Author Archives: clareburson

imagine a world in which your eyes are so sensitive to light that blinking refers to the moments during which your eyes actually open – sporadically and involuntarily. this inverse blinking offers just enough visual information for you to orient yourself before being plunged back into darkness.

this isn’t a world devoid of light.

and it isn’t blindness.

it is neither a place nor a condition with the calm and predictability to allow for adaptation.

for that, it is too interrupted, too jarring.

this world is a tease, offering you treasures only to withdraw them as you reach out your hand.  repeatedly.  thousands of times each day.

you are left, then, living out your life with a looming sense of uncertainty, instability and of things beyond your grasp and outside of your control.

in a disorienting world of inverse blinking, some of us respond by essentially blocking out all glimpses of what lies beyond our eyelids.  we take in only what we need to keep our balance, to avoid tripping over chairs or burning our hands on an open flame.

others of us fill in the blanks, connect the dots.  we take what we see in those momentary slivers of sight and build upon it. we extend a line or color in a corner of fabric.  we assemble our own narrative, hoping and sometimes believing that it actually corresponds to that which we cannot fully see.

See the map of this post from Brooklyn.