Jacques Lusseyran, Author of Against the Pollution of the I
Excerpted from Against the Pollution of the I: On the Gifts of Blindness, the Power of Poetry, and the Urgency of Awareness.
Introduction by Christopher Bamford
The Life of Jacques Lusseyran?
Born in Paris in 1924, Jacques Lusseyran’s childhood was exceptionally happy. As he tells it in his autobiography And There Was Light, his parents were ideal — generous, attentive, warm, protective, confidence-inspiring. In his own words, they were “heaven.” Very early, they communicated to him the sense that “another Being” loved him, concerned itself with his life, and even spoke to him. For his first seven years, Jacques Lusseyran lived a life of pure, unadulterated, childhood joy. He loved everything in life, especially light in all its manifold forms and colors, including darkness.
When he was seven, around Easter, something happened. It was time to go back to Paris from the little village in the Anjou where he had been vacationing. The buggy was at the door to take him to the station. Inexplicably, he stayed behind in the garden, by the corner of the barn, in tears. “I was crying,” he writes, “because I was looking at the garden for the last time.” Three weeks later, at school, as class ended, there was a rush for the door, a scuffle; Jacques was taken off guard and fell. His head struck one of the sharp corners of the teacher’s desk. He was wearing spectacles, one arm of which drove deep into his right eye. He lost consciousness, and when he came to, his eyes were gone. The doctors had decided to remove the right eye, and the operation was successful. As for the left eye, the retina was badly torn too. The blow had been so severe as to cause sympathetic ophthalmia. Jacques “had become completely and permanently blind.”
But though Jacques became blind, he continued to see. After a few days, he realized that by looking inward, he could see a radiance: “light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them.” He was able to live in this stream of inner light which, like outer light, illuminated objects and people, giving them form and full color. There were times when the light seemed to fade, or disappear, but this was only when he was afraid or hesitated, doubted or began to calculate.
Lusseyran also began to understand that there was a world beyond the ordinary auditory sense, where everything had its own sound. These sounds were neither inside nor outside, but “were passing through him.” Similarly with touch: a new world of infinitely differentiated pressure opened up to him. To find one’s way around the world, all it took was a certain training in attention. Reality was a complex field of interacting pressures. “By the time I was ten years old,” he writes, “I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else, ready to take its place if it should fall by the way. And this continued miracle of healing I heard expressed fully in the Lord’s Prayer that I repeated at night before going to sleep....”
What accounts for this? Lusseyran gives no global explanation, except to insist on the wisdom and the health of his parents’ decision not to treat his blindness as a “disability” and sequester him from the world among the “disabled,” but to allow him to continue to lead an ordinary life among the “seeing.” He went back to school. When he learned Braille, his parents bought him a Braille typewriter. The rest was imagination, attention, and a deepening sense of the inner light. He was reborn.
Lusseyran was an extraordinary soul. A brilliant student, he quickly became the head of his class — a lively, joyful, reflective, deeply caring young person. He loved languages, literature, art, theater, life. Then, on March 12, 1938, Germany invaded Austria. The thirteen-year-old heard the news on the radio and heard the German language, twisted and tormented in unimaginable ways. To understand what he heard, he decided to perfect his German, for he intuited that what was happening would destroy his childhood.
The turning point came when the Gestapo showed its hand. People began to disappear. Jacques fell ill with measles, and when it left him “it set free a torrent of energy.” He formed his own Resistance movement. Fifty- two young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one attended the first meeting. Within a year, there were more than six hundred. Calling themselves the Volunteers of Liberty, they took it as their task “to give people the news” — creating an information network, a newspaper. It is a miracle of the Resistance, this army of young people, commanded by a blind adolescent who kept everything, including fifteen hundred telephone numbers, in his head to avoid having anything incriminating on paper. Nor was that all; in the fall of 1941, he entered the University of Paris to study literature.
In “What One Sees Without Eyes,” after describing his realization that he had lost nothing when he had become blind — that an inner light greater than any outer light had come to take the place of that which he had lost — he writes: “When one realizes that...I assure you it is not difficult to believe in God. He is there under a form that [is]...quite simply alive....When I remember it, I have exactly the sensation of someone taking my hand, or that a ray of light — it is exactly this way — comes toward and touches me. If I know where that ray of light is, I no longer have any problems.”
