by Hull, John;
With steady controlled breathing, and by holding a small object in my hands, these feelings of panic pass away within a few minutes. I am left rather shaky, and not far from tears.
3
Beyond light and darkness
Winter 1983
7 January
Early in infancy we learn to associate our desires with the visual images of the things which satisfy them. So complete is the identification of desire with image that it becomes difficult to distinguish between ‘I feel hungry’ and ‘I want to eat that food which I see there’. One feels hungry, of course, even when there is no food in sight, but once the food can be seen desire for the actual food takes the place of the feeling of hunger, or blends with the feeling, so that one’s energies, attentions, senses of smell and taste are occupied with the anticipation of the perceived food. The internal sensation of hunger is now given an objective reference outside the body. Desire becomes specific. Indeed, the sight of the food can actually make you feel hungry, or make you realise that you are hungry.
This close association between image and desire reminds us that sight is an anticipatory sense. The anticipation of satisfied hunger replaces the sensation of hunger itself. As the need and its fulfilment come into focus upon the image of food, activity is aroused. I stretch out my hand for the food. I enter the restaurant. I buy the grapes. Naturally, sight is not the only sense to be involved in this. The smell of food is very important, indeed, perhaps even for sighted people the smell of food may be more important than the sight. As always, however, sight is the foundation upon which the other senses build. The delicious smell of cooking attracts you to the kitchen and makes you feel hungry, but it is the sight of the food which actually tells you what is for dinner. The aroma, although wonderfully evocative, is often rather general. You say, ‘That smells delicious. What is it?’ Moreover, there are many foods the sight of which is much more stimulating than the smell. It is the sight of a rosy, shining apple which is attractive. The beautiful but subtle aroma of the apple, so noticeable when you open a whole crate or go into the loft where they are stored, may not be noticeable in the case of a single apple, especially when it is in the bowl with other kinds of fruit.
Blindness dislocates this primordial union of desire and image. I am often bored by food, feel that I am losing interest in it or cannot be bothered eating. At the same time, I have the normal pangs of hunger. Even whilst feeling hungry, I remain unmotivated by the approach of food. I know it is there, because somebody tells me. Somebody says, ‘Your soup has come’, or ‘Don’t start yet; the waiter is working his way round the table with the vegetables.’ ‘But what is it?’ I ask. ‘It’s veal cutlet.’ Now I know. But what do I know? I have this sentence, and I believe it, but the visual cues which excite the actual desire and turn it outwards towards the object are lacking.
Something rather similar seems to happen in the case of sexual desire. There is, I think, the same connection between the general but disorientated sense of sexual hunger and the particular image of the one who can satisfy it. The image of that which satisfies is quite inseparable from the realisation of the desire itself. What can we imagine of the sexual feelings of Adam before he met Eve? He knew he wanted something, but he did not know what. When he saw Eve, the restlessness of an unformed longing was turned into the passionate pursuit of a particular person.
So it is possible, I think, for a heterosexual blind man to be bored by women and yet to be conscious of sexual hunger. The trace of a perfume and the nuance of a voice are so insubstantial when compared with the full-bodied impact upon a sighted man of the appearance of an attractive woman. It must take a long time for a man who loses sight in adult life to transfer the cues of sexual arousal from the visual to the other senses. There must be many men in that position who wonder whether they will ever again be capable of genuine sexual excitement.
This dissociation of desire from image is a very curious and unsettling thing.
8 January
If I were to accept this thing, if I were to acquiesce, then I would die. It would be as if my ability to fight back, my will to resist were broken. On the other hand, not to acquiesce, not to accept, seems futile. What I am refusing to accept is a fact.
This then is the dilemma. I am in the presence of an unacceptable reality.
I must be content with little answers. This requires the careful planning of each day, which must be broken into its compartments. Each hour must have its particular skills, its various techniques, its little routines which enable something to be accomplished successfully. Otherwise, I will have a sense of pointless desolation, a feeling of being carried helplessly deeper and deeper into it. This becomes so sharp that I am almost overwhelmed. The sense of subterranean or subconscious weight oppresses me, and I link in my mind the dream image of the huge, water-soaked hulk being dragged down into the depths with my waking reverie about the little coal-truck being driven remorselessly deeper and deeper beneath the infinite weight of the mountain. The common feature is irresistible heaviness.
One fights such a thing by minute steps. One adopts tiny techniques which help one to do tiny things step by step. I will not try to get home; that is too far. But I will get to the end of the next block. I cannot recover my grasp of the dictionaries and the encyclopaedias. Nevertheless, I will find out the meaning of this one word. To read the whole of this book, at this speed, will take an age. Very well, I will not even attempt it. But I will get to the bottom of this page even if it kills me.
I must also fight back by recognising the circumstances in which panic is likely to occur. Let me see if I can set these out in my mind. I never have feelings of panic in my office. I always have a sense of being in an ordered environment, I know where things are, and I have something to get on with. I may sometimes feel sleepy and depressed, as if I can’t be bothered, but I never panic.
