It is very difficult to represent for others the subjective experience of vision. I know that I am only in the early stages of RP, and others out there may well be able to see things (and explain things) differently. But it irritates me when tunnel vision is represented as a pinhole camera: blackness surrounding a bright circle of light, in which the faces of your family are constricted. Like being in a hide, bird-watching: a bright restricted slot of sight, surrounded by darkness. As far as I can tell, things don’t go black when you can’t see them. I don’t have large black patches on the right side of my eye. It’s much more difficult than that to describe not seeing something.
So let’s have a go. You know how vision works: that we only look in detail at a small part of the world and our brains make the rest of it up. Well, my brain just has to make more up. If you wear glasses, you may have experienced the gradual degradation of vision caused by dust and other detritus gathering on the lenses. It’s rather like that. Or that you can’t actually see very much outside the area of the lenses. Or when you are tired, you struggle to focus and things go in and out of focus. That too.
In many ways, this is more dangerous than a helpful black space telling you what you can’t see. I have to remember that I have a huge blind spot on my right and be extra careful when moving towards the right (especially turning right on the bike) to turn my head far enough.
It is impossible to fully represent absence, especially using a visual representation. I suppose I might go for blurred and pixillated rather than blackness as a less misleading approximation. Is absence, paradoxically, conveyed better by words than images?
I suppose not seeing things is a bit like being dead: you can’t remember what it was like before you were born, and it doesn’t bother you (often you can’t remember a lot of what it was like after you were born too – at least I can’t). In the same way, you can’t see what’s behind your head, and that doesn’t bother you either. But the thought of suddenly becoming unable to see things that you can now see is a great deal more problematic, as is the thought of not being around to experience the lives of your children (and grandchildren?).
So in Epicurean fashion, I shouldn’t be afraid of blindness, but instead make the most of what I can see and just get on with things. That’s told me. Off to mark some more essays.
