by Hull, John;
I was most anxious about the people I was to meet. I knew that it would undoubtedly cause pain to people I knew and loved so much when they met me as a blind person. I felt worried and rather frightened at the thought that I would have to reconstitute my knowledge of them on the basis of sound and touch, just as I was doing with people I was not meeting for the first time in England. All of my visual memories of those loved faces were now at best an irrelevance and at worst an actual obstruction to my entering into a real and contemporary relationship with them.
I also felt disturbed at the thought of being deprived of my routine for so many weeks. I would have to learn my way round so many new houses and buildings, make myself familiar with new household utensils, and learn the names of so many new people. I felt afraid that in this situation I would be even more thoroughly marginalised, even more completely passive than I always am these days.
I have to admit that all of these fears were fulfilled. After three or four days I developed persistent asthma which has not really lifted after ten or twelve days. I have been aware of quite a severe sense of suffering, even of anguish. One of the strands of this is realising that people who love me are trying to communicate with me. They are having to get used to me again, like this. My mother sat close beside me at the nature reservation, while the children fed a tiny wallaby with a bottle of milk. She stroked my hand lightly, saying, ‘I have to touch you because I feel that’s the only way I can get close to you now.’ I longed for a more immediate recognition of loved ones than the rather slow, day-by-day building up of impressions, histories and voices which blindness seems to require.
In the presence of those from whom I have been absent for so long, I want something more than this. I want to be in the immediate presence, to have the same person again. I want to be greeted by the person I love in his or her remembered form. Not being able to experience this is a cause not only of frustration but of grief.
The loss of the sights of the city, the sea and the countryside, I can endure. There is, however, a problem of sharing. It is so difficult to remain always interested and enthusiastic when people are pointing things out and reminding me of the lovely view which one can see from this spot. I sense their own perplexity at how they can help me to share their own enjoyment, how to show things off, how to be proud about the recent developments, how to draw me into this world which they love so much.
I still have difficulty in renouncing my role as father, as the convivial one who always makes others feel at home. How can I any longer count upon being reliable as good company? How can I any longer take the initiative in anecdotes and witticisms? What about my role as leader and guide to my own children? I am sharply conscious of the difficulty of showing the place off to them. As we travel around, I want to say, ‘Look! That is where we did so-and-so. There is the place where it happened. Down that street I once lived. There! You can just catch a glimpse of my old school.’ I cannot even point out the strange animals to the children unless I get a description first of what they look like.
I have been driving myself on with the expectation that I would and should be able to do all these things. During the first ten or twelve days I was fighting to bring my emotions under control, and felt almost continually on the edge of exhaustion and panic. The defences which I have built up were being threatened.
In the middle of all this, I had a strangely impressive dream. I was going to Cambridge to register for a Master of Theology degree. I was to enrol at Gonville and Caius College. Suddenly I was myself required to sit the final paper, with all the other candidates who had, however, been able to pursue the course the whole year. I was struggling with the examination questions, knowing that I was at a considerable disadvantage. After the examination, I was presented with a financial statement of what the year would cost me, if I was successfully enrolled. This was given to me by the Rev. Jack Newport (who had actually been my tutor when I was at Cambridge from 1959 to 1962). The bill amounted to £2,600 and with a shock I realised that I had not yet made any applications to trusts for grants. I would have to take immediate steps to make it clear to the college authorities that the work I had done on the examination paper should not be considered in the same light as the papers done by the other candidates, because there had been a terrible misunderstanding. I should not even have been taking that examination. The rest of the dream consisted in wandering around this beautifully furnished old college, with its lovely displays of antiques, its thronging students everywhere, its strange and interesting doors with the impressive names of members of staff with whom one had to make appointments.
The thing that stuck in my mind was that I was being judged in a context full of associations of a beautiful past which was, however, misunderstanding me, and to which I could probably not now gain access. I am blaming myself for being blind, accusing myself of being on the margin, critical of myself for not doing more for my parents, my wife and my children. I blame myself that I cannot give them a better life, that I cannot make it good for them to be here, in this wonderful country.
One thing which I did not feel, compared with my trip here more than four years ago, was the sense of resentment against the sighted world. I did not feel as if I wanted to withdraw from the world of sighted people and lose myself in the less demanding and more comfortable world of blind people who would understand me.
I have been helped a lot through the present crisis by Marilyn, who keeps telling me that I must not put myself under such demands, that I must not have such expectations. I have also been comforted by applying to myself the words from the famous sermon by Paul Tillich, ‘You are accepted’. I am accepted in my blindness. I am accepted as a blind person.
