Notes on Blindness

by Hull, John;

  This experience occurs from time to time. I am never quite sure what to make of it. People occasionally do this over the telephone to each other, but that is different. Each party on the end of a telephone is equal with respect to sight. I have various ways of trying to deal with it, and I think the method of cheerful scorn is quite successful. I do not want to hurt people’s feelings, and to say boldly, ‘No. I don’t play silly games. If you want to talk to me you must tell me who you are’, seems too harsh. What am I to do? Am I to stand there, feeling more and more foolish, suggesting name after name, while my interrogator with increasing impatience says, ‘No. No. No. Try again’?

  I have never had such a sharp sense of being the centre of a game of Blind Man’s Buff as I did in the foyer of Staff House.

  7 June

  When I put Lizzie to bed last night she was in rather a giggly mood. As I laid her down in the cot she said in a teasing voice, ‘You can’t see! You can’t see!’

  ‘Why can’t I see?’

  ‘’Cos you’re a blind man.’

  ‘What’s a blind man?’ I asked.

  Laughing, she replied, ‘It’s someone tall and strong and he turns into Banana Man.’ This last expression was uttered with a shriek of delight.

  Was she just fooling around? Does she know what blindness is or not? Is she associating blindness with other features of Daddy? I do pretend to be Banana Man when I am carrying her on my shoulders down the stairs. Or is she just telling me that I am a pompous old fool and both of us know perfectly well what a blind man is?

  9

  Waking up blind

  Summer 1985

  17 June

  A few nights ago I attended the annual meeting of an association for the blind. This was the first time that I had been into a meeting attended by other blind people. Indeed, apart from occasional conversations with John Lorimer, the distinguished blind braillist who is on the staff of our Faculty, I have had almost no contact with other blind people, although it is now about five years since I lost my own sight.

  It was curious and in a strange way rather comforting to find myself in a situation where the little habits which characterise the response of blind people to the world were accepted by a social group. The meeting began, for example, by everybody announcing who was present. This sometimes takes place in sighted groups when there is about to be a discussion, but I have never known it at the start of a business meeting. In the social exchange after the business meeting, there was a tremendous hubbub. People were simply shouting out the names of those they wanted to speak with, and in reply, you simply forced your way through the crowd towards whoever was shouting out your name.

  I was told by two or three older blind men that the time of adjustment towards loss of sight grew longer in direct proportion to your age. For somebody of my age, I should consider five years quite a short time, and was assured that it would probably take me ten or fifteen years to make a full adjustment.

  21 June

  Marilyn happened to ask me if I had seen a certain colleague during the day. I knew that I had spoken with him, but had the curious sensation of not knowing whether I had been in his presence or not at the time. Was it face to face or was it on the telephone?

  If I use the desk set and not the head set for a telephone call, the voice of my caller comes through so clearly in the room, while I am just sitting in my chair, that it is really quite similar to having the person with me. My colleague and I have a telephone link between our rooms, and often chat for a few minutes about a problem each day. I do not remember, however, that as a sighted person I ever had this strange hesitancy about whether I had been in their presence or not. This must be because a sighted person’s memories of what was said are always associated with what was being seen at the time, so the words are either associated with the expression and posture of the speaker or with gazing at the traffic through the window as you made the telephone call. If this background information is stripped off, then the difference between the face-to-face situation and the telephone conversation is less. Of course, even for the blind considerable differences remain, but the fact that I could experience this uncertainty shows that the difference has become rather fragile. If a slightly absentminded person, at the end of a busy day, might wonder for a moment about the context in which he had met someone briefly, it is easy to see that the blind person will more often find himself in that uncertainty. But the most absentminded sighted person would not confuse speaking on the phone with being in their presence. He would only wonder whether it happened yesterday or today – ‘it’ would always be a meeting, or a telephone call.

  This little moment of uncertainty tells us a great deal about blindness. As I paused, explaining to Marilyn that I was trying to work out whether we had been together or not, she sighed, and said, ‘Oh dear! How strange! Even after all these years I still find it extremely difficult to realise what your experience of the world must be like.’

  23 June

  You can see lots of things at once. Indeed, your visual field is made up of many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny segments which are assembled into a totality. Your attention may be focused upon some particular item but the individual parts of what you see are not in direct competition. They are laid out alongside each other in space. In sound, however, one part of the acoustic field may actually obliterate the rest. The nearest visual parallel would be the experience of being dazzled. A bright shaft of light obliterates everything else. With sound, however, this happens much more readily. It is a characteristic of ordinary sounds, not just of exceptional sounds, although exceptional sounds certainly do wipe out other sounds.

  When somebody turns the juke-box on in the coffee bar, the sound literally obliterates the voices of my friends. It is as if I was alone. They disappear. Only the juke-box exists. Its noise washes out all the rest of reality. It is as if you were painting, and you kept brushing over the water-colours with more and more colours, until all the distinctions vanished, and you were left with an even, grey smudge.

