Notes on Blindness

by Hull, John;

  From then on, I made my telephone calls late at night when everyone was asleep. It was perfectly simple to walk down the aisle, touching lightly the end of an occasional bed just to make sure I was going straight. I never had the slightest difficulty in finding the phone, and I never bumped into anything, provided all the men were asleep. It is these offers of help which really disable me.

  30 January

  I was on my way home one evening last November. I was standing at the traffic lights on the Bristol Road waiting for the bleeps. I suddenly became aware of the contrast between what I must have looked like and what I felt like. All these people rushing past in their cars must be thinking, ‘Gosh. There’s a blind man. I hope he doesn’t step out in front of me. I wonder if he’ll be all right. Perhaps I should slow down or see if he needs help. I wonder why he hasn’t got a dog.’

  On the inside, however, I felt light-hearted, competent, in a situation I knew I could handle. The noise of the traffic, coming from either direction, was full and rich, the peripheral sounds made by people walking on the footpath, louder on this side of the road, fainter on the other side, and all of the other echoes and contours made up that acoustic shape which I call the Bristol Road. In a few moments the noise of the traffic would change. Instead of the present movement of approaching and departing rushes of sound there would be the purring of engines idling on either side. Between would be a silent space. I would lean forward, stretch out my white cane to its full length, tap it briskly first on one side of me and then on the other, so announcing my intention to cross (if anyone could have doubted it) and would then step boldly out into that silent space. I would walk across the road rapidly, strike the far kerb with my cane, and step up on to the footpath, turning round briefly to wave at the imagined drivers before coming to rest against the iron pickets of the fence. By now, behind me, the gap would have closed, and the roaring passage of movement from both sides would have flooded the place through which I had passed. I had made it, one more time.

  It struck me, however, as I stood waiting for the bleeps, that what to me was a perfectly normal, full and informative environment, telling me everything I needed for a safe crossing, must look very different to the motorist. The thought went through my mind, ‘They think I’m blind, but I’m not!’ What I meant to think was, ‘They think I’m ignorant and helpless, that I don’t really know where I am and that I will probably do something silly and dangerous to myself or to them. But I am probably as safe as the average sighted pedestrian at this crossing.’

  Looking back now, I think that this was the first time I had a feeling of calmness and confidence as a blind person in a blind person’s world, in which I could move reasonably safely, and easily. Now that a satisfactory Christmas is behind me, I feel more clearly than before that the Australian experience of last summer was a turning-point, if not a breaking-point, in my period of mourning over the loss of sight. I am sometimes still afflicted by a sharp sense of grief and loss, particularly in the presence of the children, but on the whole I am calmer. Life has become bearable, I am more or less in control of my situation and of my work and of my feelings about it. I daresay that many of these feelings will recur, and that I shall lapse into mourning again and again. Nevertheless, the basic period of mourning is over.

  It has taken four-and-a-half years to reach this point. On the radio programme ‘In Touch’ the other day someone was speaking of her own period of mourning for the loss of sight. With an apologetic laugh, she remarked that it had taken a full fortnight. I am amazed at how some people seem to be able to adjust so quickly, so vigorously. For me, it has been like a long, slow and lingering death.

  3 February

  I seem to be all right as long as I take the initiative. The children were given a large construction set for Christmas. The nuts and bolts were as big as adults’ fingers. The plastic building strips were from eight to eighteen inches long. It was a primitive, childlike sort of thing, quite easy for a blind person to handle. Lego, on the other hand, is too tiny and complicated.

  A few weeks ago, Thomas and I had a splendid time playing with this construction set on a Saturday morning. We made a space gun, and then a high chair for Teddy. It was on wheels and everything. It was by far the best playtime I have ever had with him. I was doing something, and we were doing it together. Most of the time, I am merely present while things are being done. Even when we do things together, it is often individual but simultaneous, like eating, which we do at the same time, but separately. The fun about building with the construction set was that it was reciprocal.

