I see men as trees walking, part 1: The tree with the lights in it.

am not scared of much in the way of ill­ness and death (I tell myself) but I am scared of demen­tia and blind­ness. These are an intel­lec­tu­al’s fears: being unable to think and unable to read. There’s braille, yes, but that’s dif­fer­ent from being able to see words and let­ters; it’s dif­fer­ent, that is, to some­one for whom read­ing has always been a form of see­ing rather than touch­ing. I sup­pose that’s also an intel­lec­tu­al’s distinction—possibly a cur­mud­geon’s too. Main­ly the fear has to do with adjust­ing to a world that is less. “Some­thing in the sight / Adjusts itself to mid­night,” Emi­ly Dick­in­son writes. But there is res­ig­na­tion and sad­ness, not con­so­la­tion, in that. Mil­ton, per­haps, has a health­i­er phi­los­o­phy of blind­ness.

Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,

I fond­ly ask; But patience to pre­vent

That mur­mur, soon replies, God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best

Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best.

This is health­i­er large­ly because it has the virtue of unde­lud­ed hon­esty. When Mil­ton is tempt­ed to com­plain that God can hard­ly ask him to work unaid­ed by his sight, his “patience” reminds him that God has no need of John Mil­ton or his work, and that “best” ser­vice lies in accept­ing the “milde yoak” God has giv­en us. It is a stark les­son, and I won­der great­ly whether I’d have the same patience for it as John Mil­ton. Even though my eyes and my mind and all I have belong to God, I con­fess I am attached. Nei­ther Mil­ton nor Dick­in­son explains why God, as it seems, choos­es to play games with peo­ple’s sight. He gives it to some; with­holds it from oth­ers; removes it from some who’ve had it; grants it to oth­ers for­mer­ly blind. Prob­a­bly we should reflect that our capac­i­ties belong to God, not to our­selves. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But it seems a rather arbi­trary method of mak­ing the point. Why this per­son and not that? Because none can answer such a ques­tion, I am con­tent to pose it and then leave it alone. In its place, I would con­sid­er the expe­ri­ences, not of those who have lost their sight, but those who have had it restored.

Agnosia & fear.

Annie Dil­lard has writ­ten what I take to be the best med­i­ta­tion on blind­ness and sight in the sec­ond chap­ter of her Pulitzer Prize-win­ning clas­sic Pil­grim at Tin­ker Creek. The chap­ter is titled “See­ing.” In it she tells the sto­ries of sev­er­al men and women, blind­ed by cataracts since birth, who were among the first to receive their sight after physi­cians learned how to per­form surgery on such peo­ple. If their expe­ri­ences are any indi­ca­tion, receiv­ing one’s sight after a life­time of blind­ness may be more curse than bless­ing. The dif­fi­cul­ty involves spa­tial per­cep­tion, depth per­cep­tion, and the abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy and give mean­ing to what the world presents to the eyes. Dil­lard explains:

Before the oper­a­tion a doc­tor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it cor­rect­ly. After the oper­a­tion a doc­tor would show the same objects to the patient with­out let­ting him touch them; now he had no clue what­so­ev­er what he was see­ing. One patient called lemon­ade ‘square’ because it pricked on his tongue as a square shape pricked on the touch of his hands. (27–28)

Mau­rice von Senden, whose 1932 book Space and Sight is Dil­lard’s source, describes anoth­er case.

Those who are blind from birth … have no real con­cep­tion of height or dis­tance. A house that is a mile away is thought of as near­by, but requir­ing the tak­ing of a lot of steps. … The ele­va­tor that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of ver­ti­cal dis­tance than the train does of hor­i­zon­tal. (Dil­lard qtg. von Senden 28)

In one case a patient sees a paint­ing after her oper­a­tion; she asks why there are “those dark marks all over them.” Her moth­er tells her they are shad­ows; she says if it weren’t for a paint­ing’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of shad­ows, every­thing would look flat. “Well, that’s how they do look,” she says. “Every­thing looks flat with dull patch­es.” Dil­lard describes this as “pure sen­sa­tion unen­cum­bered by mean­ing.” It is “a daz­zle of col­or patch­es.” The patients, she says, “are pleased by the sen­sa­tion of col­or, and quick­ly learn to name the col­ors, but the rest of see­ing is tor­ment­ing­ly dif­fi­cult” (28–29).

