In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man becomes king, not for the simple fact that he sees, but exclusively because of what he can do perceptibly within a sightless world.

The king tells his subjects that they will soon hear, feel and smell an approaching herd of horses, and subsequently his subjects do hear, feel and smell according to his prediction.

But if he tells his subjects of the beauty of a sunrise, or he makes a painting of the world he sees, these utterances have no significance beyond being characteristic behaviors of a man able to prophesy the coming of horses to a silent, intangible, odorless present. They are attributes of a visionary.

Eventually the one-eyed king dies, and then later, all who knew him. The world loses its eye-witness.

People will repeat his word on sunrises. They will preserve his paintings. Thousands will line up to feel the contours of the frame and the texture of the paint, and will reverently savor the aroma of wood, paint and canvas.

Knowledge about sunrises will grow. Many new paintings will be painted. The saying and doing will be innocent, with no sense that anyone can see a difference between their products and the example they imitate.

Others will call bullshit on sunrises and paintings, and they will be mostly right.

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Some might witness this spectacle and try to talk about it to someone else, in half-blind-half-monocular bastard language. But unlike the utterances of old one-eyed kind, this speech will have no practical value whatsoever. Who cares about a world “seen” from the “eye” of a king? Does such talk even have sense, let alone truth?