In the aftermath of my cataract surgery, my friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing” (1974). In it Dillard recounts several case histories from Marius von Senden’s Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation (1960), a study of people who were able to see for the first time after the removal of congenital cataracts.
Von Senden found that for many newly sighted people, the world is difficult, even oppressive. But others, Dillard says, “speak well of the world, and teach us how dull our own vision is.” She writes about one such person:
Another patient, a twenty-two-year-old girl, was dazzled by the world's brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but “the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’”Von Senden’s book was published in 1932 as Ranm und Gestaltauffassung bei Operierten Blindgeborenen and nearly lost. An article in Psychology Today tells the story of its survival. The English translation, by Peter Heath, was published in 1960 and is available at archive.org.
Thanks, Stefan.
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comments: 4
Glad you enjoyed it, Michael. I'm still searching for the "tree with the lights in it."
I wondered about that too. Maybe just a tree in flower?
From Dillard's final paragraph I suspect there is no verbal explanation, for such would be muddy words.
At a more mundane level, I think of the wonderful work of the surrealist painters, the same ones who saw shadows as being not pure black, as on the oxygen less moon, but as having shades and gradations. I recall them seeing a tree as not just a foreground blackness, but as also a figure along with light between the leaves, the light being part of the tree.
I once spent time at the Trafalgar Square gallery looking at the huge painting of Perseus while a gang is attacking the wedding, and after an hour I perceived a proscenium arch, which the artist next to me, who was sketching a detail, hadn't noticed.
Sea, I think you’d like reading the New Yorker article in the post before this one, Third Birds.
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