For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  It seems obvious to me that whatever Laura’s emotional difficulties were, they had less to do with her physical disabilities than with the various traumas she had suffered in her young life. Consider the facts: As a very small child, she suddenly became unable to see, hear, or communicate and for five years afterward lived indeed like a household pet. At the age of seven, she was taken from the only place in the world that was familiar to her and delivered to an asylum a hundred and thirty miles away, where she found herself at the mercy of complete strangers for reasons utterly unknown to her; eighteen months passed before she met her mother again. She was used as a public socio-scientific experiment, constantly surveyed, corrected, manipulated, tested, and entreated to perform. She was more vulnerable than most children because of her sensory deprivations (she had a not unreasonable fear that she might fall off the edge of the floor, just as the earliest mariners feared they might sail off the edge of the flat earth), and the terror, confusion, and frustration that Laura Bridgman lived with must have been extremely difficult to cope with psychologically. One can only imagine the emotional riot that went on in her head. And the sole way for her to express her feelings civilly was to spell them out painstakingly with her fingers to those few people able to understand that language. (Laura’s own parents never properly learned the manual alphabet.) Her emotional difficulties were surely not caused by her blindness but by the upheaval she had endured.

  Toward the end of her life, Annie Sullivan stated that she had “always believed Laura Bridgman to be intellectually superior to Helen Keller.” Keller herself said that if Bridgman had had Sullivan as a teacher, “she would have outshone me.” Yet despite her remarkable intellect, following her brief period of celebrity, Laura Bridgman lived out the rest of her years in obscurity, abandoned by her teacher and by society, a lifelong resident of the Perkins Institution, monotonously doing needlework and reading embossed books, a shut-in no less than she had been as a child on the farm in rural New Hampshire.

  The Blind

  Consider them, my soul; they are truly horrific!

  Similar to mannequins; vaguely ridiculous;

  Terrible, strange as sleepwalkers

  Darting, one knows not where, their shadowy globes.

  Their eyes, from which the divine spark is gone,

  How they gaze afar, raised up

  To the sky; never do they gaze at the pavement beneath them,

  Dreamily bending their heavy heads.

  They pass this way through endless night,

  That brother of eternal silence. Oh, city!

  While around us you sing, laugh and bellow,

  Taking pleasure in the atrocity,

  Look! I drag myself too! but more stupefied than they,

  I say: What are they seeking in the sky, all these blind people?

  —Charles Baudelaire; translated by Ellen Mahoney Sawyer with Frances Papazafiropoulos

  1Likely the reason that photographs of Helen Keller in her youth show the right side of her face markedly more often than they show the left.

  2In her autobiography Teacher, Keller claimed that as a child she was so uncontrollable that she had “acted like a demon” and knocked out two of Annie Sullivan’s teeth.

  3I could, I think, start with almost any ancient text—The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Tale of Genji, The Pyramid Texts, or The Avestan Gathas—and effectively make the same point.

  4This is one of several explanations for the cause of Tiresias’s blindness; others include his failure to take Hera’s side in a disagreement between Hera and Zeus about sexual pleasure, and the general annoyance of the gods when he revealed their secrets.

  5Richard E. Doyle, Átē, Its Use and Meaning: A Study in the Greek Poetic Tradition from Homer to Euripides (New York: Fordham University Press, 1984).

  6How else to describe a man who was moved to purchase from the emperor of Constantinople all the existing accoutrements of Christ’s crucifixion: the crown of thorns, parts of the true cross, the holy lance, and the holy sponge? How else to describe a king who was said to have attended mass twice daily, loved sermons, surrounded himself at all times with chanting priests (even when traveling), fed the poor and the sick with his own hands, and had a habit of passing out hair shirts to his friends?

  7Helen Keller, for her part, wrote, “I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands or the wealth of form, the mobility and fullness that press into my palms.”

  8More technically, Keller wrote, “The blind child—the deaf blind child—has inherited the mind of seeing and hearing ancestors—a mind measured to five senses. Therefore he must be influenced, even if it be unknown to himself, by the light, color, song which have been transmitted through the language he is taught, for the chambers of the mind are ready to receive that language.…Since the mind of the sightless is essentially the same as that of the seeing…it must supply some sort of equivalent for missing physical sensations.…Because I can understand the word ‘reflect’ figuratively, a mirror has never perplexed me.” (The blind man of Puiseaux also seemed to understand the general concept of the mirror.) On this topic, by the way, Schopenhauer believed that an intelligent blind person could create a theory and understanding of color simply from hearing accurate descriptive statements.

  9He wrote, further, “I found that of the senses, the eye is the most superficial, the ear the most arrogant, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and fickle, touch the most profound and the most philosophical.”

