by Hull, John;
10 March
My efforts to understand the impact of blindness upon my life have taken a new twist. Yesterday I had a very happy day with the family. Imogen was here for the weekend, and after breakfast all the children played Ludo with me. Some visitors arrived in the middle of the morning and stayed for lunch. In the afternoon Marilyn and I took the children in the car to a playground. I pushed them on the swings and turned the big wheel around while they sat on it. Coming home by four o’clock I became aware of being rather tense. By bathtime, an hour later, the tension had increased and during the evening meal, between six and half past, I was feeling I could not go on much longer. Marilyn, noticing that I was becoming withdrawn, suggested that I should try to do some work upstairs. I did not feel sleepy, but by half-past seven I was, in fact, fast asleep and did not wake for three hours. The house was silent, the children were in bed, and I felt much better. What had gone wrong with the day? Why had I gone like this after such a happy time?
The tension is not necessarily associated with depression, although it can be triggered by depression. It leads to an absence of feeling and movement, a sort of catatonic state. It also takes longer to come out of the situation when it is associated with depression.
What happened yesterday seems to be independent both of happiness and of depression. It is some kind of cognitive state.
The role of sleep is also different. When the tension is associated with depression, I am overcome by a desire, perhaps a need, to sleep. On this occasion I did not feel sleepy during the day, and when I went to my study about seven in the evening, it was with the intention of working, not sleeping. I found that I could not work, because I needed an item of information which was only available in my office. I could not go on with the micro-cassette dictation I was doing, and, in the end, I lay down and went to sleep because I had run out of things to do. Sleep is a very acceptable substitute for work, but I was not actually overcome by irresistible waves of sleep.
Although my best policy is still to take the initiative and in that way to fend off the feelings of passivity and nonentity which bring on the depression, there remains nevertheless a strange kind of cognitive or psychological exhaustion which overcomes me, in spite of happiness. What is this?
Noise may be a factor. It is natural enough that I have become sensitive to noise. It certainly was rather a noisy day. Two older children were having a disco upstairs. Two younger boys were enjoying an exciting game of ‘He-man’ in my study. The radio was on downstairs, and a group of younger children were racing around everywhere. The whole house was gradually strewn with toys, despite the best efforts of hard-pressed adults to tidy up, so that in the end I could hardly take a step unless I cleared the ground in front of me, like some sacred ritual. All that makes me feel bombarded; I cannot respond even though the environment is calling out to me. This gives a sense of remoteness.
At work, I can control the bombardment, at least to some extent, by creating a predictable day. I have my hand on the tap, so to speak, and can increase or decrease the flow, more or less as I wish. I can bring the interview to an end. Even if I am stuck in a seminar or a committee, I know that it will finish in an hour or so. At home it is different.
Any normal adult would feel somewhat similar in circumstances like these. The children really wear Marilyn out, and would wear anyone out. As far as I can tell, however, my experience is not quite like this. It did not affect me like this before I lost my sight. It is quite different now. The sense of recoil, of numbness is greater, and there is this strange feeling that one is becoming more and more unreal.
Can it be that I have become a sort of nocturnal animal? When such a creature is forced to remain up and to mix all day, under the bright light, with the daylight animals, its senses become hounded until it longs for the stillness and silence of a retreat where it can recover. In my case, the metaphor breaks down, because there is no particular time of night. There is no nighttime just as there is no day-time.
Is there any more to this than metaphor? Am I becoming a creature of the night? Am I not close to dreams? Does not blindness give me an affinity with darkness? If the sun is the symbol of consciousness then the moon represents the magical sources of our deeper life. Not only am I cut off from the physical sun, but less tolerant of consciousness unless it is frequently bathed in the mysterious energies of its opposite.
8
Still looking
Spring 1985
11 March
I am struck by the stoicism in many of the autobiographies of blind people which I have read. An outstanding example is the autobiography of the war-wounded hero Colonel Sir Michael Ansell, whose book is appropriately called Soldier On (London, Peter Davies, 1973). Sir Michael Ansell lost his sight in an unfortunate misunderstanding during the confused withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force before the expanding German onslaught in 1940. He and his companions were sheltering in a barn when they were attacked by a group of British soldiers who thought that they were Germans. The rest of the book tells of the influence of this remarkable man in British showjumping, including his work in creating the Horse of the Year Show and as the trainer of the British equestrian team for the Olympics. Even when he lost his first wife, through cancer, and his second wife, who was tragically killed in a road accident, the story continues in the same completely matter-of-fact way. There is not a trace of self-pity or even of self-analysis in the whole book.
