There was once a painter whose eyesight was limited to the domain of artistic expression.

He was literally blind unless he had a blank or painted canvas in front of his face.

When he wasn’t painting or contemplating paintings, he had to stumble around with his hand extended in front of him, feeling for forms he could identify, or avoid bumping into — or, in exceptional cases, capture as a painting. His genius was rendering what he called “darkly felt objects” as hyper-visible art.

Whenever the artist did happen upon some novel form “in the outer world” that “demanded to be painted”, he would set up his easel and observe it with his entire being. He would capture in a painting, not just the impression the object makes on the eye, but also on the soul, or as the artist put it “the object’s essence”.

When he finished a painting he would place it in his repertoire of visible things. In the future, whenever his fingertips registered that particular object, or another object identical to it, he could pull the corresponding painting from his collection and see the object through his own vision and experience its essence.

The artist also kept a small sketchbook for less important things that didn’t concern him much — object/obstacles he needed to see just enough to get them out of his way: things of which he needed only to “get a gist”. Of these less relevant objects he sketched tiny, schematic, cartoon-like diagrams, dozens per page. He kept this sketchbook with him at all times more for reference than for drawing. The book only had so many pages, and he was conscious of the need to conserve.

Does this sound like an awkward way to deal with the visible world? Maybe, but it had advantages, too. Where others were constantly glimpsing and losing sights, and incapable of showing their vision to others, the artist was able to produce on demand every image of his entire visual experience. Once he saw something himself, he could convey the image to others, and even provide his followers with replicas of his images to use as a substitute for their own feeble and ephemeral looking. For this reason, the artist was celebrated as the most intensely visual person who ever lived.