  10In her introduction to the 1911 edition of Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, the translator Margaret Jourdain offered the reader some curious and inapposite bits of information about the philosopher. It is known to anyone who has read it that the Letter on the Blind was formally addressed to one Madame Madeleine de Puisieux (nothing to do with the blind man of Puiseaux), who happened to be Diderot’s mistress. Madame de Puisieux was a writer (Jourdain dismissed her as a “fifth-rate female scribbler”) and in constant need of money; indeed, according to Jourdain, much of the writing Diderot did at that time he took on “to fill the purse of Madame de Puisieux.” While Diderot was in prison, Madame de Puisieux came to visit him, and when he saw that she was dressed in her best clothing, he became suspicious. He asked her where she was going in her finery; she responded, “To a fete at Champigny.” When he asked whether she was going alone, she answered, “Yes.” As soon as she left him, Diderot escaped over the prison wall and found at Champigny exactly what he had feared he would: Madame de Puisieux with another lover. This story ends with Diderot climbing back over the wall into the prison. While in prison, Diderot had neither pen nor ink to write with, so he broke a slate off the wall of his prison room, ground it to powder, and mixed it with wine in a broken glass, thereby making ink. For a pen he used a toothpick he found in his pocket. And what did he do for paper? He just happened to have with him a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost and in its margins and blank pages he wrote his thoughts and notes. (That a man imprisoned for writing an essay on the blind should happen to have with him in his cell the work of a blind author either makes perfect sense or is so tidily coincidental and symbolic that the entire story is complete rubbish.)

  11On the value of educating the blind in music, he wrote: “It is only the want of instruction…which reduces some of them to the necessity of wandering in the streets, from door to door, grating the ear by the aid of an ill-tuned instrument, or a hoarse voice, that they may extort an inconsiderable piece of money, which is frequently given them with an injunction to be silent.”

  12In 2011, 63 percent of America’s blind population of working age were unemployed. Thus, even now a “competent livelihood” is still a dream for the majority of the blind.

  13Most people deaf from a very young age are not, in fact, mute. They have functioning voices and can make sounds. They do not speak simply because they cannot hear and therefore cannot learn spoken
language. Laura Bridgman could not speak but was not mute.

  14Laura’s teachers claimed that she had an astonishing ability to judge people’s moods and intentions; they believed she had a degree of extrasensory perception.

  15Author of the poem “The Spider and the Fly.”

  16The Fiji Mermaid was billed as the mummified remains of a real-life mermaid—half human, half fish. It was, in fact, the head and torso of a baby monkey sewn to the rear half of a large fish and then covered so artfully with papier-mâché that it was entirely convincing. The Fiji Mermaid was destroyed in a fire just before the Wild Men of Borneo entered Barnum’s fold.

  Navigation

  The International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs,1 the newest offshoot of Braille Without Borders, is located in southern India, in the state of Kerala, some eleven or so miles outside the city of Trivandrum in the little village of Nemom Po. The village is a scattering of brick houses and shacks built along a network of one-lane roads that wind through a vast, dense jungle of coconut, mango, and banana trees. The small campus of the institute lies at the edge of a freshwater lake called Vellayani.

  One evening during my first week at the institute, in January of 2009, I stepped out of the office building and found Sabriye Tenberken standing on a footpath in the dark with Basant, a blind Indian computer expert. The only light on the path came from a tepid bulb above the door of the dining room, just beyond where they stood. That the light was feeble made no difference to them. They didn’t need it. But I did. Without it I would not have known that there were three or four fruit bats appearing and swiftly disappearing just inches above their heads, swerving and fluttering and repulsively large. The bats had heads the size of a Chihuahua’s and their wingspans were half as wide as an open golf umbrella. They were so big they did not dart or flit as normal bats do; instead, they lurched. It was their blindness that led them to fly so close to an object, and their sharp hearing that steered them away again.

  Sabriye, wearing a yellow baseball cap and her ever-present portable Braille computer on a strap across her chest, was holding Basant’s wrist and drawing on his palm with her fingertip. She was teaching him the layout of the IISE campus, the shape of the dorms; she was even detailing a few small outbuildings that had yet to be built. “And here is the jetty,” she said, “and here the dock at the lake’s edge, and here the swimming pool, although none of that is there yet.” She was teaching a blind man the shape of things that didn’t exist, which is not fundamentally different from teaching a blind man the shape of things that do exist. Whether the objects were there or not, Basant would henceforth retain their precise configuration and location in his mind, just as Sabriye had done.

  “The shape of the dining room and auditorium building is that of a whale, and the shape of the amphitheater is like the number nine,” Sabriye said. “Do you know what a nine looks like?”

  Blind from birth, Basant did not know what a nine looked like. Sensing my presence beside her—and I mean by this that she sensed in her eerie way my particular presence and not just the presence of some anonymous human being—Sabriye turned toward me and asked me how one could best describe the shape of a 9. I thought about it. “How about a snake that has turned the front part of its body backward to examine its own midsection?”

  Basant didn’t know exactly what a snake looked like. This surprised me, for he was a local man, and the area around Lake Vellayani is, like the entire state of Kerala, not just full of large fruit bats but full of many very large snakes as well. I drew a 9 on Basant’s palm. He couldn’t make sense of it. I asked permission to draw the number on his forehead, which seemed to me an excellently flat, smooth, sensitive slate through which he could surely feel and thereby perceive the shape of a small figure. He gave me permission, and as I drew the 9, he giggled uproariously.

