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Blind - Alvar Cawen, 1926
Of all the major disabilities, blindness is perhaps the easiest to simulate,
but the most difficult to really comprehend. At first sight, it might seem to be
sufficient to close one's eyes. However, when you, a sighted person, close your
eyes, do not imagine that what you see is comparable to what a blind person sees.
After all, behind your closed eyelids you still have the brain of a sighted
person, and your brain is full of the images, colours, shapes, movements and
faces of the things and people around you, which you know are still there, and
which you can recapture the moment you open your eyes.
What can it be like when closing your eyes makes no difference? What is it
like when behind those closed eyes there is a blind person’s brain, a brain
without colour, without stars and smiles, without scenery and horizons, and
perhaps above all without faces.
Here is a simple test. Close your eyes now and try to think of a person close
to you, someone you love, but do not permit the picture or image of the face of
your loved one to come up before your imagination. I have tried this on Marilyn,
who has considerable powers of concentration. She says that she can just about
do it by concentrating on the shoes, or perhaps the handbag, or a lapel badge of
the person, but it is very difficult to maintain and the face of the person
almost irresistibly keeps sliding back. Now imagine that this never happens.
Imagine that you speak to yourself the names of your children, your family and
closest friends, and no face appears, nothing visual at all. I think that most
sighted people would find this very difficult to imagine.
It is because of this subtle strangeness about the condition that we call
blindness that I want to ask the question today about what it is.
The first reply which I shall suggest is that blindness is something that
goes wrong with your eyes. Blindness is when you can't see.
My own history is that after a long experience of retinal detachment and
repeated surgery, I was finally registered blind in 1980 when I was forty-five
years old. I continued to have a little bit of mobility vision. I could see a
white glow where the window was, and I could see dark shadow if you were to walk
between me and the window. After about 3 years this little bit of light
sensation faded, and since about 1983 I have lived without light sensation at
all.
My first reaction to this situation was, I suppose, fairly robust. I took the
view that blindness takes place when your eyes go wrong. Your eyes are a
convenient visual aid situated in your head. If they become useless, you just
make other arrangements. The necessity of making these other arrangements and so
to retain my job as a senior lecturer in the University of Birmingham School of
Education kept me busy for the next three years. Looking back upon that time, I
now see that I was not so much a blind person as a sighted person who couldn't
see. I lived in a sighted person’s world without seeing it. I had the memory,
the imagination, the expectations of a sighted person, without sight.
Gradually, however, I began to understand that blindness was more serious
than I had thought at first. I began to realise that it was changing the way I
thought. It was changing the way I experienced the things around me, and indeed
the people around me were also changing. Day and night were changing, food was
changing, sex was changing, my own body was changing and so I realised that
blindness is something which happens to your brain.
After all, the retina is said to be an extension of the brain. We speak of
brain-blindness referring to that condition when although the eyes themselves
are perfectly sound, the brain is unable to receive or process visual
information. But I am speaking of brain blindness in a more comprehensive sense,
not as a medical condition, but as a form of thinking.
I came to think that blindness was essentially a cognitive condition. That
is, it is a way of knowing, or as I first experienced it, a way of not knowing.
We do speak of blindness and hearing impairment as the two major cognitive
disabilities. For me, this meant first of all that what I lacked was knowledge.
After all, I could cross the road as well as anybody, since my legs and the rest
of me function more or less normally. What prevents me from crossing the road is
my lack of knowledge. I do not know when the lights have turned from red to
green, and I do not know for sure when the road is clear. What I need from the
passer-by is not physical assistance. I do not need to be helped to cross the
road. What I need is knowledge. Is anything coming? No. Then I can cross now.
Blindness is a cognitive condition in the sense also that blindness does
affect the brain. The brain is not like a computer which can be switched off,
and quickly resumes its activities the moment it is switched on. The brain is
never switched off. Even in sleep, the brain continues to carry out various
functions e.g. dreaming. The brain is affected by its sources of knowledge. When
I say that the brain becomes tactile I mean that the brain begins to operate, in
the case of a blind person, a bit like the hand. The brain becomes a hand. This
is expressed in the popular saying that blind people see with their fingers. I
prefer to put it a little bit more cognitively and to say that the brain begins
to act like a hand.
The hand does things one by one. The hand places things in positions, puts
things next to each other, ignores subjective factors such as perspective and
distance, since for the hand nothing is ever distant. Thus it is that the blind
thinker becomes extremely economical with thought. Thoughts are arranged, filed,
just as the objects in the drawer in a blind person’s office are carefully
stored, each in its place, so the tactile brain becomes more concrete, more
intimate, more orderly, and more sequential. It was going blind which taught me,
a university academic, to think in concrete terms. It was blindness which taught
my brain the importance of pictures.
