Blinds are eyes.
Eyes that close and open cautiously, carefully:
“Now you see it – Now you do not.”
As a “Close your eyes, Honey. Daddy has a surprise …”
Is it a new doll or a sharp knife?
Idyll or horror?

Who knows it – before the blind opens?
Opens like a flower. Like the eye itself.
The eye through which we perceive everything.
That eternally curious mind.
Blinds are made both for and against:
Who does not love staring?
(Show me one who is a denier,
and I’ll show you a liar.
For free – and at the same time.)

Everyone wants to see everything.
Not everyone will always like to be seen.
That is why there are blinds. Only therefore.
In the same way as women
in large parts of the world
wear a veil.
Just like magicians deftly manipulate
with their handkerchiefs:
“Where is the card game?”

“Now you see it. Now you do not”.
Like an ever-repeated eye test at an optician.
The universal optician.
As your perception of the world.
Your own dreams and ideas.
Now you can see them. Now you cannot.
They flicker. They come and go.

Also consciousness has its blinds
which often only allow us
small, narrow chinks of light.

At home, in private: Blinds are closed.
Outside, open, public: Blinds are open.

And in between, all kinds of suspense:
The small cracks of light
that the unknown inventor of the Venetian blind
must have seen in his dream in Paris –
one late afternoon in the 1750s …

Dan Turéll – 1989