  This must be why I find noisy parties, especially discos, so lonely. People have to tap me on the shoulder to attract my attention. It is like having headphones on and not being able to take them off.

  3 July

  Marilyn asked me what I had done during the day, but for a moment I could not remember where I had been in the morning. I had been speaking with two colleagues, but where? It suddenly flashed upon me that I had spent the morning at Newman College.

  This was not like the experience of a sighted but slightly absentminded person who momentarily forgets what has been done during the day. I knew I had been somewhere, and had done particular things with certain people, but where? I could not put the conversations I had had into a context. There was no background, no features against which to identify the place. Normally, the memories of people you have spoken to during the day are stored in frames which include the background. You remember talking to the person and you remember that he was sitting in an armchair in front of a bookcase, or leaning against the windowsill through which the garden could be seen and so on. I knew that I had spoken with these people in some unusual context, because I could not associate my conversations with the usual sensations of my office chair and the feel of my elbows on the desk.

  It was this strange sense of blankness which was so disconcerting. It reminds me of the incident the other day when I could not, for a moment, remember whether I had been in the presence of Michael when I had a conversation with him. What someone says is normally associated with the look on her face as she says it, and with her posture and what she is wearing. The body in turn is situated against its own background.

  So I was at Newman College. But what does it mean to me? What does the concrete, physical presence of the College buildings mean? I have taught with these people in what they told me was ‘Newman College’. It could have been anywhere else. We walked up and down stairs and along corridors. We sat down in what was described as the Principal’s off
ice. All this, however, could have been anywhere. The blind person’s experience of institutions is rather abstract.

  4 July

  It is now many months since I began to appreciate the illumination and sense of real knowledge which comes through touch. In more recent weeks, I am beginning to experience not only this real knowledge through touch but also the pleasure of it. The other day I was at the home of a friend whose wife collects model owls. He put into my hand a little stone owl about five inches high. It was squat and beautifully rough. The weight of it in my hand was satisfying. There was a carved, wooden owl from Africa. I admired the simplicity of the details, the warmth and smoothness of the wood, the way that the whole object could be contained within the hand.

  I am developing the art of gazing with my hands. I like to hold and rehold and go on holding a beautiful object, absorbing every aspect of it. In a multi-cultural exhibition the other day, I was allowed to handle a string of beads, smooth and polished, and a South American water jar made from earthenware. There was a lovely, scraping sound when one rotated the lid of the jar, and thousands of tiny, tinkling, hollow echoes were made when the full, round belly of the jar was touched with the fingernails.

  I am beginning to enjoy the different textures of materials. One of my teacher friends is using a heavy, velvet bag to conceal an object from her children. They have to feel it through the bag. I love the way the fibres wiggle as your hands pass over the bag, this way and that. There is a delightful contrast with the smooth clean sharpness of the metal bracelet in the bag.

  I am surprised that it should have taken approximately five years to begin to appreciate experiences of this kind. Weight, texture and shape, temperature and the sounds things make, these are what I look for now.

  14 July

  During breakfast the other day I called out to Marilyn, who was struggling with a million other things, ‘Have you made the tea yet, darling?’

  ‘Yes’, she called back from the kitchen. ‘It’s on the table in front of you.’

  Lizzie interjected, ‘Why did you ask Mummy for the tea?’

  Thomas said, ‘It’s because he had to ask Mummy.’

  Lizzie added, ‘It’s because you can’t see and I can see.’

  I thought this was a good example of Lizzie’s increasing ability to interpret my otherwise extraordinary behaviour.

  As I was standing in the front porch with Thomas, looking down the steps towards the car which was parked in the road, Thomas asked, ‘Why don’t we park the car in the house?’

  ‘We’d have a job getting up the steps’, I replied.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Have you ever tried to lift it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it’s pretty heavy’, I said. ‘Anyway’, I continued, ‘We might try it. You could take one end and I could take the other.’ ‘Well’, he said in a serious but rather doubtful tone, ‘it would be difficult. You’re blind and I’m not very strong.’

  ‘We could get Lizzie’, I suggested.

  ‘She’s not very strong either’, he mused.

  ‘What about Mummy?’ I asked.

  ‘Well …’ he sounded most uncertain.

  ‘Let’s face it’, I said briskly, ‘the whole family’s not very strong.’

  He did not seem inclined to pursue this any further, and changed the subject.

  15 July

  On Friday I went to New Street station to meet a friend. As I moved across the concourse, I was approached by a chatty Irishman who escorted me to a suitable position where I would be seen by my guest as she came through the barriers. Having put me into position, he asked if I would mind some personal questions. I told him to go ahead, and he asked me if it was true that I was blind. I confirmed this, and without further ado, he declared, ‘Jesus will heal you’. I responded to this in vigorous religious terms, assuring him that he need have no anxiety, Jesus had already healed me, had given me his presence and his guidance and that although my outward sight was decayed I hoped that my inward vision was getting stronger every day. Moving the discussion to his life, I found out that he was a Pentecostalist, and we talked about this for some time.

