On His Blindness

 As readers of the blog know, my dad is recovering right now from a week-long stay at the hospital for septic shock. On top of that, he has a brain tumor in his right temporal lobe that has robbed him of vision on the left side. He also has severe hearing loss that long predated the cancer, but which has certainly not been improved by the tumor or the fact that he is currently down one hearing aid because of an accident in the ICU. 

As he put it to me at one point: "This would all be a lot easier if I could see or hear." 

There are people other than my dad who might find it easier to settle into a somewhat helpless condition. Some people might find it wasn't the worst thing that could happen to them to stay in a hospital room, call the nurse when they needed anything, and watch TV. 

But the fundamental problem for my dad is that he has very few wholly passive activities that he enjoys. He has never derived much satisfaction from what we call "entertainment." There's no TV show ever made that he could contentedly binge for hours at a time. 

Dad's entire sense of meaning and personhood comes from leading groups of people on shared creative projects. And that's one thing you cannot do from a hospital bed—especially if you can no longer hear what people say or see your phone or laptop well enough to read and type. 

The result is that, when dad first came home from the hospital, he spent much of his time just sitting in a chair and staring off into space. When he got tired, he would doze or simply slump into a kind of stupor. We found ourselves at a loss for how to occupy his mind. He does not want to watch TV. He can't hear podcasts or the radio. He can't read. He can't write. 

Eventually, I hit upon a partial solution. I became his occasional amanuensis. Something like my mental image of Milton's daughters. I pulled up a chair next to him, with his iPad in one hand, and read his emails aloud to him. He dictated more or less what he wanted to say in response to the various messages of support and encouragement he was receiving from friends. 

But I didn't know what to do or say when the emails contained bad news: people who weren't available to work on projects; people who had disappointing updates to share. I felt like the possibility of reengaging in these shared creative efforts was the only thing dad was thinking about all day, and the only thing keeping him going. And now, it was impossible to avoid the feeling any longer that all of that was slipping away. 

He still has so much to offer in terms of his ideas and commitment. He wants to pick up his ministry exactly where he left it. But, as his universe daily narrows, as his vision and hearing are gradually lost, it just becomes harder to do so. One can sense the black prison walls closing in around him with each passing hour. 

No one has ever described the panic terror of such a condition better than Kipling in The Light That Failed—his novel about an artist who gradually loses his ability to paint, or—really—to exist in the world independently at all—because of his fading eyesight. Kipling describes the sense of being inclosed in an ever-smaller prison as his protagonist's senses dwindle. 

But what his account really captures is the problem of time—how difficult it suddenly becomes to tolerate the passing seconds and minutes and hours, when they are now nothing but a blank and changeless void. What is one to do with oneself? 

I think of these haunting passages when I see my dad looking sightlessly around the room for hours at a time, with nothing to think about or engage with. What torture it would be to think of the passing hours and feel they cannot go swiftly enough. 

It would be torture for anyone—but most especially for my dad. As I say, he is simply not the sort of person who enjoys being passive. He has never been motivated to seek "fun" or "entertainment." Plopping him in front of Netflix is not an option. Without some "redeeming value," such things seem pointless to him. He would agree with Dante Gabriel Rossetti: woe to thee if once thou yield / Unto the act of doing nought! / How callous seems beyond revoke / The clock with its last listless stroke!

Or with Thomas Carlyle, when he wrote: Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been [...] But our work,—behold that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, [...] 

What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness: all that was but the wages thou hadst; thou hast spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin of it remains with thee, it is all spent, eaten: and now thy work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy work!

To take a person with values like that—a Protestant work ethic, if you want to call it that, though it sounds chauvinist; let us simply say, a work ethic tout court—and trap them in enforced idleness, is a special kind of cruelty. All my dad wants to spend his time doing is emailing and "connecting with people," he says, on his project to build spiritual wholeness communities. All he asks for is to continue his ministry. And that seems like the one thing he now least can do. 

When I consider how my light is spent,

   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

   And that one Talent which is death to hide

   Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker... as Milton wrote, in a sonnet sometimes anthologized with the editorial title: "On His Blindness." 

Milton's solution to this problem is famous. He tells himself: “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. [...] They also serve who only stand and wait.”

What a revolting statement. I'll tell God what he can do with his "mild yoke." And Milton where he can stick his efforts to justify God's ways to Man. 

I know my dad is not interested in passive submission to this or any fate. He is one of the world's kindest and gentlest men; but he is also among its most stubborn. I know he will go on doing as much of his active ministry as he can for as long as he can—even as the light is failing and the walls closing in. 

I prefer the conclusion of James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night—his vision of Melancholia toiling ever dauntlessly on, no matter the obstacles—to Milton's forced and utterly unconvincing attempt to talk himself into passive obedience. Thomson wrote: 

Baffled and beaten back she works on still, 

    Weary and sick of soul she works the more,

  Sustained by her indomitable will:

    The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,

  And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,

  Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre

    That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.