It all sounds very dis­tress­ing and disorienting—to sud­den­ly be able to see but not know what any­thing is; or to have the world look all askew. We call it agnosia—the inabil­i­ty to make sense of what one is able to see; and it is com­mon among those who have been blind from birth, or who went blind at an ear­ly age but have had their sight restored. What­ev­er else you might call the expe­ri­ence, it does­n’t sound like a bless­ing. Not real­ly. For at some point in the expe­ri­ence of the unblind—too ear­ly for any­one to remember—we learn to inter­pret what the eyes present to us. We learn to iden­ti­fy objects. We learn, for exam­ple, to dif­fer­en­ti­ate objects from the shad­ows they cast and to see in three dimen­sions; to inter­pret the size of an object, the shape of an object, the dis­tance of an object. We learn the dif­fer­ence between ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal space. But the blind have nev­er had occa­sion to learn such things; their oth­er senses—taste, touch, smell—are their only means of encounter with the world. Thus for those who regain their sight, there is no inter­pre­tive fil­ter. They can see; they can­not per­ceive.

We also know the phonemo­nenon as Molyneux’s Prob­lem, after the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher William Molyneux, who posed the ques­tion to John Locke in the form of a thought exper­i­ment. It was because of his hypoth­e­sis that the physi­cians per­formed the exper­i­ment with the cube and the sphere. Molyneux explains:

Sup­pose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to dis­tin­guish between a cube and a sphere of the same met­al, and nigh­ly of the same big­ness, so as to tell, when he felt one and oth­er, which is the cube, which is the sphere. Sup­pose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table, and the blind man made to see: query, Whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now dis­tin­guish which is the globe, which the cube? To which the acute and judi­cious pro­pos­er answers: Not. For though he has obtained the expe­ri­ence of how a globe, and how a cube, affects his touch; yet he has not obtained the expe­ri­ence, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so.

We know today that Molyneux was right. Sight and per­cep­tion are not the same thing; God gives us sight, but per­cep­tion we must learn. Vision for the new­ly-sight­ed is “pure sen­sa­tion unen­cum­bered by mean­ing”; mean­ing we must achieve. And that can be, in Dil­lard’s words, “tor­ment­ing­ly dif­fi­cult” and “over­whelm­ing.” As a result, many of the patients in von Senden’s study refused to use their sight; shut their eyes; and relapsed into their for­mer state. “No, real­ly,” one cried, “I can’t stand it any­more; I want to be sent back to the asy­lum again. If things aren’t altered, I’ll tear my eyes out.” Oth­ers, who learned to adjust, nev­er­the­less lost the self-peace they once had and became quick­ly ashamed of what sort of impres­sion they were mak­ing on oth­ers. One began to suf­fer obses­sive-com­pul­sive dis­or­der about his phys­i­cal appear­ance (30).

Color patches & wonder.

These are indeed unhap­py sto­ries that should make any­one feel rather pity than rejoic­ing. Take a per­son who has already learned to inter­pret the world through the sens­es he does have; restore to him his sight, under the guise of a great bless­ing and joy; and thus sub­ject him to the dis­tress­ing real­i­ty of agnosia, so that he now under­stands noth­ing, and is dis­ori­ent­ed by what the world presents to him, and longs to return to his blind­ness. Well, what was God up to when he healed all those blind peo­ple? But in a para­graph that is worth quot­ing in full, Dil­lard shows us the oth­er side of the expe­ri­ence. “Many new­ly-sight­ed peo­ple,” she writes,

speak well of the world and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrec­og­nized, is “some­thing bright and then holes.” Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy cries out, “It is dark, blue, and shiny. … It isn’t smooth, it has bumps and hol­lows.” A lit­tle girl vis­its a gar­den. “She is great­ly aston­ished, and can scarce­ly be per­suaded to answer, stands speech­less in front of the tree, which she only names on tak­ing hold of it, and then as “the tree with the lights in it.”

