by Hull, John;
The implications of this reciprocity of sight for the relationships between the blind and the sighted are extensive. Because I cannot see, I cannot be seen. I can be ignored, treated as if I did not exist, spoken about in the third person. ‘Will you look after him? Will you put him by the lift? Where would you like to sit him? Will you walk him back to his office?’ When in a hurry, one can rush past a blind friend without the inconvenience of having to greet him. He does not see you, therefore he does not know. Therefore you can pretend that you cannot see him either.
The other day, with my colleague, Michael Grimmitt, I was interviewing a student. Michael told me afterwards that she did not look at me once during the entire interview. All of her questions, her smiles, her whole body were pointed towards Michael. Even when I was directly questioning her, she barely inclined her head in my direction.
Was it that she could not bear to look at me? Did she think that Michael would think she was stupid if she smiled at me and looked at me because she would know that Michael would know that I could not know if she smiled at me or not? Whatever the reason, the effect was that she was unable to see me, because I was unable to see her.
This feeling of having become invisible must be related to the loss of the body image. Just as one has lost the faces of others, so it would not matter if one’s own face were to be lost. On cold, wintry mornings, I suffer from a strange, almost inhuman feeling, that I could go around not merely with the lower part of my face muffled against the wind, but with my entire head shrouded. It would make no difference if my whole face disappeared. Being invisible to others, I become invisible to myself. This means that I lack self-knowledge, I become unconscious. This is what the archetype of blindness indicates, the loss of consciousness, the descent into sleep, the sense of nothingness, of becoming nothing. To be seen is to exist.
This gives insight into the longing of the beloved sighted to be seen by the beloved blind. It is the longing to exist in the lover’s sight, the desire to be perceived by him. This is surely what lies behind the thought which my elder daughter, aged ten and a half, expressed the other day, ‘Oh Daddy, I wish you could see me.’ This is not merely the desire to be seen performing some feat, such as a younger child might feel, it is the desire to have been in the presence of someone who did, as a parent, confer being, but now is blind.
11 February
The other day Thomas and I were listening to the story of Rapunzel on cassette. When we came to the part where the young prince falls from the tower, scratches his eyes on the thorns and becomes blind, Thomas interrupted, in some agitation, turning to me and crying out, ‘Why was he blind?’
‘Because the thorns hurt his eyes’, I replied.
‘Why did the thorns hurt his eyes?’
‘It was when he fell out of the tower. He fell on to the thorn bushes.’
There was a pause while he digested this. I decided to take the initiative. ‘What’s blindness, Thomas?’
After a short pause, he replied thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know.’
There was again a short pause. The illustration in the book apparently showed the young prince wandering through the forest with a white cane or a stick of some kind, because Thomas next asked, ‘Is the prince blind?’
‘Yes’, I replied.
Thomas added, ‘He’s carrying a stick.’
‘Is it a white stick?’ I asked him.
‘No.’
‘Why is he carrying a stick?’ I inquired.
Again there was a pause, and he said, ‘I don’t know.’
Thomas does not know what the word ‘blind’ means, although he realises that it is something to do with one’s eyes. He knows that it is not natural, and is, indeed, the result of some misfortune, and he knows that blindness is associated with the carrying of a stick, although it is not clear quite what the association is. He made no reference to my own blindness, nor to the conversation we had last week which so startled him, when he heard Marilyn say that her husband was blind. Is it possible that my foolish refusal to answer his question directly, about whether I was indeed blind, has now confused him? Perhaps he now is not quite sure whether I am blind or not. He does, however, realise that the word ‘blind’ is a significant word for us all.
24 February
Occasionally I feel depressed, and this is worst when I am frustrated in playing with the children. I feel as if I have become nothing, unable to act as a father, impotent, unable to survey, to admire, or to exercise jurisdiction or discrimination. I have a strange feeling of being dead.
My response is to go even further inwards, into a deeper deadness. I sink into quietness and passivity. I might sit in a chair alone, without moving, reducing my breathing to the barest minimum, simmering down until I am aware of less and less. I try to think of nothing, and often drift in and out of sleep. I might cover myself with a blanket, cutting out any faint sounds, and by emptying myself completely, I become the cipher that my blindness tells me I am. In this state, I can continue for hours.
This technique for fighting depression is effective up to a point. It does provide a certain refuge, a kind of solace, a place to go to. I certainly find that, if the joyful games of the children throw me into one of these depressed states, and if I am unable to go into my nothingness refuge, possibly because I am responsible for the children and have to remain alert, or because of some social obligation to visitors or friends, then I seem to go to pieces. I build up inner tension. There is a tightness in my forehead, a feeling that I will not be able to go on much longer. The image of the quiet little bed in the corner of my study keeps flooding into my mind and I feel that the demands of the outside world which prevent me from retiring are rapidly becoming less and less acceptable. Each voice comes, as it were, from an increasingly remote distance, and is heard with increasing reluctance. The sounds of the outside world now strike me with a certain pain, as if they are preventing me from obtaining relief, and I will, at this stage, find it impossible to remain awake.
