EKPHRASIS: “EL TÍO PAQUETE,” FRANCISCO DE GOYA, CA. 1819–1820
John Blair The famous blind man shuffles from unlit room to unlit room and lives like a flea in the ear of a mouse in a desert borderless and mad with the rustling of snakes rules nothing but his hands and sometimes his thoughts which wander to touch everything and everything’s keen edges in a dark as profound as the contemplation of sea floors or of the hollows inside the hundred gourds that Chiyo-jo said must spring from the living mind of just one vine climbing patiently towards the sun like a hundred universes vibrating in unseen loops and strings that even when they’re cut and dried and fashioned into useful things are still the thought as well as the thinking the cave that cups its palpable emptiness like a word lost in the ear of a blind man who never hears it though there’s nothing to do in the land of famously blind except listen.