Notes on Blindness

by Hull, John;

  Not only have I become sensitive to thinner objects, but the range seems to have increased. When walking home, I used only to be able to detect parked cars by making contact with my cane. These days I almost never make contact with a parked car unexpectedly. Nearly always, I realise that there is an obstacle in my path before my stick strikes against it. This is in spite of the fact that I am now using the very long cane. I think the range for detecting parked cars must be approximately six to eight feet. Another feature of this experience is that it seems to be giving me a sort of generalised sense of the environment. There is one part of my route where I must step aside to avoid an upward flight of steps. I am expecting these, of course, since I come this way every day. Nevertheless, I am now aware of their approach, and not merely of the lower, closer steps but of the whole massive object, looming up and somehow away from me. The phenomenon seems to be partly dependent on attention, since at home I can easily walk into the edge of doors, having had no warning of their proximity. Possibly in a house where sound is muffled by carpets and curtains, echoes would be less easily perceived?

  The experience itself is quite extraordinary, and I cannot compare it with anything else I have ever known. It is like a sense of physical pressure. One wants to put up a hand to protect oneself, so intense is the awareness. One shrinks from whatever it is. It seems to be characterised by a certain stillness in the atmosphere. Where one should perceive the movement of air and a certain openness somehow one becomes aware of a stillness, an intensity instead of an emptiness, a sense of vague solidity. The exact source of the sensation is difficult to locate. It seems to be the head, yet often it seems to extend to the shoulders and even the arms. Awareness is greater when the environment is less polluted by sound, and in the silence of my late evening walk home, I am most intensely aware of it. In a crowded noisy street, the experience is less noticeable, and if I am travelling on somebody’s elbow, I never seem to notice the experience at all. Presumably, I just switch off whatever it is.

  It is a sort of guidance system which comes into operation when absolutely necessary, and when the cues are somehow available, but it is not always easy to distinguish it from other experiences. When I come to the end of a block, I can often tell. Is this because of the movement of the air, the breeze which one often feels at the corner, or is it the reverse of the experience of presence? Have I, without realising it, been aware of the presence of the walls and fences, suddenly encountering an absence when they end?

  On one of my walks, I pass beside a five-foot-high fence made of vertical, metal bars. This gives way, at a certain point, to a solid brick wall. I find that if I pay attention I can tell when I have left the fence and am going along the wall. There is, somehow, a sense of a more massive presence.

  I gather from conversations that this experience is essentially acoustic and is based upon awareness of echoes. This certainly fits in with my experience, but at the same time it is important to emphasise that one is not aware of listening. One is simply aware of becoming aware. The sense of pressure is upon the skin of the face, rather than upon or within the ears. That must be why the older name for the experience was ‘facial vision’.

  1 September

  ‘Well, I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Nice to see you again.’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  When I use expressions like these, some of my sighted friends are surprised. They laugh, perhaps teasing me, and say, ‘You don’t really mean that, do you John?’ I explain that, when I say I am pleased to see you, what I mean is that I am pleased to meet you, pleased to be with you, glad to be in your presence. I explain that this is surely what anybody, blind or sighted, would mean by that expression. In the same way, I explain, when I say that I see what you mean, what I mean is that I understand you. Your words make sense to me. This is what anybody must mean by that expression, since the meaning itself is invisible.

  When you are blind you do become aware of how much of our language is dependent upon images drawn from sight. It is natural that sighted people also become sharply aware of this when talking with a blind person. ‘What is your point of view?’ ‘Do you have any observations?’ ‘I just don’t understand the way you look at this.’ ‘Now look here my friend!’ ‘I’ve looked everywhere for it.’ ‘I’ll see if I can help you.’

  In expressions like these, attitudes, intentions, demands and references to knowledge and understanding are all suggested by the use of visual metaphors. There is an intimate connection between seeing and knowing. Blindness leads to ignorance.

  Must disabled people refrain from using that part of the language which makes metaphorical use of the disability from which they suffer? How absurd this would be. It would impose a new, linguistic disability upon people already disabled. When somebody in a wheelchair says that he or she is thinking of standing for parliament, I don’t draw attention to the disability by commenting wittily, ‘You mean you will go in your wheelchair to parliament’. If one of my friends remarks that she bumped into so and so the other day in the High Street, I do not, as a rule, guffaw and ask, ‘Did you hurt him?’

  It is true, nevertheless, that beneath the little irritations of these exchanges between blind people and their sighted friends there lies a genuine problem. The whole structure of our ordinary, everyday conversation presupposes a sighted world. This can be easily noticed if you compare conversations on the radio with those on the television. So when the sighted person draws attention to a little oddity in the use of a visual metaphor by a blind person, beneath this lies a subtle shift in the whole character of communication between the sighted and the blind. There is a language of blindness.

  9 September

  This evening, at about nine o’clock, I was getting ready to leave the house. I opened the front door, and rain was falling. I stood for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of it. Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience.

