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Kabutski the Liar (The Final Paragraph on Obscurity)
Yvonne Kiddle (University of Western Australia, Australia)

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I met the blind mapmaker in one of Kabutski’s shops. He took my hand and remarked on the luminescence of the nails. I, who had also been blind since birth, asked if I might buy a map, one of those which he had so magnanimously drawn, by the light of small, revolving lantern which hung in the shadow of an ancient and overly-elaborate Gaudi door-stop. Something in the distance moved, they tell me, from one place to another, something in the order of the colour blue (or was it grey even?) where I could not ever hope to see. As I looked at him without the gift of eyes, I wondered what he saw in me. Perhaps it was a willingness to let everything fall and unlisten, to lend all the formal boundaries that we had learned in our inheritance of the eternal clamour (for such is the observance of the world now, to a blind man) the chance to swim, out, out into the wide world and to drown there, in the hope that someone might come forth and not rescue, but receive them – from the nightmare of their own unbound obscurity. But ideas are fickle things. In the unborn talent of their narrow might of vision, there is a maleficence of laughter which signs with light and burns in manic imitation of a truer, more prodigious sight, that the blind, being only the blind, can see —

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Yvonne is currently doing a doctorate in Early Modern Studies at UWA, whilst (simultaneously) trying to finish the most protracted novel ever written!

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