by Hull, John;
Let us take an example of internal body timing. For several days recently, I have been overshooting my front gate by about fifteen yards, which would be about the length occupied by a single house. I could not work out why I was doing this, but I did it several times in a week. My house is about a hundred and fifty yards from the corner of the block. As I begin that final part of my walk home, I seem to know more or less how far I have to walk. I do not count the paces, I just know how much work I have to do in order to arrive. I am usually tapping the line of fences, and this gives me all sorts of clues about my exact position, but even if I am being guided by somebody else and have no contact with the fences, I seem to know how far it is.
At present, the second house up from the corner is having a new roof, and the footpath is blocked with piles of roofing materials. It is clear that my body clock had been resetting itself again after that interruption, and then allowing me to go the expected distance. I was overshooting by about the same distance as that which was occupied by the tiles on the footpath. For the blind person, the house is only there because of past experience. Space is reduced to one’s own body, and the position of the body is known not by what objects have been passed but by how long it has been in motion. Position is thus measured by time.
Let us take another example. A page on a printed book is an area of space. When you are reading with your eyes you traverse this space until it is all covered, and then turning the page you encounter another space and so on. The same is true of braille. Books recorded on tape are, however, like speech itself, always moving, and measured by time. We may say that the problem for the blind author not using braille is to find an equivalent in time for everything which the sighted author does in space.
This brings us to the difference in the blind perception of people. For the deaf person, people have an abiding presence. They are there, all the time, every day. For the blind, people are not there unless they speak. Many times I have continued a conversation with a sighted friend, only to discover that he is not there. He may have walked away without telling me. He may have nodded or smiled, thinking the conversation was over. From my point of view, he has suddenly vanished.
When you are blind, a hand suddenly grabs you. A voice suddenly addresses you. There is no anticipation or preparation. There is no hiding around the corner. There is no lying low. I am grasped. I am greeted. I am passive in the presence of that which accosts me. I cannot escape it. The sighted person can choose whom he wants to speak to, as he wanders around the streets or the market-place. People are already there for him; they have a presence prior to his greeting them, and he can choose whether or not to turn that presence into a relationship by addressing his acquaintance. For the blind person, people are in motion, they are temporal, they come and they go. They come out of nothing; they disappear. St Augustine has a parable about the human soul. He says it is like a bird which bursts into a large building, flutters for a while, and then finds an escape and disappears. This idea of being visited, of being blessed by receiving a visitation, seems to me to be quite important in the blind experience of other people.
3 July
I have just returned from a conference in Ontario. I made a big effort in getting to know all of the eighty or so people there. If I heard someone speaking in one of the public sessions, and could not recognise the voice, I would whisper to the person next to me, asking who it was. I was surprised by the number of times my neighbours were unable to reply. They recognised the speaker; they knew it was the person with whom they had had such and such a conversation, but they did not know the name. Even late in the conference, when I would have thought that most people had got to know each other, I found that if I asked an acquaintance to take me over to anyone in the room whose name he knew, there might be no more than two or three in a room with twenty people in it whose names were familiar. I discussed this with a colleague, pointing out that it was relatively easy for a sighted person to get to know a group of seventy or eighty people, whereas a blind person had to work hard at it. My colleague replied that my assumptions about how sighted people got to know each other were mistaken. They do not, on the whole, get to know each other by name. That is part of it, of course, but it is more a requirement of courtesy. Sighted people get to know each other by recognising each other’s appearance, and all the things the new acquaintance has said and done are associated with that image of what he or she looks like. The appearance, the look of the person, is that around which all of the other items cluster. The name of the person is one additional item of information, but the appearance is that central core around which everything gathers.
For me, knowing someone hangs upon knowing the name. It is the same with streets. Sighted people often do not know the names of the streets they use every day. For the blind person the name of the street is essential, so that he can ask where he is.
The name of a person, however, does not tell you much about what to expect. You can tell the sex, and often the nationality, and sometimes you might be able to make a rough guess at the age of the person. From the appearance of somebody, on the other hand, you can learn much more.
In Ontario, I worked by getting to know people’s names. I had the list of names read to me again and again, and I could simply ask to be taken to somebody by name, and could keep on asking, until I met somebody who could do this. I kept on working down the list, name by name. Not until I heard the voice and felt the hand clasp which would, from now on, be associated with that name, did I form much of an expectation. Around the name I would build up the story of that person. The name is the verbal cue around which that particular story hangs.
When a blind person and a sighted person are making friends, it is a bit like the difference between the parables about the merchant who, having discovered a pearl of great price, sold everything he had to buy that pearl, and the one about the farmer, ploughing in the field, who accidentally discovered a hidden treasure. The sighted person, having formed an image of the pearl he is seeking, takes steps to deepen that friendship. The blind person suddenly strikes treasure in the field. Without anticipation, without previous images, he encounters someone, enters into dialogue, and meets a surprising new story.
