Landscapes in the American Southwest

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There is something about wilderness, the eternal carpet and spread of littered flowers mixed with the wild humps of ancient mountains. It gets into you somehow, down past your humanity and your inhibitions and your mammalian instincts until you once again collapse into the solitude of the eternal, unbroken evolution of life.

I take photographs so people can see what I see. I haven't always been able to see. I was born with an eye condition called strabismus, with one eye wandering out to the corner of my eye as a result of weak eye muscles. Growing up, this was an annoyance at best. But as a teenager, I began to lose sight in my left eye. However, my brain was used to switching between eyes, so the added strain began to make me lose sight in my right eye as well.

I had a surgery when I was 18. The doctor rearranged my eye muscles, tightening everything up in the hope that it would save my sight. When I opened my eyes, still groggy from the anesthesia, I couldn't see anything. The world was a vast gray landscape, with dim, darker silhouettes marking the largest and most important shapes. I saw no color, no form, and could recognize nothing. That creates a special form of panic. Your brain is creaming for the familiar, but nothing is familiar and you know it will never be the same again.

The first thing I grabbed was a nose. It was my uncle's nose, but my brain remembered what brains looked like. As he feebly protested, I felt up his nostril, my hands sensing what my eyes could not. I could see pores, in my mind's eye. I could feel the roll of the nose reaching into my palm. He shoved it down and marked it up to the drugs. My brain was racing, a feeling more profound than any orgasm or high. Here was something new, something unsettling, but achingly familiar. I could see, but not with my eyes.

I won't bore you with the details. I felt so many things with my fingers, learning their shape and feel and texture. I could feel the grain of wood, the texture of paper, the threads in a cotton sheet. I could see them in detail my eyes had never provided. In time, my sight began to return, first in fits and starts, then blurry like the longest bender of all time.

Today, I went out to the wilderness and took photographs full of vibrant light. Today, I saw the infinite riot of color. I have seen things in my twenties that I have never seen before. The beauty of the world simply astounds me. How was there all of this color, all of this form, all of this space and distance, in the familiar 2-D world of broken eyes? Was it all there, all around me, unperceivable and thus unknown?