blindness
Suprematist Composition: White on White, Kazimir Malevich. Public Domain.
In the book Blindness by Jose Saramago, a mysterious epidemic takes over: a sudden blindness that, rather than causing the afflicted to see darkness, shrouds their sight completely in milky white. As more and more fall victim to this contagion, the government isolates patients in a former asylum where conditions quickly deteriorate. The worst excesses of humanity are put on full display, but the book is shot through with redemption and grace and whatever we call the spirit that moves you to take a stranger by the hand and lead them through the dark (or blinding light). It was the best book I read in 2021.
Nabokov says the worst thing for a reader to do is to identify with a character in a book: “a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.” I’m unwise: I like the characters I relate to and the sensation of recognition, of being seen and described. I like the way Jia Tolentino writes about contemporary women and the relentless drive to optimize. Sally Rooney’s millennials with their champagne socialism and charmed careers. Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, because who doesn’t love a coming-of-age story about unconsummated desire largely communicated through obnoxiously cerebral emails. Books that are about the indomitable human spirit in the face of world-historical adversity are generally less in my wheelhouse. The last one like this, before Blindness, might have been a socialist realist book called Soul by the Russian writer Andrey Platonov, about the arduous migration of a nomadic people through the desert. I read it in November 2020. That month we waited for a week not knowing if we would have the same terrible president for the next four years. We weren’t supposed to touch anyone or hang out indoors; you could pick your state of being, shivering or lonely. When we found out who won a symphony of horns sounded in downtown Berkeley, people made pilgrimages to Kamala Harris’s childhood home, and we danced in the street.
I read Soul because it was the favorite book of someone I loved. He’d written about it glowingly in a card he sent from Boston. I didn’t read it until we lived in the same city again, fleetingly. When I finished reading Blindness I thought of Platonov’s book and my friend and how much I wanted to write something one day that would touch him like that. I wonder if I am writing too many short stories about people whose problems are not high-stakes enough. The last stories I wrote were about a character who avoids conflict by going on long walks and a character who feels unsure about her relationship to domination and physical aggression during sex. Both characters have food to eat and roofs over their heads. To write a book like either Saramago or Platonov’s it seems you have to write about suffering on a different level. To make a comment on human nature you have to lose the sociological analysis and go back to this elemental proving ground of who we are when we are blind and sick and lost.
I had an emotionally charged conversation with my family on New Year’s Day. It isn’t important what we argued about. Most arguments are probably about the same thing: we want to be loved, we don’t feel that we are, or we’re being loved in the wrong ways, ways we can’t see or accept as love. Indeed during this conversation my mother said it was difficult for her when she compared the love of her own children to what she felt for her parents, growing up. She said she thinks about how passionately she felt love for them as a child, before she reflected more critically as an adult. How they often didn’t have enough to eat, how her father would choose not to eat so that they could have more. Maybe, she said, you can’t love me the same way I loved them because you’ve always had enough.
There is a vision of love that only finds its expression at the extremes. Love as wordless gnawing hunger. Love as what you go without. I don’t think this is the vision we put on Hallmark cards, celebrate during Valentine’s Day or family birthdays. Wasn’t that one of the hardest parts of messaging during the early days of the pandemic — getting people to see that love could be distance, absence. Masked elders in the PSAs on local television said resolutely, Love means staying away. There’s so much about the very language we use that embeds the opposite idea: when you love someone you add something, bring, give, we “show up” for each other, when I was in an upscale coffeeshop in Kirkland I glanced at bags of $16 coffee and cans of quince-flavored tea thinking of people who I loved.
In love — familial, platonic, romantic — the nature of objects changes. Growing up, going to a function with free food meant loading up a paper plate, putting another one on top, or wrapping cookies in a napkin — everything was something I could take home for family to eat. The instinct is still there even now that I no longer live with them. I tell my housemate, Go ahead and eat the samosas I got for free in the fridge. At the Hartford airport, stopping in the Hudson News for some tchotchke that could plausibly be useful or entertaining for a house in Berkeley. Everything around is a potential gift; items twinkle like they have nametags already attached. Would she like that book, would he use that candle, would they listen to that record. This is an easy joyful love. All I have to lose is the bill in my pocket. It’s a crisp twenty, inside a red envelope. Hongbao from Yeye and Popo. This December we stood outside with the smoke from a fire blowing onto us, too cautious to go inside. They asked me repeatedly, Are you hungry? Have you eaten enough?
I don’t remember if anyone says the words I love you in Blindness — they might. Towards the beginning of the story when an optometrist takes sick and is about to be borne away to quarantine, his wife lies and says she, too, has gone blind. She gets into the vehicle with him to share his fate. Two of my friends, a couple, got COVID recently; they’d decided to isolate together, even while she was testing negative. I see tweets from people, mothers mostly, about how to avoid getting your child sick if you have COVID or vice versa. There’s an image that’s stuck with me, of a 7-year-old boy FaceTiming Mom and Dad isolated in their room while he fixes himself cereal for breakfast. Love can be this or that.
My mother didn’t want me to go on the trip I took north to see family, when Yeye and Popo gave me the hongbao. Too dangerous, she thought, with all the uncertainty about the new variant. We couldn’t reliably pronounce its name. Oh-mee-cron, ahm-nee-cron, oh-my-cron. I took a test on the East Coast before I came to California and a test in Berkeley and a rapid test at my aunt and uncle’s house. Still I wondered every day if there was a way I might be sick and not know it, if what I thought was love might be a Trojan horse.
In sickness and in health, they say in wedding vows. It’s January of this new year and we’re all thinking about the virus again all the time. I’m writing this piece in the cold under the awning of a coffeeshop in my parents’ town; I always sit outside now. A couple of women sit down at a neighboring table. Their conversation is about negative tests. One says, I just want you to know, I would never hang out with you if I thought there was any chance I’d been exposed. I can’t help but think there is no certainty, not really. You never know when your luck runs out. I wonder what each woman thinks is love. A chosen absence or a chosen risk. The two of them don’t stay long; soon, they’re putting their masks back on to leave. It’s raining, and against the green trees and red brick buildings, the drops coming down look like diagonal slashes of white.
a place I went today: Chapel of the Chimes, a crematory and columbarium in Oakland, CA designed by Julia Louis Morgan.
urns in drawers, light sharp-cast, angled glass, marble polished to a fine sheen, workers here sweeping the sleeping in their stone beds like file-cabinets, the music of water in a fountain, on every wall some words about God, Thy gentleness hath made me great, by one resting place are oranges, an Asian pear still in its soft white grocery-store netting, a bouquet of flowers for when the ashes grow hungry, or desirous of bright things.