  Today was rather different. An old and much-loved friend of the family came with late Christmas presents. There were a series of little plastic tubes of foam rubber which turned into animal shapes when placed in warm water. The children loved them. There were shrieks of delight from the bathroom as each new animal wiggled into life.

  Next, there were a couple of super mobiles, including a clown. You had to hang various rings, bangles and performing animals over his hands and feet.

  The next morning I woke feeling remote and sleepy. During the morning, a little boy came to play with Thomas and Lizzie. This situation is always rather difficult, because I never know exactly what they are doing. I miss the reactions and the inter-reactions. It is so hard to tell what the one who isn’t shouting at the moment is doing. I put on a record, and went into the dining room to listen on the extension speakers. I had to stand up and lean against the wall to keep myself awake. Waves of sleep passed over me and in the end I went upstairs to lie down. I switched myself off for about three-quarters of an hour.

  I rallied for lunch, but afterwards Thomas asked me to play with the clown mobile. I had a sinking feeling that this would be very difficult, but I badly wanted to try. I allowed him to lead me into the living room and when I sat down he put the mobile into my hands. It was a mass of shapes and string. After some exploration, I discovered what must have been the peaked hat of the clown. He seemed to be standing on one leg, with the second leg kicking in the air. He was running, Thomas said. I held the clown in an upright position while Thomas began to decorate him with the bits and pieces of the mobile.

  During this time, spasms rather than waves of sleep were flicking through my brain. I felt more and more remote. Coming into the room, Marilyn was rather alarmed when she saw me, and urged me to go into the office. Most reluctantly, I took her advice, and set out with a heavy heart. Withdrawal, whether internal or external, was my only form of defence.

  Even walking into work I felt groggy, and as soon as I dropped into my comfortable office chair I fell into a dazed, dopey sort of fitful sleep which lasted for nearly three hours. I was just beginning to come round, and get my cassettes organised on the desk to begin work when Marilyn phoned.

  It was very much like being drugged. Whilst playing with the mobile, I felt the way you do when you have just had the anaesthetic before an operation. You start to feel sleep creeping over you. What I felt was not as irresistible as that, of course, otherwise I would have fallen over. Nevertheless, it was that kind of thing.

  This must be a protection against an unbearable situation. I hear the children and everyone else whooping with delight, making comments, and it is as if the knowledge which I do have mocks the knowledge which I don’t have, while the poignancy of that contrast makes me want to have no more knowledge at all.

  The visit of the old friend was certainly another factor. She played so happily with the children, and with such imagination. She pointed things out, ooh-ed and ah-ed as things were opened, and sat down to look at the pop-up book. This detailed exchange of playful interludes somehow made me more sharply aware of my own difficulties in playing with the children, and of the lack of finesse and detail which has blurred my play with them. I have always had a particular love for the minute details of children’s behaviour.

  The strange thing is that I would not describe my reaction as being an emotion. Similarly, as I have already learned, the depre
ssion associated with blindness is not a feeling. In the situation I am describing I do not actually feel sad, and I certainly have no feelings of bitterness. When I think of my relationship with Imogen when she was two or three, and how we used to play together for hours, and I compare it with my present habits of play with Thomas and Lizzie, I do have an emotion. It is hard to say what that emotion is. Is it possible to be in the grip of an emotion so strong and so close that one cannot put a name to it? Is it possible that we can only name our milder feelings? Does emotion, like light, dazzle us when it becomes too intense? The best I can do is to say that it is a poignant sense of loss. There is also a sense of longing for a relationship, for an experience, and perhaps some panic at the thought that this is now all passing me by and these golden years of children’s play will never be recovered.

  Then it seems to me that I have lost Imogen, my daughter from my former marriage, in one way and I am losing these present children in a different way.

  In this situation I don’t, however, feel at all tearful, and I am not aware of anger, self-pity or pathos. It is rather as if an intention has taken the place of a feeling. The intention is to withdraw. The emotional life is no longer experienced as content (i.e. an emotion having the identifiable content of anger, sadness, and so on) but as a sort of numbness of recoil. I seek refuge in sleep, or sleep seeks to inhabit me.

