Notes on Blindness

by Hull, John;

We didn’t dwell on the diagnosis, but in a kind of way I suppose you might say we were prepared. Indeed, occasionally in a quiet moment John tried to explain to a close friend who asked after his health that actually he was pretty ill and might not be much longer for this world. The response to this was polite incredulity because he remained so intellectually alive, so full of ideas and commitment, so strong in his voice, with his huge laugh, that no one ever believed his age, let alone his true state of health.

  After appearing to stabilise for a couple of days, John’s condition suddenly deteriorated on the third day. Pneumonia set in. Faster than the doctors were managing to get a grip of the situation his systems collapsed one by one. Our children tried to return to the hospital, but in the end only two managed to get there. He died in my arms, held by Lizzie and squeezing Joshua’s hand.

  *

  Writing about the person you loved after they have died is a strange experience. Out of the vast bank of memories, you have to decide which bits to mention and which to leave out, all the while knowing there will be no right of reply. Trying to convey just what a brilliant human being John was without making him sound like the saint he definitely was not: the exasperating stubbornness; the Australian directness which wincingly failed to understand my English restraint; the reluctance to dance. Yet above all, remembering what came through time after time in letters and messages I have received in the past year. Astonishingly consistently, whether from those who had known him a lifetime or had only met him once, they testify to his humour, warmth, humility and attentiveness to others.

  Listening to all five adult children’s tributes to their father at his funeral in the summer of 2015, there was all the tender ordinariness of love, of a sadness that can begin the letting go because nothing vitally important had been left unsaid. Tom remembered a stormy boat trip on a family holiday in Yugoslavia before it descended into war, ‘We were pitching and rolling and water was coming into the boat. Around us tourists were shouting and vomiting over the sides. But Dad was absolutely loving it. He put his arm around my shoulder and I felt no fear. We were roaring with laughter, yelling “Go faster, go faster!”’ Josh spoke of how music brought them all together, ‘for the countless hours you spent listening to me practise the trombone, thank you. And believe me, I also spent many hours listening to you practise the piano – you and Lee [the piano teacher] cracking up in those morning piano lessons, with “Frosty the Snowman” tinkering up through the floorboards.’ Lizzie remembered his story-telling, ‘bedtime shorts about Tarzan’s dog (Little Botty Bot Bot) to the legendary “Daddy’s House of Horror”, an annual event for the local kids at Halloween’. She thanked him above all for ‘the courage to think critically and not to settle comfortably into any single perspective of the world.’

  I leave it to Gabriel, our middle son and himself now a father, to have the last word. For those who knew John, or who meet him in this book, I think this speaks for us all:

  ‘I will think of Dad every time it rains.’

  Foreword to Touching the Rock

  Oliver Sacks

  There have been many autobiographies written by the blind – narratives at once poignant and inspiring – which bring out the emotional and moral effects of blindness in a life, and the qualities of will and humour and fortitude needed to transcend these. This book is not such a tale: it has no clear beginning, middle or end; it lacks literary pretension; it eschews the narrative form itself – and it is, to my mind, a masterpiece.

  Touching the Rock was not written at a sitting, as a narrative, but was dictated at intervals – at first daily, then occasionally – after Professor Hull finally lost his sight completely, in his forties. What he provides are observations that are piercing in their immediacy and clarity, observations on every aspect of his now so-fearfully-transformed life and inner world. He describes how it is to cross the street; how terrifyingly and totally one can get lost when one is blind; how it is to find oneself ignored or infantilised; how the memories and images of people’s faces, one’s own face too, no longer updated by actually seeing, become first fossilised, then faint, then disappear altogether; how relationships with one’s family change; how the very concepts of ‘place’, ‘space’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘presence’, ‘appearance’ become, by degrees, with the advance into blindness, completely emptied of meaning. There has never been, to my knowledge, so minute and fascinating (and frightening) an account of how not only the outer eye, but the ‘inner eye’, gradually vanishes with blindness; of the steady loss of visual memory, visual imagery, visual orientation, visual concepts (at one time he cannot remember whether a 3 points backwards or forwards); of the steady advance or journey (which for him takes five years) into the state which he calls ‘deep blindness’.

  The observation is minute, and equally it is profound: everything is pondered, explored, to its limit – every experience turned this way and that, until it yields its full harvest of meanings. The incisiveness of Hull’s observation, the beauty of his language, make this book poetry; the depth of his reflection turns it into phenomenology or philosophy. If Wittgenstein had gone blind, he would have written such a book, sounding the depths of an ever-altering phenomenology of perception. And, indeed, in its style, its use of dazzling brief sketches and remarks, Touching the Rock is oddly reminiscent of Philosophical Investigations.

  Hull himself writes in his Preface:

  The relationship between dreaming and waking and the nature of consciousness itself is one of the persistent themes of this book. Other themes are the changing perception of nature, the transformation in my understanding of what a person is, and the problem of making sense of such terrible loss … There are bits and pieces all over the place … [and] if there is repetition, it is because the same problems and the same experiences went round and round, interpreted from many aspects.

