 |  |
|
We bus drivers have our favorites, passengers who lift us up and carry us away from the dull repetitive regularity of the bus route. (We should be paying them to ride the bus, rather than the other way around.) Byron, one of my blind passengers, was the ne plus ultra in transport-the-driver-away-from-boredom. He knew I was into wordplay and once we challenged each other to name every word in English that only had "y" as the vowel. Between us, over the course of a couple of months we came up with about 40 examples. Syzygy made us hoot out loud like pith helmeted adventurers stumbling upon King Tut's tomb. One day he got on the bus and said he had an art question. He wanted to get a fine art print for his wife. The parameters of his quest were specific: he wanted something modern and erotic, but tasteful, definitely not a "dirty picture". But not too abstract. And so, slipping into my first time role of art advisor to the blind I said,"Gustav Klimt, The Kiss." And off he went to the framing shop and they had a print of The Kiss and they described it to him. It sounded good so he had it dry mounted and then went about town on other errands, showing it to shopkeepers to get their reaction to it as he went. One clerk said, "They look mighty uncomfortable standing on their heads, no wonder that guy's neck is bent so much." Ooops. (Thought we were at an art show down under, in Australia) I think being blind and being an avid collector can be similar. You are a minority. You're surrounded by a mass of people who can't fully understand you. Except for the matter of choice of course. No one chooses to be blind. Theoretically you *could* give up every last piece of depression glass you've collected over the last 50 years. But you wont. And I'm not gonna get started on the topic of collection as handicap.(Not in this column anyway.) I was always impressed by that art appreciation angle in Byron. It was art for the sake of another's eyes and it was enlivening that he thought to use me to get there. A picture is worth a thousand words. Here's a dozen words----- what's my picture, Bub? Beauty is in the eye or perhaps the mind of the beholder. Helen of Troy was proclaimed to have the beauty to launch a thousand ships. What would you call the amount of beauty sufficient for the launching of just one ship? A milihelen!
|
|