  I hear the rain pattering on the roof above me, dripping down the walls to my left and right, splashing from the drainpipe at ground level on my left, while further over to the left there is a lighter patch as the rain falls almost inaudibly upon a large leafy shrub. On the right, it is drumming, with a deeper, steadier sound upon the lawn. I can even make out the contours of the lawn, which rises to the right in a little hill. The sound of the rain is different and shapes out the curvature for me. Still further to the right, I hear the rain sounding upon the fence which divides our property from that next door. In front, the contours of the path and the steps are marked out, right down to the garden gate. Here the rain is striking the concrete, here it is splashing into the shallow pools which have already formed. Here and there is a light cascade as it drips from step to step. The sound on the path is quite different from the sound of the rain drumming into the lawn on the right, and this is different again from the blanketed, heavy, sodden feel of the large bush on the left. Further out, the sounds are less detailed. I can hear the rain falling on the road, and the swish of the cars that pass up and down. I can hear the rushing of the water in the flooded gutter on the edge of the road. The whole scene is much more differentiated than I have been able to describe, because everywhere there are little breaks in the patterns, obstructions, projections, where some slight interruption or difference of texture or of echo gives an additional detail or dimension to the scene. Over the whole thing, like light falling upon a landscape, is the gentle background patter gathered up into one continuous murmur of rain.

  I think that this experience of opening the door on a rainy garden must be similar to that which a sighted person feels when opening the curtains and seeing the world outside. Usually, when I open my front door, there are various broken sounds spread across a nothingness. I know that when I take the next step I will encounter the path, and that to the right my shoe will
meet the lawn. As I walk down the path, my head will be brushed by fronds of the overhanging shrub on the left and I will then come to the steps, the front gate, the footpath, the culvert and the road. I know all these things are there but I know them from memory. They give no immediate evidence of their presence, I know them in the form of prediction. They will be what I will be experiencing in the next few seconds. The rain presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once, not merely remembered, not in anticipation, but actually and now. The rain gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another.

  If only rain could fall inside a room, it would help me to understand where things are in that room, to give a sense of being in the room, instead of just sitting on a chair.

  This is an experience of great beauty. I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me. I feel that the rain is gracious, that it has granted a gift to me, the gift of the world. I am no longer isolated, preoccupied with my thoughts, concentrating upon what I must do next. Instead of having to worry about where my body will be and what it will meet, I am presented with a totality, a world which speaks to me.

  Have I grasped why it is so beautiful? When what there is to know is in itself varied, intricate and harmonious, then the knowledge of that reality shares the same characteristics. I am filled internally with a sense of variety, intricacy and harmony. The knowledge itself is beautiful, because the knowledge creates in me a mirror of what there is to know. As I listen to the rain, I am the image of the rain, and I am one with it.

  16 September

  I dreamt that we were on an ocean liner. We were struggling towards the stern of the ship. I was with someone, I could not tell who; it could have been Marilyn. We were fighting our way through bars, cocktail lounges, along little corridors, up and down flights of stairs, past cabins and finally emerged on the deck at the very stern. There we were, out in the open air, and saw the great swell of the ocean. There were no waves, but a long steady swell of masses and masses of water, sea, sky and wind. The ship was hurrying along through all this. Somehow, we were transported over the stern of the ship and now I found myself with two women on another ship. I didn’t know, or don’t remember, who the two women were, but there were three of us. This second ship was sinking. Or was it still the same ship? We were still in the stern, but now the deck was vertical, and the ship was sliding down. Perhaps three-quarters of the vessel was now beneath the water. We were clinging to the upper part of it. The other ship was going away, leaving us further and further behind. There we were, now clearly marooned on this second ship. Now there came a feeling of the enormous weight of the huge bulk of the waterlogged vessel, a vision of it going down under the water, becoming lost in the deep-green murky depths, where it was getting darker, colder and more silent. There was no storm, it was not a wild sea. There was a vast, sullen swell and the weight of the ship’s hull underneath us. Every time a great swell came along the vessel would become just a little more waterlogged, a little heavier, and would settle down a little further. Now we were more or less on eye-level with the swell, and it was a question of which surge would engulf us. A terrible sense of dread and hopelessness filled the dream.

  My mind was full of the knowledge of that irresistible weight, dragging everything down and down, while the freedom and light and speed of the ship upon which we had been travelling was receding, always receding. The gap was widening all the time and one was left in the silence of the green sea while the weight was pulling one further and further down. I woke with a feeling of horror as if I had received a portent so ominous that it filled my whole life.

  The ship that moves away with its light and speed is the world of the sighted. My family, my loved ones, and I are pushing our way through it. We are stranded, increasingly cut off. We are immobile, waterlogged. I am being dragged down and down into something unimaginable from which there will be no return. One world will disappear. The world into which I am being dragged with my loved ones will engulf us. There will be no return. Blindness is permanent and irreversible. I know now that my dreaming self is, after all, not deceived. My life is in crisis.