  The arrival of my train was announced, and my friend told me that he had a young daughter, injured in a hit-and-run road accident. She was in hospital, he had to go and see her, but he had no money to give her a gift. Would I be kind enough to help him to buy a bunch of grapes for her? I gave him the required sum and we parted with mutual praising of the Lord.

  16 July

  Marilyn told me that a sensitive friend had asked her whether it was my blindness which, through helping me to concentrate more, had been responsible for the creativity which she thinks I have shown during the last six months or so.

  There may be something in this. Blindness is like a huge vacuum cleaner which comes down upon your life, sucking almost everything away. Your past memories, your interests, your perception of time and how you will spend it, of place itself, even the world, everything is sucked out. Your consciousness is evacuated, and you are left to reconstruct it, including a new sense of time, a new realisation of the body in space and so on. In that situation, there is likely to be a drastic revision of priorities. As for my own so-called creativity during these months, for what it is worth, it must be remembered that from 1968 until about 1983 I was completely occupied by my teaching and supervising duties with students, and my university committee work. No less important than the onset of my blindness is the fact that since about 1983, through the natural process of not seeking re-election, I have given up most of my university committees including Court, Council, Senate, Academic Executive, Faculty Board, Education General Purposes Committee and lots of lesser committees. It is quite possible that, had I been relieved of those duties and retained my sight, I would have been just as creative in research and publications as perhaps I have been these last few months.

  It is also true that I spent the first three or four years after my loss of sight in getting my university teaching work together. It was not really until the beginning of the 1984/5 academic year that I began to feel confident. The time which I had spent on making notes on cassette so I could resource my teaching work could now be diverted into more original writing.

  Taking all of these factors into account, I still think there is something purging about blindness. One must re-create one’s life or be destroyed. I was fortunate in that I had such a strong central core to my life. I had a job, a secure family life, an institution which accepted me and helped me, and multitudes of friends.

  19 July

  I can tell when other things are moving by the sounds they make. Cars swish past, feet patter along, leaves rustle, but a silent nature is immobile. So it is that, for me, the clouds do not move, the world outside the car window or the window of the train is not moving. The countryside makes no noise as the train passes through it. The hills and fields are silent.

  If the movements of other bodies are revealed by sound, the movements of my own body are revealed by the fact that it is being made to vibrate, or I feel the sway of the carriage as we round the bend at high speed. I am held back in my seat as we accelerate, and thrust forward as we slow down.

  This means, however, that the knowledge I have of my own body’s movements and of the movements of other things is not symmetrical. The cues are provided by external sound and internal sensation. This is not the case for the sighted person, who can tell whether other things are moving and whether he himself is moving by the same faculty of sight. You know when the train starts by looking out of the window. You tell it, as a sighted person, by seeing a changing relationship between your body and the world. The different ways in which the blind person experiences motion indicate that the normal relationship between the body and the world has been severed.

  21 July

  When she is out walking, the sighted person sees a world within potential reach. She knows that by performing a certain amount of work (i.e. walking) she will turn that p
otential into an actual reach. A measured, predictable quantity of walking will bring the anticipated object closer. The walking of the sighted person thus has purpose. Her purpose is to get to a certain point which she already envisages. This is illustrated by the fact that sighted people tend to become discouraged when objects towards which they are walking, like a distant line of hills, do not seem to be any nearer after putting in a lot of work.

  The problem of walking for the blind person is that he has no world of potential reach, but only a zone of actual reach, made up by the feeling of his feet on the ground. He does not know if a bend in the road is in sight, or if there is a range of hills ahead. The blind person thus lacks an incentive to form a purposeful action which would turn something grasped potentially into something realised actually.

  The result is that the blind person, when walking, becomes mainly conscious of his own body. There are movements up and down, steps one after the other. There is, of course, a pleasure in feeling the wind in one’s face, the sound of the birds, and the smells, but all this could be experienced stationary. If the blind person is walking along a familiar route, then it is better. Through memory, he knows that a certain amount of work will bring him to a particular point, for example where we sat on the fallen log, where there is a bridge we’ll be able to lean on and listen to the river. Because the route is familiar, the blind walker can estimate how much work it will take to get to that point. A new route, without information, can easily become rather meaningless.

  When I am walking along the city streets, along a strange route, escorted by a friend, I tend to ask frequently such questions as, ‘Can you see it yet? Is it a long block? How far do you think it will be now?’ I seem to need to set my body to reach certain goals in a walk which otherwise will become a weary plod. There is so little progress; the things now passing were not far off a moment ago. It is easy for a blind person to have the feeling that a lot of work is being done but little progress is being made.