss what he says will be harder for the public to deal with than even his race: his blindness.

Kuusisto, who is blind himself and thus speaks from experience and with authority, describes the challenges that Paterson faces every day:

I can’t afford forgotten things. Blind folks must constantly keep track of what we learn and memorize our surroundings. For us, an unfamiliar setting that a sighted person could map out in a glance is a puzzle that requires agile problem-solving. On occasion we even need to ask strangers for advice.

And what is perhaps more important for our immediate purposes, and I suppose related in some obscure way, is that Kuusisto also teaches Creative Nonfiction (which the NYT editors see fit to put in lower case) at the University of Iowa.

And I was struck by how all that Kuusisto says here applies to the writer in general, but how it particularly applies to the Creative Nonfiction writer, who is constantly probing what they see, the received, the perceived. Writers must not take the world around them as an end, but get beneath it in whatever way they can. Rather than being complacent in what they have seen, the Creative Nonfiction writer must constantly ask "What is it I have seen?" to reapply an interrogative formulated by Francois Hartog.

The urge to see and the lack of satisfaction with what we do see should guide all of our writing efforts, as we see in this famous account of a student learning to see what was before his eyes.

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