the beachcombing dreams

"When one is blind, all that once seemed solid now flows and pursues. The day, like a lift out of control, sweeps up and down stopping at all floors of darkness. One longs more than ever to keep the world in its place, to demand that furniture should be seen and not heard, speak only when it is spoken to. But perhaps I am mistaken, perhaps our sight is not the perfect host, it is merely the owner of the house trying to make the best of entertaining this furious gate-crasher, light, which denied the shelter and sustenance of being seen, will persist at the doors of other senses, queuing at the house of touch and hearing and smell and the unnamed senses which absorb the world, as some creatures absorb food, through the skin and through the invisible sponges on the shores of the mind which suck in the experience of time and are sought each night by the beachcombing dreams which also pick up the pawa shells, the lamp shells, the snail houses."

Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind