I am, to paraphrase one of the greatest lines ever written, typing blind.
“I am writing blind,” wrote the Kursk sailor whose submarine had sunk to the bottom of the sea, slowly suffocating all on board.
Motivated by what none seem to know, but confronting that ghastly fate the sailor found pen, paper and the need to write.
I am not blind in any such dramatic way. I am not writing from the bottom of the sea. I am not trapped in a coal mine or waving for help from the top of a doomed building.
It is, I accuse myself, mere bluster to announce myself this day by robbing that Russian sailor of his words — words which startled me then as now.
My blindness is more of a legal designation. A technicality. I am typing without corrective lenses, making this keyboard a blur and the computer screen a streaky blob.
It is an ascetic experiment, perhaps, to start my days with no artificial assistance. Gradually I allow myself the trappings of civilization. My civilization.
Colors are more beautiful without corrective lenses. I have never owned glasses through which colors look as nuanced and sweet as they do without.
It is an experiment in silence, perhaps. Of late I am clearing out my spaces, physical and mental. Silence is not always what I hear but what I see. The physical detritus may look like so much junk, but I find the physical trappings of one’s life truly are its mental furniture and its mental noise. Most of the objects formerly in this room are either gone or stashed in another room, leaving a space of silence for me to look into.
I try to start each day in silence, and in a place of no technology. No radio, computer, television, or blinking lights. The only exception I must make is my piano, which is digital.
This morning I plucked through my current re-fascination, Chabrier’s Idylle, feeling like a caricature for craning my neck to get my eyes an inch or so from the score to read the passages not memorized.
At my first real job in New York I sat at a computer and, having never really used one before (I lied to get the job) I typed blind into a bottomless little window. I made the text too small to read. It was visible only as a squall. Forgetting the words as I typed them I imagined myself creating a time-capsule, my experiences scratch-encoded for future technologies to read.
If typing is not as valuable a skill as before then I wish it at least felt more viscerally satisfying. The thunder and ruckus of an old typewriter is not waiting for release from these cheap plastic computer keyboards, though a line of wildly expensive novelty gifts claim to emulate the feel of the old typewriters.
