Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Praise

  Foreword

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AFTERWORD

  About the Author

  ALSO BY ANDREW POTOK

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR ORDINARY DAYLIGHT

  “Potok...shares his mixed emotions in a way that inspires admiration for the human spirit.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Ordinary Daylight is an extraordinary book....Potok writes well; he is anecdotal, funny, charming, and very direct, and he has written a beautiful book.” —Chicago Tribune

  “[Potok’s] sensitivity and his mixture of intelligence and vulnerability mark his forced transition to the written word with flashes of courage that almost border on grace....This is not an ‘inspirational’ book, but a precise, cool yet intense portrait of one man and, indeed, of the whole human condition.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Both original and powerful...affecting.” — Booklist

  “More absorbing than any novel, the story is also more impressive because it is true. Potok is sensitive and articulate.”—Library Journal

  “The prose...is nimble, at times even elegant. It is alive with carefully observed detail.” —The Washington Post

  “Frequently funny, always individual, and never lachrymose.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “As straightforward, as fast-moving, as charming and as utterly un-self-indulgent as the man himself...one terrific story.”—The Sacramento Bee

  “The story of Potok’s blindness and artistic adaptation...is compelling. But...the best thing about this book is not that Potok’s a brave blind man, but rather that he’s on his way to becoming an exceptionally good writer.” —The Boston Globe

  “While many people have known the agony of slowly losing eyesight, few have recorded the experience as eloquently as Andrew Potok.” — The Braille Forum

  “A fascinating journey into a territory where most of us will never have to go.” —The Toronto Star

  “A remarkable book...Potok is a talented writer.” — New York Post

  “The artist who misses the playfulness of color has a tenderness with words. And when he says, ‘look,’ you see, more than you ever saw before.” — The Vermonter

  FOREWORD

  WHEN ORDINARY DAYLIGHT was first published almost twenty-five years ago, I expected it to be a kind of coming-out party. I hoped the book would liberate me from trying to “pass,” would get me out of the closet of the fully sighted man. Finally, I thought, everyone would realize why I had become so clumsy, falling off curbs, smashing into telephone poles, wandering like a drunk on city sidewalks, my fingers trailing along a wall. I also looked forward to ending my own community’s confusion about why I sometimes seemed quite blind, sometimes not. All would be answered now. In this book, I had looked deep within, come clean, and told the truth.

  On publication day, I walked somewhat self-consciously out of my Vermont house. There had already been press about the book, about the perplexities of the eye condition called retinitis pigmentosa, about this privileged man and talented artist struck down in mid-career. A differently defined me was about to walk the couple of miles to my office and the truth would be visible to all.

  Going down the long hill to my office, my left foot sensitive to the ditch at the side of the dirt road, I passed my neighbors. Ray was replacing several rows of clapboards on his house; Dale was already up on his ladder putting a fresh coat of paint on his. “Hi, Andy,” each of them yelled as if nothing new had happened. In the village, a van was delivering bread and a group of regulars were drinking coffee as they sat on the church wall. A perfectly ordinary day. Nothing had changed.

  Even after my book reading in our local bookstore, attended by several friends and a few people I didn’t know, no one seemed to see me differently. Hundreds of letters came in full of sympathy, suggestions for other cures, for a conversion to this or that religion which would surely restore my vision, warnings that I would be punished for confessed infidelities, for my arrogance, for my obviously bad karma. There were appreciations of my writing and truth-telling as well, and wonderful reviews, but there were no “ahas.” Everything was as before.

  Though this book, my first, did change my life profoundly, and I hope helped others recognize that they, like me, were not alone in facing serious changes to their lives, my real “coming out” was not to happen for another seven years, when my left hand held the leather harness strapped to my first guide dog, a beautiful black shepherd named Dash. From that moment, there was no mistaking it, no more hiding. Unless I was some actor impersonating a blind man, I would from that moment on be seen as blind.

  Still, it is also true that the writing of the book, and writing itself, turned out to be life-changing events. They transformed the use of line and color, the painted image, that had been the center of my creative work, into the use of words; the words giving a shape to my new life of deteriorating eyesight. It not only helped me define that life but made my acceptance of it easier.

  And I loved writing it. Aware of tear-jerking, triumphalist disability memoirs and disease-of-the-month movies, I stayed far away from both. I was not going to write a story of crossing the finish line in spite of my disability. I had not climbed Mount Everest blind or in a wheelchair; I was simply struggling to survive. And when I looked inside as I wrote, I saw that my psyche, which harbored a disappearing self-esteem and a flourishing self-pity, was also home to more useful features: feistiness and resilience. Nevertheless, I recognized that I was as vulnerable as anyone to anything that suggested the possibility of relief, of cure. Together with resilience, there was desperation, the unexpected power of which led me into the experience that is the center of this book.

  This experience, in which I took the leap from my fairly rational world into a kind of insanity, had moved me away from a doctoral program in counseling in which my mentors were judicious and scientific, and away from our focus on social work, counseling, hospital-affiliated internships, ophthalmologists and psychologists. I landed in the world of a paranoid true believer and her fawning, desperate patients. I was ready to take a voyage through hell, to undergo the penance of desert ascetics, of martyrdoms—anything to escape the death of eyesight.

