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Science, art, philosophy, even politics—it all started with the Greeks. At least that's what my pre-multicultural schooling taught me. And the Greek who gave Western literature its initial push was Homer, the blind bard who, in the eighth century b.c., wandered from one rich man's table to another, reciting the adventures of heroes and gods. Today, most classical scholars deem those epics previously attributed to Homer to be the composite creation of many poets. Unfortunately, the scholars never mention those putative poets' ophthalmic condition.
How blindness affects writers has been a salient concern of mine ever since I began losing my sight five years ago. Americans, whatever their work, fear blindness more than any other physical affliction except cancer. Of course, affliction is not a word often applied to such conditions anymore. Instead, we use "disability," though even that term is challenged by the more militant wing of organizations representing the interests of—to use biblical taxonomy—the maimed, the halt, and the blind. And though I am more sympathetic with such concerns than I was five years ago, I nonetheless find the monosyllable that designates my own condition appropriately blunt. Blind.
Disabled certainly doesn't fit Homer's seer, Tiresias of Thebes, who was struck blind by Athena for peeking at her while she bathed. To compensate for the loss of his sight, the goddess generously granted him the gift of prophecy. A dubious reward, as Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex makes clear. Whoever believes prophets, blind or otherwise, in literature?
Nevertheless, in many and diverse cultures, prophets are often blind, as if not being able to look out at the world, they are endowed with special powers of looking inward. Like the fools who speak much sense in Shakespeare's plays, blind literary characters often fill the paradoxical role of seer. And whether or not Homer existed, the poems traditionally attributed to him have influenced other blind writers of note, among them John Milton, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges.
As a young man, Milton consciously set about educating himself to be a poet by studying classical languages. In Paradise Lost he braids together the strands of biblical and Homeric allusions so tightly that the first three chapters of Genesis have had a distinctly Greek flavor for subsequent generations. By transforming the simple pastoral story of Eden into a grand epic of celestial warfare, Milton reinvented Satan as an upstart god challenging a Homeric Zeus. Thus, he solidified our near-Manichaean picture of the cosmic struggle between good and evil.
Homer aside, what other signs show that blindness affected Milton's writing? When civil war broke England apart along religious lines, Milton made the conscious decision to sacrifice his literary ambition for the sake of the Puritan cause. He served as Cromwell's Latin secretary (international documents and letters were written in this universal scholar's language). Giving up his poetical ambitions, Milton claimed he had worn out his eyes in these labors, but the real cause of his blindness has not been firmly established. Some researchers speculate that he lost his sight to diabetes. The Royalists posited their own explanation: Milton's blindness was God's judgment on him for supporting Charles I's beheading.
In 1652, Milton was functionally blind. By 1657, his visual difficulties demanded he take on an amanuensis, the poet Andrew Marvell, who later helped to secure Milton's pardon when Charles II was restored to the throne. The royal clemency proved to be well rewarded. Seven years later, Milton gave the world Paradise Lost, whose effects still reverberate in Western culture. But how did a blind man manage to come up with a 12-book poem? And without the computer-based "adaptive technology" of the sort that enables me to keep writing?
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