Baby Goes Blind

and other things that too much light makes you not see...

My dearest luminaries and literati:

I lost the library book Blindness. I looked everywhere. Couldn’t find it. Finally went ahead and paid for it.

(Side note: Spring in Brooklyn was so painfully pretty this week I almost went blind)

When I lost José Saramago’s Blindness (and yes, this irony hit hard) I was terribly embarrassed. How does anyone lose a book? I have books on my shelves that predate my three decades of marriage. Books from childhood even. Books that were once covered in the dust of 9-11 and books that traveled with me to West Germany when that was a country. I have books that are out of print, and books that are out of style…

There are books that I keep because they are relics. Books that I keep for the inscription. Books that remind me that I was once someone else.

Is that possible? to be someone else? Yet books definitely can change you - they pry open your mind to let the light inside. Sometimes they fill you with joy and sometimes they open your eyes so wide it hurts. I did most of my greatest learning through books.

Books are a tunnel out of your life, and also a tunnel deeper into yourself.

There is no better way to get to know someone’s entire history quickly than to scan their bookshelves.

Books are treasure chests full of stories. Stories, I guess, are the real treasure—but even in the case of a pirate chest, the gold coins inside are sometimes banal when compared to that amazing, battered, weatherbeaten strongbox half-buried in the sand and containing…?

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Writing News:

This is my last week in the States for a while! I’m going to a writing residency in Croatia on Friday and after that I’ll stop in Vienna, Prague (for my birthday!) and finally land in Lithuania where the Writers of the Diaspora Forum is convening (as we do every three years).

I will be out of this country (and my mind?) for the next month!

I’ll be writing posts on this Substack full of my observations, thoughts, maybe short fiction or poetry - as a thank you to those of you who are paid subscribers—I’m grateful to you for making this trip possible with your support of my writing! I’ll also of course continue these weekly free Sunday posts if I can remember which day is Sunday!

MORE NEWS!!

On June 28th, Your Faithful Reader (a theater company) will perform my “letter” on stage. It’s a wonderful and strange off-Broadway venue - they solicit letters from writers and transform them into theater through a combination of improv and direction. Thanks to Vesna Jaksic Lowe who invited me to see her piece and inspired me to write one of my own!

Inspiration? This week I went to the book launch of my friend Sarah Farivar-Hayes, and I saw two Broadway shows; a quite perplexing one at Lincoln Center - Five Models in Ruins, 1981, and one at Manhattan Theater Club: Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends - with Lea Salonga and Bernadette Peters! I was 23 when I first met Bernadette Peters - she came into the shop on a Saturday afternoon where I worked on Broadway and bought some ridiculous thing that she returned the next day. The cast of the show is outstanding and nearly all of the ensemble are established lead actors in their own right - 50-70 and still nailing high notes and high kicks (one of them did the splits!)

The cast teaches us a good lesson: there’s always someone more famous than you (they are overshadowed by Lea and Bernadette even while they nail Sondheim showstoppers to the point that most of the audience was weeping from the sheer beauty of it all). And even if you don’t want to go deep on what it means to be middle-aged on the stage, the genius of Sondheim’s rhymes and the stunning one-liners remind us of truths about relationships. Including those great lines from I’m Still Here:

First you're another
Sloe-eyed vamp,
Then someone's mother,
Then you're camp.
Then you career from career
To career.
I'm almost through my memoirs.
And I'm here.

Besides theater, I’ve also been listening to James Turrell explain his own work about light on a video (isn’t a video just a story made of light?). Enlightenment. We are all a little wiser now.

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Random Final Thought:

So remember I lost Nobel-Prize winning author José Saramago’s best known book, Blindness and eventually paid the library for its loss? I found the book again (fallen behind my bed’s headboard and stuck against the wall). And now that Blindness has been shaken loose, I don’t know who owns it. I paid for it, so technically it doesn’t belong to the library anymore. But does a library book ever stop being a library book? Can I treat it like a normal book on my bookshelves? I’m finding that difficult—after all, it looks like a library book, it has the markings, the stamps and tags, the overused feel, soft dogeared well-loved pages. I can’t sell it as a used book because it was owned in a very different way - not just read by a stranger or two but belonged to a library. I am embarrassed to lend it out to friends because it is so clearly a library book. Is it actually mine now? Will it ever be? Or was the cost I paid merely a punishment; a means by which the library could get a replacement that was newer, less abused?

Absurdly, this actually happened. I am living with this book on my desk, trying to see it as anything but a metaphor. I will be bringing it on my travels.

Long time ago, I watched the play Too Much Light Makes Baby Go Blind the same month that I played Nanny in the play Baby with the Bathwater. Coincidence? Less coincidental than meeting a woman last week at the Apple store because she was speaking Lithuanian, and then having coffee with her this week (why not, we’re neighbors), and discovering she is a parent looking for accountability for the memoir she’d like to write. Now THAT was coincidence.