I have been helped by two other things. First, the primary school at which my older sister teaches has made an office available for my use. She picks me up in her car every morning on her way to school, and I have my tape recorders in the office there. I work there all the school day, joining the staff for the tea breaks and at lunchtime. After school, I return with my sister and spend the rest of the late afternoon and evening with the family and relatives. This has established a pattern which is giving me a sense of familiarity. Secondly, I have discovered that I can control the attacks of asthma by breathing. I must have seen dozens of doctors over the years about asthma, but none has ever told me that I could reduce my panic and thus diminish the actual attack by a simple technique of breathing. I have discovered it over the past two or three days. By breathing from the stomach, I can stop wheezing. After a dozen or twenty breaths the sense of panic passes, and breathing becomes easier. Instead of being frightened by the thought that I could be dead in three or four minutes, I now know that I am already up to the seventh or eighth breath, and within another ten or twelve the worst will be over. It works. It is like fighting an enemy.
30 July
Maybe my earlier view that one place is like another was exaggerated. Yesterday the whole family went to a park about twenty miles inland from Geelong called Fairy Park. This is a granite outcrop, worn into huge boulders intersected with gulleys and ravines, laid out as a barbecue area with a winding trail through the boulders, into which are set scenes of fairy-tales. These animated models are behind glass like shop windows. The children ran from one to the next with great excitement, pressing the buttons which set the displays in motion, turning on the music and the story.
I came away with quite a vivid impression of this place. I did not feel remote and abstract, perhaps because I was able to take an active part, in lifting the children up to see better, or so they could press the buttons, and because the nursery rhymes and fairy-tales were familiar, so there was plenty to talk about. Having direct acoustic access to the displays was important. I knew what was going on, because of the commentary. I was in demand from the children to answer questions, and to hold buttons pressed down and so on. There was also the walking itself, up and down little slopes, passing through the gaps between boulders, a series of little ravines, feelin
g the rough stone on either side, going into caves or other covered areas and feeling the difference in the echoes, the changes in temperature as we moved from an exposed place where the breeze was quite cool into a secluded place where the air was still warm and we could feel the sunlight. We came to the highest point, a look-out place, and I could feel the handrail. I could sense the vast, open space, the drop at my feet. The movement of air was so different, and whereas before I could hear the echoing footsteps of the running children, now it was the cries of the wheeling gulls, the noise coming from the distant brick kiln down in the valley, the patterns of the roads beneath me traced out by the passing traffic and the excited comments of the sighted people gathered along the rail next to me. Finally, we came back to the picnic area, where there was the fascinating feel of the rough-hewn wooden benches and the different kinds of tessellated pavements linking the various facilities. The fact that we had gone around the entire area and come back helped me to realise the dimensions of the place and made me feel it was distinctive.
13 August
Last Friday I had a very impressive dream. It was set entirely in the depths of the ocean. Nothing was shown above the surface at all. It was a bit like scenes from the film Ice Station Zebra, I think it was called, about a nuclear submarine going under the ice cap, except that in the dream there was no ice cap; it was just deep under the ocean, very murky. The dream was divided between scenes of the outside of the submarine and those of the inside. This huge hulk, rather like a gigantic, elongated, flying saucer equipped with jet engines, was travelling through the depths of the ocean. It was not long and thin, as a submarine might be, but bulky and round. The view of the inside of the submarine showed the crew trying to interpret their instruments. They did not know whether the craft was travelling forwards or backwards. I myself was not in the dream; I was viewing all this, as if at the cinema. The crew were intently watching the screens upon which the water outside the submarine was displayed. They were covered with disappearing, fluctuating, luminous traces, rather like the ones I now see in my right eye. There was a discussion about whether these traces were approaching the vessel or leaving it. Finally, there was a picture, from the outside, of the submarine touching the bottom of the sea. A very perilous situation had been reached. The main impression left by the dream was of a huge, lumbering weight, of vast power advancing steadily, but with those in charge not knowing which way it was going.
There was no trace of blindness in this dream. It was in beautiful, impressive colour. There were the deep blues and greens of the ocean, the lights of the moving submarine, its grey and white hulk, the luminous trails that it left behind as it moved.
It is strange how much I have come to depend upon dreams for entertainment. I am engrossed in dreams like this, rather as I might have been fascinated by watching an epic film. The outside world seldom comes home to me with such vividness.
Although the dream was powerful, and portrayed a situation of great peril, it also conveyed to my waking mind a sort of friendliness, as if the depths are aware of my problem, and are trying to help me, to describe things for me. The submarine is blind, and sees as I do. But the ocean is also blind, and the submarine moves through it, trying to find direction and contact. Now I am the ocean; now I am the submarine. I am also the submarine and the ocean at the same time. The dream is me and yet it is greater than me.
