the new canon: blindness, by jose saramago

I've just finished a book, and though this book is probably written about tirelessly, endlessly, and without hesitation, I just have to say how wonderful this book was to my outlook (at least, we can argue, for today). The book of course is Jose Saramago's Blindness, something that I'd purchased some odd years ago and finally gotten around to reading. I've also got his book The Body-Double just laying around, ready to be devoured. Anyway, this book centers around a country that suddenly, and inexplicably, begins to suffer from White Sickness, a sudden and vivid whiteness taking over their sight.

It serves, in a way, as a quick and neat allegory for the uselessness of our current, sumptuous society; towards the latter pages of the book, blind prophets preach about the head of the praying mantis and the claw of the hen, the tail of the rabbit and the circumfrence of who knows what. Simultaneously, equal prophets gain audience for preaching of free markets, circles, vertical, diagonal, tariffs and the imaginary, putting both society and religion into an equal realm of obsurdity. While wading through the reality of the human animal - that without our world of society to protect us, we indeed reveal ourselves to be the worst of animal kind - the reader is confronted with the shit, literally, of thousands of defected and defeated humans with no other way to express their base instinct.

We are given one seeing narrator, safely, a female, removing the initial need to make a connection to Jesus or any other allegorical bullshit. Then again, Saramago brusquely deals away with any questions of God with a church where all the icons have been hidden by swatches of white paint. God cannot see, Saramago proclaims in a sweep of images, and is as ridiculous as the head of the praying mantis (which I would like to add is often eaten by the female of the species).

To extend so far as I am able, I would argue the work is a strictly irreligious sort, but only insomuch as it is not religious; it is neither strictly atheist, nor is it strictly theologist. It decides with an unflinching eye - to be ironic - to dispose of the notions of the non-physical, and argue as the doctor's wife does, that it is all irrelevant. "The soul and the body must be one or none," she thinks to herself, after correcting her own metaphysical idea that this rain will wash the soul or perhaps it will wash the body instead...

Ultimately, I've never been so fortunate to see. The text is hard: his choice to emulate blindness by removing a lot of necessary paragraph breaks and quotation marks is admirable and symbolic but without a desirable result. It can read in a distracting confusion of who's speaking and what's going on, looking for capital letters when certain words must always be. But I assure you, the read is worth every penny of your reality; if you are, like me, one of the seeing who is sometimes too concerned with the size of her thighs or the condition of her bedroom's floor.

now revising "the gravedigger"
now writing "there's probably no god"
now reading willard and his bowling trophies, a perverse mystery - richard brautigan
now listening automatic (jonny vicious remix) - hikaru utada
i am at the metrosphere office, 313e, tivoli