Seeing the Blind

It is slowly getting dark. J walks along the street. A noise gets louder, white lights, red lights, a breeze, then it's quiet again. J crosses the street and looks down the embankment. In the back the lights of the street lighting, in front of him only noise. After a short wait, he recognizes a narrow path in the dim light. Was it here? His heartbeat almost drowns out the chirping of the crickets. J takes a breath and starts walking. Dry stalks brush his calves, bushes brush his arms. There is a rustling. J flinches and stops. He tries to remember the way. In the process, the spinning in his head only speeds up. He tries to remember the images from back then. But it's as if the rustling in front of his eyes is also spreading inside. Drops on his arm snap J out of the rising panic. Intuitively, he looks up. But he does not see the rain. He feels his face touched by the rain. He smells the air being washed by the rain. He hears the plants that are covered by the rain. "Rain has the peculiarity of highlighting the outlines of all things; it casts a colored blanket over things that were previously invisible; where before there was an interrupted and thus fragmented world, the evenly falling rain creates a continuity of acoustic perception." J exhales and continues walking. Text and images explore what it feels like to walk the path to total blindness. This was based on the notes of a blind person who describes how in the state of blindness not only the physical eye but also the "inner eye" gradually goes blind, how visual memory and orientation, pictorial memories and concepts are lost.