CONTINUING NED CONDINI'S STORY

II THE SHIP OF FIRE

I guess my second death occurred on December 24, 2009. It was just into midnight and I was sleeping-raving after a tumor operation on the left side of my face. “Not enough,” an evil genie snarled. “You must crave something stronger. You need death by fire if you really want to be purified.” There was something like an explosion, my right eye ached viciously and my vision fizzed off. So long, island of light! The million stars that made up the constellation of my brain dissolved into a globe of flames. All I could see out of my right eye was a spectacular incandescence. Cascades of red embers rolled around me. Clearly, it was the end. The ship of fire had arrived and unloaded, the fire had departed.

Hard to describe what you see when you don’t see. I mean, I kept my left eye closed for the fun of it, hoping the right one would again disclose to me the supposed wonders of the night. I was never much interested in the night. If I ever was, the night to me loomed like an echo to battles and dreams I had witnessed in my youth (or in my old age, it didn’t make any difference): in particular I often thought of German poet Heine’s black, phantom ship; or of French Bardamu’s accursed galleon on his first trip to Africa; or of Jenny the Pirate’s “Black Freighter” in Brecht’s chilling song. Otherwise, I slept.

My mother, when alive, insisted that the poor were born to suffer, like me in my dreadful night. Why? I would ask. Why this dark all of a sudden? “Because you did something against the light that you don’t even remember, and now you have to pay a price.” The destitution in which she had lived for years had not daunted her soul. Her dread, on the contrary, was the outside world, as though cold, fear, and death could come to her only from that direction, never from within. So I finally got it. A sacrifice was needed, and I was the designated victim, with the sacrificial bit too a part of my nocturnal trip to Africa.

I sailed there on nothing less than the Consolidated Corsairs and soon realized that sultry wetness and heat make white men beasts. Céline is right. On the spot I agreed with the crazy Frenchman that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from me and pass me by, and then calmly, all by myself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

Most look like the dead, I sadly reasoned. That was the purpose of losing my right eye’s sight. To see myself as if I were partially dead, half-way dead! As a matter of fact, during those dreadful nights at the hospital, I realized that my person and the objects around me had become unreal and slow moving, losing their importance and even the colors they had formerly worn for me, and taking on a dreamlike, ambivalent softness… I was reading historian Macaulay at the time, when defeat rises before his hero, Baryton, in the pale dawn, and the unfair sea sweeps his last ships away. Face to face with his monstrous misadventure, where all the wantonness of our puerile and tragic nature discloses itself in the mirror of eternity, like Baryton I was seized with vertigo. Only the thinnest thread had attached me to our common lot, and now that thread snapped.

My mate is watching me lose my eyesight and realizing how powerless she is in trying to help someone dear being chucked off. I was like a stranger in the room, someone who had come from a dismal country and you wouldn’t have dared to speak to…

III TOTAL NIGHT

The third night was definitely the most abominable, fearsome and challenging of them all. Picture yourself locked up in a cube that has only a few shafts of light filtering to its core. I’m losing my left eye’s sight. After that, I won’t see any more. Good-bye, rich tapestries. Good-bye, redwood sunsets. Good-bye, visages of Botticellian ladies. From now on I’ll be confined to my computer (after mastering it without my eyes) and to one of those Braille machines for the blind. Some time ago, when I lost my right eye, I started living in a world of shadows and reflections; but I could still exchange understanding glances with my wife, enjoy the secret geometry of the skies, soak in the green wonders around my house. Now day by day I’m losing them, reverting to a world of fragments that’s at the antipodes of my former vision. I like the world to have a meaningful unity. I want to believe that God made it such. Or did God want me to look for Him in this chaos? Did He want me to be shattered like an atom, and go looking for particles of light everywhere until I found the first electron of love? What is love that I have to look for it? Do we need love, or is this dark enough to act as a protective, merciful shield--something I’d wear to war to save my life?
"you’re talking like a student of divinity, darling," my wife would say.

"What would I do without your love, or you without mine? Don’t you understand I’m already losing you?" I would insist. "Look, my left pupil is practically dead."

"I’ll love you so much that it will resurrect."

In the meantime, the lightless days go by. Days when my back hurts, my neck is half paralyzed, my will constantly bombarded by attacks of inaction, fatigue, despondency. I try to find something nice and cozy in this cube of darkness. Every now and then I seem to be able to collect one ray, one line, one dot of light that will help me recover the galactic universe that made up my eyesight. But it’s only a pitiful glimmer. The gigantic, propitious fire that lived in my brain is gone. I look at these silent, black, crude walls, on my knees asking for a rivulet of hope, a coal of friendship, a spark of pity. Oh gods, some compassion! For the few days I was an angel, not a sinner. The walls do not answer. They are God’s mute, unappeasable messengers.

Ah, Hölderlin: the nocturnal landscape, the hallowed, terrified landscape which one feels in departures. No one gave it away more sublimely, gave it back more fully to the universe, without any need to hold on, free of desire, stone upon stone till it stood. And when it collapsed you were not bewildered. We don’t have any right to our possessions. The rose on my desk shouldn’t be there. And the bear etched on the retina of my eye, he too should go forever free. I would lie down, in my encountering him, on my face, and just pray to be spared.

I’m starting to see, now that I am blind, surrounded all around by a black wall, now that I am naked, helpless like a poor worm fated to be hooked. Is this what Jesus meant when he said, When you put down your life in front of you, and let it be something that anybody can take away, only then are you worthy of salvation. They say He sacrificed Himself for the whole world, so that the world could be saved. Do I have that kind of courage? The long night of the soul--that’s what John of the Cross had in mind. You pray until you get out of your puny, miserable self, and become available for others. You accept your sentence to the darkness of blindness, so that others may find light in your loss.

Perhaps that was what I wanted from the beginning. My trip to Alaska, too, was a way of finding the light in the composure of death, the silence of ice, the dignity of my passing. The cross of blindness was sent me as a special grace. Embrace it with all your heart, a voice said. Don’t you remember Mom’s ever forgiving face, Dad slowly burning his right hand over the fire? How beautiful that was. How beautiful it is.



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