It started like this, under a railway bridge: a faded navy-blue Adidas bag, half torn open by wind, by rain, by sun. It started with a snake emerging from the bag, brushing its scaly skin against a broken zipper from what was probably once a pocket.We have written records going back over two thousand years mentioning blind wanderers. Some are blind from birth and have never seen images of war, the sun, an insect crawling out of a half-crushed Red Bull can tangled in brambles, someone’s coronation, or the slow expiration of a moth. That’s the case with certain monks, for example. Others have gouged out their eyes voluntarily, out of shame for having witnessed, or taken part in, all those images, like Oedipus.We worked together on a bag. It was a meeting point, a topic of conversation, but never a goal, never a destination. We worked on a bag the way we might have worked on anything else. We didn’t talk about beauty, lines, or shapes. We talked about practicality, about envelopes, containers, skin. One material couldn’t be used because it was the skin of a calf, too small.I’m thinking of calves and lambs. Of the fur on the belly of a calf.The shape wasn’t designed, it imposed itself because it had to be practical, though we didn’t yet know in what way. To be practical, a material can have holes, be prehensile, foldable, attachable, subject to manipulation, optimized. An eyelid is practical, like a 5 mm hex key.A good example of practical skin adaptation is the down that grows on the skin of certain moths. This fuzz muffles the sound of their wings,
making them harder for bats to detect. Contrary to popular belief, bats
aren’t blind, but their hearing is better than their vision. Moths are saidto mistake the glow of electric bulbs for the light of the Moon, which nocturnal insects use as a navigational reference.While we worked, people were sleeping. Some were sleeping in the hotel across the street. People in town for work.Lovers meeting in anonymity. People coming to find sleep. In an article, it says:Some people sleep in hotels to catch up on lost sleep. This last reason is actually more common than you think, followed by a top 5 list of things to do to fall asleep somewhere new.We collected bags full of used hotel bedsheets from the laundry service. A teenage girl said, “We’re not really making a bag, we’re just making skin convenient.”There is, on Reddit, a community where people send each other photos of their eyes rolled back as far as possible. Rolled back into blindness, they say.Rolling one’s eyes might be innate. Some animals do it too. The gesture shows the other party that a situation is so undesirable it’s not even worth looking at, according to Wikipedia. It’s a voluntary blindness.You can tell how panicked a cow is by the amount of white showing in its eyes. It doesn’t roll its eyes back, but it squints, as if projecting its gaze forward, when stressed.I’m thinking of calves and lambs.