by Andrew Potok
About ten years ago, Charlotte and I were driving home from a concert of Mozart quintets at Dartmouth, and as I looked lazily toward the car ahead of us, the bright point of its red taillight suddenly and entirely disappeared from my vision. I jerked myself up and peered directly at it, blinking and straining, but no matter what I did, it didn’t register. It came back only as I looked away. From that moment, my central vision, the area of color perception and the fine acuity needed for detail work, such as reading, declined steadily. This was the beginning of the end. Retinitis pigmentosa was taking real useful vision, and I knew that in time it would take all.
At home, I lit a cigarette, and the flame clouded then splintered into fragments. I didn’t believe my senses, and the next morning I called Dr. Lubkin to ask if my pupils could possibly have locked into a dilated position. She said no. I began to lose detail in my painting, unaware now of the texture of brushstrokes. Lines began to separate into segments, like dying, curling worms. When color—other than the brightest primaries—lost its individual character, I had lost the vocabulary of paint.
In a panic, I went to New York to see Dr. Lubkin again. I liked her enormously and trusted her implicitly. She wasn’t burdened with the massive ego carried about by most of the ophthalmologists I had known. Retinitis pigmentosa was to her a sad human problem like so many others, not a threat to her profession. I sat across the desk from her as I had done twice a year since my mid-twenties.
As I played with a museum copy of an eye taken from a life-size Egyptian sculpture, she asked for a precise description of the new visual changes. I had special feelings about this beautiful stone eye because I wished eyes were all as simple as it was—a circle of black onyx set into alabaster; no blood vessels or nerve fibers, no flimsy little retinas, none of the millions of tiny parts, any of which could and did go wrong.
Dr. Lubkin looked into my eyes for a very long time with her ophthalmoscope and finally said: “Damn it! Damn it all! You’re right of course. There’s now a central involvement in both eyes, the left slightly better than the right.” She had turned the ceiling lights back on, but I couldn’t see anything through my dilated pupils, the backs of my eyes pulsating with haloed black afterimages. “Unfortunately, the cataracts are much too small to matter.” Tears formed in my eyes. I tried to contain my grief and anger. I was grateful that she was with me. “All I can say is use your eyes as much as you need to. Don’t spare them. Keep painting until you absolutely have to stop.”
On this visit, I had entered a new domain, that of “legal blindness,” an administrative definition meaning that even with corrective lenses, central acuity is worse than 20/200 in the better eye. “Or,” Dr. Lubkin said, “a visual field of less than twenty degrees. And you, my dear, qualify in both categories,” she added sadly. “I’ll write you a note for the IRS. You may as well start getting all you can. This isn’t much, just another deduction on your taxes.”
Not long after this visit, on the advice of a friend, I left fifteen slides of my paintings at the Bertha Shaefer Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street.
After years of large abstractions, I had settled into the cozy luxuriousness of nudes and interiors. Considering my background and temperament, my talents and limitations, I had a sense of belonging in this territory, a sense of rootedness akin to the roots of my house on a hill, my children’s one-room schoolhouse, drapes, pillows, and the abundance of flesh.
I had come to this work after several varied and restive apprenticeships. I had learned about color from Albers at Yale. In Paris, I had studied with the neo-cubist Lhote and the neo-impressionist Brianchon. I had tried to paint like Soutine, Rouault, Braque, Matisse. I had fallen in love with deStael, then de Kooning. Then two years on a Greek island subdued my fickleness. It tempered my abstractions and laid the groundwork for the cornucopia of my new domesticity.
But after my legal blindness had been officially established in Dr. Lubkin’s office, my work changed again, this time more dramatically than before. In spite of the valiant efforts of a well-known lens maker who followed me around my studio to determine my special needs, I stopped my visually demanding interiors to launch into grosser forms: large wooden assemblages painted with pots of commercial pigments.
Then I heard from Bertha Shaefer. She liked what she saw of the nudes and interiors, and wanted to give me a show. I was very excited. Showing on the side streets of Paris, Palma, Athens, even New York, was not like showing at the Shaefer Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. This was a mainline event. Once seen there, I would be seen again, and seen well.
Bertha Shaefer met me at the elevator. Her place had a substantial, European flavor.
“I’m so glad to see you here,” she said. “Your work gives me pleasure.”
We moved into an inner room where she took out my slides, held each up to the light to look again. “Did you bring more?” she asked.
“Just a few,” I said. “That’s all I have.” I had decided to say nothing about the recent changes in either my painting or my eyes.
“I like these,” she said. “I like them very much. I’ll have a slot open next winter. But we will need more. I’ll want to hang half of these, then I’d like to choose from, say, another fifteen. That should give us enough. Could you have that many within the year?”
I could not. Not within this year or any year. I tried to say something but I stammered. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted this chance so badly, but the new things I was making didn’t belong at Bertha Shaefer’s, and I would never have enough of the old ones to fill the space.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. She was elderly and gray haired, and I liked her. “You know, this can be the start of a long collaboration.”
“I’m going blind,” I said.
“You’re not joking,” she half stated, half asked. She looked suddenly much older.