I cannot write a stoical or a matter-of-fact book; I have to write in my own way, trying to understand what is happening to me. This must include some effort to understand blindness itself, as well as my own blindness. In seeking understanding, I am seeking for meaning. This statement is already made in faith. I am already committed to the value that a unified life is superior to a fragmented life, and a full meaning is better than a partial one. Of course, the quest for full significance and for complete integration will never be ended. It will never be a finished product. Nevertheless, the quest remains worthwhile. I will be all the more sane if I have been able to accept, to include, to harmonise more and more of my experience.
When I speak of seeking understanding, I am thinking of faith in search of understanding. This is why, for me, there can be no stoical resignation before an inscrutable destiny, no gritting of the teeth, no acceptance, however courageous, of a meaningless destiny.
This is the sense in which, in my opinion, it would not be a Christian act to accept blindness, or try to go on as if it had not happened, or to defy it through mere courage, although I cannot but have the deepest respect for those noble blind people who have responded in those ways. My desire for coherence, a desire which in my case has taken the Christian form, impels me to probe the experience, to grapple with it, to strip off layer after layer from it, to find meaning within it and to relate that meaning to the other parts or aspects of living.
This approach does not suggest that I would look for any specific meaning peculiar to blindness itself as if ‘the blindness was sent for a reason’ or as if I would be interested in the answer to the question ‘Why did this happen to me?’ Since the meaning which I seek will be coherent, it will lie in the wholeness. Blindness is a part of my life, and I must try to understand its particular characteristics so that I can be faithful in this part. I must, however, never forget that blindness is only a part. My overriding attempt must be to have the courage to be faithful as a whole, that is as a person in whose life this is one aspect amongst many others. Taking the thought still further, my own life is but a part of a still larger whole, and if I am coherent with that larger whole, I will again be a whole myself, but at a more universal level. This is part of what I understand communion with God to mean.
In the attempt to integrate one’s life around a meaning, one of the dangers which one faces is reduction. One tends to set up a meaning-making machine, like a sausage-making machine, so that no matter what kind of experiences you pour in one end, exactly the same kind of sausages or meanings come out t
he other end. Inconsistencies are excluded, and only the homogeneous is retained. The result is a strong identity but a narrow one.
What I seek is a strong identity based on inclusion, not exclusion. Christianity must become an ecumenical faith, not a tribalistic sect.
This means that, while I cannot simply accept blindness, I must not reject it either. I must integrate it. I must try to relate blindness to sight, consciousness to unconsciousness, God to the devil, the life of humanity to the cosmos, the powers of creation to the powers of destruction. The stoic courageously tolerates these antitheses, but the one whose Christian faith is in search of understanding must seek to go beyond these differences and to unite them.
25 March
I still have the feeling that I am looking. With the right eye, the one most recently blinded, I still have some sense of the macula, and I know how to turn my eyes from one side to another. I often do this automatically towards the place from which sounds come. So, in a sense, I still know how to look. Indeed, I still have a feeling that I am peering, gazing intently through the blackness, in case something should come into view.
I am not so sure if I am aware of doing this with the left eye, which has been totally blind for about thirty years. Sometimes I try the experiment of closing one eye and trying to imagine what I might be doing with the other. When both eyes are completely blind, however, it is extremely difficult to know whether I am really paying attention to this one rather than that one. I am helped a little by the fact that the right eye does still have some internal light sensation, although I cannot tell whether it is in the brain rather than the retina, and I do not know enough about it to know if either of these is more probable. From time to time, in the right eye, or with what I seem to be aware of when I pay attention to what I think is the right eye, a round area of fan-shaped pink or light orange light will appear. It will slowly roll around the ‘visual field’, the central area will then grow dark again, and the little display will then fade out towards the perimeter and disappear. It is quite interesting to ‘watch’ this.
Perhaps with a long-blinded eye one ceases to look, but with a recently blinded eye one is still looking. Perhaps the eye is switched off but the brain is still ready to receive some stimulation.
1 May
What corresponds visually to the difference between sound and silence? It cannot be the difference between seeing and shutting one’s eyes, because you can always open your eyes and see again. It is within your power to grasp again the object of sense, but when there is silence, the ear has no power to grasp sound again. Even when your eyes are shut, you know that what you have seen is still there.
Does sound relate to silence as day relates to night? Surely not, for day and night are predictable, and even at night one sees a little. Is the relationship between sound and silence like that between seeing and being blind? Is blindness to sight as silence is to sound? This is clearly incorrect. Blindness is to sight as deafness is to sound. Blindness is an internal state. One knows that the external world is still there to be seen. One has merely lost the faculty of seeing it. In the case of silence, however, the external world, the world of sound, is not there any longer. It has gone into silence. In the case of silence one is still listening, but in the case of blindness, one can hardly be said to be still looking. You seldom look and see nothing, whereas you often listen but hear nothing, or very little. Whenever you look, the full range of your retina is always occupied with whatever there is to look at, but when you listen the full range of your hearing is not thus occupied with whatever there is to listen to. In total darkness, sight is useless. But in total silence, we would not say that the faculty of hearing was useless. It is just that there is nothing at the moment to hear.