  And Wittgenstein in his Preface:

  This was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought crisscross in every direction. The … remarks in this book are, as it were, sketches of landscape which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. The same or almost the same points were always being approached from different directions, and new sketches made … Thus this book is really only an album.

  All this applies, equally, to Touching the Rock – it provides, finally, a picture, or an album, of the utmost comprehensiveness, the landscape of deep blindness sketched from a hundred different points; it shows us, finally, the universe of blindness, and in a way which could not be done by any straightforward, consecutive, direct account.

  It is not all darkness. As vision, and inner vision, disappear, other modes of perception become more intense and important, most especially those of hearing and touch. Some of the most beautiful passages describe this; there is a constant comparison, throughout the book, of the character of seeing and hearing, the essential contrast between visual and acoustic experience. Yet rain (and wind) sometimes seem to bridge this:

  Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience … Usually, when I open my door there are various broken sounds spread across a nothingness. I know that when I take the next step I will encounter the path, and that to the right my shoe will meet the lawn … I know all these things are there, but I know them from memory … The rain presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once, not merely remembered, not in anticipation, but actually and now. The rain gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another … I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me.

  As a neurologist deeply interested in the effects of sensory deficit and deprivation, and of the powers of ‘compensation’ in other senses, I find myself riveted by the detail a
nd obvious authenticity of such descriptions. Though there have been many accounts of blindness, none of them, to my knowledge, has explored its inner effects in the way that Hull does.

  It is known that if there is damage to the visual parts of the brain, the visual cortex, there may be a loss not only of visual imagery and visual memory, but of all visual concepts, all visual thinking, of ‘visual identity’. The person may become a wholly nonvisual creature. But if the visual parts of the brain have stopped working, or deteriorated, other parts of the brain – the auditory and tactile – by Hull’s descriptions, seemed heightened in function. A similar enhancement (of vision – of visual perception and imagery and discrimination and memory) may occur among those who are deaf; and here there is good evidence for physiological changes in the brain, for increased and finer responsiveness in the visual cortex, and additionally, a reallocation of other brain areas, namely auditory cortex, for the purposes of visual processing. One would strongly suspect, from Hull’s account, that there is, similarly, not only a lowering (and even extinction) of function in the visual cortex, but a heightening of function in the auditory and tactile cortex, and perhaps even some reallocation of visual cortex for his now greatly enhanced auditory processing.

  Two linked metaphors run through this book, giving it an immense metaphorical strength: those of the journey and the tunnel. The receding visual world is the vanishing light behind him as he advances through the tunnel, the deathlike tunnel which has no light at the other end, the tunnel from which he can never hope to emerge. We travel with Hull farther and farther into the world, or non-world, of blindness, until finally he comes to a point where he can no longer summon up memories of faces, of places, even memories of the light – this is the bend in the tunnel: beyond this is ‘deep blindness’. And yet at this deepest, darkest, most despairing point, there comes a mysterious change – no longer an agonised sense of loss, of bereftness, of hopelessness, of mourning, but a new sense of life and creativity and identity. ‘One must recreate one’s life or be destroyed’, Hull writes, and it is precisely recreation, the creation of an entirely new organisation and identity, which is described in the closing pages of his astonishing book. At this point, then, Hull wonders if blindness is not ‘a dark, paradoxical gift’ and an entry – unsought, surely, horrific, but to be received – into a new and deep form of being. ‘Deep blindness’ now shows its other side, and Hull becomes, as he puts it, ‘a Whole-Body-Seer’.

  ‘Being a WBS’, he writes in his Postscript, ‘is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions. It is a state like the state of being young, or of being old, of being male or female, it is one of the orders of human being.’ And in the completeness of this state – which reminds one somewhat of the completeness of ‘deep deafness’ described by the poet David Wright in his book Deafness – there is not only a new organisation and depth and identity, but a discovery, in one’s deepest depths, of one’s centre and soul and root and anchor: this, for Hull, is ‘touching the rock’.

  Introduction to Touching the Rock

  John M. Hull

  I was born on 22 April 1935 in Corryong, a town in North Eastern Victoria. My father was the Methodist minister in nearby Cudgewa. He had emigrated from England as a lad in 1915 and, after a series of jobs in farms and factories, trained as an engine driver. He drove traction engines, agricultural machinery, worked on refrigeration plants and irrigation schemes, and was then drawn into the timber industry. He worked in sawmills and as a winch driver on various logging stations, mostly in the forests of Eastern and Southern Victoria. He has told the story of these colourful years in his autobiography Yarns of Cowra Jack which was published by the Joint Board of Christian Education in Melbourne, 1984.

  It was while he was working in a remote logging camp in the Beenak area of the Dandenong Ranges that he met Madge Huttley, the only teacher in the tiny local school. She was an enthusiastic Christian and was a major influence in Jack’s conversion to Christianity which took place in 1927. He trained for the Methodist ministry in Queen’s College, Melbourne, and Cudgewa was his first appointment.

