Imagine you are searching for your reading glasses only to find them sitting atop your head – or, perhaps worse, discovering that you are already wearing them.
The Cubans have an expression for finding something that was right in front of you all along: “If it was a dog, it would have bitten me.”
The most shocking revelations are those that are obvious in hindsight. We are – or should be – most alarmed by our blind spots.
We experience these encounters, both banal and harrowing, as a blow to our egos. Suddenly faced with the evidence of our “blindness,” we must confront a void before our very eyes; a large tear in the fabric of reality that was always already there.
We are upended by these moments not because they are new or different but because they are an unexpected or sudden return to home. They are reunions with some misplaced part of ourselves – involuntary acts of recognition.
In past country kitchens, these haunting visits were associated with the supernatural: the work of imps, fairies, ghosts, demons. In present college lecture halls, they’re described as the traces of lacunae, the repressed, the forgetting that makes remembering possible.
As powerful reminders of our limitations, blind spots are a recurring theme in literature, from Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex to Edgar Allan Poe’s mystery The Purloined Letter.
They are also at the center of Mike Leigh’s comedy Happy Go Lucky. It is a masterful movie about a woman taking driving lessons and stumbling upon her own blind spots. I strongly recommend it.