Unseen Visions

I am sitting in the waiting room of the Day Surgery unit at Lions Eye Institute in Perth, Western Australia.

I am waiting for my father to come out from an operation for cataracts in his left eye.

It is the first time I have had to fill a caring role for one of my parents. My father had to abstain from food and water since 2am this morning. I was parched when I woke up, I didn’t want to dwell too much about how starved and thirsty he must be feeling, under the Western Australian sun, already so harsh at eight in the morning.

The nurse asks if I will be the one to care for him tonight. I say, ‘Yes’, without hesitating. This surprised me. Me? Care for him? He was the one paying for my dresses just last night! What do I know about caring for him?
Nonetheless, I say, ‘Yes.’

He puts on a gown and disappears into the care of strange withered white men with hands I hope are sturdier than they look.

As I wait, my eyes, thirty-six years younger than those of my father’s, glide along the room.

On the walls are framed paintings of E. Van Wilgenburg’s experience of Macular Degeneration, an eye condition that is the leading cause of blindness in Australia. I am wholly unfamiliar with it, but I gain an ironically visual sense of the condition, through the paintings on the wall.

There are ink washes of darkness, surrounded by a cooling aqua blue, reminiscent of monochromatic black holes that feature in my nightmares from time to time. In one painting, Wilgenburg has depicted fleeting bright lights not unlike the clearest pictures of young stars. In another painting, Wilgenburg drew a meticulous golden pond underneath a mottled maroon sky, a vision generated post-surgery. On another canvas, in place of darkness, we see aurora borealis, quickly replaced by mysterious dancing orbs.

It is of some consolation to me that here is one person who created some wondrous art through their experiences of becoming temporarily ‘blind’. Their paintings are a testament to the variety of visions that they encountered in ‘losing’ their eyesight.

Contrary to my belief that becoming blind plunges you into a world of darkness, the journey for Wilgenburg meant that they were privy to visions that everyone else was excluded from seeing. Wilgenburg had an ever-evolving canvas stretched over their pupils and irises. They couldn’t see what other people were seeing: grey asphalt, electric poles, corporate slogans on billboards… More importantly, no one else could see the miracles they were beholding everyday, without even having to open their eyelids.

It is interesting that I myself have just finished performing in Blind, As you see it, a hybrid physical theatre and puppetry performance based on the experiences of people losing their eyesight, created by Michal Imielski. Here was another example of the creation of something beautiful out of painful and emotionally exigent experiences.

What a silver lining! I wonder whether my father and I will find our own silver lining through this new stage of our father-daughter relationship?