THE CAVERN OF DEEP HARMONY

PART TWENTY-FOUR:

The wooden dollhouse had ridden home, sharing the back seat with Wadsworth, who seemed to find the smell of it interesting and kept moving his nose over the roof and walls. Harold had carried it up to Eden's room and set it on the bureau.

"Went to Bellefonte, did you?" he remarked.

"Marshall used to go there a lot when his older brother was at Penn State," Eden explained. "It sure has a lot of bed and breakfasts."

"Folks've kinda discovered it now. Almost can't get a room in peak fall season these days. But, yeah, the B&B's there are something special all right."

"Not as special as this one," Eden said softly. "This is the most special one of all."

"'Cause of him, I 'spect."

"He might have something to do with it," she admitted, turning the dollhouse so she could study the rooms. The interior had never really been finished and in her mind she was already planning on adding wallpaper and furnishings. She'd named the house Bellefonte Manor in honor of where it had been purchased. The fact that Marshall had bought it for her only added to her delight in the little house.

Marshall tapped lightly on her doorframe. The door was still wide open and Harold left as Marshall and Wadsworth entered. Wadsworth was not in harness and went over to flop down near the window seat.

"I love the house, Marshall."

"May I?" he asked, coming up beside her, reaching his hand out to trace the contours of the structure. "Ah, it is a fine little building, isn't it? You know, there's a program, especially in the UK where they have models about this size of cathedrals and such so that blind people can feel them and get a better concept of what the building is like. A blind college professor came up with the idea."

"I think that's simply wonderful."  She took his hand and moved it down to where the bay window was. "Don't you think this needs more trim or something here?"

"It is a bit plain. I think you should just drip the thing in gingerbread."

She laughed. "I may do that!! I just may do that!"

Giving him a bit more time to explore the house, she then asked, "What about your book?"

"Would you really like to work a bit on that with me?"

"I'd love to."

"Ok, then. I have what we need in my room."

The two of them, accompanied by Wadsworth, went down the hall and into his room. "How do you go about this?" She was truly curious.

"Usually I just type it into my computer myself.  I have a lot of special software installed that does fancy stuff just for blind people and a LaserJet printer that can print out in ink or in braille. Back in the city I have a Sounding Board speech synthesizer and other really fancy stuff that lets me just talk to the computer. But it's not here. I didn't think I'd need it. I guess I could send for it...."

"Well," she interrupted, "I am here. So I can type it in for you until your shoulder heals."

"You really don't mind?"

"Mind? I'm really interested in what you might be writing."

"You know what I need, too?"

"What's that?"

"Someone to keep me straight. There are times when I'm writing a sighted character and I'm just, well, off.  I need someone who sees to let me know if I'm doing right by my sighted characters."

"Have you written a novel before?"

"Not a novel, no. I've written probably a literal ton of poetry, a few short stories, but most of it has been exposition on the literary works of others, essays, commentaries, that sort of thing.

This is my first."

"Tell me about it. What's it about?"

"It's set in Colonial Williamsburg not long before the Revolutionary War begins. My protagonist is a young man named Morgan Kent, recently arrived from England."

"Have you been to Williamsburg?"

"Last summer Wadsworth and I spent about two weeks there. I think we walked over every square inch of the place."

"What was your favorite thing about it?"

"The bell. The one in Bruton Parrish Church. It's the same one that was there at the time my book is set. I'd be walking down the Duke of Gloucester Street and it would peal out and every single time it just got to me. It was the exact sound George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, all of them back then heard. I'd stand very still and just let the sound of it soak through me. The same sound. It was marvelous."

"I'd love to know more of what Williamsburg was like for you. What else was special for you?"

"The walls. The tops of the brick walls are all shaped into a continuous curve. I'd run my hand along them."

He smiled, remembering. "Some of them were quite long.  And then there are the picket fences. Everywhere. Picket fences. And the gates to them have small cannonball counterweights to make them close automatically." He paused again, casting his mind back. "And brick walkways. They feel so different under your feet. Duke of Gloucester Street is gritty with sand and some of that gets up on the sidewalk, too. Then there's the sound of horses, the jingle of harnesses, the clop of their feet, the squeak of carriage wheels.  I rode in one. Had to get the feeling of it, you know.
Took me a little bit to talk the guy into letting Wadsworth come along, but he finally relented.

