After reading "Cathedral" and Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", my mind didn't immediately go to the blind reference, but to another text. In Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, there is a very similar situation to "Cathedral". The main characters have come to a planet with an opaque atmosphere, where there is no distinct difference between day and night except in temperature and the shades of gray.
What caught my attention was a dialogue between Meg, the main character, and one of the planet's population, whom she has affectionately dubbed "Aunt Beast". Aunt Beast and all of her kind do not see. They have no need for it. And so, Meg tries to describe light to her, but cannot do it. She tries to describe sight, which doesn't go over well either. Aunt Beast says, (roughly) "What a sad world, where you have to rely so heavily on something you do not understand."
The reason I bring this up is because I see a connection, beyond the idea of sight and blindness, in "Cathedral" and "Allegory". In "Cathedral", we see the stumbling attempts of a seeing man to describe a cathedral to a blind man. Automatically, he uses references to things that he sees. He cannot get around the mental block placed by having sight. The same is true in "Allegory". The men in the cave only know what the "see", what is presented to them. Each gets caught up in the act of "seeing" and cannot get beyond their sight. The same is true with Meg and Aunt Beast.
In an attempt to help the struggling Meg, Aunt Beast suggests thinking about what she means. Meg does, but still words like "light" and "seeing" get thrown in. Aunt Beast cannot understand what Meg means because she can't get around the mental block. In "Cathedral", however, the Blind Man thinks of a way. By drawing a cathedral together, he can "feel" what a cathedral looks like. It is very successful, and they go a step farther, having the speaker close his eyes and continue drawing the cathedral.
What happens is that the man with sight begins to understand how a blind man views the world. It isn't through "sight", but a vision beyond sight. The speaker has to get beyond his sight to actually "see" a cathedral. When he describes the cathedral to the blind man, he describes it's features; buttrasses, stone, and stained glass. But he doesn't actually "see" the cathedral, he sees it's parts. It isn't until he closes his eyes and simply draws the cathedral that he actually "sees" what it really is.
In "Allegory", Plato says, "To them (the men in the cave), the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images." The men in the cave rely on their sight to try and see the world arround them, but they go no farther than what is presented to them. It is only when one of them breaks away and goes beyond what is presented that he actually sees the true world.
The lesson? Very simply, we have to go farther than just sight to actually "see" what is in the world arround us. We can't just say "It's a cathedral" whithout knowing what a cathedral is, beyond what we see. The same is true in life. We can simply rely on our sight, but then the world is nothing but the "shadows" of the truth. Truth is beyond sight. And we have to try to see beyond sight to find it.
Posted by RachelCrump at January 26, 2004 01:26 PM