Confessions of Blindness

This lecture steps into the Paleolithic dark and asks a series of stubborn and ridiculous questions that no respectable curriculum would bother to raise: What if the first creature to act as our god was a pig, and what if it fashioned us in its “image and likeness” before theology had the courage to plagiarize the idea? What if drawing began as the pathetic improvisation of a hand that had spent far longer stabbing at animals than tracing their contours, acting under the old principle “destructio ad aedificationem” (I destroy in order to build)? And what if the cave, that blind globe of smoke, echo, and afterimage, taught us to see only by forcing us to confront what we could no longer directly perceive?

We consider the handprint as the earliest autobiography: a residue left by a trembling limb unsure of itself, announcing “I was here,” a kind of ancient pre-Abrahamic “hineni” (here I am), spoken with all the misplaced confidence of a creature that had only just learned to stand upright roughly six million years earlier. We ask whether these images come from madmen, hermits, and visionaries, or simply from evolutionary accidents no grander than fermented fruit or the viral tulip that once bankrupted half of Holland. We look at the sins and commandments as late moralistic rebukes of the very appetites, desire, excess, imitation, hoarding, and killing that made image making possible in the first place. And we ask whether myth arose not as a form of pre-religious belief but from the irritating human necessity to compensate for our own sensory incompetence, a species so unimpressed by the limits of its own vision and dexterity that it began spinning stories to cover the shortfall, and in the process invented myth as a technology of distancing.

In short, this lecture follows the pig that authored us, the blindness that shaped us, and the small, exhausted hand that has spent forty five thousand years bluffing its way through a world it barely manages to perceive, forever trying to repay in lines of pigment the ancient debts it incurred in blood.

“Confessions of Blindness: An Autobiography of the Forty Five Thousand Year Old Pig That Authored Us” is a guest lecture by Adrianos Eftymiadis presented as part of David Gersten’s Fall Semester Long Tone Thesis Studio on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025, at 10 a.m. New York ET.