And the scents! Herb gardens in every yard, magnolia trees all in lemony bloom, and boxwood. They say Williamsburg is the scent of boxwood and they're right. Neat hedges of it all over the place and when the sun is hot, the scent of it gets stronger and stronger. This spring I want to plant some of it around my house. I grew to love the smell of it. Of course there's the definite scent of road apples left by the horses. You can't have a constant stream of horse-drawn carriages and not get road apples. Sometimes Wadsworth wasn't always all that careful about leading me around them, either. I don't think road apples were part of his training.  But especially the Duke of Gloucester Street had quite a lot of them. It got so that when he would

put his head down to sniff at something, I knew I'd better start watching my step...so to speak."

"Sometimes," he continued, "I'd pause by a picket fence with a garden just beyond. The air would be filled with the sound of bees in the lavender. And birds. There were lots of birds. And voices. People come there from all over the world and I'd count how many different
languages I'd hear in a day. Once I was sitting on the steps of the old Courthouse where the Declaration of Independence was read to the people of the town, and the fife and drum corps came marching by. It was just so easy to imagine myself back in time. I found it really helped with my feel for the book, you know."

She was silent, picturing him exploring Williamsburg by sound and scent and feel. How he went about that was steadily becoming more real for her, though she knew she'd never grasp it completely. He couldn't stand on the lawn and look down the length of the Palace
Green and see the palace itself. He had to go up to it, touch the brick walls, the wrought iron gate, get someone else to describe the high crown atop the gate he'd walk beneath. He'd have no real idea what the palace, as a building, looked like. Why did that make that dull ache for him rise in her chest?  It wasn't pity. She knew that. There was nothing about Marshall that made you think of pitying him. It was more of a yearning.

She suddenly realized he was aware of her silence. When her eyes focused on him again, he had the slightest wry smile on his lips. "It's all right, Eden. Really it is. I'd like you to know that."

"I...I'm trying so hard, Marshall, to understand what it's like for you. I want to know. I just...."

"Me, too," he said softly. "This thing you do with your eyes...this other way of sensing and knowing...I wish I had some idea what it is. But I'm truly fine with what I have. I don't bemoan sight as a loss. For me it's not a loss."  He leaned back in his chair. "But I've had a couple of friends who once had sight and then went blind. For them the loss was enormous and adjusting to the fact of it took much time, much emotion. I've never had to go through that."

She sighed a bit raggedly. "I've never thought so much about the blind life as I have in the past few days. I feel ignorant, like there's so much I need to understand, a lot of ideas I need to get rid of, too."

"It's that way with most sighted people, probably. The general assumption is that blindness is some profound mistake that makes ordinary life impossible. In past history, with some notable exceptions, that's likely been all too true. I was blessed with a family that in no way was
going to let blindness mean a reduced life for me.  It always amazes me how ingrained the social attitudes toward blindness still are, you know. Jeffrey told me about a quiz show of some sort he was watching once and the word the man was trying to get the woman to guess was 'blind.' She just couldn't seem to get any of his hints until he said the word 'cup'.  Instantly she knew. And

so it is that what comes to the mind of most people when they think of blindness is the tin cup of the beggar. Still. Because someone is blind, they are not only affected in the eyes but must also be in the head. There's this pervasive image of helplessness, of some total disability of the body, not just the vision."

She was quiet, letting him talk.

"All my life, not from my family, but from others I've had this way of looking at blindness washing up against me like some wave." He leaned forward again. "Do you know what you get

if you look up 'blind' in Roget's Thesaurus? You get: 'weakness, lack of effect, ignorant, obtuse,
oblivious, unaware, blocked, concealed, obstructed, hidden, illiterate, backward, crude, uneducated, unversed' and so on." He drew in a deep breath. "In Sparta, you know, they used

to put blind babies in small earthenware tubs and set them out on the hillsides to die. The
blind life wasn't thought even worth a chance at living."

He stopped. "I'm sorry. My mind suddenly flooded with too many memories, too many things I've read."

"Don't be sorry, not for a minute. I need to hear all these things if I'm to know what it's like for you."

"It's one of the reasons I became a lit professor."

"This? How?"

"It seems that the main source the sighted have for information about the blind is...fiction. So it became important to me to understand just what the image of blind people is in fiction. There's quite a history to it."

"Like what?"

