by Hull, John;
The misunderstanding between me and the sighted arises when it is a mild day, even warm, with a light breeze but overcast. To the sighted, this would not be a nice day, because the sky is not blue.
I will have to make my comments about the weather more specific. I must remember to say that it is nice and mild today, or that it is a pleasant breeze.
8 June
Last night I had a beautiful, refreshing dream, in which I was walking along a river valley. There were fine homes, holiday bungalows, built along the river bank. I was on a walking holiday. I experimented, looking this way and that, finding out if I had sufficient range of sight to take in the whole of the valley and the landscape. Although it was not perfect, I found that I could get a sufficient sense of the place to move freely and to enjoy the scenery. I was saying to myself, ‘There you are, you see! In good light and in these conditions you can still manage fairly well.’
In 1976 and ’77 I could still see well enough to enjoy going for long, solitary walks in the Worcestershire and Shropshire countryside. The Severn Valley was a favourite walk. I used to go by bus or rail. Getting on the right bus was a problem. I could go into the coach station in the city centre and find the exact bay for the bus I wanted, or I could stand at the bus stop near my home and stop every bus that came along, asking the driver if he was going my way. I tried to make out the numbers of the buses by using a little telescope, but often the bus was upon me before I could work it out. Reading the maps was still possible with magnifying glasses. I liked walking beside the river, because it was almost impossible to get lost, although it was necessary to pay fairly close attention to the ground immediately in front. I often used to say to myself, ‘Provided it doesn’t get any worse, I can still manage.’
I have been having that thought for at least ten years. I could still manage, provided it did not get any worse. Even after I was registered blind, I could work my way from the office to my home by following the bright, double yellow parking lines painted on the edges of the University roads.
I would still be alright, if it stayed like this. When it got worse, I could still get home at night by following the street lamps one by one. I felt like a sailor far out at sea on an inky, black night, with one star to guide me. When I reached the lamppost, I could dimly make out the next little light. I could still manage, provided it didn’t get any worse.
My dreams seem to be lagging about six years behind reality.
21 June
During the first couple of years of blindness, when I thought about the people I knew, they fell into two groups. There were those with faces, and those without faces. It was a bit like wandering round the National Portrait Gallery. Here are rows of portraits, but here is a blank. You can tell where it used to hang by the outline of the wallpaper, and beneath the space is a little label giving the name. Perhaps this portrait is on loan elsewhere, or perhaps it is being repaired.
The people I knew before I lost my sight have faces but the people I have met since then do not have faces. I used to find the contrast between the two groups of people disturbed me. I could not relate one set to the other set. I knew how I knew the first lot – by their faces. How could I ever feel that I really knew the second lot?
As time went by, the proportion of people with no faces increased. Whole rooms are now bare, and the portraits which remain are covered with dust. Is it possible that some day I will come to visit the gallery and find the door locked, with a notice which says, ‘This exhibition is permanently closed’?
It is three years now since I have seen anybody. Strangely enough, I have fairly clear pictures of many people whom I have not met again during these three years, but the pictures of the people I meet every day are becoming blurred. Why should this be?
In the case of people I meet every day my relationship has continued beyond loss of sight, so my thoughts about these people are full of the latest developments in our relationships. These have partly covered the portrait, which has thus become less important. In the case of somebody I know quite well but have not seen for several years, nothing has happened to take the place of the portrait, and when I think of those people, it is the portrait which comes to mind.
It distressed me considerably when I realised that I was beginning to forget what Marilyn and Imogen looked like. I had wanted to defy blindness. I had sworn to myself that I would always carry their faces hidden in my heart, even if everything else in the gallery was stolen.
If I do want to recapture the face of someone very close to me, I do it through visualising a particular photograph, an actual photograph that I can remember very clearly from my sighted days. When I try to conjure up the memory of a loved face, I cannot seem to capture it, but the straight edges of the photograph seem to fix the mobile features firmly in my mind, so that I can imagine myself gazing at the image. Some people tell me that this is a happy situation. I will always remember Marilyn as being young. She need never be troubled by the thought that I will see her getting older. I am not so sure about this, since I find it hard to believe that ignorance can ever be better than knowledge.
The difference between those who have faces and those who do not becomes more poignant when I think of my own children. I have a lot of visual memories of Imogen, now aged ten, mostly based on photographs, but with the occasional vivid life situation thrown in. I have only a few rather vague impressions of the face of Thomas, now nearly three, which are based upon the first six or nine months of his life, while I still had a little residual vision. Of Elizabeth, now sixteen months, I have no visual images at all. The place on the wall which should carry her portrait is completely blank.
What difference does it make? I am not aware of any difference in my present relationships with these three children which could be affected in any way by the fact that they stand in different relationships to my blindness. They are all alike now.