“I can’t paint like that anymore. I’m not seeing color well, nor detail.”
“What will you do? Are you painting still? Can I see your new work? Maybe we can make do with these,” she said all at once.
“I’ll send you new work to look at,” I promised. Now I couldn’t wait to leave, to close my eyes and never open them again, to run under a car.
Bertha Shaefer called a few times after that to ask how I was doing. She suggested other galleries for the new work. But the progressive loss of my eyesight distracted me from caring about my painting or my near success. All of that seemed suddenly unimportant, almost frivolous, like making frantic phone calls from my deathbed to promote the work of my youth.
I never saw Bertha Shaefer again.
Since Albers, I’d been interested in the problem of figure and ground, the interchange of foreground and background, the manipulation of objects in painted space. Suddenly the problem shifted from canvas to self, where it nagged like pain. The figure of my diseased eyes superseded all others and, having taken up residence in my body, threatened always to be there. It would neither recede into the background of my life nor be assimilated into the foreground. It was the start of a long, unfinished business, which would not permit resolution until I had finally lost every bit of eyesight or until I was miraculously cured.
Blind spots took over the majority of my retina, spreading like the plague. Deep inside my eyes, I felt a lack of flow and metabolism, a desert, stagnation, death.
The normal field of vision, the scope of the area we see in front of us, is about 140 degrees (horizontal) in each eye. My field now, piecing together the odd bits here and there, is less than 5 degrees. Because the losses are a patchwork of dead or dying cells, my functional vision is difficult to understand. If one imagines full sight as a mosaic of millions of visual units, the vision remaining to me is determined by a small number of functioning cells unevenly distributed over the whole. I see through a small, irregular doughnut-shaped area with a little help from two thin motion-perceiving crescents somewhere near the edges. The central losses eliminate all clarity, and the peripheral ones limi
t my orientation in space. In the full mosaic of cells, the dysfunctional ones are not black, nor are there sharp boundaries between them and the neighboring useful cells. Blindness isn’t blackness; it is nothingness. I have, therefore, on my retina, a tiny amount of somethingness surrounded and influenced by a vast nothingness. There is a disorganization of the whole; everything is ill-fitting, jagged and incomplete. Such fragmented visual experience affects one’s personality. Objects appear or vanish abruptly and inexplicably. Nothing makes spatial sense, so I put together visual clues based largely on memory and imagination. For me, perceived reality is spotty, appearing in a kind of charged, flickering motion. At night or in dim light, I see nothing; it doesn’t matter if my eyes are open or closed. But even the darkness vibrates, sometimes with an unpleasant dance of thousands of pinpoints of shimmering light. Color retains some value (its lightness and darkness) but little hue (its perceptual scale ranging from red through yellow, green, and blue). I picture a few cones here and there struggling heroically to keep alive to give me the best they can: a bare recognition of the red family, almost none of the blues or greens. A maddening sensitivity to light ironically makes the very act of looking irritating and painful.
Sta called Helga Barnes again from Victoria. He was asked not to call anymore. Mrs. Barnes would be in touch with his nephew later that day at the Grosvenor House.
We arrived at the reception desk, where I expected crowds of her patients: turbaned, bejeweled, Nehrucapped, Mao-jacketed, the still-unknown hordes of retinitis pigmentosa people, lining up to register and be cured. I do tend to exaggerate, but I had pictured a small ball-room reserved for the occasion—Jews and Arabs drinking together, laughing, talking of cures and the impotence of modern medicine. In fact, no one was there. It was the slow season, and the hotel lobby was relatively empty. When I mentioned Helga Barnes the desk clerk said, no, he had not heard of her, but perhaps I should talk with the hotel medical staff, just off the lobby. But the room off the lobby contained a sleepy Pakistani doctor with a carnation in his lapel, who thought, alas, with a mixture of linguistic confusion and Eastern clairvoyance, that Helga Barnes was the name of my problem.
To make a show for Sta, I wandered off alone into the spacious lobby. I was becoming used to assuming the posture of a sighted person, pretending, almost defiantly, to be normal.
I strolled like a German philosopher, hands behind my back, head down, brows knit in thought, while my toes and ears probed like antennae, to give me clear passage. Stairs were my nemesis, though, and now Sta watched me fall down three cleverly camouflaged steps. “Son of a bitch,” I murmured as a couple of small groups of Arab ministers and UN functionaries turned to look at the clatter. This strange and difficult disease, which produces so many off-register moments, such massive confusions of identity, such improbable situations, injects an element of adventure into every excursion, no matter how commonplace. Sta rushed over to me, offering help. “You must not go off alone,” he warned.
“I’m perfectly all right,” I lied. “I wasn’t paying attention, that’s all.”
We went up to our room, and in the corridors, dodged little Arab children who ran in and out of luxurious suites and played with the room-service tables smelling of kippers, parked along the walls.
A short time later, we heard from Helga Barnes. Her voice was aggressive, even annoyed. “Tomorrow I want your first morning’s water,” she commanded.
“Water?” What did she want? My sweat, my tears, my filtered blood?
“Urine!” she yelled, rolling the r.
