Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

The Vineyard was the real estate phenomenon of Steadman’s life. He had gone there from Boston as a child when it had been a hymn-singing island of fishermen and vegetable farmers, odd-jobbers and lobster — men. His mother had been a Mayhew; it was a return for her. Then the island became a version of America — a choice destination with an unflagging building boom, too many newcomers, mutual suspicion and class conflict, environmental battles, unsustainable development crowding areas of natural beauty, a dwindling labor pool, heavy traffic, drugs in the summer, race problems, angry Indians, and now and then a knifing in Oak Bluffs: Hometown USA.

Still, it was home for him, and for that reason, prettier than anywhere else. Old money built discreetly and dressed down and didn’t show off and was famously frugal. Old money fraternized with the locals, formed alliances, got things done — or, more often, managed to be quietly obstructive, meddling for the good of the island. What new money there was remained intimidated by the locals, gently browbeaten, never understanding that the gentry prided themselves on and gained self-esteem by knowing the workers, for the boat builders and the fishermen and the ferrymen and the police and the raggedest Wamponoags were the island’s true aristocrats.

“How long have you lived here?” Steadman was sometimes asked.

“I went to John Belushi’s funeral,” he said. “And my mother’s people, the Mayhews, have lived here for three hundred and sixty-five years.”

These days, as an addict — there was no other word — he often thought about Belushi’s drug habit. He knew enough about it to understand that it was the opposite of his own. Poor Belushi shot himself full of speedballs and was incoherent and out of control, comatose and futile. Steadman’s addiction was benign and enlightening, healthful and productive.

The blinding light bestowed by the datura inspired and strengthened him and gave him back the past; granted him something just short of omniscience; was revelation and remembrance. He had heard that blindness was sensory deprivation and had believed it to be something like a thick bag over the head of a doomed man in a noose. Never had he imagined that such blindness would grant him power, that he would be given such vision. Darkness was light, the world was turned inside out, he saw to the essence of things, and it was prophetic, for at the heart of it all was the future.

Blindness was his addiction and his obsession — his entire waking life was given to it; his whole world was transformed. No one knew what he knew. How deluded sighted people were, insects twitching in a stick-figure tango, animated by their feeble impulses, seeing so little.

Drinking the muddy mixture, Steadman was blinded and uplifted. In the glow of his sightlessness nothing was hidden; the world was vast and bright, and its vital odors filled his soul. The simplest touch roused him by the pressure of its tragic eloquence. He learned a whole narrative of smell, a grammar of sound, a syntax of touch.

At first, preoccupied with dabbling in the datura, he had done no writing at all. He had sat big and bright as though enthroned, overwhelmed by the luminous warmth that blindness had kindled in him and by the insights it provoked — he was truly seeing the world for the first time. Writing could wait. He had fantasized that as a blind man he needed round-the-clock nursing. Well, it was partly true.

He did not begin writing immediately, but when he did he realized how incomplete Trespassing had been, how thinly imagined, and not a fluke but a failure. Yet even failures had the power to delude the reader. Once, he had wondered whether he would ever write anything again. Trespassing, for those who remembered that he wrote it, might be his only literary legacy. Now, with the datura, he could not see any end of creation. He could barely keep pace with the tumult of his visions, the record of his nights and days, in the god-like realm of the erotic, the doctor by his side, his dark dreams fulfilled and revealed.

On some days of dictation he felt that he had poisoned himself and died; that in death he had entered the shimmering chambers that some people had glimpsed but none had described, because unlike Steadman they were unable to come back from the dead. He died once a day and woke, delivered from death, freighted with revelation.

He worked alone, with Ava. No one else knew how he had been transformed. Steadman remained secluded as the bleaker seasons passed into the cold Vineyard spring, with its spells of frigid sunshine. He had no need to go anywhere. His writing was the one constant in his life, and he was content with the conceit that, blinded this way, he contained the world.

But late May brought warmth and color. After the clammy winter and the cold northwest wind there were some uncertain days, and then at last the Vineyard was enlarged with more assertive sunlight, and the rain diminished, and the wind swung around and blew from the southwest. He knew the island would be sunny and pleasant for the next four months. The first flowers were the biggest and brightest, the daffodils and early Asian daylilies, the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the white viburnum the locals called mayflowers, the blossoms he preferred for their fragrance, for the more extravagant the flower, the more modest its aroma. He was no longer tricked by his eye. One of the lessons of blindness was that night-blooming flowers had the most powerful perfume.

After the long winter up-island he prepared himself for summer — the pleasures of spring lasted just a few weeks. Steadman wondered what the season might bring. The winter for him had been perfect: safe and sexual, turning him into an imaginative animal. After his day’s work, he ate and rutted and then slept soundly. He woke and blinded himself first thing and resumed his dictation. He felt as confident as a prophet. He spoke his narrative as the book was revealed to him.

His writing was not work — it was his life, flesh made into words, the erotic novel rehearsed at night. He was like someone conducting an experiment on himself, then writing up the results. Blindness was his method and his memory; the drug created in his consciousness a miracle of remembering and invention.

He was most himself in his blindness, an eyeless worm on the move; most himself in his sexuality, and paired with Ava absolutely without inhibition. He was convinced that his sexual history was the essential truth that demanded to be written as fiction.

He was satisfied with his progress so far: enough had been transcribed and printed for him to begin calling it a book. The book contained his world; he inhabited the book. The act of creation became understandable to him: it was brilliant transformation, not making something from nothing, but giving order to his life, turning darkness into light. He knew now that the travel in Trespassing was a delusion. There was no travel on earth like the distances he was covering now, locked and blindfolded in his hidden house.

A satisfying solitude was returned to him, and he delighted in its stimulation. For years he had longed to write the fictional counterpart to Trespassing, a novel as an interior journey that would also be an erotic masterpiece, wandering across areas of human experience that had been regarded as forbidden — like the sort of fenced-off frontiers he had crossed in his travel book: sex as trespass in the realms of touch, taste, and smell; sex as memory, as fantasy, as prophecy. And fantasy, because it was ritualistic, became something like a sacrament that gave him access to the truth of his past.

He had been so hesitant to go to Ecuador; it had taken an effort of will to submit to the drugs; he had needed to be tempted; he knew it was his last bargain. But the datura had made all the difference, had revealed his book to him, and the months of productive seclusion he had spent since arriving back on the island were the happiest he had ever known.