by Hull, John;
So my memories of Melbourne consist of the innumerable car journeys from place to place, and the different textures of this seat belt and that car upholstery. From such and such a city I remember the discomfort of standing in the cold wind, from another the stiffness of sitting for hours in the same chair, from another the comfort of the smooth cool tiles in the bathroom. My memory is like the memory of a snail. My body can recollect the narrow little strip of ground over which I have passed, and it consists of tiny details, so tiny as to be irrelevant from the point of view of the cat and the dog. Here the footpath goes up slightly, there is a nick in the kerb, this telephone pole has a metal plate screwed to it but this other one is smooth.
This route, like the path of a snail, is what I know about my walk from home to the office. It is not exactly going from one place to another place through some intermediate places. When I try to visualise my route, what I do is to anticipate the sensations which my body will have at various times (i.e. places) along that route. Here I will be guided by something which I will pass on my left, later on it will be something on my right. What lies more than two or three feet away on either side of that trail means nothing to me. It is not part of my experience, except when it comes home to me in traffic noise or birdsong. My place is known to me by the soles of my feet and by the tip of my cane.
29 September
I can now reflect upon the meaning of the whole Australian experience. I have turned a corner in the tunnel. So far, there has been light at the end. True, I have been travelling away from that light, deeper and deeper from it; nevertheless, the light has been there behind me. It has been an ever-diminishing pinpoint, yet its presence has served to orientate and guide. At least, there was some point of definition in the past from which I was receding. It has been like a bright star from which my spacecraft has been moving further and further away, but I only know this because of the star, which fixes a point from which my position becomes more and more remote.
Going back to the image of the tunnel, I have turned a corner. The pinpoint of light seems to have vanished.
The light at the end of the tunnel consisted of my memories of my forty-five years of sighted life. This seems to fall into two sections. There are twenty-four years (1935–59) spent in Australia. Then there are twenty-one years (1959–80) spent in England, fourteen of them in Birmingham. The part of the light represented by my years in Birmingham has gradually had superimposed upon it memories from my years of blindness. There are now many journeys which I can make by car through the streets of Birmingham, along familiar routes, and I can tell where I am by the turns and twists of the car. I am like a dog, asleep on the back seat, that wakes up a block or two from home. He knows in his body those familiar, final twists and turns of the car. These memories have, to some extent, taken the place of the visual memories of the streets. Of course, it is true that I am still much better off in Birmingham than I would be in any other city, because there is still so much of my blind experience which is enriched by my sighted memories. So, for example, I still see the University clock tower, Big Joe, in my imagination. This helps to fill out my environment and to know where I am. The first twenty-four years are, however, entirely light. There had been no opportunity, apart from the visit to Melbourne in 1980 when I was partially sighted, to superimpose upon that visual layer a gradual readjustment of blind memories. Between me and that sighted past there has now built up a sort of protective wall. When I think of Australia now, it not only conjures up visions of dazzling, golden beaches, swaying eucalyptus forests, and the dry hillsides with their rocky outcrops, but also the bumpiness of the car rides, the wheezing from room to room, the feel of the handrails at Melbourne Zoo, and the fragrance of the bush.
There are parts of my twenty-one years of sighted English experience which are still brightly lit. The light seems to fall on all the places which I have not revisited as a blind person. Every time I do revisit one of these places, it comes home to me with a sense of loss that now, instead of accumulating further visual images, bringing up to date the memories I have, making a mental note of changes, and finding out what lay beyond the corner I had not had time to visit previously, I have to start again, helped to some extent by the visual memories, but knowing the city now as part of a different world. So my entire visual stock of knowledge is receding into the past, becoming less useful, less relevant to me, less accurate. It is the dramatic realisation of the remoteness of that visual past brought on by the Melbourne visit which I am referring to as turning the corner in a tunnel. Just as the disappearance of the final speck of light means that I have to find new ways of orientating myself in space, so it also means that I must find new ways of orientating myself within my life span. I am now in blind time, not sighted time.
What is the meaning of blindness? It is strange that after four years of being registered, and two years of total blindness, I am still seeking to understand this question.
7
Beyond feelings
Winter 1984
13 October
Last night Marilyn and I were talking about whether or not it would have made a difference to my feelings about Thomas and Elizabeth if I had ever seen them. Is the fact that I have never seen them going to be a permanent loss in my relationship with them? Does it matter that they belong entirely to my second life, my blind life?
It is true that Imogen bridges both lives. She was seven when I lost my sight; now she is eleven. Is it not possible, however, that Imogen will remain in my imagination permanently fixed at the age of seven, while Marilyn will always remain young and beautiful?
This is relevant to the experience of blindness as a journey into a dark tunnel. The receding faces of Imogen and Marilyn form a sort of fixed light at the far end, behind me. This provides a point of reference from which I can judge my continued travelling on through the tunnel. In a way, this serves to exaggerate the time I have spent in the tunnel, by providing a point of orientation which makes me aware of the continual recessions of the light. It is as if, during the first part of a journey through space, the voyagers are aware of the speed with which they are parting from the still visible earth, but once out in the black vastness of space, there is no longer the same sense of speed, or time. As long as there is a receding image, one is still aware of departing.