*
I arrived in Melbourne with the family about a month ago. This is the long-awaited visit to my relatives, and the long-feared attempt to get to know my parents again as a blind person. My parents have been marvellous, most understanding and matter of fact. I still find the experience particularly difficult and distressing, to be cut off in this way from the people one loves most, to have to begin again, as it were, without the faces of one’s own mother and father.
Melbourne is where my childhood lies. Here, I always have a strange experience of encounter with that past. I left Australia for study in England at the age of twenty-four. This is the fourth time I have been back. Visiting my parents always makes me aware of the connection between my faith in God and my relationship with them. I have no doubt that my lifelong love affair with God is, at least partly, an expression of my lifelong attempt to know and love my father, and to be known and loved by him.
6
Round the bend
Autumn 1984
19 August
I have now spent about four years grappling with the problem of how to speak in public without notes. As a sighted lecturer, I never had to read from a text, except when trying to present a particularly closely argued section. Usually all I needed was a list of headings, divided into sections with subheadings. Of course, if I was giving the sort of lecture which involved a lot of historical facts or statistics, then I would refer to a printed text.
After loss of sight, I tried various ways of dealing with this problem. I experimented in making a summary on micro-cassette which I would use as a prompt. The problem was that, if I happened not to need the reminder until later in the lecture, I would have to run the cassette through all the material until arriving at the point, and this would take a few seconds. Locating the exact point was very difficult, and it was an embarrassing disclosure to an audience that one had lost the way.
Sometimes I would record a brief summary of what I proposed to say, divided into sections. I would actually play this short summary to my audience, and would simply talk around it. This was only a partial success. Sometimes my listeners found it difficult to hear what was coming out of the tape recorder and I would have to repeat it, which was time-wasting. It was also inflexible, in that it committed me to an invariable sequence and to a great deal of laborious preparation, and these factors impaired my informal style and my capacity to respond to the needs of the moment.
I tried dictating to myself by making a recording of the whole speech, or a summary, and using an earplug. For a while I actually tried to listen and speak at the same time, but after one or two disastrous experiences I gave this up. I tried using braille headings. This not only involved laborious preparation, but my braille was just not good enough. I could not scan quickly enough to get myself out of the difficulty which arose when I forgot what to say next.
In the end, I developed the habit of making a precison cassette and of listening and re-listening to this right up to the moment when I had to deliver the lecture. I would take the tape recorder to the lecture, since it gave me a sense of security, although I seldom needed to refer to it.
During a teachers’ course in Canterbury in the spring of 1982, I was sitting in my room feverishly listening to this summary when I was called to the lecture theatre by an old friend. When she realised what I was doing, she told me off. ‘Just forget all that rubbish’, she said. ‘You won’t forget it. Just come and talk to us.’ I did, and it was a great success.
I now seem to have developed a way of scanning ahead in my mind, to work out what I am going to say. Everybody does this in ordinary speech, otherwise we couldn’t complete a sentence. Somehow or other, and without effort, I have developed a longer perspective, and now when I am speaking I can see paragraphs coming up from the recesses of my mind. It is a bit like reading them off a scanner. While I am speaking, another part of my mind is sorting out into paragraphs what I am going to be saying in the next few minutes, and a yet more remote part is selecting alternative lines of argument from a sort of bank of material. This seems to give my lecturing style a greater sense of order than I had before, and people seem to be able to follow me more easily.
I can often cross-reference what I have said, that is, I can remind my audience of a point I made under subheading 2(a) fifteen minutes ago. People find this surprising, but it actually isn’t. If I did not have the material in sections like that, I would not be able to maintain the argument at all. That particular little habit has come, I think, from hearing students’ essays read to me. Often one of my readers will be slightly surprised when I say, ‘Go back to what was sai
d on page 3 under section 4(f)’. I have not put any particular effort into learning how to do this; it is just that it is so inconvenient if you have to have the whole essay read again. You tend to make unconscious mental notes of the structure so that you can go back to it again if necessary. Of course, often it doesn’t work, either because I am not concentrating sufficiently or because the structure in what is being read to me is too vague. It is, however, a kind of mental skill which studying from cassettes has, I suppose, forced upon me.
A sighted author tends to paragraph his or her work retrospectively. You see the stuff unrolling on the typewriter or screen, and you think that it is about time you started a new paragraph. A person listening to books on cassettes, where the actual paragraphs in the printed page are not normally indicated, does his own paragraphing, and when composing tends to project this into the future of the composition. I think that this also helps me to organise my material in advance when I am speaking in public. A sighted lecturer reading from a typescript concentrates mainly upon what he has said, that is, the paragraphs slip away behind him as he ‘swims’ forward through his speech. A blind speaker has to concentrate entirely upon what he is about to say, or what he will be saying fifteen minutes from now, because otherwise he will lose direction. It is rather fallible, but it does seem to be turning into a method which will often work.