I must find another way of tackling this problem. I need to understand it more. It has been suggested that blindness is one of the great symbols or archetypes. In the art and mythology of many peoples, blindness is associated with ignorance, confusion and unconsciousness. Perhaps my imagination has come under the power of these associations. Perhaps my actual blindness has activated the archetype of blindness within me.
This could be why in these states of depression I feel as if I am on the borders of conscious life, not just in the literal sense that I am slipping in and out of sleep, but in a deeper and more alarming sense. I feel as if I want to stop thinking, stop experiencing. The lack of a body image makes this worse: the fact that one can’t glance down and see the reassuring continuity of one’s own consciousness in the outlines of one’s own body, moving a distant foot which, so to speak, waves back, saying, ‘Yes, I hear you. I am here’. There is no extension of awareness into space. So I am nothing but a pure consciousness, and if so, I could be anywhere. I am becoming ubiquitous; it no longer matters where I am. I am dissolving. I am no longer concentrated in a particular location, which would be symbolised by the integrity of the body.
The archetype of blindness represents the power to obliterate the distinction between that which is known and that which is not known, that which is here and that which is not here, the inside and the outside, the specific and the general. It represents dissolution, the borderland between being and not-being.
The techniques which I have described for fighting panic and depression are only partly successful. In the case of the withdrawing technique, it is too similar to the object of its fear. This is why it cannot be an effective response, urgent and perhaps inevitable though it may be in the short term. As for blindness being an archetype, what do I do about it? I need to find an antidote. Could there be an opposing archetype? Could this be the idea of light? Light is certainly one of the perennial symbols. Light gives detail, drives away uncertainty, allows discrimination, dissolves ambiguity
, and gives a particular place and context.
26 February
Thomas had asked me if he could have the light on in the room where we were playing. It had not occurred to me that it had become dark. He had explained, ‘Thomas needs the light. Daddy doesn’t need the light’.
I thought of the passage in Psalm 139.12: ‘Darkness and light are both alike to thee’. There is a strange sense in which I have become like God. I may have discovered not so much the opposing archetype as the alternative one, the one which transcends and unifies at a higher level.
27 February
I am often surprised that my sighted friends know something when it is still so far off. The blind have to remember that it is just as if the sighted were touching their faces all the time. Sighted people gain knowledge of what blind people are thinking just through watching their faces. Sighted people often call out, telling me that there is a car parked on the footpath. Friends often tell me that they saw me (from their cars) crossing the road. They honked me, but there was no way I could recognise them before the traffic moved on. I was surprised the other day to find out how far down the road I was when my children, knowing I was coming, had time to prepare something for me.
In some ways, God’s knowledge of the world is rather like the knowledge which the sighted have of the blind, but it also goes further. ‘Open your eyes!’ one of my sighted friends said to her husband. ‘I can’t tell what you’re thinking when you sit there with your eyes closed.’ The eyes of the blind are inscrutable. It is true that the sighted can catch the transient emotions upon the face of the blind, but all too often I find that my friends think I am asleep, when in fact I am paying very close attention to them. I must speak if they are to know my inner thoughts. Speech becomes all important to the blind. God, however, does not depend upon my speech to know me, even though I am blind. It is at this point that we realise that we are entering into the presence of something which transcends the distinction between blindness and sight, darkness and light.
As a sighted person, you are acknowledged by your friends with a smile, a nod, a wink or even the most fleeting exchange of glances. To be acknowledged by my friends, I must soon be spoken to or touched. I find that I have developed a little habit, which I feel sure is due to my blindness, of shaking hands with people by using both of my hands. I somehow feel the need to extend an acknowledgement of their presence which will make up for my inability to receive their smiles. When I am speaking at a meeting, it is important to go around as many people as I can beforehand, shaking hands and literally making contact.
*
I drop a teaspoon on to the floor. I lower my twelve-month old baby, holding her by the waist. I wait a moment, moving her up and down a little like a vacuum cleaner. I lift her up again. The teaspoon is in her hand. I am full of wonder. She picked it up, so smoothly, so easily, with no need to scrape the carpet with her hand. She went straight for it. How did she know? This child has some strange sense which I can but remember. God’s knowledge fills me with even greater wonder. ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me! It is high, I cannot attain it’ (Psalm 139, v.6). What does ‘high’ mean to a blind person? How high are the buildings? How high are the clouds? I only know that things are up there; they are beyond my reach.
The knowledge which God has is inescapable. It surrounds me; it fills me. It makes every place alike, for all places are known to God. ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?’ (v.7). There are no degrees of the divine presence because there are no degrees of divine knowledge. ‘If I ascend to heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in Sheol thou art there’ (v.8). God is Lord of all worlds. The world of heaven, of light is his. The world of Sheol, of darkness and of the depths is also his. It makes no difference to him where I am, or in what world I find myself. He is not enclosed within the world of heavenly light nor is he defeated by the world of impenetrable night.
