“And our equipment provided the image-loss folk with similar shadows of trees, rocks, clouds, airplanes: leaves, needles, limbs, lichens, sheets of mica, veins of quartz, strands of alabaster, strips of sunlight, blue holes, aluminum, etc., shimmered in the shadow images of these objects of the air or ground, in colors more brilliant or pure white than the objects themselves ever displayed. And did the people we were treating so much as mention these miraculous works? Why will you not hazard a guess?
“That even the moving images of films failed to make a dent on these people robbed of their image sense is superfluous to report. Neither the classic series of twenty-four images per second nor accelerated image-bombardment more in tune with the contemporary way of seeing could straighten things out. No penetration occurs when the image receptors have been removed, you understand. Why do you not understand?
“Yet we set up an open-air cinema for them, probably more lovely than ever existed anywhere and at any time — films projected without a screen onto the smooth rock faces of the Sierra. But even the young people who moved there with the core population are already completely image-resistant, or have become so in this place.
“Even the young people, who can otherwise be distracted by any little liver spot on someone else’s face and any speck of color in a dewdrop, however small, simply let the images be images — or, rather, categorically refuse to let the images be images, that is to say, they categorically refuse to let images, no matter which, pry open access to the world of today and, instead of leaving them as hostages to their parents and grandparents, connect them with their own kind, wherever they may be, beyond the mountains, no matter where — everywhere.
“Granted, my people here in the Dark Clearing do not represent a new generation of iconoclasts. Not once have our image-projecting devices, which hardly allow them to choose to look in directions we have not populated with images, been attacked or vandalized by them. It is as if their eyes simply veered past the walls of images erected on all sides, seeking the narrow, imageless strip along the horizon, as once the Israelites during their exodus from bondage in Egypt moved through the passage that opened up for them through the Dead, no, the Red, Sea.
“Each of them avers that he has not suffered a loss of images, but rather that he has sworn off images. Each claims that no image, not a single one, exists or is valid, at least during this transitional period, and not merely for him, but in general. But what matters to him, precisely in this transitional period, is perception. Along with his life in the place from which he emigrated, he has lost not the images, whether natural or created, dreamed or lived, external or internal; what he has lost, or what at least is threatened, is the ability to perceive.
“And, he says, what he misses more and more painfully in the world, and in this world, is seeing. And regaining the ability to see is what motivates him up here, on the ‘Isthmus of the Transitional Period’—such an appropriate term — in the Pleasant Plantation or the Deep Enclosure, the Mojada Honda, and not for the sake of one image or another, no, simply for the sake of seeing, conflict-resolving, existence-justifying, ‘world-anchoring,’ dignifying, renewing, connecting, seeing. As Goethe says, ‘Born to look, appointed to see … thus the world is pleasing to me,’ thus the world is created for me, thus the world coalesces for me, or something like that.
“And accordingly the primary activity of each individual and solitary person here, independent of his neighbor and next-door property owner, is seeing, on the strips or isthmuses, wherever in their view there is something to see, no matter what. Daybreak and seeing. Deep night and more seeing, for instance of the trees’ shadows on the rock faces (in the image-free strips or passages). ‘To see and let appear’—the settlement’s motto, similar to ‘Dream and work.’ Or is it a form of working? Or of leisure? Impossible to tell the difference.
“What do you think? Why do you say nothing? This is what the returnees believe at any rate, as always in complete unanimity, without prior consultation with one another: images are certainly essential; without them no transmission of the world and no sense of life. But in the previous century in particular, images were overexploited as never before. As a result, the world of images has dried up — has, without exception, become blind, mute, and stale — incapable of being refreshed by any science. And thus, in this transitional period, all that is possible is seeing — in which, by the way, all science is included, and out of which science must develop, one step at a time. The Hondareda idiots consider themselves scientists!
“And the childish things on which they spend their time in their Dark Clearing are, for them — even if they use entirely different terms, as for almost everything, old-fashioned and obsolete ones—‘sight-enhancing measures.’ That includes not only their posing as hunters, their acting as though they were stalking, taking aim, and so on: time and again one sees them walking backward, more often than forward; that kind of thing, they assert, enhances seeing as much as their constant squatting, close to the ground (whereas standing on tiptoes is prohibited — their standard dictum: ‘Standing on tiptoes is no standing’).
“When they unexpectedly whirl like dervishes, one person in the background turning to the east, then, without any connection to him, another in back to the west, it is of course no dance, either; the people of the Pedrada-Hondareda region have neither games nor dances, and that includes the young ones — but rather, well, you already know this, or do you? — an exercise in seeing!
“Instead of putting things where they belong or filing them away like adults, these people of the depression are also constantly tossing things into place, and from as far away as possible, and, furthermore, not straightaway and forthwith — now I am using such obsolete expressions myself — but always in an arc, and one that is as high as possible, and to what end? You know this. To facilitate seeing, seeing, nothing but seeing.
“If only such exercises, measures, and exertions led to something: to moldability (ah, another word from horse-and-buggy days); to mobility; to awareness of another person — I don’t necessarily mean of me — to neighborliness, or at least a hint of everyday togetherness. But as I have observed for one year, three days, and five to nine hours, each of these Hondareda desperados is holed up, stiff as a board, deep inside his hovel, shack, and barbed-wire enclosure, immobile and immovable, having taken leave for good of the present.
“While in the meantime we have lit up even the North and South Pole, as well as the peak of Everest and the Aconcagua, only the Hondareda region persists in its self-imposed darkness. The only semblance of a joint activity I have been able to observe in my subjects here is that whenever one of them thinks he has spotted something for which he has long been searching, or something precious, or simply something beautiful — precisely in their ugliness they are obsessed with beauty, or, as they express it, with the ‘uncommonly beautiful’—but then realizes that he was mistaken — as he was every other time, by the way — that he was thoroughly mistaken and rashly pounced on what he mistook for a treasure or something uncommonly beautiful, but which turned out to be worthless, ordinary, or nothing at all, the person experiencing such a disappointment, and that is what can be astonishing, at the moment when he realizes he was deluded, turns out to be not bitter in the slightest, but rather, without any premeditation, cheerfully disappointed. Disappointment fills the person in question, no matter who in this glacial basin, with cheerfulness.