In class on Friday, while discussing the story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, I posed a question for the class. I asked my classmates how big of a role—if any—marijuana played in altering, as Alex so poetically stated in her blog assignment, “the narrator’s perception not just of the blind, but also of the world.” A few of my classmates shared what they thought, and Mr. Coon even joked that it could have really been more like a Cheech and Chong routine. Now while I’m sure this was a joke—yes, Mr. Coon, I am learning—it still got me thinking. I decided to fill my blog quota for the week with a hypothetical situation: what would I have seen if I had been there? How did the husband and the blind man actually interact with one another? Would I have really observed a revelatory “high” and a bizarre hybrid game of Taboo and Pictionary? Then, how would what happens in the story compare to what I actually see? So here goes (we are assuming that, though I can see the characters, they cannot see me; therefore they thankfully do not offer me any marijuana.)
I look around. The wife has just hit the pillow and fallen asleep. The husband and the blind man sit there. The husband stares at the blind man; the blind man stares at something beyond the narrator. They’ve already had their marijuana, and it’s affecting the blind man a lot more than the narrator. As I’m watching, the blind man doses in and out, and I can tell it’s not from actual fatigue, but from the affects of smoking marijuana for the first time in his life. On the television is a program about the Middle Ages—this part the narrator in “Cathedral” got right. The narrator still seems really on top of his game. He notices a cathedral on the TV. And here, in my opinion, after having witnessed the scene myself, is the true revelation. Suddenly, he looks up at the blind man, then back at the cathedral. He asks Robert if he has any idea what a cathedral looks like. I laugh, but I cover it with my hands so that it just sounds like a strange cough. The wife rolls over. Then I think about it, and I swear that just for a second I can tell what he’s thinking. He realizes at this moment that he has taken everything for granted: his wife, his sight, everything. He tries to describe the cathedral but fails. The blind man smiles gently. He’s not totally with it, but as I think about it now, the marijuana facilitates the revelation the narrator would have had regardless. The narrator feels no hesitation in having this conversation with the blind man, nor in letting the blind man touch his hand. The drug allows him to get lost in the moment, but it doesn’t allow him to be able to forget that same moment when he wakes up the next morning. I know this—I saw the look on his face as they drew a cathedral together. Gosh, it was a terrible drawing. But that’s not what mattered, because neither the narrator nor the blind man cared at all about what it looked like. The blind man couldn’t see it with his eyes, and the narrator didn’t even care to look. And then the narrator said, “It’s really something,” and I knew what he was saying. He finally felt like an open-minded citizen of the world, he finally had a friend, he finally saw beneath the surface. His story of what happened that night is not about the marijuana, it’s not about cathedrals, and it’s not about the game of Pictionary: these too are symbolically superficial things that merely facilitated his realization. The story is about understanding, about vision (not sight), and about true friendship. And it is these things that would have occurred regardless.
So, Mr. Coon, as is my tendency, I will respond to your pot joke as if you were serious. Though I am not too familiar with the work of Cheech & Chong, I know what they are famous for, and I have even done a little research into them for this blog entry. I can safely say that “Cathedral” is nothing like that. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Coon, or anybody over the age of forty who is reading this, but it seems to me that without marijuana, Cheech and Chong would be nothing more than a pair of artists featured in the hit cartoon Space Jam (admittedly, a fantastic movie). But the narrator of “Cathedral,” if faced with the same situation minus the dope, would still become his new self: the one who sees everything for what it is, not for what it looks like or seems like it should be.
(816)
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1 comment:
Jack--I like the format of this post, the way you imagine yourself as a bystander of the final scene of the story.
And I think you're right; to see it as a story about drugs is to miss the point. It's about a moment when an isolated, closed-off man achieves a bit of real communication with another human. The fact that the other man is blind makes him have to work a little harder to have that moment, and maybe that makes it more meaningful, but the important thing is that he experiences something which is largely missing form his life. Good point.
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