Now I imagine I am flying. I imagine I am free, once again, to go where I will, and that the morning and the ocean will once again be accessible to me. ‘If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea …’ (v.9). I may, perhaps, live beneath the sea, in that world of the unconscious depths. Even there, the One who is the Lord of all worlds will make himself known to me in the manner which suits my condition. He will not show himself to me: he will not appear to me. He will not offer me a vision or be transformed in glory. He will remember my blindness. ‘… even there thy hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall hold me’ (v.10).
I feel certain that the author of this psalm was blind. Nobody else could have described so powerfully the religious experience of the blind person, or could have interpreted so perfectly the presence of a blind person before God.
*
The physical closeness of two people making love is a problem to the pornographic film-maker, for at the point of most intimate touching where sight becomes irrelevant, the pornographer must introduce distance in order to retain visual excitement. It is amusing for a blind man to think that there is still one thing he can do, and people often remark that you don’t need speech and you don’t need sight to do it. No matter how exciting and profound may be the mutual knowledge which lovers exchange, none can ever be said to know or experience the moment when the sperm joins the ovum and a new life is born. I was made in secret and I am still being made in the secrets of blindness, but all secrets are open to God. I no longer know the passage of my days by means of the alternation of day and night, light and darkness, and in this sense also, my knowledge of my days is rather like God’s. The important thing about waking up is not the morning but the presence. I am restored by wakefulness to the presence of the ones I love. So although I experience the paradoxes of redis-covering sight in the unconscious life of dreams and of losing my sight once again every time I wake up, the paradoxes are transcended in communion with the One who knows me, whether I wake or sleep, for I am still with him.
28 February
As a blind person, sitting on the beach, I have poured a fistful of sand upon the palm of my other hand, allowing it to trickle through my fingers. I have rubbed the sand between my finger and thumb, wondering at the various textures. Some of the grains are coarse and sharp, filing the skin in such a way that every little speck stands out. Some are so smooth and silky that it is almost impossible to tell the grains, the sand disappearing like water. If I stretch my hand out a little further, I can still grasp sand, and so on, further and further. I know that with sight I could tell the sweep of this beach for miles around the bay. This beach is but one of thousands of such beaches, and there are probably thousands of people like me just now, doing what I am doing, running the grains between their fingers and wondering. So are the divine thoughts. My body holds them, one by one, while I myself am held like a grain upon the hand of God.
In adoration I welcome the divine knowledge. What matters is not that I am blind, but that I am known and that I am led by the hand, and that my life, whether sighted or blind, is full of praise.
2 March
Last night I had the most powerful, frightening and impressive dream. I was on board a huge ship. There were no women on board, it was all men. It appeared to be some kind of naval expedition. Giant waves kept crashing right over the ship. The first of these we saw coming. Everyone ran for shelter. We had time to scuttle inside the bulkheads, to run along to the end, and to clamber up the metal stairways. Up and up we climbed to the very top recesses. Then the wave broke. It came crashing across the deck, into the cabins and holds, swamping the whole of the interior section where we were, and splashing right up, but not quite touching us. We were all grouped on the very top part of this spacious hall, or stateroom, in the ship. This was the first of many such waves. One, in particular, I saw coming. It was a mountainous, threatening wall of dark, green water. They crashed again and again over the ship. The whole place was awash. We ourselves had just managed to escape, although others were being swept awa
y. Now the vessel became a submarine. We went down, under the water. We were on some kind of mission. Three men seemed to be in charge. They were the captain and his helpers, the officers. They were swimming around, beautiful, strong, powerful men. Now I had an external view of this submarine. Still it was descending, very modern, like a space craft. It was covered with bulbs, all sorts of equipment and lamps. It was not particularly large, but was coming down and down, very gently. Now it was resting on the deck of another ship, far beneath the water, where there seemed to be some mission to accomplish. Then we were back inside the large vessel. There seemed to be some kind of disaster, a punishment amongst the crew. There was my colleague, Michael, being wrapped up inside a blanket or a shroud and hung on a rope out of the cabin window. This was to serve as a punishment, or some kind of signal. As he was lowered out of the window, I heard the bell sounding. I was full of distress, and I saw others of my colleagues being punished in the same way. I did not know what for. I was full of fear that somehow or other my colleagues and I had let down the expedition, disgraced the party. We were being punished in this dreadful and incomprehensible manner by these majestic men who were our captains. It was a very vivid, compelling and exciting dream.
Above and below blindness … is there to be a meeting with something down there? What loss! What failure! How incomprehensible it all is and how irresistible!
5 March
On a number of occasions in one of the Birmingham city centre churches Marilyn and I had met a man whom I will call Mr Cresswell. A few Sundays ago Mr Cresswell approached me after the morning service, shook me warmly by the hand, and told me that God had told him that it was his intention to heal me of my blindness. Mr Cresswell would have to wait for the signal from the Lord that the time had come but as soon as the Lord did give him the word he would be along to see me. I congratulated him on having received this message, adding that, as soon as the Lord gave him the word he was to lose no time but to come out and see me straight away.