I used to speculate what people thought of my wife Laura, an artist, being married to me, a husband who can’t see. Did some feel bad that I couldn’t appreciate her work and that she had a husband who couldn’t? How about when I attended an exhibit of her work? These questions recently became explicit when a friend with whom I’d been out of touch for many years saw Laura’s website and wrote: “Her work is beautiful. Isn’t it ironic, though, that you know her so well but can’t see her work.” It’s an awkward but fair question.
Before losing my vision during adolescence, I sketched all the time. I wasn’t skilled, and I certainly wasn’t educated in art. Still, it suggests I was capable of grasping artistic concepts and being open to artistic experience.
Engaged in creative writing, I often think about the differences and yet connectedness among the various arts. Differences? It could be as basic as that for an audience to get a first impression of a painting can take minutes, even seconds, while for a reader to do the same with a novel requires dedicating hours to get from beginning to end. With music, often we don’t appreciate a piece on the first listen, or even the third or seventh, and then suddenly it hits, which unfortunately means we don’t have the time and patience to give our full attention to a work or song we might have grown to love. Then again, musicians capture feelings with immediacy in ways an author rarely, if ever, can. Hear even a single minor chord, and your mind can be taken to some other place.
On the other hand, there are crucial similarities among the arts. They all aim to influence us to think, experience or feel differently, however slight the shift. A painting, a story and a piece of music can affect how you envision a street scene or rural landscape. An author might describe a person ruminating, which a painter can depict in an image. The author can go on to elaborate on the person’s thoughts, while a painter might intimate the nature of the subject’s thought with evocative objects or a glowering sky. In music, linking a line of verse with a melodic passage can forever plant that moment in our brain.
Through our conversations, Laura reveals her sketcher’s techniques. I relied on one such conversation in an unpublished faux-autobiographical story. As its principal characters, Laura and I sit in a park while she paints and I read an audiobook:
She examined her water color from various angles. I heard her scratching out this or that excess.
“What I’m trying to work out,” she said, “is how to get the little bush to look as though it’s in front of the tree. Both are pale green, which is a receding color.”
“Receding color?”
“Remember I was telling you how red is the most prominent color and greens and blues the most recedent. So if you have two light green objects, they both fade into the background. The trick is how to get the bush to stand in front of the tree. I’m thinking of making it darker and bolder, which should bring it forward.”
So much contrivance was required to imitate nature, I thought. Witness all the trouble perfume makers took to mimic the scents of flowers.
Reflecting on dominant and recedent colors led me to think about how a work of fiction gives prominence to the storyline, while secondary details must support that story and not overwhelm it.
This perhaps obvious principle has important ramifications for me. In his July 16, 2001 New York Times article on writing, Elmore Leonard urged authors to “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.” He elaborated:
In Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ what do the ‘American and the girl with him’ look like? ‘She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.’ That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice…
Leonard is saying the crucial detail is the girl’s handling of the hat, along with dialog that isn’t quoted. The rest is left to the reader’s imagination. Done right, in a paradox common to all art, reduction of detail causes the audience to imagine more clearly what the artist intends or to make the story partly their own.
In my novel Caroline, there’s this exchange, edited for concision and relevance, during a writing class discussion:
A young man said, “I was wanting descriptions of the characters. I didn’t hear one. Okay, his roommate’s girlfriend is blonde, but that’s it.”
The woman at the back responded, “That’s what I find so fascinating. I pictured each of these characters—most of them anyway. Like, Amanda is an attractive woman, maybe dark brown hair, like mine, or with a reddish tinge. Peter is full of suppressed energy. I see a lock of hair falling over his forehead, and he has a compact frame.”
“That’s funny,” said a woman sitting diagonally way back from me, “because I see Amanda as tall with short, blonde hair. Peter is tall and slim with dark hair and a Mediterranean look. Until we learned Cheryl was blonde near the end, I saw her as dark and buxom.”
The lawyer raised his voice. “We’re imposing our own biases on the story. Who knows what they really look like.”
The first woman laughed warmly. “It’s a story. There’s no ‘what they really look like’ about it.”
The young man had reconsidered. “She’s right. It’s like when you read a novel and then you see the movie. The actors hardly ever look like I imagined the characters did.”
As one who often writes from the point of view of blind characters, such economy enables me to portray them with no more reference to their disability than necessary. One of my objectives is to lead readers to perceive them as people with human thoughts and feelings, as opposed to afflicted with never-ending tragic suffering.
When an audience fills in the spaces that artists leave open, they aren’t necessarily conscious of doing so. Looking at Laura’s depiction of a tree, for instance, only a viewer absorbed in the skills of artistic creation is likely to notice her application of prominent and recedent techniques. Likewise, in the passage I quote from my unpublished story, I leave it to the reader’s imagination to bring in the park, the comfortable weather (a pleasant summer day has been mentioned earlier), what the two characters look like, even what they’re wearing. If the reader gave such questions any thought, they might say to themselves, well, they wouldn’t be out in the snow or a thunder storm, and it’s doubtful they’re wearing their spiffiest clothes or else something would have been said. Beyond that, though knowing her boyfriend can’t see, they aren’t thinking, how sad. At any rate, I hope they aren’t. I hope they view him as engaged in learning something about art from the woman he loves and in encouraging her to think through her artistic process.
There’s another way of looking at my friend’s question. We are all incapable of fully apprehending another’s accomplishments, feelings and experiences. I’ve long admired the skills that people have that I don’t, such as farmers and surgeons. If one is ignorant about farming, does one fully appreciate what there is to see in a farm? Someone who has had a hip replaced will be glad of the relief from pain, but might well have little idea of what went into the new joint and its placement in the body. Speaking as a lawyer, someone who isn’t trained in the law might well be unimpressed by a well-crafted brief. My inability to see Laura’s work may be more poignant because it highlights a disability I have, but in the end, it’s comparable to my limited understanding of other accomplishments.
The most important response to my friend is that my inability to see Laura’s work has triggered any number of conversations around her individual sketches, watercolors and photographs, about art in general, about the life that art ultimately mirrors. I do wish I could see her work, as she might wish she could show them to me. I’m not one to pretend that loss of vision makes no difference, even as I contend that the differences are manageable. There’s just no point in lamenting what can’t be corrected and so much to celebrate in what we share.
Notes:
I am grateful to my friend and Laura for authorizing me to post this essay.
In “How to Write Fiction from a Blind Character’s Point of View,” originally published by Disabilities Studies Quarterly in 2004 and later revised, I expand on this subject.
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