Dining Blindly, Part II: Being Seen & Being Watched

For a fleeting moment I fretted about how the hipsters might size up my appearance, an upstate New York writer decked in black cowboy boots, toy metal spurs, a black suit, and a metal badge that named me “Sheriff.” My cowboy hat and a silver bolo tie framed my shaggy gray hair and unkempt beard, all indicators that I did not fit amongst the hip twenty-somethings with tight fitting jeans and semi-mohawks. Most of them acted like regulars in this cinder-block warehouse nightclub with orange light bulbs easing the space’s overall neo-bohemian darkness. I was consciously in costume; the rest of the crowd--besides my fiancé donning her version of Peruvian cowgirl attire--probably did not think they were. Since the organizer had billed this event as a “Pre-Halloween Bash,” I thought we should come in costume; no one else, apparently, did.

After all, we each had arrived at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn’s trendy Williamsburg neighborhood to experience something with our eyes closed--Dark Dining--so why dress up? I should’ve figured that out. Consequently, in typical social awkwardness, my eyes hitched mostly on Hillary’s face and my glass of wine while we waited to eat in the dark. Mostly, I didn't care, but part of me still wondered how this crowd viewed me.

Then, a woman clacked two sticks. “Welcome to Dark Dining,” she said in a deliberately stilted, ceremonious voice. The only other forty-something in the crowd, she kept her hair cropped close and dyed red, her eyes framed in stark black glasses. She was New York hip. Plus, she was the organizer, so she fit fine. “Soon, you will be instructed to put on your blindfolds,” she said, “and someone will lead you and your party carefully into the dining room and to your table.” Then she laid out the rules of the game: 1. When the sticks clack, keep silent. 2. Signal your waitperson by raising your hand should you have a question, need a drink, or want to pee. 3. Above all else, once you’re in the dining room, don’t peek! The admonition piqued my Pandora curiosity all the more, of course, but I would comply.

We lined up outside the dining room, a waitperson instructed me to place my hand on Hillary’s shoulder, and over my cowboy hat I slipped on a “Mindfold.” This blindfold with a tight-fitting foam lining blocks out any and all light source. As all visual cues vanished, as I entered my personal virtual pitch-black forest or my mind’s isolation chamber right there in the nightclub corridor, my body eased. For the first time all evening, with my eye sight completely blocked, I surrendered to the moment.

Perhaps more than any other sense organ, eyes govern our perception of reality and truth. Our common language betrays our sight-centric nature. “I’ll know it when I see it.” “I see what you mean.” “How do you view the situation?” “She has a unique point of view.” Truth, though, loves to hide itself, as the pre-Socratic Greek thinker Heraclitus reminded us centuries ago. So often, of course, our eyes betray us.

Our eyes, we might even say, can blind us. With them, we quickly size up and assess. Worse, folks like me often feel not seen but watched as if a cadre of god-like judges daily gawks at our physical awkwardness, our bad haircut, our outdated corduroys. Both our eyes’ anticipation and our self-consciousness alter our perception of reality. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that not our eyes but our spinning mental faculties smudge our windows of perception. More to come on that and the rest of the Dark Dining experience.