blind man's meal

i've found myself wondering about the sensation of indulging in the most sensual experiences without the power of sight (from 'baser' things like bodily expulsions) to eating, listening to music, and so on...consequently when i stumbled across a picasso painting the other day, i was moved and found myself returning to it again and again without a clear reason why..

of course the painting is problematic as it may be romanticizing the austerity of a blind man's life, most probably inflicting his own feelings of what blindness may feel like, yet i think the beauty of the image is, despite the artist's inflicting what he feels blindness feels like, that his vision of it in itself holds something important, some kind of romantic excess and fullness of experience. for example, the wholeness of the bread in his hands, these objects, the water jug become all encompassing, the bread is not a brown flaky spongy-looking thing but rather a solidity that occupies a space in his mind, in the same way, everything is assorted not by sight but by feel, by the innerness, essence of it. and there is something so large about this, the concavity of his body expresses this, as though the weight of the world overwhelms him in some crucial way ... and the juxtaposition of that with the meager bread and water and the concave shoulders, it is an underestimation, a retraction, a withdrawal of the blind man because this superfluity of feeling can only be expressed by the sense of shrinking away from it, keeping yourself guarded against the awe -- and watching, the onlooker, the painter -- he can only see the shrinking because that is how he feels ...and that is the only way in which he can express the magnitude in these colors, on this canvas.