I'm Seeing Imaginary

"Well? he said. Are you looking?

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel I was inside anything." pg 228. The case presented here is of strange occurrence, and where the choices the characters make show a meaning to their actions. We have two characters: the narrator, who is only referred to as "bud", and Robert, who is blind. As they draw the picture of a cathedral, Robert asks "bud" to close his eyes while drawing it and then open them again when they are finished. Here is where these lines take part in the story, and whose occurrence show a lot about what is happening. Why wouldn't "bud" open his eyes? The only difference between him and Robert was that he had the ability to look at whatever the two had created. He decided not to. When he closed his eyes he says he knew about everything that was there around him. There was a reality he knew was present with all the things he knew surrounded him, a reality that wouldn't change no matter what. While knowing all this he thinks about how the emptiness of feeling nothing there begins to appear. Isn't it blindness when you know somethings there, but you have no way of assuring yourself of being certain it really is?

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Robert had actually told "bud" to open his eyes, to see and assure himself in what was in front of him, but the point was really to make him understand that depending on how we can describe something, we are able to see it one way or another. Robert could not see it in the same way as he did, but once they were finished there was a way for both of them to actually recognize it. But was "bud" trying to see something else apart from what Robert wanted him to see? He finishes off by saying: "It's really something. I said." pg 228. From Roberts point of view you would think "bud" is referring to how beautiful the piece came out after he saw it, but it really isn't like that. He is looking at nothing really, but is rather imagining while his eyes are closed. He is imagining a world he hadn't paid much attention to before, a world that showed him a new point of view. What he saw was not the picture. What he saw was what he thought the picture would look like. By actually not looking at it directly, he is opening his mind to what the picture could be. He knows it is there. He knows he drew it and how it must sort of look like. Now he uses his imagination, he constructs it in his head and sees how it is we can all see something, one way or another.