Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

shadow of something desired.
Bob had never heard that story and was interested, especially because three people who did not
know each other that well had seen it simultaneously; and we talked about various aspects of
vision as we had experienced them.
Somewhere in that discussion, Bob said, ‘I went blind the other day; well, I lost my sight for a
while’.
It was such an unexpected thing for him to say that I did not quite comprehend it. And perhaps
that is another example of a brain tending to reject what it had not expected to receive.
Did you? I asked, hanging on to what I knew he had said; and he said yes, but it was all right now;
and he steered the conversation back to where it had been. I imagine that we were drinking tea;
but that’s all it is, imagining: I don’t remember.
We drifted on to colour, something we worried at from time to time, as we practised it from time
to time, and Bob more than I. And, from there, different perceptions of colour, depending on the
number and quality of receptors in body or machine. Not that either of us really knew much about
that.
Who knew, I asked, what either of us was seeing? What hope of knowing if the perception were
consistent?
Just now, said Bob, out of one of his eyes, everything was blue or blueish; and then we went on to
say what he could see in colour terms out of the other eye; but oddly I have no recollection of what
that was. I had been overwhelmed by the mention of blue, because there wasn’t very much blue in
that room, except as an element of more complex colour, as there will be in any room.
This somewhat overpowering blueness had arrived after his temporary loss of sight and was
gradually fading as what he remembered to be normality of vision returned.
He had been going up the stairs. You entered the home downstairs and went upstairs to the living
area, where we were while we were talking. Downstairs were the toilet/bathroom and the two
work areas, one for Bob, centred on his photocopier, and one for Jennifer.
Half way up, he said, his sight went.
I asked what he did and he said that he stood still, holding the recent output of the photocopier,
which was both his working tool and printing machine. He had been going to look at what he had
done in the light from the kitchen window.
I asked him what he felt while he stood there waiting to find out what would happen and he said ‘I
thought: How am I going to get this bloody poem finished?’.
I do not doubt that; but there must have been other emotions.