The challenge with which Lusseyran confronts us is that these two realities of light and faith are ineffable and unstated realities. Faith must become an experience that unfolds “our very self.” This is why I think it legitimate to call him a secular “saint,” as well as a hero. What he has to say about his cognitive and suprasensory experiences is challenging enough. The world is other than what we seeing, sleeping ones imagine. He convinces us of the truth of this other world, even if we do not quite understand it. We realize that there is more than simply an altered, perhaps truer state of consciousness: Lusseyran is really talking about metanoia, a change of mind in God.
— Christopher Bamford
Introduction by Christopher Bamford
The Life of Jacques Lusseyran?
When he was seven, around Easter, something happened. It was time to go back to Paris from the little village in the Anjou where he had been vacationing. The buggy was at the door to take him to the station. Inexplicably, he stayed behind in the garden, by the corner of the barn, in tears. “I was crying,” he writes, “because I was looking at the garden for the last time.” Three weeks later, at school, as class ended, there was a rush for the door, a scuffle; Jacques was taken off guard and fell. His head struck one of the sharp corners of the teacher’s desk. He was wearing spectacles, one arm of which drove deep into his right eye. He lost consciousness, and when he came to, his eyes were gone. The doctors had decided to remove the right eye, and the operation was successful. As for the left eye, the retina was badly torn too. The blow had been so severe as to cause sympathetic ophthalmia. Jacques “had become completely and permanently blind.”
But though Jacques became blind, he continued to see. After a few days, he realized that by looking inward, he could see a radiance: “light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them.” He was able to live in this stream of inner light which, like outer light, illuminated objects and people, giving them form and full color. There were times when the light seemed to fade, or disappear, but this was only when he was afraid or hesitated, doubted or began to calculate.
Lusseyran also began to understand that there was a world beyond the ordinary auditory sense, where everything had its own sound. These sounds were neither inside nor outside, but “were passing through him.” Similarly with touch: a new world of infinitely differentiated pressure opened up to him. To find one’s way around the world, all it took was a certain training in attention. Reality was a complex field of interacting pressures. “By the time I was ten years old,” he writes, “I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else, ready to take its place if it should fall by the way. And this continued miracle of healing I heard expressed fully in the Lord’s Prayer that I repeated at night before going to sleep....”
What accounts for this? Lusseyran gives no global explanation, except to insist on the wisdom and the health of his parents’ decision not to treat his blindness as a “disability” and sequester him from the world among the “disabled,” but to allow him to continue to lead an ordinary life among the “seeing.” He went back to school. When he learned Braille, his parents bought him a Braille typewriter. The rest was imagination, attention, and a deepening sense of the inner light. He was reborn.
Lusseyran was an extraordinary soul. A brilliant student, he quickly became the head of his class — a lively, joyful, reflective, deeply caring young person. He loved languages, literature, art, theater, life. Then, on March 12, 1938, Germany invaded Austria. The thirteen-year-old heard the news on the radio and heard the German language, twisted and tormented in unimaginable ways. To understand what he heard, he decided to perfect his German, for he intuited that what was happening would destroy his childhood.
The turning point came when the Gestapo showed its hand. People began to disappear. Jacques fell ill with measles, and when it left him “it set free a torrent of energy.” He formed his own Resistance movement. Fifty- two young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one attended the first meeting. Within a year, there were more than six hundred. Calling themselves the Volunteers of Liberty, they took it as their task “to give people the news” — creating an information network, a newspaper. It is a miracle of the Resistance, this army of young people, commanded by a blind adolescent who kept everything, including fifteen hundred telephone numbers, in his head to avoid having anything incriminating on paper. Nor was that all; in the fall of 1941, he entered the University of Paris to study literature.
In “What One Sees Without Eyes,” after describing his realization that he had lost nothing when he had become blind — that an inner light greater than any outer light had come to take the place of that which he had lost — he writes: “When one realizes that...I assure you it is not difficult to believe in God. He is there under a form that [is]...quite simply alive....When I remember it, I have exactly the sensation of someone taking my hand, or that a ray of light — it is exactly this way — comes toward and touches me. If I know where that ray of light is, I no longer have any problems.”
The challenge with which Lusseyran confronts us is that these two realities of light and faith are ineffable and unstated realities. Faith must become an experience that unfolds “our very self.” This is why I think it legitimate to call him a secular “saint,” as well as a hero. What he has to say about his cognitive and suprasensory experiences is challenging enough. The world is other than what we seeing, sleeping ones imagine. He convinces us of the truth of this other world, even if we do not quite understand it. We realize that there is more than simply an altered, perhaps truer state of consciousness: Lusseyran is really talking about metanoia, a change of mind in God.
— Christopher Bamford