Saramago’s Blindness.

Saramago's novel Blindness is about a pandemic of blindness where people only see a milky white substance. In the first part, the blind are confined in an old asylum guarded by soldiers and the novel describes life in confinement. In the second part, the confined realise that the soldiers guarding them have gone and that in fact everyone has gone blind. here the novel turns to describe blind people trying to survive in a city where everyone is blind. 

on one hand the novel does not aim for realism: for instance, we only have a glimpse of how people who are already blind and rely on braille, and other markers for the visually impaired, can rise to become a new dominant governing elite in such a world. There is an assumption that all what would follow if everyone goes blind is chaos and hobbesian-like tendencies. on the other hand, the novel is exceptionally realist, Saramago goes to great length to capture what an individual and collective experience of blindness entails. a remarkable achievement.

By the end of the novel it become clear that at least one chief aim of the novel is to be a morality tale: the personal and social degradation experienced in this state of blindness is but an extreme concentration of the way we degrade ourselves and each other when we are not blind. It made me think of an ‘ethics of the senses’ that is perhaps strongly present in Nietzsche.

just like those of us who can hear well can hear without listening - that is, without assuming the social and ethical responsibility towards ourselves and others that the possession of a sense of hearing put before us - there are those of us who have banalised the possession of the sense of sight, such as we fail to experience it in it’s full intensity. we can look very well without seeing, without fully ‘taking in’, what we are looking at. without, as Nietzsche put it, bringing in those interests and affects which transform seeing into seeing something.

In the face of Covid19 we practice physical distancing. And just as people in the novel lost their eye sight, we have lost our physical capacity to be physically close to people. Thus, the novel’s take on blindness invites us to think. Just as blindness brought out what we did not see even when we could see, is our physical distancing bringing out the social and affective distance that marked how we relate to people even when we could still be in their proximity? That is, do physical confinement and distancing bring out the question of how much have we allowed ourselves to ‘take in’ and be ethically responsible for our closeness to people when we were practicing physical proximity? 

There are no easy answers here for i have actually heard a number of people say that they have become closer to some people now that they are no longer in their physical proximity. and as Amine Maalouf says about his relation to Lebanon in his book Origines: ‘there are loves that only flourish at a distance’

Writing Challenge: 500 words max of speculative pessimistic autobiographical writing

23 February 2027,

Today is my 70th birthday. It’s also the 7th anniversary of the night I went out with friends for a live performance of Gounod's Faust at the Sydney Opera House, followed by dinner at Mr. Wong, one of my favourite Sydney restaurants. How were we to know then, 7 years ago, that it was to be the last time we go to a live performance and the last time we eat out at a restaurant?

I still remember how we met at the northern gate of Sydney’s Botanical Gardens and jokingly asked each other if we’ve caught the ‘coronavirus’ as everyone called it then. Two weeks later it was no longer a joke, someone we all knew was in intensive care at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick. 

Not that taking the pandemic seriously helped. We all religiously followed the government’s directive in the first few months and we joined with everyone celebrating Australia’s capacity to ‘flatten the curve’ (one of the early obsessions in the first year of the outbreak) only to realise by the end of 2020 that we are dealing with a wildly oscillating pandemic where flat curves were mere moments of respite in the virus’ intensity of circulation. 

The virus accentuated one of the worst contradictions of our era: the more it was clear that the world was inevitably interconnected the more people acted as if each nation was an island. The illusion was easier to maintain when your nation is effectively an island. But this has not stopped the virus from continuing to spread in all kind of ways.

I was forced to retire on my 65th birthday 5 years ago. For this birthday, I received last week my category 7 medicare card. This indicates my new 70+ age group and the medical care one is entitled to get for that group. No one says it openly, but everyone knows that, as the health system is struggling to cope, the card indicates that you are not a priority. You are expendable. 

More than 7 years since I have seen, let alone hugged, my daughters. Who would have thought that Australia will return to being something like a penal colony again. We used to say this metaphorically sometimes. But there is nothing metaphoric about it today. Australia is for all practical purposes a heavily policed prison for its inhabitants. It is not just that we cannot leave the island. It’s illegal to even try. When tracking apps were introduced, some lefties were worried that the app will be used for political purposes to hunt leftist dissenters. It was much worth than that, the app was used to just keep track of you regardless of politics.

