The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness

Rod Michalko offers us an exploration of blindness which places blindness at the cultural centre of western thought and experience. Michalko values the variety of the lives of those who are blind and offers their stories as a way of both challenging our assumptions about blindness and offering ways of appreciating the place of blindness culturally and personally. I was particularly struck by this sentence from the book which is the operating principle of his work " Fictional or not, blindness is always revealed through narration and is always dramatic" (pg 8). He recounts the stories of the blind and those who work with and on the blind. In this way he makes the story of blindness an intimate one. This intimacy leads us through the various attitudes and treatments of the blind and allows us to discover the extraordnariness of blindness. In turn, blindness challenges our assumptions about the ordinariness of seeing and reveals the mysteries that lie at the heart of sight.It is a powerful book, dare I say, it opened my eyes.