On the other hand, the element of fixation in this, that you go on thinking of the person as he or she was years ago, makes time less real. You have a sense of not having travelled on in your relationships. There is conflict between the timeless, fixated image of not travelling on, and (on the other hand) the sharpened sense of distance, that one is travelling on, further and further, all the time. This conflict helps me to understand the strange poignancy and confusion which I feel in the presence of loved people whom once I saw but now no longer see. This would also explain my distress in meeting my Australian relatives, especially my parents, in the summer.
This is a good example of what the psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. There is discomfort because you are aware of holding two opinions or beliefs which are contradictory. First, I believe that I know what you look like. I have your image in my mind’s eye as I speak with you now. Thus, although I am blind, nothing has changed. I have not changed. You have not changed. I can still relate to you through the mediation provided by that visual image, which is in my memory. Secondly, I know that between that visual memory which mediates between us and my actual present life there is a deep, black river of time, flooding the banks of my consciousness, growing ever wider and stronger, carrying us apart. Your image is there, on the far side, always receding and now totally inaccessible. I have changed. You have changed. Everything is changed. There is a conflict between these two beliefs.
The discomfort of this contradiction can make you feel a little uneasy, or it can become quite painful. It can be relieved in various ways. I may try to turn my back upon your image as it glows brightly on the far side of the floor. Now I can try to reconstruct my relationship to you on a
completely new basis, on this side, where we are now. On the other hand, I may be tempted to linger in the past, to indulge in the contemplation of your remembered image, and to have it always before me, so that always speaking with you I am deliberately conversing through that loved image. In the first case, I try to abolish the past. In the second, I live in the past.
In my relationship with Thomas and Lizzie I am not aware of this particular conflict. Rather, I have been marginalised as a father. My interaction with them is now severely limited, and I am not the sort of father that I would like to be. Nevertheless, in their presence I do not experience that strange sense of baffled shock that I sometimes feel with Imogen and Marilyn, and particularly with my parents. Thomas and Lizzie are entirely children of my blindness. They are habituated there, and so my relationship with them is not inhibited by visual memories from the past. It develops entirely along the lines of a non-visual relationship. Do I, then, experience with Thomas and Lizzie what Alfred Schutz calls ‘growing old together’? Is there a common participation in a maturing pattern of experience? Are we really together, sharing this time and space? The answer is yes. The base may be narrow, but the shared community is there. With Imogen and Marilyn, I feel less certain.
With a loved woman, so much of the experience of growing older together lies in witnessing the work of time. Perhaps in the case of a child who is becoming an adolescent, it lies in witnessing the growing up process. I want to know how that childlike face and figure are being transformed into those of a young woman. Would it be different with a son?
My relationship with the younger children has elements of role alienation (loss of fatherhood) but my relationship with Imogen and Marilyn has traces of cognitive conflict (relating past to present).
This applies to my relationship with myself. I know what I looked like because of memories of photographs and seeing myself in the mirror. Oddly enough, many of the photographs which I remember most vividly are not recent, but were taken years ago, and have stuck in my mind. So I know that my memories of myself are already out of date, and the strange thing is that I have no way of updating them. This means that I have a sense of cognitive dissonance when I think about myself. On the one hand, I know that I am such and such a person, with certain features. On the other hand, I know myself as someone who probably no longer looks like that, and I cannot witness the work of time upon my own face. How can I grow old together even with myself?
I have become separated from my own shadow, as in the cartoons. A quivering image of myself is left behind, while the real me has been blown away by a sudden explosion, which has split me into two images. Each one has a different expression and posture, and is doing different things. I have a double relationship with myself.
Should I forget all about my old, sighted appearance? Should I now try to get to know myself again entirely on the basis of non-visual data? That is clearly inevitable. What will become, then, of those forty-five years of being a sighted self?
This must be part of the reason why it was so painful returning to Australia, because I was confronted by the first twenty-four years, the childhood and youth of that sighted self, from whom I have now become divided because I am plunged into different ways of knowing my present self.
8 November
I think it is David Scott Blackhall, in his autobiography The Way I See It, who remarks how annoying he found it when people refused to answer his question about where he was and insisted on asking him where he was trying to get to. I share this experience.
Going home the other night I was turned out of my way by some construction work on one of the footpaths. By mistake I turned along a side street, and after a block or so, when I realised I had made a mistake somewhere, I was not sure exactly where I was. There were some chaps working on a car parked on the roadside. ‘Excuse me’, I said. ‘Could you tell me please where I am?’ What is the name of this street?’
The chap replied, ‘Where are you trying to get to?’
With what I hoped was a good-humoured laugh, I said, ‘Never mind about that, just tell me, please, what street this is?’
‘This is Alton Road. You usually go up Bournbrook Road don’t you? It’s just a block further along.’
