Chapter 1: The Seen in the Thaw

I spoke those words, ‘Let’s see’, to Liv in the hope, if not the trust, of something happening that would cast me with the white pebbles of sight or the black stone of blindness.

It fell out less plainly, or less directly. There is a kind of resolution, but it’s not white, or black, or even grey. It is black overlaid with a new variety of white, you might say. I shall try to explain. I wrote what follows in the late spring of 2009.

This is what actually happened next.

Art the masseur, I should say, broke me down into pieces and made me drink something that tasted of guavas and hot rubber. After any strenuous massage at the hands of those who know the body’s connections with itself, I was given sometimes as much as an hour of seeing, and often a near-night of sleep. These things became, throughout that time, impossible to set a price on.

More than ten years ago in a suburban supermarket I bumped into a friend who paints on silk. She happens to be the second wife of an influential and lucid atheist. She is an actress as well as a painter, used to making something new where there was something else before.

I was bunging stuff into my trolley, being familiar with my own tastes and those of my children, my spirit dimmed yet excited by the anaesthetising greedy glare of the supermarket. She was taking more care, handling her purchases in a fashion more mannerly, like one not wholly familiar with some aspect of the chore, as though she might be undertaking it for someone else.

And so she was. Her shopping trip that day was executed for the woman who had been married to her husband before she was and who was now, in the last stages of mortal sickness, too unwell to shop for her own groceries.

God might have been let slip, seen off, even, from the declared, indeed renowned, intellectual orbit of the household. The graces of private moral consideration were however very likely reinforced rather than diminished by this large overmastering dismissal. Illness was making its demands upon family life and causing new domestic shapes to be made. A net was being set for safety, in a system acknowledged to be without certain consolations.

I was often to think of my friend doing her predecessor’s messages in the months that were to come, and as my husbands’ wives did much for me.

Ten years or so later than that observation in the bright supermarket, in the late June of 2007, I finished dictating my short memoir, What to Look for in Winter. I didn’t know what to make of it, when it was over. It didn’t feel as it had when I finished the others, the books that had come down my arm and not out of my mouth.

I had little sense of its weight. Talk flies away, while words, written, are at least a bit more tethered. The silence left by words, uttered, is for the talker, in this circumstance perforce a monologist, often a self-disliking silence, sweetened only by relief at the falling away of the sound of one’s own voice. The negotiations between thought and page are grosser, at any rate in my own case, when spoken, than those accommodated by the hands moving under silent orders that have not been confided even to the self, when the writer may have planned the journey but the mind may take detours or unpack maps of quite another route towards the posited destination. Is that the place, after all, where you want to end, let alone end up? It’s perfectly possible that the mind has decided to travel by air, or water, or to the stars, and that it decides to travel beyond the planned destination, or to stop short of it.

The unconscious mind is more explicitly present in a room where a writer is working apparently alone (though almost certainly with one or more invisible collaborators) than when he is working with someone else, the typist, in the room, waiting to trap the spoken words.

Or so it has been for me during these years since I began to go blind in the spring of 2006. Let me remind you now, for fear of offending any more conventionally blind person who may by some means be reading these words, that I am ‘functionally blind’, that is my eyes work quite well but my brain has decided that they must be shut and that its self-allotted job is by no means to permit them to open. My own brain is powerfully good at its task of interdiction.

So, having become trapped in a sightless head, I decided to try to talk my way out of it by speaking my little memoir. A talking cure where the typist is the neutral presence and the reader the eventual listener or, perhaps, if he or she cannot read in the conventional way, or has come ‘blind’, to a recording of the work, its eventual hearer. A reader hears things in his head more than he listens to them, since the sound made is often silent though uttered in the reading mind, having been fed through the translating eyes.

In the carrying out of my project, I was as encrypted and self-subverting as I have learned to be from habit and by training, temperament and taste.

Fewer forces, or so it felt to me, were at work upon the spoken than had been upon the written words, when I had written my first books in the conventional way. The spoken words were less refined, more coarsely hatched, the pressures upon them all but social, the misgivings and selections temporary and local, necessarily predicated upon what I wrongly or rightly felt that the typist might endure, or even be entertained by.

The sense of invocation, paradoxically, was lacking, when the words were spoken. A fruitful uncertainty was seen off by the transaction. I was fairly certain that much of what I value and seek in fiction and attempt to transmit in my own writing could not have existed had I tried to speak fiction as I spoke that memoir. I wasn’t sure that this quality was present in the memoir.

Still, my agent sent it out, and I was happy when Jonathan Cape offered for it. I was fifty-two when I finished dictating it.

In the months and now years of compromised sight, what has borne me up now that I cannot read words from the page with any continuity has been the written word, spoken. I have listened to books. This is very far from reading them.

My gaze, like that of Actaeon upon the naked goddess Diana, is refused. Many of my new or fresh thoughts came, in the sighted past, to my brain through my eyes, in reaction to what I saw or to what I read. The thoughts that lay in the new dark within were in danger, without the eye-fed light from outwith my closed brain, of knotting up. My eyes had brought in the light that kept my mind open, or as open as it was. Now that my brain refuses my gaze to me (my brain absolutely will not open my eyes; I do it, when I can, manually. I would rather mention this blinkingly between the curving lids of parentheses), the thoughts can be like hunting dogs in my mind and tear and tear at my jittery gaze, my dear and dragged-low sight, tear at it constantly.

I sleep poorly. Inside my head carnage repeats itself daily; by night it is bloodier, since the vocabulary of image and event available to nightmare seems crudely vulgar and sensational. It is also predictable and banal. I may dream architecture and colonnaded freedoms, but my nightmares are of body parts, humiliation, fear and leakage.

I suppose we know so well what to scare ourselves with, having made the limited and powerful selection without words before we could speak much. Most of us saw before we spoke.

The most intimate consolations have been offered by two writers who did, as it happens, dictate much of their work, Henry James and Marcel Proust. The length of breath, the precision and extent of steer, the understanding of the pictorial and the want of illusion, that acceptance that we are very little but all in all to ourselves and all that we ourselves have, that breakage can be less sterile than some forms of wholeness, are in both cases such that each writer in his own fantastically atomised fashion does reflect the fabric of thought while seeming for the duration of one’s immersion in his art, to hold up or to reveal the richest losses of time.