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Dooneyscafe.com
Blind Man's Bluff by Stan Persky
Ryan Knighton is my first blind guy.
He’s 33-years-old, has a shaved head, frequently wears a black porkpie
hat, has a gym-developed hard-body, sports some this-generation tattoos, teaches
English at Capilano College in North Vancouver, B.C. (which is where I also work),
and taps around the universe with a long white cane. Knighton has retinitis pigmentosa
(RP), a genetic eye disease that’s progressively reduced his sight to about
one per cent in one eye over the last 15 years. Eventually, it’ll be all
gone.
Since we both teach early morning classes, I frequently pick him
up for the ride to work. My one-liner is: “We’re a car-pool, but I don’t let
him drive very often.” On the road, in between literary gossip and my running
description of the traffic pattern (“Oh no, we’re sandwiched between
two 18-wheelers…
Hey, you SUV pig! Get a bigger vehicle. How ‘bout a Hummer
with a machine-gun mount?” etc.), we occasionally refer to
his obvious, but unseeing “condition” or “situation” or
whatever you call it -- how about blindness? I have a one-liner for
that, too: “You’ve got two choices: irony or suicide.”
Since there are about 300,000 blind Canadians (about 1 per cent of
the population), I guess it’s just the luck of the draw that Knighton is “my first
blind person.” Pretty good luck, I’d say. And more or less like with
my first Jew, or first poet, or first lesbian, one of the side-benefits of knowing
an identifiable Other of any sort is that you quickly become sensitized to a
bunch of things you otherwise might not have noticed.
At work, as we’re heading off to the coffee kiosk through a maze of stairwells,
doors, and student-crowded corridors, I confine myself to occasional warnings
in the jargon of World War II fighter pilots, like, “Bogie at 3 o’clock,” to
indicate some major obstacle that I don’t think his white stick will fully
appreciate.
But let’s get back to choices, since deciding what to do about blindness
is one of any blind person’s big decisions, and is one of the things that
Knighton’s brilliant, funny, beautifully written, and serious-but-not-over-serious
memoir, Cockeyed, is all about. As he notes, there are actually more than two
choices on offer. In addition to irony, there’s also cynicism, victimhood,
and possibly something resembling serenity, although the latter is pretty much
out of reach, given Knighton’s mildly angst-ridden temperament. Suicide,
too, is presumably not an option. Or, well, of course it’s an option, and
it’s silly not to face it, but it doesn’t seem like an especially
good one. Knighton, like most writers, prefers writing to suicide. So did Jorge
Luis Borges, who also had RP, and possibly even such other famous scribes as
John Milton and, who knows, mythic Homer himself.
Cockeyed is an episodic rather than a one-damned-thing-after-another
sort of memoir, though it’s roughly chronological. Written under an epigraph from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses -- “My purpose is to tell of bodies which have
been transformed into shapes of a different kind…” -- the bodily
changes in Knighton’s life first registered in early adolescence around
a family dinner-table in Langley, B.C., when Uncle Brad remarked, “Look
at his face. Ryan’s got a squint or something. See? He’s kind of
cockeyed.”
The squint persisted and the kid found himself “trying to focus
through a problem I couldn’t see. Not yet.”
Things become even less clear in his mid-teens when young Knighton
scores a summer warehouse job that includes driving a forklift. That’s when he starts “missing” things
in his field of vision. There’s an effort to pass it off as mere bumbling,
but it’s more than klutziness. He’d imagined a “summer of fortune”
for himself, thanks to his great job, but “instead of wealth,
I found another fortune, the kind that is told. Somehow I’d
bumbled into my fate as a blind man before it was upon me.”
In hindsight, it’s like Pozzo’s line in Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot, which Knighton cites: “I woke up one fine
day as blind as Fortune.” Actually, it’s not until he’s
18, after he drives the family car in a slow-motion nightmare into
a ditch on a foggy night, that he gets the full monty RP diagnosis.
And after that, he’s dealing with the “situation.”
What makes Cockeyed unique among tales of encroaching darkness is
that Knighton mostly treats blindness as a kind of surrealism. It’s
a brilliant move that allows him to write a series of very funny
set-pieces about everyday mishaps and worse that are unfailingly
presented with perfect pitch and timing.