I thanked him, and explained that I needed now to know exactly whereabouts in Alton Road I was so that I could get to Bournbrook Road. ‘Which side of Alton Road am I on? If I face that way, am I looking towards Bristol Road or is it the other way?’
‘You live high up Bournbrook Road, don’t you? Well, if you take the next to the left you’ll be OK.’
But which way is ‘left’? Does he mean me to cross the road or to stay on this side? At this point, the blind and the sighted enter into mutual bafflement.
When a sighted person is lost, what matters to him or her is not where he is, but where he is going. When he is told that the building he is looking for lies in a certain direction, he is no longer lost. A sighted person is lost in the sense that he does not know where the building he is looking for is. He is never lost with respect to what street he is actually in; he just looks at the street sign on the corner of the block. It is his direction he has lost, rather than his position. The blind person lost has neither direction nor position. He needs position in order to discover direction. This is such a profound lostness that most sighted people find it difficult to imagine.
10 November
Sighted people often help me to hail taxis. I can’t help noticing how frequently my new-found friend will not only lead me over the road to the taxi, but will give the taxi driver instructions. As we are walking along towards the taxi rank, my guide will ask me where I am going. Then, when he has got me into the taxi, making sure that I do not bang my head, he will then relay these directions to the driver.
The sighted person is caring for me. He is looking after me. The relationship of caring makes him feel that he is an adult and I am a child. If you were putting a child into a taxi, you would try to find out from the child exactly where he lived or where he thought he was going. You would not leave it to the child to negotiate with the taxi driver. You would make sure that the driver had absorbed this information and fully understood it before allowing the child to pass out of your care and be driven away. So it is between the sighted and the blind.
11 December
Thomas is very interested in how I know things, and what the extent and detail of my knowledge is. At breakfast this morning I said, ‘Now you are gobbling up! That’s a good boy.’
He said, ‘How do you know?’
‘I can hear you, and I can feel you.’ I had stretched out my hand and placed it on his back, and could feel his body vibrating as he ate.
He moved away a little and ate more quietly, asking, ‘Can you still hear me? Am I gobbling now?’
‘Yes, I can still hear you.’
Eating even more quietly, he inquired again.
‘No’, I replied. ‘I can’t hear you now. Are you gobbling up?’
‘Yes’, he replied cheerfully and began to eat vigorously once more.
He had discovered the limit.
Whilst getting dressed upstairs, in my presence, he said to Marilyn, ‘When I’m a lot older, say, about ten, will Daddy’s eyes have got better?’
Marilyn replied, ‘No, Thomas, they won’t have got better.’
‘Will they get better after a long, long, long time?’
‘No, dear, they’ll never get better.’
‘Oh.’
13 December
I spent ten days in hospital. I was in a small, two-bed ward, just off the main ward, which had about twenty beds in it. The Day Room, where the telephone was, was at the far end of the main ward. To get to it, I had to walk along the aisle down the middle of the main ward, with a line of beds on either side.
The first time I made this journey, it was a nightmare. It was the nearest thing to running the gauntlet I have ever experienced. I was a sensation. With my white cane, I commanded the attention of every eye. Every co
nversation stopped. Every man in the ward called out advice. ‘Left a little! Right a little! Watch out, mate! Now you are okay, mate! Straight ahead and you’ll be all right. Watch out for the trolley! On you go! Now stop a bit.’ I was thoroughly confused by all this and found it impossible to concentrate.
When I got to the end of the ward, I stopped and asked one of the men who had been giving me this friendly encouragement to read to me a telephone number, which was written on a piece of paper. A young lad came across and read it. I memorised it, thanked him and went on my way. I heard an older man say to this lad, ‘You’d better go after him and make sure he’s okay.’ A moment later, pattering feet behind me, and a hand came on my arm. I turned round and said rather bluntly but with a smile, ‘What do you want?’
The lad laughed, and, slightly embarrassed, replied, ‘I’ve just come to make sure that you didn’t, er, bump into the door.’
I replied, ‘Well, thank you very much, but in helping me in that way, you’ve made me forget the telephone number.’
He laughed at this, and I pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket. ‘Now, what was it?’
He read it for me and I set off again. From behind, he shouted out, ‘Left a little, watch out, now you’re okay, it’s straight ahead.’
Turning around I said, ‘Ssssh – you’ll make me forget it again!’
‘Sorry’, he called, as I found the door to the Day Room, went through and made my call.
The return trip was just as bad. Once again, every man in the place was helping me. The air was thick with cries of ‘Left a little, right a little, back a little.’ I felt unable to ignore these calls, and was turning from left to right, like Prince Philip at an exhibition, thanking this man and that man, saying hello and goodbye, assuring them that I was all right, in the midst of which it was quite impossible to concentrate and I was in real danger of walking into a trolley. When I got back to my own little room, I found that my hands were moist with perspiration, my heart was beating with excitement, and I felt completely exhausted. I was overcome with the effort and with the embarrassment.