  As soon as I am out of the presence of the children and in a position to give in to these feelings, I do become conscious of a certain desolation, but mainly of a sort of incapacity, an inability to think or act, a confusion or drifting away, together with a sense of bodily comfort as sleep swamps me.

  This seems to take several hours to work through. Sometimes it is after the children have had their baths and gone to bed that I feel better. I may be in the office, and not even be thinking of going home yet, but I somehow improve as if a demand has been lifted. Sometimes the turning-point comes even earlier, when I know that the regular routine of the evening, the bathing and changing, the goodnight ritual, has begun. I take part in this, quite often and quite successfully. It is as if I know that playtime is now over, and a sequence has begun which I can handle. It is only sitting down now and thinking about it that I notice these apparent regularities.

  4 February

  Trying to work in my office one weekend I fell into a heavy, depressed sleep, as if drugged. I had a vivid dream about the office. The room was full of light. I noticed that I had not closed the office door. People were walking to and fro in the corridor, and I realised that they might have seen me there, fast asleep in my chair. All of this was in the dream. Perhaps I was half awake? There was a wardrobe with a light in it. I was feeling for the light, groping for the switch. When the light was on, it was so intensely bright that every detail in the wardrobe stood out. The clothes hanging on hooks appeared in brilliant detail against the clear, cream wall. When I gazed around the room, the illumination seemed to be patchy and to bring to my attention details I had never noticed before. What was this? A door. An internal door, leading perhaps to the next office. It is a painted, wooden door, of the old-fashioned type, with carved, oblong panels and a round, domestic-type knob. It is a rich, chocolate brown against the surrounding cream wall. I look at this door with amazement, wondering how it could be that, in all my feeling round this room and in my belief that I knew every nook and cranny of it, I had never noticed it. Then I woke up.

  Upon awakening, this dream struck me as strange and deeply moving. But I could not tell why. It is about privacy, and the loss of privacy, enclosures, including three doors, one open, one through which I can half go (the wardrobe door) and the secret door. The dream is about the relationships between various kinds of interiors. These interiors are related in different ways to the world, and the dream describes the various kinds of frustrations and possibilities which blindness, the necessary avenue of communication between my interior and the world, poses. There is a strange hope in the mysterious, tightly closed but previously unnoticed door. There is always more to a familiar place than you realise. In the most intimately loved situation, if you look closely, there is often another door.

  5 February

  Clive Inman, after his road accident, spent six months in hospital and a further six months or so undergoing physiotherapy. He can now walk again, and drive his car, but he has no sensation of heat or cold in his body below his neck except in one or two fingers. He told me the other day that he can only tell when he is hot by noticing whether he is sweating. If he is shivering, then he knows he must be cold. I pointed out that sometimes his palms would be sweaty or clammy when he was nervous, so how would he know whether it was nervousness or heat? Clive replied that his psyche informed him when he was nervous, but his psyche did not inform him when his body was hot. He agreed, however, that there might well be times when one would notice that one’s palms were sweating, and would think, ‘Goodness! I must be nervous’. In such a situation, where the symptom drew attention to the state, he might not know which state the symptom indicated.

  I asked Clive whether he did not feel that he was no longer living in that part of his body which is below his neck. He agreed that often he did have a very strange feeling of being disassociated from his own body.

  Clive’s situation is the opposite to my own. I, as a blind person, tend to be enclosed within my body, to be conscious primarily of it, and to be cut off from the world. He, on the other hand, is cut off from his body. He has perfect senses, and knows just what he wants his body to do in the world, but his body will not do it. My body will do perfectly well what I want it to do in the world, but it has no world within which to do it. In the early stages of his physiotherapy, he could not walk but he knew exactly where he wanted to walk. I can walk perfectly, but I do not know where to walk. I have no world to walk in; he had no body to walk with.

  16 February

  Many sighted people express concern about how I manage in the snow. It is true that snow creates a considerable problem for blind people. There is a saying: snow is the blind person’s fog.

