My dreams are still sighted in the way I used to be.
Perhaps now is the time to address any bright side of my not-seeing. I am used to looking for bright sides. Usually, though, being bright, they will have shown up if they are going to.
Long ago, when I was well inside my marriage’s shelter and could see, with no thought of either safety or sight being in question, I was much interested by the writing of Ved Mehta. His blindness, his Indianness, his dwelling in the reading world, his insistent intellectuality and his pursuit of love, his utter failure to accept that one mustn’t grumble, his want of need to camouflage within consensus, all appealed to me. Try as I might, I cannot find his work in recorded form. All these traits but blindness are shared by Fram, I see.
Why was I interested in blindness, so interested that throughout my reading life I sought out books about it? I think that it was simply an impossibly difficult state to imagine, and probably among the worst routine bad things that can happen. I think that I returned repeatedly to the matter of blindness because I believed, and do believe, that we are all to some extent metaphorically blind and this is something at which I have squinted, more or less blind-sidedly, in my work.
Or rather, I think that the gift is rarely given us to see ourselves as others see us, that we do not see others as they see themselves, or if we do they might have preferred that we had not, and I am sure that the whole event is but half glimpsed, if that.
I do not believe that when I was reading books about blindness, metaphorical or not, or by blind writers, by Stephen Kuusisto or José Saramago or Henry Green, let alone by Homer or Milton or Borges, I was stocking up in advance on works that would come to my rescue in my later darkness.
If a person who goes to prison happens to have by heart a good deal of verse, that is an arbitrary blessing, although a great one. We cannot prepare for these blows. All we can do is our best.
The shaman of Portobello had her pitch in the sort of set-up that is familiar if you have visited the fringes of alternative cure. Outside, it was an unexceptional shopfront in a small red Dumfries sandstone terrace of businesses, a tiler, a greengrocer, a Londis. To the left of the terrace a narrow close led down to the North Sea and its sandy shore, grey cockle and sea-glass sand crunching over and again under low waves that day.
I was early and had left my son to listen to his chosen writers at the Book Festival. He knew about the shaman and would have been happy to come along. In the event, I was glad he hadn’t so that the idea might remain in his mind’s tropical zone. At first, the impression was of an entranced and definitely decommissioned beauty parlour, with just a hint of those therapy rooms that induce a special claustrophobia relating to fruit tea and uncleanliness, lost hopes and women beyond romance having that new, fairly frugal, fling — with themselves.
I held open my eyes and peered through plate glass into the little carpeted shop beyond. The keynote shades were from the calming gamut. I am unsuited to alternative medicine. I do not like yellow on walls (or on book covers; the how-to-commit-suicide-and-not-be-found-out book is actually yellow, in a bossy life-affirming way). I am afraid that I will break wicker furniture. That said, I’m always curious about what is on people’s mugs. And if there is a mug tree, I learn something. Mugs don’t grow on trees.
On the wall behind the door, there were leaflets about hypnotherapy that had gone stiff on the noticeboard where rain had forced entry. There was an old and duly respected kettle, with a tray to catch its spillage, and a cloth for the handle. There were head massages on offer in the window from a young woman with a surname from deep in the Scots nobility; a novel in that, as in all disjointedness? She was also offering journeys into past lives at reasonable rates. There were long-overdry dried flowers.
Because I have lost the notes I made that day, I am collecting detail up from my memory-beach where things are ground down and worn away by the days coming in over one another like waves.
How can I see detail and have as my illness that I cannot see? It is one of the peculiar things about blepharospasm that sometimes the twitch and tremor leave you in peace and you can see. But if you badly need them to do so, they take a tighter grip and blind you. I remain observant although, as I am now, I need guiding around this house that I have known for over forty years. It’s hard to explain to those you know, and impossible to explain to strangers without boring them.
Claudia the shaman appeared. I knew it must be Claudia because she practically made the car’s bumper curve upwards, she was so smiley and dainty. She parked her Mini and hopped out, a small Latin woman of perhaps twenty and pretty as a picture, long black hair, gold skin, smile to make a morning, lots of jerseys and a poncho. She had a soft raffia basket, which she put over her elbow.
She asked, ‘Are you Candia? I am Claudia’, which always strikes me as an almost palindromic and certainly confusing thing to have to say, and unlocked her premises just like any shopkeeper. There was no alarm system. That was a good sign. Spirits worth their salt can protect their premises.
She had the glow and pace that make normal gestures feel like bestowed privileges. We settled with our mugs of fruit tea. After many years I have not worked out which blend is the least nasty.
She was undoubtedly a hibiscus flower along this cold shore. She took off her sensible boots and some of her thicker woollens. It was, after all, August. Settled at her desk, she took a look at me over it. She was tiny, and perhaps not even twenty. I was sure that I was growing.
Soon I would fill the shop.
She started to ask the questions and I began to bore myself, retelling my much-handled story. Often, when I am telling medical people or other putative therapists about it, I start to think, ‘Oh it’s not that bad really. Why don’t I stop troubling you this minute?’
Shaman-Claudia sat on her chair like a sprite, not in it like a weighted person. I noticed a tall thing in the corner that looked as if it might be a rainmaker, one of those hollow stalks full of seeds that fall with a sound like sudden rain on big leaves. I was sure there were maracas somewhere about.
There is no point doing these things with half a heart.
We went down to the basement; it was clean and fresh. It might have been in a modest East Coast B & B, before the Scottish Tourist Board fell to the torrid charms of air freshener and full-strength potpourri.
I lay down as I was told, Shaman-Claudia dimmed the lights and lit a candle, passed a number of large feathers, could they have been from a condor? over me, rattled her various instruments, and settled, with a gravity that made her small form intensify, to calling down the relevant spirits.
At no point did I even feel like laughing. I am not unusual I’m sure in testing myself in these circumstances. As a rule I can get through with manners and going deep within not to retrieve past selves but to avoid being hurtful. At no point at all did I not take literally all Shaman-Claudia said. That was her achievement. The bogus couldn’t get a grip on her anywhere, possibly on account of her wholesome physical person. We entered the spirit world.
That, in a basement in Portobello on the East Coast of Scotland, takes some strength of being, when a complete stranger is rattling and chanting over an old Scots body, calling up its animal familiars. Mine arrived at once, punctual as their keeper, or whatever one is to one’s animal familiar. One was a small tiger not through the kitten stage and with very large feet and the other was a whippy and talkative snake.
There is no surprise for the reader there at all. They come straight from my library of predictable attachments and concerns, my usual wardrobe of metaphors. Maybe the tiger was related to Ormiston, maybe the snake to our first mother, Eve.