On My Blindness (Part 6)

It's funny what goes through the mind when in a mortal crisis. When I was in the bottom of the roaster, I envisioned the Kellogg Evening News newspaper story telling the story of my death, illustrated with my senior picture. A great basketball player, Tommy Brainard, had been electrocuted in a whirlpool in December, 1967 and his picture had been on the front page. Somehow I was thinking I'd be afforded similar treatment.

I also was stubborn. I refused to pray. A voice inside me was telling me to go ahead and die, but not to do what my young mind thought of as cliched. Looking back, it's weird to me that here I was on the porch of death and I was imagining how my death would be treated in the local paper and thinking about whether praying for deliverance from death would be an original approach or not.

Similarly, after I survived, different people encouraged me to write about this experience. At Whitworth College, a handful of people saw a Christian analogy in the way I was in deep darkness with light shining above me and in the way I climbed toward the light to be saved. One faculty wife, and later a faculty member, who was beginning her career as a writer, encouraged me to submit my story to Guideposts.

She said that it was just the kind of story they were looking for, that they would pay for. I couldn't do it. I just could not see my experience in terms of a Guidepost rescued by the Lord tale. I couldn't see my story as a way to inspire others to come from their own darkness into the light of the Lord. I still can't. Such a story felt inauthentic to me.

Others thought I should write it up in a mythological way. They saw my experience as an embodiment of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. I agreed. I had fallen into the pit as an unformed young man and rose out of this darkness and suffering into the a stage of life that was more mature. But, again, however much truth lay in seeing my experience as the hero's journey or could be explained as the embodiment of Jungian archetypes, I resisted writing it up this way. I never did.

I'm glad I didn't. The most authentic way for me to regard my experience was through the perspective of existentialism. I learned about existentialism in the fall of 1973, the fall following the accident. Existentialism, especially as expressed by Sartre and Camus, taught me that I had an obligation, if I were to exercise my freedom as a human, to make meaning out of my life myself.

This appealed to me deeply. I didn't want external sources like the Bible or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung to make meaning out of my experience. I went to work to make meaning out of what had happened.

In short, and I'll write about this in future posts, Camus and Sartre forced me to confront the emptiness I had seen inside me when I was blind. I hadn't realized that any thinkers or writers saw this emptiness as a shared human experience. I hadn't thought that I had responsibility to make meaning out of my life. I hadn't thought that if I were to devote myself to anything in life, it would be my responsibility to live with what I decided and live with the consequences.

I had never been confronted with anything that felt so deeply moral in my young life.

So, I began to examine myself and my life and began the conscious effort to make meaning out of my life.

I didn't want my inner life to be empty.

I wanted my life to be meaningful.

I started my conscious search for meaning by reading fiction, poetry, and drama of the 20th century. The literature appealed to me because it told me that I was not alone in my sense of alienation and in my search for meaning in life. The internal darkness and emptiness I confronted within myself when blind turned out to be understood by these writers as a universal human experience.

I found this reassuring and stimulating.