Still we know that we are better off than the people of the United States where, because the elections of November 2020 could not happen and no elections was possible since, Donald Trump, who was president before those elections, and already becoming visibly senile, is still in power - in the role of a so-called care-taker president. we are no longer sure what exactly is happening there.

Prelude to War

Yesterday was the 45^th anniversary of the Lebanese civil war which started on the 13^th of April 1975. I’ve been wanting to tell this story for some time now. So now is a good time.

It was in the late spring of 1974. I was doing my ‘retraite’. This is a period where you ‘retreat’ with some of your friends to study before the baccalaureate exams. This was my Baccalauréat 2ème Partie. My final year at school. We were in a mountain resort which is usually full of tourists in summer. But this being spring, it was mainly the local villagers that were prominent in the streets. The ‘retraite’ was a mixture of fun and hard work. We did a lot of work. But we also had a lot of fun. As much fun as a bunch of 17 years olds occupying a house on their own can have.

One of us was a serious car freak. He not only knew everything about car mechanics but he was already a serious driver. His name was Grégoire Audi. I later heard that not only he became a successful dentist somewhere in Europe but that he ended up racing older prototypes of cars at Le Mans. I am dwelling on this because it has everything to do with what happened during that retraite.

As part our fun time, Grégoire was teaching us powersliding. This is where you turn a corner with your car by making it slide into place in order to maintain speed and traction.

So here we were on this road and ahead of us was a sharp turn. We wait for cars to pass, and when there is no one coming we take turns at negotiating the turn by doing a powerslide.

At one point, Grégoire was explaining to us something about turning the steering wheel that all of us were not doing so well. A car passed us. He waited a bit. Then he sped through the corner showing us how to sharply turn the steering wheel while accelerating. For some reason, the car that had passed us a short time before had slowed down. And as we surged through the corner we found ourselves slightly too close to it. Not dangerously close, but uncomfortably close.

We stopped. The car ahead of us stopped. Grégoire was saying something like ‘Damn idiots why did they slow down?’. But suddenly the two guys who were in the car got out. 

They had revolvers in their hands. 

The one on the right, pointed his gun up in the air and pulled the trigger. The sound stunned us. The guy was now pointing the gun at us. We were petrified. The guy shouted: ‘Come out of the car you sons of whores’.

Then he said: ‘Kneel on the ground. Kneel all of you’.

We all knelt. I don’t know about the others but I knelt and I was very close to peeing in my pants. Then the guy asked: ‘are you from here?’

My friend who had invited us to his house replied that he lived here. The guy with the gun said: ‘Whose son are you? what's your father's name?’ My friend told him his father’s name.

The guy said: ‘your father is a respectable man but that doesn’t mean you own the place. Do you understand? Next time I’ll take you to the Party’s headquarters and we’ll ask your dad to come and get you! Do you understand?’ My friend replied ‘Yes’. The guy said ‘Now you go home all of you’.

They were members of the Phalangist Party. My friend actually recognised them. I did not have the intellectual tools to think this at the time but I clearly remember feeling a distinct sense of class and regional resentment in the way the two guys were behaving. Especially from the guy who did the shooting and the talking. Regardless of the fact that we might have genuinely scared him as we surged behind him, in the way he talked to us, in the way he talked about my friend's father, in the way he said 'you don't own the village', there was a kind of ‘my time has come you bourgeois city dwelling shits’ oozing out of the way he spoke to us.

While I consider this my first taste of the civil war to come, it was, however, what happened afterward that signalled to me that a major transformation was taking place.

Throughout my youth my father had been an influential Colonel in the gendarmerie. And at the very moment when those guys were terrorising us, and even though, I was very scared, I was also thinking ‘you wait till I tell my dad about you fuckers’. And indeed, the first thing I did when I got home was ring my dad and tell him. He asked me a few questions, asked me to put my friend on the phone. Asked him a few questions. I was sure they will end up in jail. But towards the end of the week as my friends and I were out to get a pizza, we had to endure an uncomfortable encounter with those same two guys. Not only this, but the guy who pulled the gun on us looked us straight in the face and said: ‘keefkun? (how are you?’ and he added ‘I hope you are studying well.’ 

When I went home. I asked my father what happened. He muttered an answer in a way I've never heard him speak before. He said, that he called the local police headquarters and he was told: ‘These are members of the Phalangist Party. We cannot touch them’. It became clear to me then that a new social order was coming into place.