Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  My wonderful uncle Stas died in the mid-eighties, hoping until the end that someone somewhere had the answer to my blindness. His dear Edith died a few years after him. My mother died in 1987, at the age of ninety.

  I now have practically no vision left, simply what is called light perception, the ability to see the difference between night and day. In circumstances of high contrast I can sometimes detect movement. In those months in London I traveled to Beckenham and back without any aids, changing trains and buses and walking fairly confidently on city streets. Now I cannot negotiate more than a few steps on a street or even in my backyard without my dog or the arm of a companion. I can hear Julia Owen screaming at me. “You rotter!” she is saying. “If only you had never gone to a doctor, if only you had never had a drop of alcohol or the medication they force down people’s throats, if only you abstained from filthy sex, you would be seeing perfectly well like all my other patients.”

  Nevertheless, a few years ago, I decided to try painting again, remembering the obnoxious advice of an old friend who at the time of my first serious vision losses advised me to “think Beethoven.” But when I went to the local art store to buy paints and brushes and canvas, I had a familiar feeling. I was embarrassed in the way I remember being when as a thirteen-year-old I bought condoms in a New York drugstore. “It’s for my brother,” I lied, in the long tradition of boys who bought condoms years before the opportunity for their use occurred. I had felt a similar confusion when, early in my blindness, I walked over to the New York Lighthouse to see what a white cane would feel like in the city. “For you?” the clerk asked. “For my brother,” I lied again. “What size?” she asked unexpectedly. “He’s about my height,” I said.

  I took the long white stick to my mother’s fancy mid-town apartment, hiding it under my raincoat, and when I tried using it, it kept getting caught under her little Empire chairs and tables. I finally watched as it tumbled down seventeen stories into the fires of the apartment house incinerator. And now, at the Drawing Board Art Store, my guide dog at my feet, I asked for tubes of pigment. For all I knew, cadmium red or cerulean blue were no longer the names used, perhaps morphing into aubergine or pistachio. “It’s for a friend,” I told Ray, who knew I had no brother. It was embarrassing for a blind man to be painting.

  I loved doing it again after some twenty years of not picking up a brush. It felt heroic at first, as if I were engaged in something unheard of, beyond human possibility. It wasn’t, of course. At the time, I had tiny shreds of vision left, and could with some inventiveness use various props to find the tubes, the canvas, the place where my brush had already left marks. I am told that some of those paintings turned out to be rather interesting. Others became unintended mud. Only when I stopped thinking that I could find some new slant—from blindness—to comment on the human condition did it become pure fun. With Benny Goodman swinging on the boom box next to me and my own body in motion, the smell of oil and turpentine wafting up my nose, I felt young again, thrilled to be away from my keyboard.

  A friend suggested that they should be marketed as a blind man’s paintings. “I bet you could make some real money,” he told me. In fact, when I read the occasional article crowing “blind woman painting!” it sickens me. It’s not because I wish it were my work that some hungry publicist was pushing, but because painting is a visual medium. Even though an innovative person can use whatever shreds of eyesight she has left, it can’t be done without those shreds.

  My life is what it is and, for the most part, I have learned to accept it. Wanting it to be otherwise is not only foolish but self-destructive. Though it is supremely difficult, at my most generous I am able to be happy for a friend who is describing his recent trip to Italy or a good movie or a spring day or a beautiful woman.

  Since the writing of Ordinary Daylight and in spite of the occasional contact I have with other blind people via counseling and my three residencies at the Seeing Eye, where with each new dog I train together with some twenty-five other blind people, I had been a rather passive observer, if even that, of the disability community. But this has been changing. In the last quarter-century, much has been accomplished within that community in technology, accessibility, civil rights, and in the gradual evolution of attitudes toward the disabled. Compelled to recognize the ways in which I had elected to keep my distance from this community, and thus from that part of myself, I began new explorations that led me to my most recent book, A Matter of Dignity. It turned out to be both a happy learning process and a labor of love. Its pages explore the lives of people, disabled or not, who do enabling, important work in many areas of disability. Writing that book brought me close to “the movement,” to the kind of quiet, caring work that I most admire. In working to change entrenched attitudes about disability, about inclusion and diversity, about a population of millions who have been stigmatized, poorly understood, and egregiously discriminated against, I have been allowed membership in that community. Disability—blindness—is not the only characteristic that defines me, but my recognition, at last, that it is a central part of me enables me to know better who I really am.

  About the Author

  ANDREW POTOK, a painter and writer, is the author of Ordinary Daylight: Portrait of the Artist Going Blind, My Life with Goya, a novel, and A Matter of Dignity: Changing the World of the Disabled. He lives in Vermont.

  ALSO BY ANDREW POTOK

  My Life with Goya

  A Matter of Dignity: Changing the World of the Disabled

  ORDINARY DAYLIGHT: PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST GOING BLIND A Bantam Book

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1980 by Andrew Potok

  Excerpt [13 lines] from “A Cloud in Trousers,” as submitted, from THE BEDBUG

  AND SELECTED POETRY by VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY.

  Copyright © 1960 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

  .

  For additional territory, please contact Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd.

  Isaac Babel, excerpt from “Line and Color” from The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel (New York: S.G. Philips, 1955). Reprinted with the permission of Writers House, Inc., on behalf of the proprietor.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-20900

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-41827-2

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