Essay # 2 / Final Draft / Please Don't Read to Class!

Six weeks after the retina sprang a leak, I began to prepare my lessons for my first days back to school, so I looked at my old plan books. Two of the pieces that I had often used as examples of my favorite works of art dealt with vision loss. Hmm. One was a Springsteen song, I Wish I Were Blind. The other was an Updike story, The Lucid Eye in Silver Town. As I consider them today after I survived a threat to my 20/20 vision, each has a different look.

The heartsick narrator in the Springsteen song sings to a former lover, "I love to see cottonwood flowers in the early spring / I love to see the message of love that the bluebird brings / But when I see you walking with him down along the strand / I wish I were blind when I see you with your man." Of course, the English teacher in me always had recognized the hyperbole of the narrator's wish to be struck blind. The romantic heard the sadness in the singer's voice. Today as I still recover, I shudder at the new-found power of the poetic image.

In Updike's story, a precocious, self-absorbed young boy travels to NYC to purchase an book of portraits by his favorite artist, Vermeer. He is momentarily blinded as he looks upward to the skyscrapers. The somewhat comic resolution to the story finally enables him to see what he never could--his father's intelligence and his own pigheadedness. Though clouding my physical vision, my own accident has enabled me to see other things in my life more clearly, too.

In the Stephen Crane story The Open Boat, a war correspondent shipwrecked at sea in a tiny dinghy remembers a poem from his school days about a soldier of the French Foreign Legion who lay dying in Algiers. At one time, "it [the poem] was less to him than the breaking of a pencil's point." Cast into the raging sea and faced with his own mortality, "it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. It was no longer merely a picture . . . in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality--stern, mournful, and fine. . . He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers."

Good poets, good writers, good songwriters, use good images, tell good stories, sing good tunes. Their works identify and explore universal truths, evoke honest human emotions and provoke serious thoughts. Of course, Springsteen and Updike weren't writing just for jilted lovers or obnoxious children. Or just for an audience for whom vision is a daily worry. In the instance, though, when a great writer does tap into someone's shared experience, the work takes on a real life on its own and resonates in importance.

And so it was with Earl Holland, a NYC ambulance rescue worker nearly traumatized himself by witnessing the carnage of September 11. Yet he performed his duties valiantly in the hours of his city's need. Riding home from work one night, he heard the song, Superman, by Five for Fighting. The words reminded him of the responsibilities of own job; the words reminded him of his co-workers who had died in their rescue attempts:"I can't stand to fly, I'm not that naive / Men weren't meant to fly with the clouds between their knees. . . .It's not easy to be me." For Holland and the rest of NY's finest, the lyrics perfectly expressed the heroic and tragic qualities of their professions. Superman was no longer merely a pop song, "no longer merely a picture . . . in the breast of a poet."