Last year today, I was gardening in my yard. It was a Sunday, unseasonably warm, and I felt the need to move my body and breathe fresh air, catharsis between class days and work days. I was in my final semester at university, studying sculpture. As afternoon turned dusk, I got clumsy and sped up, trying to race the dying light. I was trimming a hedge, and found a grape vine where it didn’t belong. I hacked it at its root and pulled, and when it let go of the hedge with all of its little arms, it came whipping at my face (please wear eye protection, kids).
With perfect aim, it hit me square in the left eye, and that was that. I had torn my cornea, and (warning) I could feel under the lid that the surface of my eye was far from smooth. From this point, the healing process required multiple visits to the doctor, and, because my left eye was incredibly upset and our eyes work in tandem, I became blind for days. Two and a half years into a program studying visual art, I lost my vision. The time I spent blind I initially regarded as a hell: without natural light or the ease of glancing at a clock, time passes at the steady tick of our internal metronome; without one sense, all other senses feel heightened, and while injured those senses end up feeling disturbed and confused; I lost my edge, that barrier we fabricate that keeps us separate from the space around us.
In that state, something else happened. Without the distraction of sight, I felt the power of these other senses. Through trial, I realized that slowing down does not have to mean death. I had lived in a state of perpetual anxiety, rushing from one thing to another, always buzzing, but this experience grounded me. It kicked me to the curb. As someone who prided himself on self-sufficiency, there is nothing more humbling than being without sight.
As I let myself relax into the state, I started listening again. Before I studied sculpture, I played and composed music – this degree was to be an exploration of meeting points. Somewhere down the road, I had stopped listening. This knocked me back. A found a desire to play my piano, something I hadn’t done in quite some time. I remember feeling my way across the room and finding the keys. I had never played without sight, but it didn’t matter. It was the making of sound that was important. I bathed in it.
Once I healed, I could still only partly see for a few months. But I could HEAR. I started listening, really listening, to music again (when had I stopped…?), and I started playing. My playing was different, certainly related to being in a different headspace post-degree, but more playful and sound-based than I’d ever been, something I attribute to my time without sight, unimpeded.
This is not my advocating for blindness, or really any kind of asceticism. More, I hope that my mistakes can help remind that we can be impeded or empowered by the stories we tell ourselves. It took me months of feeling truly scarred by this incident to realize that something amazing had come from it, and that I could find strength in the myth I wove. I think about that time daily. I keep it in my thoughts not as a scar but a badge. I credit that week to who I am now as an artist.
Submitted February 19, 2018 at 10:17PM by jacobwolos http://ift.tt/2CbsKRY
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