There’s the woman in the pub who asks him why he’s staring at her
when he isn’t staring at her. He decides to “pass”
as sighted; she eventually presses a note with her address into his
hand; hours later, he’s stumbling around in a cul-de-sac, accidentally
busting into someone’s house and discovering that things go
bump in the night-blindness. Much later, well past his sowing-wild-punk-oats
phase, there’s the trip to Ikea with his wife Tracy to buy
a couch. All he sees are brownish blurs and blobs, but it occasions
a discourse on “Ikealism,” the ideology of classless
furniture and taut domestic relationships. Then there’s the
problem of asking a waitress where the bathroom is, and being told
it’s
“over there,” but “indexicals,” as such site-specific
terms are known, isn’t much help to a blind guy. And finally
there’s the story about the decision to come out of the blindness
closet by learning to navigate with a long white stick.
If that was all there is to Cockeyed, it would still be pretty good.
Think humourist David Sedaris, with added oomph. But there’s way more to Knighton’s
book. The crux chapter of Cockeyed is called “Missing.” It’s
about a family tragedy, whose details I won’t reveal, but it’s the
moment where blindness moves beyond the slapstick of surrealism. “I had
been a young man in denial, one who resisted his diagnosis and its future at
every turn,” Knighton reflects. “I’d mocked blindness, ignored
it, camouflaged it, even accepted it, to a very minor degree.”
The family tragedy, however, “left a space, and that space
demanded I become the kind of person I wanted to be: resolved, selfless,
capable, any number of adjectives I’d let my blindness disfigure
in me…
If I’d been at war, it was more or less over. Whatever I’d
been fighting didn’t matter to me anymore. It was just too
small.”
In the elegies required for tragedies, familial and otherwise, Knighton
sees that “seeing itself is touched with elegy. Reality seems to press its light
into us, it is happening, but that’s not the way things are. The eye can
process only so many images per second, taking in sights the way a camera takes
a series of stills…
We think we are seeing life as it happens, but pictures are missing.
Moments disappear between the stills and make up our unwitnessed
lives. To see is to miss things. Loss is always with us.”
The other place in Cockeyed where we’re well beyond the surreal is in Knighton’s
accounts of his relationship to his spouse, Tracy, who is the undeniable hero
of the tale of our Knighton-errant. People often ask him how they live together
and what it’s like to build blindness into an otherwise normal middle-class
life. “The truth is, it’s hard to see,” he says. “Blindness
for us is mostly made up of many small things. I reach for a glass but can’t
find it. I continue to talk to you over the table, looking for the glass with
my hand. The moment I give up, Tracy nudges the glass to my fingers. It’s
so casual, the allowance she gives me to try and to fail, and it is so reflexive,
her help when I need it,” but not before he needs it. “From where
you sit,”
he adds, “our way might not catch your eye. The exchange is
so fluid and quick, like one of those moments in between the stills.”
The reason I’ve quoted the text at some length here is to underscore
one of the more important points about Cockeyed. Ryan Knighton is
a writer, not a blind-writer, and his book is a work of writing,
not a self-help, disease-of-the-week, or triumph-over-disability
volume.
Although Knighton’s publishers have done their best to position and market
the book as hip and other than a “conventional confessional,”
the public is so conditioned to psychologizing suffering that the
point might still be missed. Knighton even includes a James Frey-like
prefatory note about truth-in-memoir in order to make clear that
this isn’t just one of those A Million Little Pieces knockoffs: “Should
a reader determine that the author is not disabled, please contact
the appropriate authorities. He would gladly delete his blindness
from any further memoirs.”
At 33, Knighton is writing about blindness because writers have to
work through whatever situation the world has handed them. When he
gets done working through blindness as a writer, I expect he’ll write about other stuff. That he’s
written about this stuff with such grace and moxy is a sign of what’s to
come.
For readers, what you get out of Cockeyed is to become sensitized
to what you see: “indexicals,” “Bogies at 3 o’clock,”
the missing stills, and such literary references as Vladimir’s
question in Godot, “When did this happen to you?”, and
Pozzo’s haunting reply, “I don’t know… The
blind know nothing of time.” Such gifts, of course, are the
whole point of, pardon a final pun, insightful writing.
May 8, 2006. Stan Persky teaches philosophy at
Capilano College and is the author of The Short Version: An ABC Book,
which won the B.C. Book Prizes’ Hubert Evans Prize for Non-Fiction.
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