Earlier this evening, I attended a chamber-music concert (Beethoven’s Septet in Eb, Op. 20 and Schubert’s Octet in F, D. 803 — gotta love the third and last Schubert movements -live!). Joining me and the fourty-some attendees, was a seeing-eye dog. What a wonderful creature; lying there listening to the music; perhaps enjoying it; perhaps at times getting bored; every now and then lifting the eyes up in a silent movement, which seemed to match the silent background, against which the musicians contrasted the faintest tones with the loudest movements. It was great.

During the break, blind was the keyword.

I brought up scientific american frontiers episode that had the segment in which a test subject is blindfolded, and her visual cortex is shown to take over some other functions related to touch (and hearing), suggesting the malleability of the human brain.

I also remembered the one time I was riding the bus in this nation’s capital, late, when a voice came over the driver’s radio-recevier: bus number 9; there’s a visually impaired woman waiting in […] for bus number 9, please make sure you pick her up…

I vividly recall an obsession with braille a few years back, which lasted for quite a while. Driven at times by a very strong -irrational- feeling of getting ready for an inevitable blindness. At other times, the -less morbid- motivation was laziness; you see, when I’m tired, say in bed, and my eyes are shot; I can rest my eyes and still read with my fingers.

Aaah… And how I loved every minute of this exhibition. The artwork was fantastic, and the experience was unique. It was extremely interesting to abandon the reliance on this particular sense for the little while it took to walk amongst the work, listen to explanations, and feel its texture, curves, and temperature.

“Don’t read in the dark, or else you’ll lose your vision”

Funny how one’s brain uses keywords to store things in memory. Memory, however, is another keyword for another day, I must go rest my eyes now.