I must carefully consider the implications of the Christmas set-up at home. Because of the pressure on sleeping space, I had had to give up my study, which I did gladly. But then I had nowhere to go, nowhere to get on with some little piece of work which would keep my brain ticking over. I must also have been affected by the fact that the whole house, from top to bottom, was littered with unfamiliar objects, children’s toys all over the floor, suitcases and relatives to be bumped into. The unusual number of people in the house adds to the problem. I have to concentrate just that little bit harder to make sure that I have instant recognition. All this makes me feel that I am in an environment which is slipping out of control. I start to feel that it is swimming around me, that the unpredictable is confronting me at every step. It makes me realise the inflexibility of the blind, or I should say the inflexible kind of life which is imposed upon people by blindness. Familiarity, predictability, the same objects, the same people, the same routes, the same movement of the hand in order to locate this or that: take these away, and the blind person is transported back into the infantile state where one simply does not know how to handle the world, how to enter into it and to control it, how to exist in a relationship with that world, where the hard-won balance between trust and fear threatens to be upset, and one is overwhelmed by the thought that the world to which one seeks to be related is unrelatable to, because either it is unreal or unavailable. It is inhabited by beings to whom it does belong, the sighted. The world which remains is then one’s own body, the introspective consciousness. This is a world into which the sighted cannot penetrate, a place where some kind of inner control can be established. This is to go back beyond infancy into the unborn state, where one is free-floating without distinction, enclosed at the end of the tunnel, without a world and finally without a self.
The alternative to this is to establish some sort of environment, a study, a room, a route, a passage, some kind of territory. I wonder if this whole thing can be thought of in terms of territorial rights.
Blindness takes away one’s territorial rights. One loses territory. The span of attention, of knowledge, re
tracts so that one lives in a little world. Almost all territory becomes potentially hostile. Only the area which can be touched with the body or tapped with the stick becomes a space in which one can live. The rest is unknown.
I am also haunted by the thought that it must be much more awful for those who, having lost their sight, go on to lose hearing as well.
11 January
People sometimes ask me if I would like to feel their faces, but the face when felt is quite different from the face when seen. One of the most significant features of the face, the eyes themselves, cannot easily be touched. Moreover, the significance of the face-to-face position is becoming dim. It is the sight of the face which requires it to have a certain position. In the sighted world, it is a mark of courtesy and attention to turn one’s face towards the person who is speaking, but in the blind world it does not matter. A blind person, after all, only knows you have been listening to him when you reply, not by whether you were looking at him while he was addressing you. The relationship, in other words, is no longer symbolised by the mutual position of the faces. Sight deals with spaces, with areas, and hence with positions.
What is the sexual significance of this? The face-to-face position is important in the lovemaking of sighted people, because it indicates the attention of the one turned fully upon the other. It represents the mutuality and the personal nature of the sexual exchange. There was a film about prehistoric people. One of the most dramatic scenes was when a couple making love abandoned the position, which the film shows as being universal, in which the male partner is behind the female, for the face-to-face position.
This is portrayed as the development of mere sexual intercourse into an act of communion between two persons. For the blind lover, however, the face-to-face position can no longer have the same significance for personal communion as it must have for the sighted partner. I do not think that a sighted person could easily accept this. It is such an infringement of this powerful convention about the relationship between personality and the body. How does blindness affect lovemaking? Must not the blind lover become more primitive? Must he not regress, as it were, to the situation described in the film as being pre-personal? On the other hand, is it not possible that the blind person, dependent so heavily upon touch, smell and taste, might develop new gentleness and sensitivity in that situation which is tactile all over?
Another aspect of this is the horror of being faceless, of forgetting one’s own appearance, of having no face. The face is the mirror-image of the self.
Is this linked with the desire which I sometimes feel quite strongly to hide my face from others? I find I want to hold my chin and to cover my mouth with one hand, pressing my hand against my nose, as if I was wearing a mask. Is this a primitive desire to find some kind of equality? Since your face is not available to me, why should my face be available to you? Or does it spring from a sense that the face has been lost? Am I somehow mourning over the loss of the face? Am I trying to regain the assurance that I have got a face by feeling it with my own hands? I want to touch my very lips as I am speaking. Other people’s voices come from nowhere. Does my own voice also come from nowhere?
I often want to rest my chin upon one of my pointed fingers, so as to remind myself always to point my face in the direction from which the sound or voice is coming. I need to do this even when in deep conversation with one person. Am I afraid that my head will develop that characteristic blind person’s wobble?
The disappearance of the face is only the most poignant example of the dematerialisation of the whole body. People become mere sounds. This leads to something else. Just because there is nothing to mediate between the intangible sounds of voices and the immediate contact of bodies, body-contact becomes all the more startling. A handshake or an embrace becomes a shock, because the body comes out of nowhere into sudden reality.
This comes home vividly in the experience of drinking very cold water from a tap. The impact is so immediate. All of a sudden, it is there – water! It slaps against the lips, swamps the face, floods the mouth and the stomach with its sharp presence, with no warning or preparation. It just comes, smack. So is the transition from speech to body contact in the human relations of the blind person. So, for the blind, other people have become both more abstract and more concrete, with an abrupt transition from one to the other. This takes us back to the problem of the sexual relationships of the blind. Perhaps the blind lover is both more abstract and more concrete, perhaps he is both more primitive and more sophisticated, in different ways. Perhaps this is what they mean when they say that true love is blind.
