A Reader on Reading

Emblematically, blindness has a double and contradictory meaning. It is said to be vision-inspiring, supposed to open the inner eye, but it is also the reverse of sight, and stands for the quality of misguided judgment personified by the goddess Ate, the deity who causes mortals to make wrong decisions and become victims of undiscriminating Nemesis. The double quality of blindness is apparent in Homer’s poems: at King Alcinous’s court, where Odysseus is received incognito, the blind bard Demodocus perceives in his darkness what others cannot see or know. Seer of the truth, blind Demodocus sings of Odysseus himself, whom no one else in the court has recognized, and tells of Odysseus’s quarrel with Achilles and the ploy of the Wooden Horse, causing the secret wanderer to weep at the memory of a past now distant. And yet Odysseus, however much he might admire Demodocus for his gift, knows that darkness is also the lot of the dead whose kingdom no light reaches and who bemoan their imposed blindness. Furthermore, Odysseus knows that blindness can be a punishment, a death-in-life, which he inflicts on the cannibal Cyclops who has imprisoned him and his companions. Blindness is also the punishment inflicted by the Muses on the bard Thamyris for having boasted that he could surpass them in song.

This Greek ambiguity survived in Judeo-Christian times. According to the Old Testament, blindness disqualified the descendants of Aaron from performing sacrifices to God; it was also a punishment sent to the men of Sodom for their lack of kindness towards strangers. But at the same time, the blind were protected by God’s covenant: it is forbidden in Leviticus to place stumbling blocks in their way, and, according to Deuteronomy, anyone who misleads a blind person is eternally cursed. Blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46–52) recognizes Jesus as the Son of David and asks to “receive” (not “have restored” as some translations have it) his sight; his blindness from birth has allowed him to see the truth, and he now wishes for his eyes to be truly opened. Milton (Paradise Lost, 3.35–42) laments that for him, as for “Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,” “Seasons return, but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,” and yet he rejoices in the fact that his blind eyes “feed on thoughts, that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird / Sings darkling, and in the shadiest Covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal Note.”

As the millennial tradition has it, Homer is both a poor blind man and an enlightened seer; this double quality provides the justification for our multiple readings of his poems. Our invention of a blind Homer excuses a ritual understanding of the Iliad and the Odyssey as metaphors of life, life as battle and life as voyage; at the same time, these readings imply his existence as primordial author, the mythical Father of Poetry, and thereby guarantee the poems’ prestige. Whether we conceive of Homer as the creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey or we conceive the two as giving rise to their colossal creator—that is to say, whether we believe, as Nietzsche suggested, that a person had been made out of a Begriff (a concept) or a Begriff out of a person — this circular process defines our relationship to the poetic act itself, an act which exists between an endless sequence of interpretations, each owing its vocabulary and perspective to a particular vision of the world, and also our relationship to an all-encompassing creative genius from the farthest regions of time — someone whom it is impossible to antecede, a man indifferent to all deluding worldly sights, capable, because of his blindness, of seeing beyond them into the truth.

The concept of blindness builds upon itself. To be blind is not to see the outer reality; implicit in this observation is the suspicion that the inner reality is perceived more clearly if not encumbered by any other. If the world of color and form is no longer grasped (that is to say, limited, as Blake says, by our senses), then the poet is free to apprehend the universe in its fullness, the past through his story’s past and the future through the future of his characters. He can become both our seer and our bookkeeper in the fullest sense. When Hector says to Andromache in the Iliad:

There will be a day when holy Troy will perish.

And Priam, and the people of Priam of the fine ash-spear

the reader knows of what fate he is speaking and that it isn’t only Priam’s own that lies open to the poet.