Seeing: Part 1

I just finished reading Saramago’s new novel, Seeing, last night.
Seeing.
I’ve been thinking about that word, off and on, all day.
Many of you have also read the book, and know that there are many tie-ins [especially in the latter half] to the events of his previous (1997) novel entitled Blindness. I hesitate to call this new one a direct sequel, and yet maybe it is, because really, I think a lot of its nuance is lost if you have not read Blindness.
But the words.
Blindness is a noun. And in that book, a rampant contagion of blindness descends upon an unsuspecting populace. It descends like a noun… like a thick white blanket upon the eyes of an entire city. Boom! The people see white. All activity is stifled by the inability to see. What I am getting at is that there is no more obvious and fitting title to Saramago’s 1997 book, then the actual word blindness!
But he has chosen to call this new book Seeing. A verb. Or, if not an actual verb, at least more verbish [verbful?] than say for instance, the other word that may have been used. Sight!
And so it is that all day I have been asking myself…. seeing what?
What is it that these people in Seeing, are seeing?
In other words, this new title is more obscure… and the book is not about a populace whose eyesight gets better, nor does it address any sort of optimetric difficulties or enhancements, nor is it about blind people who now see.
Ah, but then again… it is, in a way, because all of these characters recall their former blindness, experienced four years prior to the time frame of Seeing.
They are people who can see, but once were blind.
All except for one of them, a woman, the doctor’s wife, who mysteriously did not go blind in the former plague.
And she becomes the pivot, upon which this book… pivots.

We care a lot about seeing.
Just this morning, Toronto, Canada’s largest city, was hit with an unexpected strike of the TTC. No one saw it coming. Even many of the TTC workers themselves, as they showed up to be greeted by locked doors. The strike descended like a thick blanket over the city. Anyone who uses public transit to get to work was stranded. I was watching the news as I always do before going to work. There were images of traffic snarls ten miles long, and angry people everywhere. I sipped my coffee and watched as the news chopper hovered over the TTC grounds, showing aerial proof of the fact that every single city bus was sitting there in the yard, unmoving.
I made some breakfast. Ate it. Poured another coffee. Several commercials later, the chopper was shown again, LIVE over the TTC grounds.
I had a shower. Came out. Was getting my stuff together to run out the door and took a last glance at the TV while shutting it off. There was the same chopper, still chopping away above the TTC grounds, LIVE… on the scene.
As I drove to work, I said to myself, “My God! That is how bad we want to see stuff.”
Think of it. A news company [in this case, Global© ] sent a helicopter into the stratosphere to hover over the bus yards, and get an image. Visible proof that the buses are not running. Could they not have got their intended footage, then landed, gone to Tim Horton’s or whatever and called it a day?
Ran the same clip over and over?
No.
They kept on hovering.
Somewhere, some supervisor is shouting into the headsets of the exhausted pilot and crew…. “No. Do not return to earth. Keep hovering. I repeat… do not stop hovering over those totally parked and immobile buses! And keep the cameras rolling.”
Before I was even awake. And all though my breakfast. Then during my shower.
And even as I drove to work…. same helicopter, wasting gas, hovering like a pregnant bee, and droning the same repeated message…. “As you can clearly see folks, half a mile below us, the buses are not running. This is coming to you LIVE from the TTC yards….”
A similar thing happens when some horrendous crime is committed in a neighborhood. They actually GO to the neighborhood. Nothing else will do...
“Here we are LIVE at the scene of the crime. That’s the house there behind me, where earlier this evening ten people were viciously…. blah-blah-blah…”
And we want to see this. It is not at all good enough that they just put up one studio house façade that will easily serve for excellent tangible evidence of a year’s worth of horrendous crimes…. no, they must go to the actual house!
We want to see the actual place where this heinous thing happened! What did the neighbors think of it? How really horrific was it? How far away were you when you heard the first of the ten screams?
The reporter on the scene will tell us, or so we hope.
I say all of this to just emphasize that our desire to see stuff… and preferably, see it LIVE, as it happens, is voracious!

This is a key idea in Saramago’s Seeing, because in this book, the municipal government [the city officials] try to repeatedly sway popular opinion by way of media manipulation. When faced with an inexplicable crisis, they try to entreat and endear the people through the indirect method of creating terror and then reporting on it, always according to their own skewed objectives.
The truth is not what is true, the truth is what we tell you is true!
The trump card involves the mass distribution of a photograph, and the trick is attaching it to a web of lies!
The game becomes finding a scapegoat. And they do.
Does the government succeed in their pernicious plot?
I’ll never tell. [Truth is, I don’t even know!]

For now I should just bring this blog in for a landing. The above is not meant to be a book review, by any means. It’s just a bit of preliminary blabbing about a superb book and my morning ablutions.
Today’s overall rambling and incoherence is why I’ve subtitled this thing “Part 1” because see, I want to return to the topic of this book, in subsequent incoherent blogs.
"So for now, this is Cipriano, coming to you LIVE from a table in Starbucks… "

**************