  2

  Into the tunnel

  Autumn 1983

  17 September

  Nearly every time I smile, I am conscious of it. I am aware of the muscular effort; not that my smiles have become forced, as if I were only pretending, but it has become a more or less conscious effort. Why is this? It must be because there is no reinforcement. There is no returning smile. I am no longer dazzled by a brilliant smile. I no longer find that the face of a stranger breaks into sudden beauty and friendliness. I never seem to get anything for my efforts. Most smiling is responsive. You smile spontaneously when you receive a smile. For me, it is like sending off dead letters. Have they been received or acknowledged? Was I even smiling in the right direction? In any case, how could my sighted friend make acknowledgement? You can smile with your voice, but you have to find something to say.

  Because it has become irrelevant, I can feel myself stopping smiling. Well, I think I can feel this. I must ask someone close to me if it is true or not.

  21 September

  Thomas was three years old a month ago. He knows that he has to treat me differently. Ever since he was tiny I have trained him in the expression ‘Show Daddy’. He knows that this does not mean the same as ‘Give it to Daddy’, which means ‘surrender it up’. By contrast, ‘Show Daddy’ means ‘put whatever you’ve got in your hand into my hand and you will get it straight back’. From the earliest days, I trained him, so that, if I lightly tapped him on the back of the hand, he would immediately put into my hand what he was holding, and I would return it. If it was something which he should not have had, I would still return it to him immediately, and only after an interval would I begin on the ‘give it to Daddy’ line. We then developed this with books. I would say, ‘Is there a car?’ and if he said that there was, I would say, ‘Show Daddy’. He would then take my outstretched finger and place it on the picture of the car.

  Quite early on, he also learned an extension of this, whereby he was not using my finger only but my whole arm to guide me to something he wanted. If he wanted a toy from a high shelf, I would lift him up in my arms or on to my shoulders. He would then hold my arm, using it as a sort of instrument, and guide it towards the desired toy. So this was another version of ‘Show Daddy’.

  He also learned to say, ‘Look, Daddy!’ He would then take my hand or finger and press it against whatever it was he wanted me to inspect. Thomas thus understands that I see with my fingers. He knows what braille is. He knows that my books are brailled, or that having a braille mark is a sign that it is my book. He learned to repeat after me, ‘Daddy can’t read this book because it is not brailled’ and ‘Daddy can read this because it is brailled’. He now makes these remarks about books quite spontaneously.

  It is several months ago now that pointing to one of his own books he remarked, ‘Daddy can’t read this’ and then, pointing to the braille label in a picture book, ‘Thomas can’t read that’.

  Earlier in the summer, he asked me, ‘Daddy, did you come in like that?’, jabbing in the air this way and that with his finger. I asked him what an earth he meant. ‘Did you come in like that’ – jab, jab, jab – ‘with your stick?’ I now realised that with his finger he was describing the movements of the white cane.

  What I am not sure about, however, is whether all of this behaviour is associated with my sight, or whether it is merely special behaviour appropriate for Daddy. When he was a little more than twelve months old, he used to sit in his high chair, making funny faces first at one member of the family then another. He would turn from person to person to see what effect his funny faces had. Marilyn told me that he would turn his funny face on me, and after a few seconds would simply turn away again. Did he conclude from this experience that the reason his funny face had no effect upon me was that I could not see him? I
doubt this very much. Marilyn says that even today in the context of normal family life he gives me just the same glances, looks, smiles and other expressions as he does towards everyone else. On the other hand, a sighted adult would do this as well. One does not become poker-faced in one’s conversation with a blind person just because he cannot see you. You do not stop smiling at a blind person just because he cannot see your smiles. Your smiles make you feel good.

  Even if Thomas realised that I cannot see his funny faces, I am not sure that he would generalise this. He knows that I cannot read his books, cannot see the pictures, cannot do the jigsaws, but does he know that I cannot see him?

  Ever since he was a small baby, long before he could walk, he has been picking things up for me. When he was on my knees, if I dropped something I would lower him to the carpet, he would pick it up, crawling around if necessary, and bring it back to me. He still does this. I say, ‘Where are your socks?’ He will pass them to me, even though they have been on the floor only six inches away. On the other hand, when I am travelling in the car with him, he will cry out, ‘Look, Daddy!’ about something which is outside the car. I must try reminding him that he cannot show me something which is outside the car.

  25 September

  How strange it is for sighted people to recognise that there is a human being who is using a stick as an extension of his perception! It is not easy for sighted people to realise the implications of the fact that the blind person’s perception of the world, sound apart, is confined to the reach of his body, and to any extension of his body which he can set up, such as a cane. This is illustrated, I think, by the great difficulty which most sighted people have in helping a lost blind person to reorientate himself. The indications of place which sighted people provide are usually too general, or they presuppose that the blind person has a greater knowledge of his environment than he may actually have.