Noctium phantasmata
Jacques Lusseyran, blind from the age of eight, reflected throughout his life on the nature of seeing and not-seeing. I am struck by this passage from his Conversation amoureuse. ‘Those with eye-sight speak so poorly about the imagination. It is as if they did not know what it is. They speak as if they were sure that it replaces everything, especially the eyes. They do not see that in fact it generates thousands of figures, combining them in different ways for days on end, leaving you in an emptiness as vast as that of migraine. I have always affirmed that there is no such thing as the night of blindness. If it does exist, it takes the form of an invasion of images. For not all are good. There are those that tell you the opposite of reality; which speak to you only of your own reality. If you have the misfortune to look too much at these, it’s the end of love.’ Such reality-subverting, self-absorbed images are like the noctium phantasmata from which we pray at compline that our eyes, inward and outward, may be freed.
