Just this week I circled back around to the phenomenal movie Blindness – of course based on the book of the same name by Jose Saramago, the late Portuguese Nobel laureate.  I first came to Blindness through the book and I am glad I did. The movie offers a version of what could be, a version provided by another’s imagination, and I appreciate it. But I wasn’t terrorized nearly so much by the movie as by the book. It grabbed and shook me.

It is possible, after all, for blindness to pass as a contagion, an epidemic. At first it is contained to a few whom are quarantined. But then – on the other side of the tipping point – the whole world goes blind. It is a vast sea of liminality into which people have descended. And what Saramago allows us to see is just how bad and good people may become when they are stripped of the artificial structure of life on which they depend and take for granted. The basest drives and instincts come forward. As does heroism.

In the midst of collective blindness there is one who can see. And fortunately for everyone she has a good soul. Her sight is used for good and she becomes the liminal guide to assist and lead and provide as no one else can. Liminal guides are precious, known for who they really are when nothing is as it used to be.

Of course, we enter collective times of blindness in which we find ourselves under the spell of the times. Such blindness is contagious. It still requires brave guides who can see when others cannot. And the other side of that chasm is unlike the place we came from. It has to be. Because there is never going back, only stumbling forward toward the time when we might see something again.

TLC