  Basant is a large, polite, extremely intelligent man with a head of thick black hair. He has long hair growing out of his ears. Like many Indians, he eschews a knife and fork and eats with his hands. Giggling is one of his salient characteristics. His giggling is high-pitched and triggered by anything remotely risqué or unexpected, and when he giggles, he raises his right shoulder, places his chin firmly upon it with his mouth pinched shut and twisted off to the left, and lifts one hand to hide his face. It is the giggle of a nervous, delighted, slightly scandalized ten-year-old girl. He speaks English with a plummy upper-class British-Indian accent and the interjectory ejaculations of Henry Higgins. To wit: “Indeed, Rose, indeed,” and “Oh, quite!,” and “Too true!”

  Basant, who happens to be a chess prodigy, began his working life as an operator in a public telephone kiosk. Such kiosks, approximately twice the size of the conventional enclosed public phone booth, are found all over India. “I was sitting in that little booth all day, like in a prison,” he told me. “I was just doing nothing but reading books six hours a day and dialing phone calls. I felt I was wasting my time. And the people I met just humored me. They didn’t take me seriously.”

  When I asked him what sort of books he read, he said quickly, “Robinson Crusoe. I liked that tremendously.”

  It made sense that a story about a castaway on the Island of Despair would appeal to a blind man trapped in a phone booth with no apparent exit.

  Basant met some customers who were well versed in computer technology, and they informed him about various computer programs, including programs that could help sharpen one’s chess skills. He purchased one of these programs, rapidly improved his game, and began winning chess titles. (Chess pieces for the blind have pegs at their bottoms, rather like cribbage pegs; each peg fits into a small hole drilled into the center of each square, and this holds them steady at the touch of blindly searching fingers.) At the time of our meeting, Basant was the chess champion of the state of Kerala. His experience with the chess programs inspired his interest in other software, especially software geared toward the blind. He was now expert with JAWS and Orca, the speech-synthesizer programs that read aloud to the listener whatever text appears on the computer screen, thus enabling blind users to operate conventional computers.

  Eager to see how a blind man played chess, I had challenged Basant to a game earlier that day. I marveled at the delicacy with which his large fingers identified the various pieces, at the skill and precision with which he moved each to its next destination and nimbly inserted it into its hole, and at how, after each move I made, he felt what I had done with his right hand, touched the few pieces around it, and kept the layout of the board in his mind. And then, almost before it had begun, the game was abruptly over, and I was left sitting with my mouth agape at how quickly he had beaten me. Seven moves apiece was the extent of the match.

  “Tell me, Basant,” I said now, “how bad was my game?”

  “Not at all bad, Rose. Not bad,” he said in his transparently well-mannered way.

  “Come now, Basant, you can tell me. How bad am I at chess?”

  “No, not too bad at all.”

  “Basant?”

  He ducked his head. “Yes?”

  “Don’t bullshit me. How bad was my chess game?”

  All that was visible of Basant’s eyes was a thin sliver of white between his permanently half-closed lids. He lifted his shoulder, placed his chin upon it, and giggled out of the corner of his mouth with his left hand screening his face like a geisha’s paper fan. Eventually he sobered up and mustered the courage to tell me: “Well, I must say you fall far short, Rose. Far short.”

  Several months later, when I reminded Basant of our chess game and asked him if he remembered it, he recalled in exact sequence all fourteen moves and began to repeat them back to me. I said, “Thank God I am not a blind genius burdened by the sequence of moves of every chess game I have ever played.”

  This triggered an unusually prolonged fit of giggling.

  Memory is a crucial skill for the blind. Without vision to assist it, the memory works overtime, situating and defining many pieces of information that canno
t easily be checked twice. After Sabriye typed up the schedule of classes and staff meetings for an entire week, she automatically retained the schedule in her memory, recalling with ease the time and location of every event that would take place over the next seven days. She had the same skill with her physical surroundings. Her knowledge and memory of the location of every tree, pothole, door, and light switch in her environs was truly astonishing. One day two years before, while I was sitting with Sabriye in her office at the Braille Without Borders farm in Tibet, a strong wind came up, and an attic door above us began to bang. Sabriye jumped up from her desk, hurried out into the hallway without her white cane, clambered up a nearly vertical ladder, pulled the door shut, and hopped back down, all in less time than it would have taken a sighted person.

  After saying good-bye to Basant that evening, Sabriye invited me to see where she and Paul lived. Their house was a four-minute walk from the campus. The institute was separated from the local population by a surrounding wall and a large iron gate manned at all times by an Indian guard. When we went out through the school’s front gate, the guard in his uniform stood up so nervously and abruptly that I half expected him to give us a military salute. We turned right and set off down a narrow road that led through a coconut grove. As we moved away from the lights of the school, the road quickly became dark—so dark I could make nothing out, could not see my own hand when I held it before my face. I told Sabriye that I could see nothing and therefore would be of no assistance getting her to her house, and as soon as I said it, I realized what a foolish statement it was. She hooked her arm through mine and said with mild irony, “I know how to get there.”