  As I submitted to “the cure,” I hired readers to read me physiological texts on my condition as well as histories of quackery and poems by blind poets. And for the first time in my life, I kept a journal that chronicled the daily farces. I had no book in mind then. But then someone handed me a copy of Richard Brickner’s My Second Twenty Years, a chronicle of an automobile accident that had paralyzed him. While not diminishing the severe limitations his paralysis imposed on him, Brickner’s book was irreverent and sexy. It spoke at length of his often uproarious struggle to achieve orgasm. I read on with delight, and recognized that losing my eyesight felt as threatening to my manhood as paralysis below the waist was to his. Brickner opened me to the possibilities of mixing humor with the seriousness of the subject. Blindness, I saw, did not preclude comedy and farce.

  As I wrote, the larger shapes came into view, not only the life-or-death need to reinvent myself but the recognition of this crucial experience as not only demonic but often inherently funny. I loved the comedy, and a narrative voice emerged that was in fact m
y true voice: a mixture of cranky, funny and whiny, the voice of a fairly opinionated narcissist. Giving written shape to my life was as transformative as the new life itself. Creating that shape turned out to be nearly as satisfying and playful and as full of possibilities as painting had been. It helped in the necessary reinvention of myself.

  The germ of this book was accepted as my dissertation, and though I still occasionally practice counseling with people who are themselves facing blindness issues, I feel very much like the monk, mentioned in these pages, who at the closing of the English monasteries was reputed to have said: “I have no other means for my maintenance but to turn physician. God knows how many men’s lives it will cost.” Physician, thank God, I was not considering becoming, but a life of counseling was equally not my calling.

  Still, the loss of eyesight is enormous. It is the loss of a sense that more than any others feeds and sustains our intelligence, our sensuality. It offers us enormous pleasure as well as control. One of the main challenges in writing about this loss was balancing these momentous changes with the absurdity that is also inherently in it: the confusion of identity, the opera buffa of clumsiness, the stumbling about in the physical world, the slowness of motion, the tediousness of constantly having to think of orientation, the hard choices of concentrating on either this or that but no longer both.

  I can safely say that my friends didn’t have a clue to any of this beyond a kind of knee-jerk sympathy. Nor could they. It is difficult to put oneself in the shoes of someone who is blind, to understand what it is really like to have had to surrender so many important things like reading or driving or taking pleasure from a landscape, an object, a face, a body.

  Besides, what were they to make of the fact that in some conditions I did see things—shockingly, unexpectedly, depending on the light, the contrast, the specific situation— while in other situations I was blind as a bat? No one could figure it out, myself included. What was I? Blind or not blind? Did I need help? Was it a compliment to be told that I didn’t act blind, that I was looking directly into someone’s eyes? Or was “looking blind” ugly, unworthy of me?

  What can one say about a life that includes the slow loss of a major sense? In fact, a lot. It’s a life full of music, reading, writing, a new and wonderful marriage and new friends. If I occasionally allow myself to become nostalgic about the old sighted life or to imagine what it might have been like had blindness not become a part of it, I get into trouble. I still envy most of those who see, travel, lead lives unimpeded by severe limitations. How could I not?

  Still, despite those sometimes fierce moments of nostalgia for all that this central sense had once offered, I have learned to be mostly accepting of my limitations, although new, unimagined complications continue to shake me up. So too does that ineradicable yearning for a cure. Chekhov was supposed to have commented that where there are many choices of remedies for our ills, we can be certain that no cure exists. Nonetheless, many of us try, still seeking out therapies, glib self-help remedies, religions new and old. One of my own justifications for jumping out of the rational world had been the myth, the hope, the yearning that magic might trump science.

  That yearning is as old as humankind, of course. The longing for magic, the absolute, the impossible, is woven into the texture of our imagination, just as powerful as the rationality that equally defines our humanness. It was true for me in the time I wrote about in these pages, and it is true as I write today.

  ONE

  I HAD COME TO THAT POINT in my life when I felt that no matter what I did I had nothing to lose. The day-by-day losses of eyesight, slow and inexorable, took with them my life as a painter, my sources of pleasure and intelligence, my competence as a man. Pleasures I had taken for granted— the recognition of landscape, the coordination of hand and eyes, ordinary daylight—were slipping away. But going blind and passing forty, with dreams of youthful heroism and virtuosity gone forever, seemed, at times, too hard to bear.

  All those downhill things that happen in spite of the marvels of science were now happening to me. My dentist, seeing a relentless decay infiltrate the hidden crevices in my mouth, suggested, as I lay under his bright lights, my mouth full of rubber dams, suction tips, and hard metal, that he pull all my teeth “so you don’t have to worry about receding gums or that goddamn plaque.”

  I nearly choked as I sprang up, still connected by hoses, yelling through the spray and bubbles: “Driscoll, Driscoll, try to understand! I can’t take it anymore, not one more loss!”

