Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

All the pictures I had taken were diminished by what I discovered to be true. I hadn’t begun to be a photographer. I had once thought, when I had done blind old Mrs. Conklin and Slaughter the piano tuner, that blindness was serene, like sleep. But it was not that at all. It was ceaseless vision, a babble of voice: the floors spoke, the walls, the potted plants, the books on their shelves, every phase of daylight — nothing was more audible than dawn, or Orlando’s look of pity, or Phoebe’s skin. Shouts and whispers; and each sound was a vivid picture, reminding me that I had seen nothing.

I remained shut in. I was in the ultimate darkroom, my body. It is every desperate soul’s best refuge, and its darkness gave it a startling size, the dimensions of a cathedral, and the iron and stone echoes of an oubliette. So my body seemed a camera obscura conceived on a vast scale — not the hot little chamber I had sometimes dwelled in, but a great thing, with space for the most complete pictures, memory’s cyclorama towering at the back of my mind. But this one had no pinhole, no meniscus lens. It was in utter darkness, a total absence of light, the original darkroom, before the slightest puncture of violation.

Sealed by this virginity I ought to have been wrapped in silence, entombed and mummified by my thwarted sensuality, and remorsefully lonesome. But I wasn’t. I had remained motionless in my chair; I had heard the distant whispers saying shock and breakdown . I knew the words — they went with “nerves,” they made you cry, they embarrassed your family. You were pitiful. You couldn’t cope. You apologized. You said, “I don’t know what’s got into me.” You were drowning: everything had gone black.

I shed many tears before I realized that I had been turned inside out. I was restored. This darkness revealed like light. The victim of a breakdown is speechless. The vocabulary of despair is so limited; indeed, despair is the end of language, merely sobs and babytalk. And here visions begin. The pictorial faculty, the mind’s picture palace, has nothing to do with language, and in an inward way the images came so fast I could barely get a fix on them. I had been deceived by my eye; I was not deceived by my blindness. All my senses but one informed the pictures. There was in my vision a purity and sharpness found only in the symphonies of deaf composers and the eloquent monologues in the minds of dumb statesmen.

Blindness is not simply a loss of sight, a shade drawn on the world. It is a void. It makes you vanish. You are invisible to yourself. Its onset is darkness, within and without, like the start of the long swim from the womb where one’s suffocated soul bawls out of terror. Much worse than the outer darkness is this inner state of gloom which seems deaf and mute and everlasting and lifeless. I couldn’t reason. I had turned into a bat, and if — as I imagined — I killed myself, I would bleed spurts of ink. Blind things were blind inside and out: the clam a muscle of sand and sinew, the worm crammed with dirt.

I was sludge.

“What happened?” Orlando had said that morning. “Why are you looking like that?”

I had no reply. I lay shut and sealed on the floor like an ugly box without an opening. For that was how they found me — in my room, with rain on my face, stiff and sightless. I had just banged down and didn’t care.

Then, with the first phone call from New York, I began to stir, like a bean-shaped fetus in a sac. I kicked timidly to discover I was buoyant. I rummaged in the darkness and gasped. I could make out shapes — shades of black — inviting passages, praises carrying from unexpected quarters. I risked the journey over nearly familiar paths made wonderfully dangerous and exciting by their new feel. A great river ran through me and I followed its fury to a landscape of crystalline voices raised in sweet song. It was a world of the permissible, a kingdom without demons or monsters, better than the one I had known. Children played here, the boy and girl in their nakedness; there were lambs; it was the world before the fall. It was dark, but the darkness did not threaten. I absorbed it and found it kind. I had tunneled serenely beyond fear to be reborn and to recover my innocence. My blindness had taught me to see.

It wasn’t a miracle. It was another game in which, like the game of Hide and Seek that taught me to use a camera, Orlando was the principal player.

Blindman’s Buff started in the simplest way, after I had sat desperately in my darkness for a sorry week or more. Then the phone rang — the Camera Club ecstatic about my Florida pictures, Orlando crying, “You’ve done it, cookie!” From an ounce of warm ash black light was kindled in me, enough of a clue to give me hope. By degrees I tested my space, and what I perceived mattered more to me than anything I had ever seen, because it had none of the evasions of conventional light. It was a lesson in seeing, the teaching that light misleads: light is fickle, unreliable, and lying. I came to know that I was inhabiting in my blindness a camera obscura of palatial proportions. I had not lost the visible world; I contained it.

Orlando and Phoebe’s footfalls, their voices, their touches. How much more telling they were than their vagrant images in the pictures I had taken. Their voices buffeted me, but their footfalls were explanatory, passionate, apologetic; attempting to conceal, they were thorough, and the completeness of this sneaking gave them away. I listened; my senses were wide open; and so, in play, I rehearsed my body for seeing.

I had been fooled before, handicapped by my eyes and made into a vegetable — a great deluded root. But now I gloried in my rebirth, in the roaring of timbers in the house, the warping of joists which caused the woodwork to yelp. My ears were returned to other sounds: the restless grass, the passions of air, the wind’s fingers at the wall, the grieving of pine needles, the sweet paradoxes of time too subtle for photography — the future kissing the past. And all around me the footfalls of Orlando and Phoebe. They had no idea of how receptive I had become, how I had heard an uncomplaining fly dying at the window, or the damp piano twisting a fraction to give his death a dirge — like the plangent chord of a plucked harp; or the folding of gulls’ wings as they settled on the roof to mourn, or — at that same moment — the whisper of snowflakes sifting like crumbs into the yard. Nothing was hidden from me. Sound was movement; sound bruised the air.

The game had begun.

“Going shopping, Maude!” Phoebe said.

Harumph , went the front door.

“I’ll see to the car while she’s gone,” Orlando said.

Pshaw went the back door.

To a sighted person this might have been the end of it. They had said they were going: they were gone. Previously, I would have hurried to my darkroom to potter with my enlarger.

But in this darkroom there was much more. There were tramplings, the speaking feet of two people, not far away.

Seated — not moving — I followed them.

The muffled footfalls reached me as narration and I was able to recreate a picture of the breathless pair rounding the house, squelching down the muddy path, scuffing the windmill’s steps. Their movements exposed not only them, but the house, the path, the garden, the sky, the sea behind them, the watchful windmill I vowed never to enter. They were the necessary figures in a landscape that made it at once complete and visible.

The bolt was shot in the door. Thuds. The scrape of clothes being removed; the sighs of discarded garments being crushed. There came a steady chafing of skin that was at first dim and scarcely audible until, like gold burnished with a velvet pad, it brightened to a spangle of sound, a chime that rang in a glittering echo. And it started murmurs, the discovery of pleasure in pain, the slow enjoying grunts of an ancient dance with a smothered drum.