Do you ever feel like the universe can hear your thoughts? Or that somehow, something (someone?) out there is speaking to you? I’d been quietly asking for some kind of method to get clear and calm, and the answer was recently provided. Last week, a friend from work told me about the coolest thing ever — a restaurant called O.Noir, where your meal is served by the visually impaired and you eat while shrouded in complete and utter darkness. The restaurant is pitch black; for all intents and purposes, you lose your sight and get a taste of what it’s like to be blind.
The brilliance of this idea struck me dumb: by becoming temporarily blind, we get thrust into the present, automatically heightening all of our other senses in order to survive and live more fully. As someone who flits around from task to task all day, I can use a few more meditative, in-the-moment moments where I just stop and experience life as it’s happening. If eating at O.Noir can remind me of how to do just that, I’m more than game.
I know eating dinner isn’t really the same thing as ingesting a dose of culture, but I couldn’t stop myself from writing about O.Noir this week (even though I haven’t even been yet!), which left me pondering whether I could tie art and blindness together.
Never far from my heart, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark immediately sprang to mind. Dancer in the Dark is the story of Selma, a single mother (played gorgeously by Björk) who moves to the States from Europe with her son. They live together in rural America, getting by with very little while Selma works herself to the bone in a factory. Her goal is to save her son from the same degenerative disease that is slowly making her blind. Selma escapes her dreary life through her love of classic musicals and her ability to imagine her way to happiness as the star of such shows. Dancer in the Dark is heavy and thought-provoking and heart shattering — and the perfect movie rental if you’re in the mood for some real art.
Another piece of art that comes to mind is Blindness, the recent film starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. I’m not even sure how other critics received the film, but as I sat in the theatre and took it all in, I was riveted by the story (a whole city is suddenly struck by white blindness pandemic), the acting and the fact that the real hero of the movie is a woman. Based on the Nobel Prize winning novel by José Saramago, Blindness is both a critically acclaimed novel worth reading and a film worth seeing if you just feel like curling up in the dark and staying home on the couch.
One of my best (and wisest) friends from law school used to tell me that the reason I went through so many depressive funks during our various semesters together was because I listened to “too much heavy-deavy guitar music” (he is an old-school hip hop fan). I have been listening to a lot of “heavy-deavy guitar music” lately and maybe that’s why I’m writing this column this week. But, I’m positive that some good art (and some good food!), is all I need to move from the dark and into the light.
Leanne is an associate at Heenan Blaikie LLP. She spends her free time indulging in art, film, music and literature and swears that culture tastes better than chocolate. Her column will appear every Friday here on lawandstyle.ca.