When I Leave… Exploring the Being and Appearance of Blindness

This work explores the conventional ways that blindness and sight are differentiated. It makes use of this differentiation to establish first, how it imagines that such a difference is necessary and, second, how this difference is itself imagined. The difference between blindness and sight is, like all differences, not neutral; it springs from a cultural need to distinguish the variety of ways there are to perceive the world and differentiate the validity and fidelity of these ways. I conduct this exploration from my place of blindness, from what I perceive from this place and from what it tells me about the place of sight and the connection between the two. It opens with a poem, a poem I wrote during a specific time of my blindness. I wrote this poem as a way to preserve my emotion in a moment that, at the time, I was not yet ready to engage. This poem tells of my time as a blind graduate student. It tells, too, of tracks, of my tracks and their eraser. This work, then, understands blindness as a geography, as a place from where the world is not only perceived, but experienced. It treats sight in the same way. As geography, the movement of blindness suggests “tracks.” Even when blindness is not concretely present, its tracks are; within the geography of sight, the tracks of blindness are everywhere. And yet, sight and sighted people are compelled to erase these tracks when they are noticed. Tracks of blindness in the geography of sight are tantamount to a “sighting” of the enemy in a territory wholly committed to destroying its enemies. Understood as the opposite of sight and as a threat to its very existence, blindness becomes something that must be avoided and, if this proves impossible, ignored. This poetic work explores this particular and conventional relation between blindness and sight as it is culturally evoked as a way to differentiate between the two. It explores, too, how such a differentiation is lived.