by Hull, John;
I think that I may be beginning to understand what blindness is like.
28 October
Marilyn and I were invited to the wedding of a friend. This took place in a village church, which had been chosen because of its picturesque qualities. As we were leaving the building, the mother of the groom said to me, ‘What a pity that you can’t see the church! It really is so lovely. It’s such a sweet little church. It is a pity you can’t see it.’ I smiled vaguely and we walked outside. The bells were ringing. Someone else approached us, remarking on how beautiful the ceremony was. Again, the groom’s mother said, ‘But what a pity it was John couldn’t see the church!’ After the photographs had been taken, with the pretty little church as a background, I found myself again with the groom’s mother, this time with Marilyn. For the third time, the same observations were made. ‘What a pity John couldn’t see the pretty church.’ Marilyn and I laughed it off and changed the subject.
This makes me reflect on the psychology of sighted people. Our benign hostess, who had chosen the church because it looked so pretty, felt slightly frustrated because she was unable to be a good hostess as far as I was concerned. The whole point of having the ceremony was lost on me. The site had been chosen to give visual pleasure. I could not derive such pleasure. Therefore, it was a pity. The pity, to be quite accurate about it, was not so much that I couldn’t see it, but that all the trouble had been gone through, as far as I was concerned, for nothing. It was a pity to do all that work and make all those plans for nothing.
This raises the additional reflection that I am not recruitable by sighted people. I am not entertainable, in the way sighted people know entertainment. It is impossible to draw me into the general admiration of what has been laid on to be admired. This becomes a pity.
When I am in such a place, I am not preoccupied by the thought that there are things I cannot see. My attention and my emotions are occupied by what actually presses in upon me.
In this case, it was the bells. I could have stood there, listening to those bells, for a long time. The air was full of the vibrations. My head seemed to be ringing. The ground seemed to be trembling, and the very air was heavy and springy with the reverberations. I tried to count how many different patterns they were ringing, and, without success, to work out how many bells must be in the tower. I thought that I really must become more expert in this lovely thing. I tried to describe the qualities of the sound to myself, mentally comparing it with other bells I had recently heard. Again and again, the descending peals chimed out, over the babble of conversation, cutting up the cool autumnal air, weighting everything with a strange, solemn expectancy. I was flooded with joy, and repeated again and again in my heart, ‘Yes, I hear you, dear bells, I hear you.’
I might not have reacted in this way had I already known the place. When I return to a familiar place, like the chapel of King’s College in Cambridge, I am often full of a very strong sense of loss. In a new place, however, I usually don’t bother much about what it might look like. I just write that off as unavailable, and concentrate upon those parts of it which can get through to me. Indeed, it disturbs me to be given information about the appearance of something, unless I specifically ask for it. Often, I do ask, because I am curious. There may be certain details I want to know. There is no value in ignorance. Sometimes, on those occasions, I will interrogate a sighted friend in some detail. The initiative, however, has to be mine.
I do not know whether the sighted people even noticed the bells. At best they could have been only an extra item of atmosphere, added to the autumn leaves and the Norman tower as the bridal party gathered in their beautiful clothes. To me, the very air I was breathing was bell-shaped.
15 November
Sitting at the dining-room table the other day I became aware of heat falling upon my face. I traced it to its source by moving my face and hands around, and finally located it in the light bulb which was hanging from the ceiling above me. I cannot remember ever having had this experience before. Since then, I have been paying attention, and I find that I can often tell whether the light in a room is on or not just by standing beneath it with my face uplifted. I am also much more aware of rays of sunlight falling across my face. Indeed, the whole of my skin seems to have become much more sensitive to changes of pressure and temperature, to wind and sun.
18 November
The other day, I attended a meeting of about twenty colleagues. The speaker seemed to be a particularly kind-hearted person, very sensitive to the needs of a blind person. She drew me into her talk by offering special explanations of things. As she held something up, she would remark, ‘Now you wouldn’t know this, John, but so and so and so and so’ or, ‘John, you might like to know that this coloured so and so …’ or, ‘For your benefit, John, I’m holding up a …’ or, ‘It grieves me more than I can say that you can’t see this beautiful flag, John, but it’s a so and so and a so and so.’ I nodded politely to all this, trying to look intelligent and appreciative.
No doubt, people who value me regret that they cannot recruit me to admire the things they admire. Still, facts must be faced. Since I am not recruitable, it seems pointless to draw attention to it in this way, with lamentations and expostulations of grief. This has the effect of making me feel an outsider. Just as I am getting interested in what is being said, there comes the stabbing reminder, again and again: you are outside this; you are not one of us. Is it possible that sometimes this is intended? Is it possible that this could be a sighted person’s defence against the power of my powerlessness? How do you successfully put down a blind person?
22 December
Was there a meaning in it? Was I meant to go blind? People often ask me questions like these.
