When I was growing up, I was obsessed with Helen Keller. My parents, who worked for the children’s publishing house Scholastic, would receive boxes of books each week and many would be educational chapter books about historically important violence and heroic individuals surviving adversity. I think I read a hundred books about the Holocaust before fourth grade and perhaps double that about the Underground Railroad. I remember wondering where the books were about the AIDs epidemic? My parents were creatives living in New York City during the eighties and had lost some of their closest friends to the epidemic. They talked about these lost friends daily. Where were the books about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the children of the atom bomb? My father, a former Zen Buddhist monk whose teachers and friends had been Japanese survivors/inheritors of that American-generated nightmare, made sure I read and understood that elided history.

We can see. And we can still be blind. We can read and we can still be illiterate. What do we choose not to include in our field of vision?

Some of my favorite Scholastic-brand inspiration porn books were about Helen Keller. I found it miraculous that she had found a way to communicate without any means to auditory or visual stimulus. It seemed to me, as the child of writers with dreams of my own books, to affirm the mystical nature of The Word. Maybe words and communication were a priori - coming before the creation of our bodies and the world.

And what would it be like to have the words and not their corresponding color, not their corresponding sound?