“It just disappears?”
“Well, sure. You can’t see forever.”
“I know that the eyes can’t see forever. But if I stand right beside this painting and touch the frame, and then step back to arm’s length and touch it again, the frame feels like the same width in my hand. So this perspective thing… wow… that kind of blows my mind, Cecily.”
“You’re welcome, I guess?” she says, like a question. “I’m surprised you’ve never heard that before.”
“Well, I mean, I moved away to the school for the blind when I was in kindergarten. I spent most summers at blind camps. So basically all my friends my whole life have been blind. Even many of the teachers at my school had visual impairments. So it was literally—”
“The blind leading the blind,” she interrupts.
I touch a few of the other paintings, and she explains each one to me. Listening to descriptions of art in this way lights up distant, rarely used corners of my brain.
“There’s another room,” she says. “Do you want me to, um, lead you there? Like with your arm?”
“Guide. We call it guiding. And yes, please.”
“So how does it work?”
“Just reach your elbow a little toward me, and I’ll hold it.”
When I grab her arm, I feel this tingle, almost like touching something that has an electric current running through it. It’s not painful. Just sort of shocking. I jerk my hand away.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice shrinking. “Did I do it wrong?”
“No, that was fine. I just… Never mind. You did great.”
I reach for her arm a second time, and when I touch her sweater, I feel that charge again.
Cecily guides me into the other room.
“You know how many paintings van Gogh created?” she asks.
“No idea.”
“Almost a thousand.”
“Wow.”
“And you know how many he sold?”
“All of them, I guess. I mean, he was a really famous painter, right?”
“Not till long after he died. In his entire life, he sold only one of his paintings.”
“One?” I ask in disbelief.
“One.”
“That’s why I relate to him, I think,” she says thoughtfully. “He was born at the wrong time.”
“So you’re like some kind of unrecognized genius, too?” I realize I’m still holding her arm, so I squeeze it playfully.
She laughs, and it works its way into my brain, reminding me of what she said earlier. Her laughter is like impressionist art. Because it captures the essence of itself, the essence of laughter.
“No, just born at the wrong time in history.”
“A lot of blind people feel that way, too,” I say. “Hundreds of years ago, most people were doing manual labor, like working farms or pulling plows or whatever. You didn’t need extremely clear vision for stuff like that. You could go a lifetime without realizing you couldn’t see as well as everyone else.”
“But now we are in the information age,” she fills in.
“Exactly. Which started with the printing press, and now our society is based on communicating by words and pictures. It’s called ‘the tyranny of the visual.’ Sorry, I didn’t mean to regurgitate everything from my seventh-grade History of Visual Impairment class.”
“No, not at all,” she says, and sounds like she means it.
“Although in the last couple years, technology has been making things a lot easier,” I add.
She guides me up to a painting, and we stop. Normally at this point, I would let go of a guide’s arm. But I don’t. Instead, I loop my hand through the wrist strap on my cane so I can touch the painting with that hand while my other one stays connected to Cecily.
And then I catch myself. Why am I still holding on to this girl’s arm? I’ve already reached point B.
So I let go as I examine the painting with my other hand.
Cecily describes the painting to me in between snaps of her camera. One of van Gogh’s many self-portraits, she explains. He looks gaunt and soulful. She says there are hints in his eyes of the depression that will eventually claim his life, when he committed suicide at age thirty-seven.
“It has a lot of oranges and reds in it,” she says. “But I guess you don’t know what those look like, huh?”
“Not so much.”
“Those are considered warm colors. So they’re like the heat of the sun or the smell of the fall.”
“Sorry,” I say. “That’s poetic, but it doesn’t help me.”
“Can you not even… like, imagine a color?” she asks.
I hear more visitors shuffle into the room, voices soft as they comment on the artwork.
“Even if I could, how would I know I’m imagining a color when I’ve never seen one before?” I ask. “It’s, like, how do you know that when you see red, it’s the same red as everyone else sees? Maybe what they call red looks to them like what you call blue? There’s no way of knowing if your experience of a certain color is the same.”
“But I can close my eyes and see a color in my mind. Can you not do that?”
I chuckle.