  He moved away to his sink and began washing his hands. As the nurse untangled me, he leaned against a wall. “Look, Andy,” he said, “we’ll try to fix the damage. We’ll do the best we can.”

  Some forty years before, my mother had taken the train from Warsaw to Vienna to have her teeth “done,” but she was a rising star in the fashion world then, sure of her powers and much in demand. Nevertheless, the bad teeth came from her. The gene for retinitis pigmentosa was my father’s gift.

  I walked into the waiting room where every chair was occupied by a shadow, one of which was my wife. “Charlotte?” I said tentatively, and the appropriate shadow rose, put away her glasses, then the magazine, and took my arm.

  “Jesus, what happened to you?” she asked. “You look white.”

  “He wants to yank my teeth,” I said.

  “He what?” Charlotte asked as I pulled her into the coat closet.

  The nurse poked her head into the foyer. “Mr. Potok, the doctor wants to know when you can come for a double appointment. . . .”

  “Tell him I can’t,” I said. “I’m going away. I’ll call when I get back.”

  “Where are you going?” Charlotte asked as we walked down the stairs into the parking lot, my hand clutching hers.

  “I don’t know. I can’t take it anymore. London . . .”

  “London? That’s nice,” she said, humoring me.

  “I mean it. London. The bees . . .”

  “The what?” she winced.

  “The goddamn bees!” I yelled. “The Observer article.”

  “The one Mary sent?” Charlotte asked fearfully. I leaned against the door as far from her as I could and looked out at the black-and-white jumble. We drove in silence for a while.

  “You’re nuts,” she said under her breath. Vermont, after the long stasis of winter, was at its worst, the snow sinking slowly into barren, slimy mud.

  “I can’t see a goddamn thing. I hate my work. I’m no good at it. . . .”

  “Oh, Andy,” she said softly. “You’re learning. Everybody says you’re terrific. . . .”

  “I’m not a social worker,” I complained. “My thesis stinks.” Nothing was going right. My reading, a euphemism for listening to tapes, usually put me to sleep because my body wasn’t engaged in book holding, page turning, and eye movement. And I couldn’t stand the boring psychology texts, the soft, sweet counseling books that were eventually to give me a degree, a Doctorate of Listening or something like that. I craved movement, a leap, a risk. I remembered my Yale days when we divided the world into poets and plumbers. This patchwork therapizing felt like plumbing, Band-Aid work, makeshift coping stuff.

  “People have gone out of their way to help you get started,” Charlotte was saying. “And what about your group? What will they do if you leave?”

  “My group? You’ll see, they’ll want to come with me. . . .”

  We got off Route 2 in Plainfield, sloshed by the Methodist church, the village store, and onto our dirt road, heaving and swaying in the potholes and ruts. We pulled in by the kitchen door, and I crossed the road to check the mail. The mailbox overflowed with black cases full of recorded books, cartons of taped material, letters and announcements from organizations “for the blind” and “of the blind,” all covered with white canes, eyes, beacons of lighthouses, the terrible symbols of a dreaded new world. I was invited to join in the battle against blindness and disease, to send blind children to camp, to demand my new rights, to ask my
congressman to support eye research. I was incited into outrage at the treatment of the handicapped. I was sent newsletters picturing happy blind students at the White House, the smiling faces of movie stars lending their names to national campaigns to prevent this, promote that. I was provoked into shock that a blinding disease such as mine existed in spite of the miracles of American medicine.

  This nightmarish mail had started coming when I was pronounced “legally blind.” The very first of it was a mimeographed sheet, hardly legible even to Charlotte, announcing a Christmas party for the blind of Central Vermont at Christ Church. Volunteers were to serve punch and tea. Everyone was to receive a present. I fretted about it for several sleepless nights. I was now blind, blind like them. Blind meant lonely and abandoned, cared for by special people, sanguine, dour, also lonely. Blind meant shuffling, groping, forlorn. It meant cheap paper crookedly stapled, badly mimeographed. How long could I postpone meeting others like me? I wanted to sleep through that Christmas.

  I walked back to the house. My children were home for spring vacation and hard rock music shook the old walls, the hand-blown glass in the windows. A faint smell of marijuana still lingered on their clothes from the night before. Charlotte flew through the kitchen debris and into her studio. I heard the latch click. I put my record on and began pacing. A Beethoven quartet usually cleared the house of kids and cleared my head as well. I tried to conjure images of the woman in London who used bees to cure retinitis pigmentosa. Nothing worked on this damned disease. Why not try bees? A short time before, a noted researcher in the retina field had told me, as we sat in my orchard under an apple tree, that they knew so little still about the retina or the causes or biochemistry of the disease, that “you can expect a cure by accident, maybe,” he said looking around, “from the blossoms of apple trees.” Apple blossoms? Why not bees?

  My living room is large and comfortable. My friends like to sit in it, under my old paintings. The night before, several of us had sat here talking, brainstorming, trying to figure out what I could do with my damaged life. Careers floated about in little hermetic clouds: tactile sculpture, intellectual history, Marxist aesthetics, or the psychology and counseling I was reluctantly pursuing. All of it seemed contrived, false.