The people in the group around him are not present to him as if stretched out in space, as so many patches of colour, but they do have depths. They are like voices suspended upon stilts – a present emerging out of a past, in time rather than in space. Sight enables one to take a cross-section through somebody’s life at the present moment. The blind person, however, takes a longitudinal section, back through time. This is not only a longer view of a person’s life, but it takes longer to acquire.
4 July
One of the most difficult aspects of blindness is the way it tends to make you passive in getting to know people. Not to be able to choose freely whom you want to speak with, not to be able to get to know somebody better by making a special point of greeting him or her, this problem has always worried me since I lost my sight.
I have been developing techniques to deal with this. I hope that these will restore to me some of the initiative in making and keeping human friendships.
Suppose I am talking with somebody after a meeting. How do I change partners? The sighted person has many little devices available. She can say, ‘Oh, excuse me a minute, I just want to have a word with so and so.’ The blind person cannot do this, because he has no easy way of knowing that so and so is over there. The sighted person can say, ‘I’ll be back in a minute. I’m just going to get another drink.’ Not only have I found it very difficult to break away from a conversation, but my sighted friend finds it difficult to get away from me. He feels responsible for me. He cannot just go off and leave me standing there. It is an impasse. How can we get away from each other?
When I have decided that the time has come to stop talking to someone, I simply ask him or her to have a look around the room and to take me to someone else. Knowing the names of the people I want to speak to is, of cour
se, all important. I may say, ‘Well, I’m going to go and talk to somebody else now. Can you see if so and so is around?’ This is not too good. It takes my friend ages to look around for a particular person. If my friend does not know this person, or if the person turns out not to be around, I am stuck. I find it better to ask, ‘Can you see anybody at all you know?’ Usually, my friend will say, ‘Well, there’s old so and so over there.’ I say, ‘Will you please take me to him and introduce me?’ I repeat this process again and again.
In this way I may manage to speak to a dozen people during the course of a fifteen-minute coffee break. I am also meeting new people, because my friends are introducing me to the people they know.
This technique works best in a situation where it is a meeting of a fairly regular group of people, for example a society or a church. It works well in a confined social situation such as at a conference where people are wearing name badges, or where everybody in the building is taking part in the same event, but the technique does have various problems. It makes it rather difficult for somebody who wants to talk to me to get a word in. Since I always appear to be in conversation, there are never the natural, social spaces during which it is normally possible to intervene. Many people do not find it easy to adopt the direct approach: ‘Excuse me, I’ll just have a word with John now, if you don’t mind.’
One of the interesting features of this technique is the enormous differences I find in the skill with which people seem to realise what it is I want, and are able to carry it out smoothly. Sometimes my conversational partner will embarrass me by shouting out, ‘Excuse me, Bill! John Hull would like to have a word with you.’
Bill then breaks away from whoever he is with, comes over to me and says, ‘Yes, John, what is it?’ The truth is that I have nothing in particular to say to Bill. I merely wanted to shake hands with him and ask him how he is. The fact that the technique itself is so deliberate makes people think that I am deliberate in wanting to speak to the named individual. Other people seem to have a natural instinct for helping. They can not only rattle off half a dozen names in quick succession, but can slide me into the new conversation in an unobtrusive way. I seem to have discovered a sort of litmus paper test, a kind of social examination, which enables me to find out certain things about my new acquaintances quite quickly and, often, quite reliably.
It’s awful, having to make such demands upon people all the time. The alternative, however, seems to be almost complete social marginalisation and passivity.
6 July
When I am walking into work, it is not unusual for people to ask if I need any help. Now, the truth is that on this route I do not need help. Usually, I say, ‘Thank you very much. I’m quite okay. I come along here every day. Thanks just the same for your offer.’
I am always grateful for these offers, since I am conscious of the fact that on an unfamiliar route I would probably be quite glad of some help. The sighted pedestrian, meeting me, may not know whether I am on one of my familiar routes or not.
Sometimes, the person who offers to help me is known to me already. It may be a neighbour, somebody who works in some other part of the University, or somebody who walked in with me on some earlier occasion. Usually I respond by saying, ‘I don’t need any help because this is one of my routes, but I am glad of your company and would like to walk along with you.’
Now, with me, a curious thing takes place. I lose my independence as soon as I accept my friend’s company. This is because I must put a finger under the elbow of my companion, in order to locate him, to keep abreast of him, so as not to keep walking into him. I am like a hitch-hiker. I am being towed, moving more rapidly than would normally be possible.
Instead of waving my stick from side to side in front of me, I am either holding it steadily in front, just as a protection in case my friend forgets to tell me there is a lamppost, or I may have folded it up under my arm. Moreover, we have to have conversation. If you are walking along with somebody for company, you talk. This means that I cannot devote to my route the concentration which it would normally require.