  My mother had been brought up in Stawell, a country town in North Western Victoria close to the beautiful Grampian mountain ranges. The Huttleys had emigrated from England in the 1870s, and Madge’s father was the owner/operator of the first garage in Stawell. Madge trained as a primary teacher in Melbourne before taking up her first appointment in Beenak.

  I was the second child of the marriage, my sister Alison having been born in 1933. Within a few days of birth my skin erupted in sores. This was the start of the condition which plagued me for the first half of my life. It may have been an allergic condition, perhaps associated with the asthma and the congenital cataracts in a syndrome which was not identified until many years later. Whatever the cause, the results were dramatic, and although as a child one accepts everything as being natural without question, this aspect of my childhood and youth has left a deep impression upon me. My childhood memories are of bandages and ointments, of shirt sleeves worn thin and torn with scratching, of pushing myself around as a small child on a tricycle, being unable to straighten my legs enough to walk comfortably, of puzzled teachers asking me why my fingernails were so worn and polished, and of my mother’s caring love. Her firm hands, her endless patience and the combination of strength and intimacy which she conveyed to me left permanent influences.

  Cudgewa, not far from the sources of the river Murray and Australia’s highest peak, Mount Kosciusko, is in an area of great natural beauty, but this made no impression on me until I came back more than twenty years later, for within two years my father had been posted to the other side of the State, to Red Cliffs, a town on the Murray river not far from Mildura. The vineyards were irrigated from the waters of the Murray. My first childhood memories come from those years. Food was kept cool in the icebox, and I can still remember the man from the ice cart bringing in the huge block of ice wrapped in hessian which he would chip with a pick to make it fit. Alison and I would grab the sharp fragments of ice and run out into the furrows between the grapevines next to the house. I can remember the salty quality of the sharp ice, the sweet green grapes and the hot, dry crumbly soil.

  Under the itinerant arrangements usual for the Methodist ministry in those days, my father was again moved after three years and this time to Tasmania. It was late in 1939 or early 1940, and on the deck of the ship which took us from the mainland there was an anti-aircraft gun. When the crew removed the camouflage for the daily practice they were watched by an admiring crowd of small children, including me and my younger brother Keith, born in Red Cliffs.

  During these years of the Second World War we lived in Wynyard, on the Northern coast. There was a fear that the Japanese would bomb Melbourne guided by the lights of the Northern Tasmanian coast, or might even attempt a landing prior to attacking the mainland. A zigzag trench was dug in the school yard, and every day we were drilled in snatching our tin helmets and gas masks while we ran to the shelter of the trench. In the evenings we children would sit on the front fence and watch the searchlights play in the sky. Holidays were taken every summer at Boat Harbour, on the coast not far away. Here I first learned to love the sea, the excitement and danger of the tides and the wonder of the life in the rock pools. While we lived in Wynyard, our family was completed by the birth of Janice.

  When the war in the Pacific ended, in 1945, I was in the children’s ward of Prince Henry’s Hospital in Melbourne, because of the severity of my eczema. The firework display along the banks of the Yarra was clearly visible from the tenth floor of the hospital, and the voice of General McArthur announcing the end of the war was broadcast through the wards. The family had moved back to Victoria, and my father was now posted in Charlton, a small town on the Avoca river in the North Western part of the state. This was wheat-growing country, and we boys played cowboys and indians on the huge stacks of bags of wheat, piled up beside the railway line and in the warehouses. On my way to school I h
ad to cross the river on a footbridge. One year the river flooded and the bridge was impassable. It was very exciting watching the water come higher and higher each day and then the patterns of deep cracks in the drying mud under the fierce sunshine. Several times there were quite severe dust storms. The sky would grow red and ominous and we would all be sent home from school. I felt my way along the front fence to find the gate, hardly being able to open my eyes because of the fierce burning dust.

  I missed a year from school because of my poor health, and spent this time in the correspondence school run by the State Education Department. I loved this, and waited eagerly for the weekly packet of booklets and work cards with a personal letter from my teacher whom I had never met. There followed two years in the Charlton Higher Elementary School before we moved sixty miles south to Eaglehawk near the city of Bendigo. Keith and I travelled three miles to school on the tram or rode our bikes. Eaglehawk and Bendigo were situated on the old Victorian goldfields and the tall derricks above the mine workings were part of the skyline. In the bush there were tunnels and mineshafts, ideal for adventure.

  My father had a large circuit consisting of three town churches, each with a full programme of activities, and three small country churches. Life in the churches was busy and exciting. It was in the church that we were taught how to study, to debate, to chair public meetings, to publish newspapers, to find our way around the bush and to sing. At the age of fourteen a group of young men training for the Methodist ministry at my father’s old college in Melbourne, Queen’s, conducted a mission in the central Bendigo church, Forest Street. This marked the beginning of ten years of adolescent religious and emotional intensity, years from which I emerged to find myself studying theology in Cambridge, England.

  It was sometime earlier, perhaps when I was thirteen, that I remarked as I came in for breakfast that it was a very misty morning. My surprised mother contradicted me, and then remembering that I had been complaining of not being able to see the board at school, took me into Bendigo to see my first eye specialist. It was to be thirty-eight years later before the last eye specialist signed me off.