My blindness was the result of thousands of tiny accidental happenings. These were not a ‘path’ and I was not being led along it towards blindness. Looking back, I can see the chain of events, and it looks a bit like a path, but any trackless waste is laid out with paths once it has been crossed. When you look ahead, there is no path but only an almost infinite number of possibilities.
The word ‘providence’ means ‘looking ahead’ and traditionally refers to the idea that God leads you along a path. I believe that we should call this doctrine retrovidence, or looking back, because it is only as we look back that the fortuitous is endowed with meaning. Meaning is conferred after the event. This is why the question ‘why did this happen?’ is rather a misleading one. It happened because I happened to be born in the twentieth century and not in the nineteenth. If I had been born a hundred years ago, no doubt I should have lost my sight at a much earlier age; if I had been born a century from now, no doubt my sight would have been saved. In other words, I could describe a thousand little ifs and buts which could give some account of how it was that this event took place in the life of this individual. But if by ‘why’ one is asking about the overall purpose, as if blindness itself was my fate, I do not believe it.
Each of the events which preceded the big event was fortuitous, and the entire sequence had no more probability within it than was accumulated as each accidental event prepared the way, more or less, for the next.
Faith is a creative act. It is through faith that we transform the accidental events of our lives into the signs of our destiny. Happiness is fortuitous but meaning is conferred when chance is transfigured through a rebirth of images.
This, however, is not an achievement, or at least it is not experienced as the result of effort. Images have their own energy, and the meaningful life is experienced as those images restructure the accidental content of life. The most important thing in life is not happiness but meaning. Happiness is the product of chains of accident which tend towards our well-being. Blindness does not make me happy. I did not choose it, nor was it inflicted upon me. Nevertheless, as an accidental event it could become meaningful.
11
The gift
Winter 1985/Spring 1986
28 December
Last Friday night, as I was putting him to bed, Thomas launched into a long and detailed discussion about my blindness. ‘Will you always be blind?’ was his opening thought.
‘Yes, always.’
‘When did it happen? Was it when I was a little boy or a baby?’
‘No. It was before you were born, just before you were born.’
‘What was it like? Did you have one good eye that you could see with and one bad eye that you couldn’t see with and then your good eye got worse? Or did you have two good eyes or what?’
‘I had one good eye that I could see with but it gradually got worse.’
‘Couldn’t the doctors stop it?’
‘The doctors tried.’
‘What was wrong with it? Why did it get worse?’
I then explained to him about detached retina. I told him about the retina of the eye, what it is and a little bit about how it works. I described how the retina may become elevated from the back of the eye or torn and what effect this has.
‘Why does it tear? What makes it come off? Can’t they put it back on?’
I described the many operations I had had, and told him something of the techniques used in trying to replace the retina and prevent further elevations. I described how gradually it had got worse and worse, and how other complications had set in.
‘Couldn’t they do any more in the end? What did they say?’
‘Well’, I told him, ‘they just said, “We’re very sorry, Mr Hull, we are afraid that there isn’t much more we can do now.”’
‘That was bad luck’, he said.
I agreed.
‘Why doesn’t God help you?’
‘God does help me, in lots of ways.’
‘How?’
‘Well, he makes me strong. He gives me courage.’
‘But he doesn’t help you to get your eyes back.’
‘No, but he does help me with lots of other things, and he has helped me with lots of other things.’
At this point I felt that he had enough to think about, and so did I; I went off to have my supper and he went to sleep. This discussion must be put into the context of Thomas’s current theology, which is a theology of divine power, based upon what He-man and Superman can do. God is seen as the perfection of He-man and Superman, rolled into one but stronger than them both. The film Superman had been on the television only the previous day and the children had watched it with great interest. Superman is a deliverer, a saviour and a liberator who shows amazing strength and resourcefulness on behalf of his friends and fellow-countrymen. By contrast, the outcome of having God as one’s ally seems disappointing.
I was, however, impressed by the nature of his questioning, the interest and the details of the surgery and the ophthalmology, and what I had felt about it. I was struck by his strangely adult comment that it was bad luck.
29 December
Christmas is difficult because it is a time of loved objects. It is not easy for the blind person to take part in this unwrapping, this unveiling of loved objects. It also takes the blind person longer to learn to love that object.
What are the loved objects in my life? I used to love books. I used to love handling my small collection of eighteenth-century books, noting the antique lettering, glancing at the woodcuts or the engravings, and musing over the old handwriting which is often found inside the covers. When I have a new book these days, I certainly like to feel it. I get a certain amount of information from this and I will probably be able to identify that particular book the next time I touch it on my shelves. I always enjoy the smell of a new book, as I thumb the pages. I do not think, however, that I can honestly say that the book becomes a loved object.
Has the love of books transferred to the love of tapes? Hardly! Nobody loves cassettes the way people love books. Cassettes lack individuality and immediacy. The cassette has little or no personality until you put it on the deck. Then it speaks to you, but a new book speaks to you the moment you pick it up. The love for the book requires no mediation from a machine.