It seems then that there is no exact visual parallel to the distinction between sound and silence. Sounds come and go in a way that sights do not. Sounds have a gratuitous quality. One never possesses the sound, one never has it within one’s power the way that one possesses the sight. The evil eye has power over the world, but nobody ever heard of an evil ear. The ability to close the eyes represents the power one has over things that are seen, the power to exclude. Hearing, however, is always receptive, whether to sound or to silence. You can look away, but you cannot listen away. You cannot turn the ear aside the way you can look aside. You can pretend that you don’t hear, just as you can pretend that you don’t see, but the ears cannot be averted.
Sound and silence come upon one from beyond. Sound is, however, experienced internally. Things seen are experienced objectively.
The sound/silence distinction is thus quite a powerful vehicle for the transcendent. It suggests that over which we have no power, which comes or does not come, which mysteriously starts and just as mysteriously finishes, to which we are always open but must remain attentive. This must be why it was always considered impious to look upon God but permissible to hear him. Sound is transcendent.
3 May
Perhaps a parallel to the experience of sound and silence would be suddenly entering a bank of fog when driving along the motorway. Beyond your power to affect it or predict it, the perceptual world is suddenly removed, only to emerge again on the other side. The difference is that fog is an obstruction to sight whereas silence is not an obstruction to hearing. Silence is an absence. Sound thus has absence built into it as its counter-foil, whereas sight does not. Sound is always bringing us into the presence of nothingness.
7 May
Yesterday I went out with my elder daughter for lunch. During the meal, I began to feel strangely remote. The waiters would not address any remark to me. Everything was said to Imogen, and I found it easiest to pass on my requests for service through her to the waiters. I should not have allowed that to happen, because it made me feel more remote. The fact that I was sitting not next to Imogen but opposite her also added to the feeling that she was not really there, and led me deeper into a sense of abstraction and isolation. One or two wisps of panic began to flicker through my brain, and when we arrived home, I felt completely exhausted.
I did not feel sleepy but had a desire to lie down under a blanket. I wanted to be warm and to forget. I felt extremely comfortable. I kept wondering what it would be like to lie down under a blanket of snow. I have read that people caught in snowstorms find that, if they give in to the temptation to lie down and rest, they often feel perfectly cosy, but they never wake up. I found myself wondering what it would be like if that were to happen to me now.
When I woke up after a couple of hours sleep, the thought occurred to me that what I have been experiencing was not so much depression, since I felt rather happy, at least physically. My body felt relaxed. Had it been a sort of desire to die? Do people die in their sleep during such conditions? Can the psyche simply renounce life? Can the spirit simply not return? Can one commit suicide by mere desire?
Experiences like this have taught me that the deepest feelings go beyond feeling. One is numbed by the feeling; one does not experience the feeling. I recognise now, looking back, that I was in the grip of a profound melancholy due to the impoverishment of my rich relationship with a much-loved child, but at the time all I was conscious of was a desire to escape.
20 May
I went to Staff House for lunch with a friend. As we passed through the doors into the foyer, I was in the middle of a group of people who greeted me with cries of, ‘Now here’s a surprise for you. Can you tell who this is?’ Another voice broke through the noise saying, ‘Do you recognise my voice, John?’ I could not tell how many people there were, possibly four or five, maybe as many as seven or eight. Amongst the various voices, I recognised someone I knew and greeted him by name. Someone else was still asking me if I knew him, so I then turned towards him. With a laugh I said, ‘No, I am ever so sorry, old chap. I’m afraid that I have no idea who you are. As far as I know, I have never met you before in my life. Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to the bar with my friend to get a drink.’ I began to shoulder my way th
rough them. This reply was met with howls of laughter, which were, I think, sympathetic towards me.
The voice continued, now more urgently, ‘No, no. Come on John. You know me. You must know my voice, surely. We’ve been at conferences together.’ Again, with a smile, I cheerfully replied, ‘I really am sorry. It must be a terrible blow to your ego but I’m afraid that if we did happen to meet in the past, your impact upon me has been negligible. I’m sure it must be very sad not to be recognised but there we are. You have left no trace upon my memory. Now, whoever you are, Goodbye.’ With this, I resumed my path towards the bar. Once again there were guffaws and hoots of laughter around the circle. At this, the chap in question or somebody else grabbed me by the shoulder saying, ‘It’s blank blank.’ I changed my manner, shook hands with him warmly and reminisced briefly about old times, saying how nice it was to meet him again.
In the quietness afterwards, I said to my companion, ‘Do you think they meant to play all those silly games on me, or was it just spontaneous?’ ‘Oh no’, my friend replied, ‘it was planned. I went through the door ahead of you, and I heard one of them say to the other, “Let’s see if he can recognise your voice”.’