mr161012 A Blinding Past  

Inspired by Isaac Lidsky in his TED talk in June, 2016 titled: What reality are you creating for yourself? 

People have many fears, such as losing your job or, worse, like going blind. A man gave a TED talk about how we create our own realities based on worst-case scenarios, and he started out by fooling everyone.

He listed five things about himself that he said were all true except one: “One: graduated from Harvard at 19 with an honors degree in mathematics. Two: I currently run a construction company in Orlando. Three: I starred on a television sitcom. Four: I lost my sight to a rare genetic eye disease. Five: I served as a law clerk to two US Supreme Court justices.”

“Which one of these do you think is not true? Which one of these things do you think I am not? Actually, all five are true. I am all those things. I am blind.” From his hip pocket he whipped out a folded white cane with a red tip.

He experienced growing blindness from age twelve, until he was completely blind in a matter of a decade. As he described his experience, he made me think of the visual arts because, he said, “Vision takes up about 30% of our brain’s cognitive reasoning.”

Recently I read a remark made by an art critic who said she can only deal with what her eyeballs tell her. She reminded me of my skepticism about the importance of vision in the arts—my certainty that there is more to art than meets the eye.

I think there is an interplay between intellect and what we see. It’s central to my art philosophy.

However, Isaac Lidsky, on the TED Talk stage, had even more to say than how much vision determines our view of the world and our place in it. When he lost his sight, he gained a more total, encompassing view of life and work. His eyes no longer fed him images that shaped his understanding of reality.

When Lidsky was finished, I realized that his main message—that fear rises from visual impressions and creates a virtual reality in ourselves—applied to me.

He said: “Fear replaces the unknown with the awful,” and, “fear is self-realizing.”

Deep-seated fear shrinks and distorts your view, he said, drowns your capacity for critical thought with a flood of disruptive emotions. I believe my fears are rooted in my boyhood. The unpredictable forces of nature, man, machine and beast could ruin my father and our family the farm.

Lidsky warned, “When you face a compelling opportunity to take action, fear lulls you into inaction, enticing you to passively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves.” My father took action and he succeeded, but I was not like my father. If I didn’t act on my love of drawing I would waste my life on the farm—my worst fear.

My passion was for art. But how could a farm boy succeed in art? All I knew was what I saw in magazines, comics and TV. It was the ‘50s, after all, in small town in central Washington State, there was no art.

In the ‘60s, however, I got encouragement from my teachers: “Billy, you have talent. You are an artist!” I clung to their praise. I wanted to believe it, but my eyes saw the risk of failure. My father was reluctant, but he said that maybe in commercial art, I had a chance.

Then I met Lynda, and she gave me incentive to follow my intuition. It seemed like art was my only chance to get off the farm and into a life worth living. It turned out that I was right, with a few surprises and bonuses along the way.

There was the Vietnam conflict, which almost side-railed us. All in all, I was lucky; but I never ceased being afraid of the worst. To avoid the pitfalls, I just worked harder, drilled deeper, practiced longer, and followed my intuition.

When Isaac Lidsky was diagnosed with his blinding disease, he said he was sure that blindness would ruin his life, a death sentence for his independence and the end of achievement. He’d live an unremarkable life, small and sad, and probably alone.

It was a fiction born of fears, imagined consequences and assumptions. He believed it. It turned out his imagination was lying to him, but it was his reality—his virtual reality. If he had not confronted the reality of his fear—his virtual reality created by eyesight— he’s certain he would have lived his worst fears.

Living your life with more than your eyes wide open is a learned discipline. It can be self-taught. It can be practiced by holding yourself accountable for every moment, every thought, and every detail. He gave a list:

“See beyond your fears.

“Recognize your assumptions.

“Harness your internal strength.

“Silence your internal critic.

“Correct your misconceptions about luck and about success.

“Accept your strengths and your weaknesses, and understand the difference.

“Open your heart to your bountiful blessings.

“Your fears, your critics, your heroes, and your villains are fictions you perceive as reality.

“Choose to see through them. Choose to let them go.

“You are the creator of your own reality. With that empowerment comes complete responsibility.”

(Stephen Covey chimes in with his spelling, response-ability, the ability to respond.)

His next words were like a revelation to me. My fears had cost me my position at the University of Washington School Of Art—a hallowed horror-house filled with fears by design.

I imagined that if I continued to follow my intuition (that there was more to printmaking than visual art) I risked failure trying to prove it. Ironically, by proving it, my worst fears came true.

Finding true art itself is a challenge, and anyone who takes up art discipline as both a calling and a career must answer Lidsky’s test questions:

“What do you fear?

“What lies do you tell yourself?

“How do you embellish your truth and write your own fictions?

“What reality are you creating for yourself?

“Search them out.”

Thus Lidsky urged us listeners.

What my eyes have told me exacted a toll in years of missed opportunities and unrealized potential; they engendered insecurity and distrust when I really seek fulfillment, connections and engagement with a community.

For me, the shame and disappointment of resigning from the art faculty was my worst fear, and, as Lidsky has taught me now, the fear was a result of believing not what was true, but what I witnessed in my nineteen years there.

Instead of seeing all the accomplishments I made up until 1984, I saw the lowbrow back-stabbing, infighting, jealousies and fears that make art schools the way they are. I saw them and I dwelled upon them—as my journals testify.

On the other hand, deep in my heart and mind, I knew there was much more than what I had seen of art, artists, and artistry. Artists like Marcel Duchamp denigrated “retinal art,” judged by a stupid organ, a stupid conduit not wholly suitable for understanding art.

Lidsky quoted Helen Keller: “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” For Lidsky, going blind was a profound blessing, because blindness gave him vision. When he went blind, he chose to step out of fear's tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined.

“I chose to build there a blessed life. Far from alone, I share my beautiful life with Dorothy, my beautiful wife, with our triplets, and with the latest addition to the family, sweet baby Clementine.”

Resigning was not the end of my career as an artist and teacher, it was the beginning of another phase which, as it is turning out to be what Lidsky said it could be.