So agnosia can cause fear and ter­ror. But it can also be a source of won­der, of see­ing things in a fresh and unex­pect­ed way in much the same way an artist sees. It could be that the dif­fer­ence lies in how the indi­vid­ual is con­sti­tut­ed. Do we need def­i­n­i­tions and cer­tain­ties or do we crave a more vision­ary expe­ri­ence? Are we New­ton or Van Gogh? Dil­lard her­self envies the expe­ri­ence of “pure sen­sa­tion unen­cum­bered by mean­ing” and “a daz­zle of col­or-patch­es.” She notes that, after read­ing von Senden, she “saw col­or-patch­es for weeks” (31); and she describes at length her effort to find “the tree with the lights in it” as seen by the lit­tle girl in the gar­den.

But she is dis­tressed to find that she can­not “unpeach the peach­es.” The meaning—the very identity—she assigns things inter­feres with her abil­i­ty to see them “pure­ly.” She longs for “the world unrav­eled from rea­son,” “Eden before Adam gave names” (32). Her almost inescapable reflex, how­ev­er, is to see and then imme­di­ate­ly “main­tain … a run­ning descrip­tion,” even though all she wants to do is “gag the com­men­ta­tor, to hush the noise of use­less inte­ri­or bab­ble” (33, 34).

The effort is real­ly a dis­ci­pline,” she says,

requir­ing a life­time of ded­i­cat­ed strug­gle; it marks the lit­er­a­ture of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, dis­calced and shod. The world’s spir­i­tu­al genius­es seem to dis­cov­er uni­ver­sal­ly that the mind’s mud­dy riv­er, this cease­less flow of triv­ia and trash, can­not be dammed, and that try­ing to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to mad­ness. … The act of see­ing, then, is the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it for­ev­er, I would stag­ger bare­foot across a hun­dred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The lit­er­a­ture of illu­mi­na­tion reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most prac­ticed and adept, a gift and a total sur­prise. (34–35)

Dil­lard does finally—in a thought­less, unex­pect­ed moment—see the tree with the lights in it, “each cell buzzing with flame.” She says it was “less like see­ing than like being for the first time seen.” It was as though she was a bell that had, for the first time, “been lift­ed and struck.” “I have since,” she con­cludes, “only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, most­ly goes, but I live for it” (36).

To stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts.

The old ques­tion: Which is bet­ter, rea­son or rev­e­la­tion? Or is this anoth­er non­sense question—a false dichoto­my? To under­stand a vision at all, you some­how need to be able to name it, unless you’re con­tent to be a bab­bling mon­ster. If it seems mean to retreat from ecsta­sy for the sake of rea­son, isn’t it rather intol­er­a­ble to con­sid­er a state of ecsta­sy that does not abate? How long can we sus­tain the vision with­out going mad? G.K. Chester­ton insists that it is rea­son, not vision, that dri­ves one mad. Chess play­ers go mad, he says in Ortho­doxy, but not poets (10–11). That’s not entire­ly true, and even Chester­ton had to come down from the vision for the sake of analy­sis. So did Annie Dil­lard.

But I dis­cov­er, in Dil­lard’s sto­ries of the blind who gain their sight—both those whose expe­ri­ence of it is fear and those whose is ecstasy—a les­son about the expe­ri­ence of artists and vision­ar­ies, and what it means to say you see. Those who were blind knew they were miss­ing some­thing tru­ly impor­tant to the expe­ri­ence of being ful­ly alive; and to them near­ly all depend­ed on it. And so they took all the risks they did for the sake of see­ing, whether their expe­ri­ence of sight, in the end, destroyed their peace or gave them incred­i­ble joy. They knew it was worth the risk. Dil­lard has the sen­si­bil­i­ty of an artist who would “stag­ger bare­foot across a hun­dred deserts” for the sake of hav­ing the vision and nev­er los­ing it.