I used to love gramophone record covers. I used to admire the artwork, the way in which the atmosphere of the music was often so cleverly suggested through the illustration on the sleeve. Today, the sleeve is merely a casing, merely a protection for the disc and something upon which to put the braille label. Apart from this, the record covers are indistinguishable one from the other.
And what about people? Are not even people becoming indistinguishable? Did I not wonder if it was Lizzie on my knee? Did I not fail to recognise even Marilyn when she called out in the street the other day? What is the status now of a person as a loved object in my life? Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the boredom of the blind, or at least of this blind person. Should I be taking more active steps to fill my life with objects that I can love, objects the loving of which lies in the feeling of them?
In many ways, the blind person lives in a world which is strangely devoid of objects. A sighted person walking through a city centre comes away with impressions of many hundreds of objects, arranged in shop windows, so as to arouse desire. The blind person walks this route with little or no conception of any of these attractive objects. Not many things draw him out of himself, into life.
3 March
This morning I woke up feeling most refreshed, because I had had a beautiful night of dreaming. There was a long series of most exciting adventure stories, all in full technicolour, and I woke feeling strangely purged. My mind had been renewed, had been on holiday, had been in open spaces, knowing the freedom and excitement of living in a visual world.
The most memorable dream took the form of a serial. It was one of those unusual experiences where one wakes up several times, while the dream seems to continue in a series of episodes, in a number of snatches of sleep. It was a sea dream, and the central part, the only section I can remember vividly, showed our party navigating a ship through a wild ocean. We were on the bridge, which was glassed over. Heavy seas were breaking upon this glass roof. The waters were crashing down upon a sort of skylight. We were afraid that the ship would be swamped should this skylight window break. It was shivering and shaking with the great masses of water pounding down upon it. Several of us were stretching up our arms to hold the frame steady in case it should collapse inwards with the force of the water. It did not break and we came successfully through the storm and into port. I awoke with an exhilarating sense of recreation, happy at having had all these wonderful experiences.
Sighted people live in the world. The blind person lives in consciousness. From this consciousness there is no escape, or escape is permitted only occasionally as in dreams. Such escape is blissful.
21 March
Yesterday morning I was kneeling on the floor, helping Lizzie to get dressed. When she was finished, I stood her up in front of me and said, ‘Now! Let’s have a look at you.’ I held her face lightly between my hands while she stood there, and gave her a big smile.
We remained like that for a moment and then she said, ‘Daddy, how can you smile between you and me when I smile and when you smile because you’re blind?’
I laughed, and said, ‘What do you mean, darling? How can I what?’
With great hesitation, and faltering over every word, she said, ‘How can you smile – no – how can I smile between you and me – no – between you and me, a smile, when you’re blind?’
‘You mean, how do I know when to smile at you?’
‘Yes’, she said, ‘when you’re blind.’
‘It’s true, darling’, I said, ‘that blind people often don’t know when to smile at people, and I often don’t know when to smile at you, do I?’
She agreed.
‘But today I knew you were smiling, darling, because you were standing there, and I was smiling at you, and I thought you were probably smiling at me. Were you?’
Happily she replied, ‘Yes!’
So this little child, having just had her fourth birthday, is able to articulate the breakdown wh
ich blindness causes in the language of smiles. I noticed the fine distinction she made by implication between smiling at someone and the smiling which takes place between people. I cannot describe my emotions as I reflected upon the fact that she had had so many experiences of smiling at me, but that the in-between smile was, for her and me, not only a great rarity, but a puzzle. I had endured a terrible loss and been granted a wonderful gain simultaneously.
20 April
Thomas and Lizzie were sitting on my knee. I was telling them a story. Thomas began to poke my right eye with his finger. He asked, ‘If I do that and that, will your sight come back?’
‘No’, I said, ‘nothing will make my sight come back.’
‘Not ever?’ he said. ‘When you die, will it come back? Will God make it come back then?’
‘Well’, I speculated, ‘I suppose that, in a way, when I am entirely in God I will know everything, won’t I?’
Lizzie then joined in with an exclamation. ‘It’s not very nice, is it?’ She repeated this again quite emphatically. ‘It’s not very nice, is it?’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Being blind’, she cried, ‘always!’
I said that it was not very nice, but that there were worse things.
‘But it’s not very nice!’ she insisted passionately.
Again I repeated the thought that there were worse things, but she seemed not to hear me.
She burst out, ‘It’s like going down and down and down and down and down and down and down to the bottom of a very, very, very, very, very, very, very deep well where you can never get out, like in the castle.’ She was referring to a trip we had made recently to the ruins of Ludlow Castle where she had been impressed by the dark depths of the well. We had dropped stones down it and listened. Lizzie shrank away from the edge. Now, with a shudder, she said, ‘I didn’t like that castle. I don’t like that place. I don’t like those dungeons, and that going down and down and down and down that well. I don’t ever want to go back to a castle like that again.’