At ten the next morning, she arrived, entering like a newly wound tin soldier, weighted on both sides with paper bags and leather bags, a squat, pigeonlike woman with a black homburg hat and a chic, tentlike coat. She gave the impression of being jet-propelled, chattering: “Good morning, madam. Good morning, sir. You have no idea what is going on with these planeloads of people. They are coming from everywhere, poor souls: Arabs, Germans, what-you-call-them . . . South Americans, even rogues from Australia. Good God, what I can tell you about them! But I can hardly talk, I am so full of laryngitis. And how are we today?”
“Fine, thank you, Mrs. Barnes. . . .”
“And those filthy parasite doctors, those money-grubbing thieves. They are knocking down my door, begging for a bit of this, a scrap of that. Those lying, cheating sausages! If you only knew what I go through, what they have done to me. Forty-eight years they have not left me alone. And I tell you, Mr. What-do-you-call-it . . . Potok? . . . yes . . . I will wipe the floor with them all! I will use them for doormats! Yes, my dear, they will get nothing from me. They have had their chance many times. I will take my secret to the grave with me!”
To my ear, there seemed to be an exotic element in her middle-European accent—something truly strange, like Hindi or Urdu. Her head seemed small for her body, while the rest of her was ample, even broad. The feel of her hand surprised me when she had offered it in greeting; it was soft and smooth, sensually cushioned, very special.
She was sitting in an armchair, her body totally relaxed, her sensible black shoes planted firmly on the floor, her hands making lazy circular motions. All the energy was centered in her face, her mouth darting, pecking, sputtering.
As she sat and talked, without breaking the continuity, she fumbled in one of her bags, and I knew that I would have my first taste of a bee sting. She fished with tweezers in a small round container, suddenly vibrant with buzzing. Predatorlike, at the end of the silvered forcep, was a live and furious bee, ready for action. My anxiety and fear were overwhelming as she stepped behind me, and zap! zap!, first to the left, then to the right, two bee stings unbearably painful, each behind an ear, made me sweat, feel faint, made my head reel.
“There, sir,” she said. “That should do it. Tomorrow your pupils should be wide open, and I can take a good look inside. Then I can tell you if my bees will help. I don’t put those filthy drops in, like doctors do. No, my dear, it is my angel bees that will do it.”
I was crazy with pain, the stingers left hanging there, pulsating. And all the time she talked, telling us about this patient, that doctor. “And can you imagine,” she was saying, “that dirty Scotsman writing me he is still well. What impudence! Of course it is still. When Helga Barnes cures, it is forever!” I strained to hear every word though the burning, throbbing pain was making distracting interior static, like blood gushing through my veins. Charlotte sat ramrod straight, probably white as a sheet. “Did you read that article? Do you remember that filthy barrister saying ‘That Mrs. Barnes, she must have something’? ‘Must have something’—that parasite! I cured him good and proper, and that’s what he has to say. I won’t take people like him anymore.” She was now flushed with rage, her black shoes and her fists pounding rhythmically. “I will take only quality people, with good upbringing, cultured people. . . .” Still angry but in control, she told me, illustrating each point with hyperbolic examples, all the rules and regulations of her treatment. No resisting her cure, no reservations about her methods or results. She would be the giver, I, the receiver. No arguments, no problems. The object of my hope, my dreams, and my expectations, the present focus of my life, seemed to be a small cantankerous mad-woman.
She slipped behind me again and took out the stingers. Still talking, she began packing and repacking her bags, sliding in her container of bees. This disappeared into one package and that into another, like plutonium being slipped into its casing, the outside giving little hint of the awesome energy within.
“Please be so kind as to come to me tomorrow. Your wife, you, madam,” she said pointing to Charlotte, lest we should still have missed the point, “you will not accompany him. And yes, you can move out of this hotel to your uncle’s if you wish. Ah, even these hotels, once so elegant, are not what they used to be. Shabby and filthy, that’s what they are now. Nobody knows how to work anymore, the lazy louts! And the clientele is now all colors and shades,” she whispered. “Ruffians from blackest Africa.
Can you imagine?”
She handed me a leaflet called Notice to Applicants for Treatment, and smiling and bowing, she waddled toward the door.
“Ah, yes, I almost forgot,” she said, “hand me your water. . . . It is the first of the morning, is it not?”
After she left, Charlotte and I were speechless, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. For a moment, I wasn’t at all sure if I preferred being a patient of this pain-dispensing fanatic or chalking one up to a frivolous whim, a round-trip ticket to London, a night in a fancy hotel. But as my face began to swell from the stings, I again felt drawn, strangely committed. This kind of pain, elicited by this powerful poison, was bound to shake things up.
Charlotte read the notice aloud:
. . . I do not accept patients who cannot make up their minds as to what they want.
Patients must keep strictly to my rules, not only regarding treatment, but also for times of appointments. . . .
I do not intend here to elaborate on my successes. They are quite evident, since all my successfully treated patients were beyond the help of the medical profession, or they would not have come to me. I refuse to see any patient whose idiot doctor offers to “supervise” my treatment, about which, of course, he or she knows precisely nothing. This is a clever ruse to learn whilst watching me. . . .