  Most sighted people have some difficulty in realising the nature of my problem. They tend to assume that I will be ‘slipping and sliding’. In other words, they attribute to me the same difficulty which they are having in the snow, on the assumption that if they are slipping and sliding I must be slipping and sliding even more.

  My problem is not instability but mobility. It is not that I become unsure of my footing, but I become unsure about where I am going. What I suffer in the snow is a loss of knowledge. All my familiar points and markings, the different grades and textures of grass, gravel, asphalt and concrete are obliterated. If the snow is deep enough to cover the kerbs, then I really have a problem, because I cannot tell one block from the next, or the road from the footpath. I explain to people that I have good, solid boots, I have never slipped yet and am perfectly steady on my feet. The problem, I explain, is that I cannot tell my route.

  Sighted people find it difficult to realise that, for a blind person, the body itself has become the organ of sense. Apart from the white cane, and the sounds from the environment, the body’s knowledge of its surroundings does not exceed its own dimensions. This is such a curious position to be in, such a strange kind of reality for the body in the world, that the sighted can hardly grasp it.

  25 February

  Today I could not remember which way the Arabic number three points. I had to trace it with my finger in the air – one, two, three. Now I remember. It points to the left. If it points to the right, it is a bit like the letter E. Marilyn was with me, and was surprised to find that such a deeply ingrained image could be partially lost.

  I also had to ask her whether the border which goes around the edge of a tablecloth or a board is spelt ‘border’ or ‘boarder’.

  I think I was confused about the board around which there is a border. This illustrates how much the ability to spell is based upon visual images.

  8 March

  W
hen I was sighted, I often used to have a drink and a sandwich in the bar in Staff House. Even if I went in by myself, I would seldom be alone for long. I would see somebody I knew, or thought I knew, or pretended I knew. There would be a slight nod, a flicker of a smile, and I would find myself having a chat with somebody.

  All this has changed. I have to wait until someone approaches me, or I have to recognise the voice of somebody I know. In a crowded bar, that is not easy. Moreover, the people whose voices I know well enough to recognise in that situation are people I know very well indeed, and not the casual acquaintances which I would have met in previous days. I can no longer introduce myself to strangers, because blindness has taken from me all of the preliminary steps, the little acknowledgements, the half-questioning, tentative approaches.

  These days, I often go into the bar, stand there drinking my pint, wondering whether anyone will speak to me. Often, nobody does. The strange thing is that, as I am leaving, and am taking the eight or ten steps from the bar to the door of the room, I am suddenly approached by all manner of people, hands stretch out, concerned voices ask if I am all right, and quite often I find that amongst them there are people who know me. Maybe they hadn’t noticed me at the bar. Maybe they had been engaged in their own conversations. Maybe they thought I wanted to drink alone. The irony of it is that now I am besieged with offers of help which I don’t need, while previously, when any offer of social converse would have been gladly accepted, I was left to myself.

  One of the problems is that, in the bar at Staff House, people do not tend to know each other’s names. One can often go in there, find half a dozen people you know or have seen on the campus, but no one whose name you know. For me, knowledge of the names is the vehicle of social mobility. I travel on people’s elbows and on people’s names.

  Moreover, when I had sight, of ten conversations I might have had in the bar, seven or eight would have been initiated by me. The change enforced upon my personality is thus more severe than would have been the case had I been a shy and retiring person. What to do about it? I must come to the sad conclusion that there is little point in dropping into the bar for the casual drink. I must always go accompanied. I must make sure by ringing round my friends beforehand that I always meet someone who is expecting me. I know what will happen next; I will be ringing round, but no one will ring me. Why not? Because the practice is not to ring round in that way, but just to drop in at the bar and have a drink on the off-chance that there will be someone there you know. The other thing is that people will think I am seeking help in getting to the bar itself. I will have offers of coming to my room and escorting me. It is so hard to help people to see that physical mobility is no problem. What worries me is social mobility.