ABSTRACT
Aidan Higgins must renegotiate the conditions of life writing as he experiences a deterioration of sight and geriatric illnesses. This chapter focuses on the role of seeing in the aesthetics of Blind Man's Bluff while touching further upon references to his other books, especially those that are relevant to the author's confrontations with death anxiety. Emotional defenses have been broken through, while descriptions of inner vision, or sightlessness, combined with an array of multimedia images, form a last act of memorialization for the author. Yalom relates an interaction with a patient consumed by an unnamable "menace" about death anxiety, and how he tries to reassure her that it "is simply that every living creature wishes to persist in its own being". Ideas of morbid humor and articulations of solitary mental suffering as part of an Irish literary tradition are woven into Higgins’s last publication. The density of the book’s visual images distinguishes it from the device of ekphrasis.