2 February
Last night I had a nightmare so vivid that it woke me up. I dreamt that Elizabeth, who will be two on 23 February, was not in her cot. Instead it was full of flowers, beautiful flowers. They were in a formal arrangement, like wreaths on a gravestone. I went to Marilyn and said, ‘Where’s Lizzie?’
Marilyn said, ‘She’s dead.’
I was appalled, and broke down in tears, crying out, ‘What happened? I didn’t know. Tell me!’
Marilyn was very calm. She said, ‘It’s no good making a fuss. She’s buried.’
I was furious. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and shook her fiercely, shouting out, ‘What do you mean? How dare you! Is she not only dead but buried, and I not even told?’
Marilyn pointed out of the window. There was a grassy plot, like a cathedral close or a cloister. Over this a slow procession was moving on foot. ‘There they go’, Marilyn said. ‘There’s the funeral procession’.
So I woke up.
This dream was very visual. The colours were brilliant, people’s clothes, the green of the grass and the bright colours of the flowers. There was no trace of blindness. Who is running my children’s lives? How would I even know? Did the dreamer get the names wrong? Was it, perhaps, not Lizzie and Marilyn but other people whom I have also lost? Was it Imogen who was dead, lost first through divorce and distance and lost again through the isolating effect of blindness? The many faces of loss are terrifying.
4 February
Today the family went to Coventry Cathedral. Marilyn and Thomas went together to buy tickets for the special exhibition, while I remained in the coffee bar. Marilyn asked if there were a concession for disabled people, adding, ‘My husband is blind’. As soon as she had got the tickets, Thomas said to her, ‘Why is your husband blind?’ Marilyn, in telling this to me later, said that she was most taken aback at this question, and could not help wondering if she should have said what she did say in his hearing. She replied, however, ‘Because Daddy can’t see.’
He then asked, ‘Is Daddy your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why can’t he see?’
‘Because there’s something wrong with his eyes.’
Marilyn told me that Thomas did not pursue this any further, but later, as we were walking around the cathedral itself, he came over to me. This was the first time I had been alone with him, although Marilyn had already told me what had happened. ‘Daddy’, he asked me, ‘are you blind?’ I took him in my arms, and said, ‘Who’s been telling you that?’
This was a foolish and evasive answer and I do not quite know why I said it. In some obscure way that I cannot fully understand I felt ashamed. I was fearful that some change in my relationship with him might take place. Anyway, he now knows I am blind. Does he, however, know what blindness is? What conclusions will he be able to draw from his knowledge that I am blind?
9 February
Marilyn told me that yesterday whilst Thomas was playing with Lizzie he closed his eyelids very tightly, saying to her, ‘When I close my eyes you can’t see me.’ He kept his eyes closed for some seconds, while Lizzie stared at him, wide-eyed with wonder. Finally he opened his eyes and said triumphantly, ‘There!’ This is a vivid example of the assumption of reciprocity. One assumes that the other is like oneself. Not to see is the same as not to be seen. The active and the passive forms of speech are collated. Not to see is th
us to be unobserved. A blind person is invisible. A person who closes his own eyes is also invisible. No one can see him. If one does not use sight, one is not available for sight. The argument from reciprocity runs like this: I can see Daddy; Daddy is therefore not invisible; therefore Daddy can see.
It would be all too easy to dismiss this as a piece of infantile reasoning. We should remember the so-called ‘illusion of privacy’, a feature of the behaviour of many blind adults. It refers to the difficulty of remembering all the time, when you are blind, that you can be seen. It is so hard always to bear in mind the astonishing range of this faculty which other people are said to have. The blind person has to remind himself all the time, when tempted to scratch his bum, that he is visible.
This is not the case when hearing is lost. I have never heard of a child who put his fingers in his ears and shouted, ‘You can’t hear me.’ One of the reasons for this, I think, is that the organ of hearing and that of speech are located separately on the head or the face. The organ by means of which one hears (the ears) and the organs by means of which one makes oneself heard (the larynx and the mouth) are not identical. The organ with which one sees and the organ with which one is seen are, however, identical. Sight is reciprocal but hearing is sequential.
The eye is thus related both actively and passively to other eyes, which is not the case with the ear, which is an organ of receptivity only.
Touch is reciprocal under normal conditions. If I can feel you, you can normally feel me feeling you. If I cannot feel you, it is probable that you cannot feel me. The difference between touch and sight is that the reciprocity of sight can be turned off so easily. There are ways of turning off the reciprocity of mutual touch. I could feel you while you were asleep, or I could hold a lock of your hair without you becoming aware of it. You might have had a dab of anaesthetic and your skin might be dulled. In the case of sight, however, you only have to close your eyes. The closing of the eyes is a normal, indeed, a moment by moment action, whereas the shutting off of the sense of touch is not so simple.