When I am walking along this, my most familiar route, I have in my mind a screen with a sort of map of the area, and my own presence, like a pinpoint of light, moving along it. I continually refer to this to check up on my position. Here I am, coming along this portion of my route, having crossed the road, being about to cross that road, knowing that around the next corner there will be the traffic lights. I must never forget my position. That would be as if the light went out. I am continually verifying my position on this map by taking into account all sorts of little, familiar features. On this corner, the kerb is slightly higher. The curvature of the footpath is slightly more pronounced at this point. The road surface here is not quite the same as it was there. Here comes that little smooth patch. There are certain points along my route where I actually have to count the steps in order to avoid the lampposts. All of this requires constant attention. If I allow my concentration to lapse for a moment, I may get slightly out of position, I might walk into something, I might stray on to a busy road. I cannot do any of this and have a conversation at the same time.
This means that a sighted person cannot simply accept my company. Through no fault of his own, he has by walking with me deprived me of my independence.
Through no fault of my own, I have sacrificed my independence for the sake of his company. He then becomes responsible for me. He becomes like a car towing a caravan. It is his responsibility to make sure that the vehicle he is towing is still there – that I do not become detached from him at some crucial point of the route. He has to make sure that there is room, when passing between those two parked vehicles, not just for him, but for both of us. If he walks around the lamppost, but does not make sure that I also walk round the lamppost, my collision with the lamppost will be his responsibility. All of this can be very unnerving for the inexperienced guide.
It is easy, in this situation, for the sighted person to assume that the dependency which he now finds himself committed to is my ordinary or typical state. He realises that I am now depending on him for some warning of where the kerbs and the lampposts are; he finds it a little more difficult to imagine that, when I am alone, I can work these details out quite well for myself. He is thus always ready to rush up and give me his help, rather than merely to offer me his company, because his experience is always of my helplessness. Blindness creates a strange variation upon familiar human patterns of dependence and independence.
7 July
Once he is on it, a stairway is one of the safest places for a blind person. You never find a chair left on a stairway, or a bucket or a brick. There is never a stair missing from a stairway, and all the stairs are the same height. There is almost always a handrail or at least a wall to touch. There may be some uncertainty about the top step and the bottom step, but with the white cane, that problem is simplified.
This puzzles most sighted people, who tend to assume that stairs will be dangerous for the blind. Sighted people know that they sometimes trip and fall on stairs, and they assume that, if a sighted person is likely to trip, a blind person is bound to.
It is very common when I am going up or down stairs for my sighted guide to count aloud the number of stairs, presumably for my benefit. Oddly enough, this is one of the few situations in which the additional knowledge is of little help or relevance. One can, of course, come upon a downward flight of stairs unexpectedly, and this would be as dangerous for a blind person as for a sighted one, and so the approach to a downward stair is an uncertain moment. The blind person needs to know two things: first, that he is approaching stairs, second, that the stairs go down. Most sighted guides disclose the first fact, very many, possibly a majority, forget about the second fact. The existence and the direction are essential; the number is immaterial. If I am descending a series of stairs interrupted by platforms, it is helpful to know when the last set of stairs has been completed, so that I can now set out confidently with my gu
ide, not having to probe with my cane for the first stair of the next flight. Similarly, when approaching a circular stairway, it is helpful to know whether it will be curving clockwise or anticlockwise. A stairway can take an unexpected turn one way or the other, and it is easier on the outer edge of the curvature, where the steps are wider. Generally speaking, however, a stairway is a predictable structure. The same is true of lifts and escalators.
What the blind find difficult are smooth, open spaces. It is just these areas which are assumed by many sighted people to be best for the blind, because there is no danger of tripping. From the blind point of view, however, a flat, open surface is not negotiable because there are no orientating signals. There is no structure. It is not predictable, because it may end at any moment, and there is no way of telling where you are, once you are on it. The problem for the blind person is not falling over, but knowing where he is. For this reason, it is easier to find my way around a campus which is marked out by steps, little hills and valleys, low walls and lots of changes in texture, because I can mark out my route with sections. The structure becomes a sequence when I am moving through it.
Let us take another example of an unpredictable structure. Sometimes my route over a forecourt is obstructed by cars parked at different angles from each other. The danger is not that I might walk into a car but that I will get lost. Blind people do sometimes walk into the edges of doors or into obstructions sticking out at head height, but it is unusual for a blind person to walk into a wall or a parked car. The white cane gives sufficient warning of the presence of such a large object. The problem is rather that having negotiated around three sides of the vehicle it is difficult to pick up one’s route in exactly the same direction. If, with the next step, a second parked car is discovered, lying at a different angle, and then a third, it is almost impossible to align oneself with the original route. You have to try to maintain in your mind a map showing all these angles and set it against the original direction. This is what I call an unpredictable structure.