How many of us who say we see instead walk through life and miss every­thing? How many come to the Eucharist—and I’ve seen this—and walk straight­way out of Mass with Christ in their mouth and still chew­ing? Do they see the God who died for them? I’m com­par­ing the expe­ri­ence of the blind­ed who see to the expe­ri­ence of artists and vision­ar­ies; and the rea­son we need them—both of them—is, in Dil­lard’s words, “to teach us how dull is our vision.” Artists, whether painter or poet, writer or sculp­tor or musi­cian, show us the cre­at­ed world in unusu­al and star­tling ways. Through them we learn to see, though we’ve always had eyes. They shows us what we’ve missed. They wake us up. Who can read a descrip­tion of grapes or trees, like that of the new­ly-sight­ed quot­ed by Dil­lard, and ever look at grapes or trees the same way again? And yet we have seen our whole lives and they’ve had their eyes for five min­utes. Who is real­ly blind? The heav­ens declare the glo­ry of God, but I know I’ve shut my eyes to the heav­ens.

The vision does come at tremen­dous cost. Wordsworth com­plained in his Inti­ma­tions ode that the “vision­ary gleam” had passed away. He remained sane—for a remark­ably long life too—but his lat­er poet­ry is a noto­ri­ous dis­ap­point­ment. Van Gogh gave his san­i­ty for the sake of retain­ing the vision. And who can look at a Van Gogh paint­ing and see trees or fields the same way ever again? Can one see God and live? Van Gogh killed him­self.

The god who spits.

Blind men, artists, and vision­ar­ies: For them, the abil­i­ty to see mat­ters a great deal. God, who is inscrutible, does not coop­er­ate or deal with them in a man­ner that makes much sense. At least, it does not make much sense to our fee­ble rea­son, which under­stands less than we should like. In one of the swiftest and breezi­est heal­ings in all of scrip­ture (but we’re talk­ing about St. Mark, who regards all detail as super­flu­ous) Christ restores sight to a blind man in the course of four clipped vers­es.

And he cometh to Beth­sai­da; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of town; and when he had spit on his eyes, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walk­ing. After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clear­ly. (Mark 8:22–25)

As sim­ple as that, I guess. St. Mark’s account is so brief we are apt to gloss it over and miss too much. But here we have Jesus behav­ing in a near-mani­a­cal and quite unac­count­able fash­ion. Being God, Christ could have healed the blind man with a wave of his hand. Instead, he makes a sacra­ment out of his sali­va and spits in the man’s eyes. That strikes me as extreme. The poor man is look­ing for his sight back, and God acts like an anti-war pro­tes­tor encoun­ter­ing a Viet­nam vet. We want God to make sense and treat us with sym­pa­thy; and instead we get spit on.

When faced with such a pas­sage, John Calvin has the stan­dard response. Why did Christ spit in the blind man’s eyes? “Most prob­a­bly,” he says, “for the pur­pose of prov­ing … he had full lib­er­ty as to his method of pro­ceed­ing, and was not resist­ed to a fixed rule.” So Jesus spits to prove a point about God’s sov­er­eign­ty. Such exe­ge­sis makes it cer­tain I shall not turn Calvin­ist any time soon.

Beyond that, how­ev­er, I find in my review of the exeget­i­cal lit­er­a­ture on this pas­sage a curious—but almost universal—notion, which is that some­how Christ needs to heal the blind man twice, or in stages. Just to spit is not enough. This idea comes from the blind man’s words, “I see men as trees walk­ing,” which seems to sug­gest a blur­ri­ness of vision. So the exegetes stum­ble all over themselves—blindly, as it were—to explain. The twelfth-cen­tu­ry Ortho­dox arch­bish­op Theo­phy­lact says that the blind man only had par­tial faith, so at first Christ heals him only par­tial­ly. (This though Mark tells us noth­ing about the blind man’s faith.) For Favell Lee Mor­timer, God is try­ing to illus­trate a larg­er truth about how our spir­i­tu­al blind­ness is only grad­u­al­ly cast off. Bish­op George With­am, quot­ed in Hay­dock­’s Bible Com­men­tary of 1859, finds in the blind man’s words a les­son about “how dif­fi­cult is a sin­ner’s conversion”—though the state of the blind man’s sin­ful­ness is not described by Mark either. (Good luck with try­ing to find such details in Mark.) In the 2011 edi­tion of the New Amer­i­can Bible, a foot­note says: “Some com­men­ta­tors regard the [grad­ual] cure as an intend­ed sym­bol of the grad­ual enlight­en­ment of the dis­ci­ples regard­ing Jesus’s mes­si­ahship.” Protes­tant com­men­ta­tor John Gill sim­i­lar­ly draws the les­son that the Gospel truth is revealed to us grad­u­al­ly and in stages.