23 June
About a year after I was registered blind, I began to have such strong images of what people’s faces looked like that they were almost like hallucinations. This went on for six or twelve months. I would be sitting in a room with someone, my face pointed towards my companion, listening to him or her. Suddenly, such a vivid picture would flash before my mind that it was like looking at a television set. Ah, I would think, there he is, with his glasses and his little beard, his wavy hair and his blue, pin-striped suit, white collar and blue tie. There are his polished shoes and his briefcase, standing neatly beside his chair. Now this image would fade and in its place another one would be projected. My companion was now fat and perspiring with receding hair. He had a red necktie and waistcoat, and a couple of his teeth were missing. This in turn would fade.
Sometimes I would become so absorbed in gazing upon these images, which seemed to come and go without any intention on my part, that I would entirely lose the thread of what was being said to me. I would come back with a shock, realising that there was nothing to indicate which of these images was closer to reality. There was simply nothing there at all. The voice would return, and I would feel as if I had dropped off to sleep for a few minutes in front of the radio.
Several times in my life I have been temporarily without sight, often in eye hospitals. I have had this strange experience of getting to know the nurses through their voices and inevitably forming some mental image of them, only to find when sight returned that I was completely wrong. So I have good reason to believe that the images I have formed of the people whom I have met as a blind person are probably quite false. Moreover, I shall never have the opportunity of correcting them by discovering the truth for myself. Gradually, however, this tendency to project images is fading.
One of the results of not knowing what people look like is that the element of anticipation in a new relationship is diminished. When a sighted person makes a new acquaintance, sight alone enables him or her to form certain impressions and to get ready to meet a certain kind of person. The new acquaintance may strike one as being wise, friendly, remo
te, dignified, bewildered, and so on. The blind person, on the other hand, does not know what he is meeting. To say that this removes the possibility of facile first impressions is itself facile. The first impressions which the blind person does receive of a new acquaintance, of the voice, the touch of the hand and so on, may be equally misleading, and if one followed the strange logic which tells us it is better to be without any information which might mislead us, we could conclude that we would be better off with no information at all. We are constantly forming hypotheses about a new acquaintance, not only during the first few moments of the encounter but throughout the years of that relationship. The blind person simply has a lot less information to go on when forming these hypotheses. One of the results is that it takes a blind person longer to get to know somebody. That, at any rate, is my experience, but perhaps I am not a very skilful blind person.
The fact that the blind person has less data would seem to suggest that his hypothesis about a new person ought to be more vulnerable. Although spared misleading visual impressions, he is having to make do with fewer facts. Whether my first impressions of people are less reliable now than when I was sighted, I am unsure. I often interview candidates for University entrance with one or two colleagues. After the interview, we compare notes. I am relieved and a little surprised to find that my opinion of the candidate seemed to be no less accurate, or that I have picked up similar impressions. The sighted interviewers can add certain details. They can remark that the candidate had shifty eyes or was of untidy appearance. These almost always turn out to be consistent with various impressions of character or personality which I had formed from speech alone.
Another strange feature of not knowing what people look like is the effect this has upon reported speech. When I am describing an encounter with someone, I may want to say, ‘He looked blankly at me’. I feel a little sensitive about this, because I cannot help thinking that the sighted person to whom I am talking would know that I could not possibly know how my friend looked at me. To say, ‘He responded in a blank manner’ is absurd and pedantic. I am trying to suggest the pause which I noticed before my friend replied: the sense that I had that he was taken aback, was briefly at a loss for words, did not quite know what to say. There actually was a brief blank in the conversation. To say, ‘He paused before replying and seemed to be at a loss’ would be perfectly accurate, but to use the brief, concrete idiom of sighted exchange is so natural and vivid. What am I to do?
Another result of all this is that the face no longer has the central place for me which it has in normal human relationships. The face is merely the place from which the voice comes. I look towards the face with conscious effort, for there is no real reason why I should do so. I can often tell when people are looking at me, because their voices sound different if projected directly at me, and I am often able to glance at someone in a group when he or she has glanced at me and spoken. I do this, however, purely for effect, to show that I am listening. I no longer have any natural sense of needing to be face to face.
Sometimes I ask one of my sighted friends to give me a quick impression of what somebody else looks like. I am often interested in a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a new acquaintance. This is particularly true if my new acquaintance is a woman. What colour is her hair? What is she wearing? Is she pretty? Sometimes I long to know. I remain, after all, a man, reared in a certain sighted culture, conditioned to certain male expectations. Perhaps I should change, and be less influenced in my judgement of women by my male conditioning, but it is painful to have this change forced upon me by mere blindness.