He smiled. "It tends to swing between one extreme or the other, I'm afraid. It's either total tragedy, foolishness, abnormality, punishment for sin...or...compensatory and with miraculous power, or as purification. We blind seldom fall in between.  Take Oedipus Rex, for instance.
The king puts out his own eyes and we get the statement 'Thou art better off dead than living blind.' Or Milton." He sighed. "The great Milton, who did his best and greatest work after he'd become blind. In spite of what he personally knew of blindness, he did much to reinforce all the
old stereotypes."

"What did he write?"

Marshall smiled grimly. "This is from Samson Agonistes. 'Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age! Inferior to the vilest now become of man or worm; the vilest here excel me. They creep, yet see; I, dark in light exposed to daily fraud, contempt,
abuse, and wrong. Within doors or without, still as a fool, in power of others, never in my own; scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half, a moving grave.'" He turned his head away a moment, repeating in a whisper, "A moving grave."

"That's just terrible!" Eden said. "Terrible!"

"But widely-read, Eden. It's Milton."

"Who else?"

"Schiller. Let's take Schiller's play, 'William Tell', written in the 1700's. 'Oh, the eye's light,

of all the gifts of Heaven the dearest, best! And he must drag on through all his days in endless darkness! To die is nothing. But to have life, and not have sight, oh, that is misery indeed.'"

"Let's not take Schiller. I don't like that at all."

"Kipling? Conrad? Kipling's 'The Light That Failed' has this. 'It's the living death. We're to

be shut up in the dark and we shan't see anybody, and we shall never have anything we want,

not though we live to be a hundred.' Or Joseph Conrad. He drowns his character, Captain Whalley, because it's so much better than being alive without sight. There's even Shakespeare, whose blinded Gloucester in King Lear can be deceived and duped into anything because he's

so entirely confused and helpless."

"Are they all helpless and sad like that?"

"There wickedness. Like the old pirate Blind Pew in Stevenson's 'Treasure Island,' a cold, cruel, and ugly man. By then people had already been thoroughly conditioned in the centuries of folklore and fable that the very worst in people is brought out by blindness. There's just too many examples to mention."

"What about what you said, the other extreme?"

"Ah, perfect virtue. In its way just as much an illusion as the other. Here we get tales of blindness as a blessing in disguise. The gods, or God, depending on where and when the tale

was written, deprive you of sight so that you might be illuminated with inward light. Such characters turn out to be so overwhelmingly sweet and noble that they're close to imbecilic,

like Nydia in 'The Last Days of Pompeii' or Bertha in Dickens' 'The Cricket on the Hearth.' 

Or, if the gods hadn't so much deprived you of sight on a whim, they'd done it as punishment and then felt guilty about it and so relented and gave the blinded person extraordinary gifts, most often that of prophecy. So your seers and prophets and old wise men were most often sightless. In more recent times we get characters like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his book, 'Sir Nigel.'  He has all these compensatory powers, ways of detecting hidden things. When one character asks another how can the blind man help them in their enterprise, the other replies that it's for that very reason that he can help more than any other man because God has so strengthened his remaining senses that he can even hear the sap flowing in the trees."  He

shook his head. "It's no service to the blind to write such things. None at all. It takes the
blind out of the normal world and plops them in some foggy place of abnormality with neither responsibility for what they do nor credit for it in their own hard work."

He rubbed his hand across his chin. "But it's Dea who gets to me."

"Dea?"

"Victor Hugo's heroine in 'The Man Who Laughs.' He's gone quite overboard with her, her blindness being compensated for by the purity and ecstasy she's absolutely absorbed in. It's a mystical notion of a sixth sense bestowed on the blind so they can 'listen to the song in their
souls.'  It's, well, pretty, and convenient, and led to all sorts of books written with blind detectives and investigators with super sleuthing sixth senses. Dea, you see, had her darkness made up to her by having in her soul this fairy-like strain of ideal music. According to Hugo, 'blindness is a cavern to which reaches the deep harmony of the Eternal.' But what it suggests

is that there's some magic inherent in blindness itself, and that whatever we might accomplish

is not due to our own ability but to this magic."

He sighed. "I've rambled on way too long, I fear. Comes from years of lecturing at university about literature. Sometimes it just wants to spill out of me."

"You know so many passages," she marveled.

"Part of the job," he smiled. "At least for me. I was," he smiled more widely, "gifted with a good memory."

She pulled her chair closer to his. "I kinda like the phrase 'the cavern of deep harmony.' Sounds like the title of a book or a poem. You should write one."

He chuckled. "Maybe someday someone will. Who knows?"

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