All of these gener­ic points are true enough, as far as they go. (Though Calv­in’s god seems a pret­ty inse­cure deity who even needs to spit to prove his sov­er­eign­ty.) The prob­lem is, I don’t think we need to draw grand spir­i­tu­al lessons from the blind man’s words. A review of the med­ical lit­er­a­ture would seem to sug­gest that the blind man has agnosia. He is ful­ly capa­ble of seeing—Christ gave him his sight—but he can­not iden­ti­fy what things are. So he sees men but they appear to be “as trees.” What Christ does in verse 25, in lay­ing his hands upon him anoth­er time, is not to heal him again, or more per­fect­ly, but to allow him to bypass the nor­mal adjust­ment peri­od. Far from being a les­son in imper­fect faith, Christ gives the blind man a spe­cial grace.

Which becomes the real ques­tion: Is he? If we believe the hap­pi­er sto­ries in von Senden—if Annie Dil­lard’s long­ing for the tree with the lights in it, her hunger to always return to the vision, is valu­able as an expe­ri­ence in its own right—then why could­n’t Christ have let the blind man expe­ri­ence a lit­tle longer the joy of see­ing men as trees walk­ing? Or did Christ, being of per­fect knowl­edge, know that he would have been destroyed by it, like the oth­ers whom Dil­lard and von Senden describe? Mark does not say.

I know this much: I have seen the tree with the lights in it. I have seen men as trees walk­ing. (That’s a lat­er post.) And I would, like Dil­lard, stag­ger bare­foot across a hun­dred deserts to be able to have the vision and keep it for­ev­er. So I’m inclined to say: Could­n’t Christ have let the blind man enjoy it for a while longer? Just a while? I should rejoice in the heal­ing pow­er of Christ, but I get to the end of the sto­ry and am a bit dis­ap­point­ed.

But if I am to draw any con­clu­sion, I can­not go too far beyond the obser­va­tion that seeing—like the word of God itself—is sharp­er than any two-edged sword; and it can lead to both despair and ecsta­sy; and ulti­mate­ly God holds our see­ing (like every­thing else) in the palm of his hand. That may be why I am so afraid to lose it. I don’t real­ly object to Calv­in’s insis­tence on the sov­er­eign­ty of God to do as he pleas­es, to take our sight from us or give it back to us as he thinks best. Even if it requires spit. What I do object to is the notion that every­thing God does is specif­i­cal­ly for the pur­pose of illus­trat­ing his sov­er­eign­ty, and that mankind is noth­ing more than a pup­pet show to that end. God makes us for anoth­er pur­pose; God does with us what he will, for the sake of that oth­er pur­pose. His sov­er­eign­ty is the means but not the end.

I read the Gospels and I see: Christ heals the blind a lot. Human expe­ri­ence, and our capac­i­ty to know and to under­stand (and to reveal to oth­ers), depends upon our eyes. Seeing—or the lack of it—is very impor­tant not only in the full­ness of our lives but in our capac­i­ty to know God and the world he has giv­en us. But through the inter­play of blind­ness and sight, the Almighty has his own pur­pos­es. Ours it not to rea­son why but some­times just to rea­son.

And some days I can be unrea­son­ably attached to my rea­son.

And oth­er days I want to see men as trees, walk­ing.