It makes a difference to the way I feel about a new female acquaintance if a colleague, having caught sight of her, remarks on her beauty or her plainness. There is a double irrationality in this. In the first place, my feelings should not be so dependent upon a woman’s appearance. I know that, and I apologise. But I still feel it. The second thing is that it is surely a deplorable lack of independence on my part to be so affected by a criterion which can be of no significance to me.
What can it matter to me what sighted men think of women, when I, as a blind man, must judge women by quite different means? Yet I do care what sighted men think, and I do not seem able to throw off this prejudice.
The crucial thing in any new acquaintance is the sound of the voice. I am continuing to learn more and more about the amazing power of the human voice to reveal the person. With the people I know very well, I find that all of the emotion which would normally be expressed in the face is there in the voice: the tiredness, the anxiety, the suppressed excitement and so on. My impressions based on the voice seem to be just as accurate as those of sighted people. There is the disadvantage, however, that my friend must speak. If I were sighted, I would have access to a certain privacy, I would catch an unintended communication through the fleeting expressions of the face, especially the lips and the eyes. As a blind person, I do have access to unintended nuances of the voice, and can often hear many things which the speaker may not know are there, but it is always in the context of something which was intended, namely, the speaking itself. So I am more dependent upon other people revealing themselves to me.
The capacity of the voice to reveal the self is truly amazing. Is the voice intelligent? Is it colourful? Is there light and shade? Is there melody, humour, gracefulness, accuracy? Is it gentle, amusing and varied? On the other hand, is the voice lazy? Is it sloppy and careless? Is it flat, drab and monotonous? Is the range of vocabulary poor and used without precision and sensitivity? These are the things which matter to me now. Increasingly, I am no longer even trying to imagine what people look like. My knowledge of you is based upon what we have been through together, not on what you look like.
There is a further development. Not only do I not know or care what you look like (although I still have a few qualms and doubts in the case of women), I am beginning to lose the category itself. I am finding it more and more difficult to realise that people look like anything, to put any meaning into the idea that they have an appearance. In recent weeks I find myself practising the thought that people do have an appearance. I am experimenting, by rehearsing in my mind the different kinds of appearance which somebody might have. This is quite different from the vivid, compulsive projections which I had during that earlier period. I am now trying to remind myself that there is something about this person, something which means little or nothing to me, and to which I have no independent access, yet something which is as true about this person as anything else. This person looks like something. He or she does have what they call an ‘appearance’ of some kind.
25 June
When I was about seventeen I lost the sight of my left eye. I can remember gazing at my left shoulder and thinking, ‘Well, that’s the last time I’ll see you without looking in a mirror!’ To lose the shoulder is one thing, but to lose one’s own face poses a new problem. I find that I am trying to recall old photographs of myself, just to remember what I look like. I discover with a shock that I cannot remember. Must I become a blank on the wall of my own gallery?
To what extent is loss of the image of the face connected with loss of the image of the self? Is this one of the reasons why I often feel I am a mere spirit, a ghost, a memory? Other people have become disembodied voices, speaking out of nowhere, going into nowhere. Am I not like this too, now that I have lost my body?
14 July
I have had moments of this much-discussed blind experience ever since I lost the sight of my left eye in my seventeenth or eighteenth year. It took the form of a sudden, vivid awareness of an object on my blind side, within a few inches of my head. Stepping out to cross the road, I would recoil from something immediately on my left. Glancing around, there would be something like a parked van with a set of ladders extending from the roof, which I had not noticed.
I have since discovered that this phenomenon is now generally called ‘echo location’. It was after the first few months of complete blindness that I became aware of it.
As long as any sight at all remained, I was not aware of experiencing echo location. I first noticed that walking home over the campus in the quiet of the evening I had a sense of presence, which was the realisation of an obstacle. I discovered that if I stopped when I had this sense, and waved my white cane around, I would make contact with a tree trunk. This would be no more than three, four or five feet from me. The awareness, whatever it was, did not seem to extend beyond this range, and sometimes the tree would be as close as two feet. It was through sensing these trees, and verifying their exact location with my stick, that I gradually realised that I was developing some strange kind of perception. I learned that I could actually count the number of these trees which I would pass along the road leading down to the University gates. The sense did not seem to work on thin objects like lampposts. It had to be something about as bulky as a tree trunk or a human body before I sensed it.
As the months go past, sensitivity seems to be increasing. I find now that I am quite often aware of approaching lampposts, although it is true that, if I am expecting one, it is easier to sense it. I do occasionally walk into lampposts which I have not detected at all. When I am aware of echo location, it is infallible, in the sense that I cannot remember having had the experience only to find that there was nothing there. Unfortunately, the experience itself does not always occur, so I can only use it as a sort of red light. I must stop when I sense something, but not sensing something does not mean that I can go ahead.