However, we are not disembodied brains. The body provides an environment for
the brain, and just as the brain is affected by the source of its knowledge, so
the brain is affected by the whole of its physical surroundings. As I realised
this, I began to understand that blindness is something which happens to your
entire body.
In the first place, just as other people’s faces and images disappear, so to
the blind person his or her own body disappears. Not only do you not know or
care what other people look like, the whole idea that things have a look becomes
strange to you, and most important for your identity, the idea that you yourself
look like something becomes a strange and meaningless thought.
In a way, blindness is a regressive or atavistic condition. The blind person
becomes primitive. What I mean by this is that in primitive or simple life
forms, the organ of sight is not specific, like eyes at the end of your
tentacles or in your forehead as the case may be but perception is generalised
over the entire organism. The primitive organism sees with its skin. Thus, it is
only half true to say that the blind person sees with the fingers. The truth is
that the blind person sees with the skin. Perception is no longer specialised or
located in a specific part of the body, but the whole body becomes an organ or
perception. When I realised this, I no longer thought of myself as being blind,
but as a whole body seer. Of course, whole body seeing is a kind of short range
perception. Only through the wonder of sound and smell can the blind body
perceive at a distance. The most detailed perceptions are available only at
close contact. The world becomes a gigantic feeling. This means that the body,
now an organ of knowledge, begins to behave in a different way. This is the true
nature of those characteristics of behaviour which the sighted world calls blindisms. They are merely an indication that blindness affects the entire body.
Even as we say this we are moving towards a new conception of blindness. At
first we thought blindness was something which affects the eyes, then the brain,
and then the whole body. We begin to see that blindness is something which
creates its own world. Of course, this is also true of sight. Sight also creates
a world, but sighted people do not know this. After all, sighted people do not
generally know that they are sighted; they just think that the world is like
that. But the world is not like that. Only its world is like that, and there are
many worlds. The existence of the blind person’s world relativises the sighted
persons world. But to realise this, the sighted person has to begin to think of
blindness as a genuine, independent world with its own characteristics, its own
wonders and terrors. Blindness affects the whole body when the subliminal bodily
gifts, normally obscured by sight, begin to come to the surface of
consciousness. When this happens, the blind experience begins to generate a
world.
When I wrote my first book on blindness, 'Touching the Rock', I received a
number of thoughtful letters from blind people commenting that I did not
distinguish between the state of blindness and the experience of losing sight.
In my case, it was impossible at first to make that distinction, because both
realities, the appearance of one world and the loss of another world, made their
appearance at the same time. When I lost the sighted world, at first I had no
world. I was disembodied, de-robed, naked in an infinity of dark space.
Gradually a new world dawned - a world of fragrance, of little currents of wind
and snatches of moving air, of voices and elbows, full of bird song and
laughter, a world of minute detail, consisting of things which in the sighted
world I never even noticed, but now in their tiny particularity were full of
character and beauty.
In other words, I abandoned a deficiency model of blindness and came to think
of blindness as one of the great natural human conditions. Blindness is just the
way that some people are, and the world which blindness creates is one of the
many human worlds, which must all be put together if the human experience is to
become entire. Each world must be transcended by the other world if the first
world is to know itself. In knowing other worlds it realises its own world.
Blindness is a little world and sight is a big world. This raises important
questions of how the two worlds are to relate to each other. If the world of
power, the sighted world, can relate to the world of blindness, the smaller less
powerful world without patronising it, and if the little world can relate to the
big world without manipulating it, we will have learnt something about the way
in which power and powerlessness can be managed.
When I lost the sighted world I also lost the God of the sighted world.
Reading the Bible as a blind person, I became sharply aware of the fact that the
Bible was written by sighted people, and the God described in the bible is the
sighted person’s God, the God of light who rejects darkness, the God in whom
there is no darkness at all, the God who sends Jesus Christ to be the light of
the world and so on. My experience with God was rather like my experience with
the world. When I lost the sighted person’s God, I wandered in the darkness with
no God. Gradually, along with the blind person’s world there emerged the blind
person’s God. This is the God who says ‘I who create light shall I not also
create darkness?’ This is the God who said 'I will show you the treasures of
darkness'. This is the God who says that he dwells in 'thick darkness'. This is
also the God who says that 'God is beyond both light and darkness, that darkness
and light are both alike to God'.
No sighted person can say those words. No sighted person can ever say that
darkness and light are both alike as far as he or she is concerned. Only a blind
person can have that experience, can know that knowledge. And yet, to be beyond
light and darkness is to be in the image of God. From this I have come to
believe that the image of God is stamped into the lives of blind persons in
their blindness, just as the image of God is stamped into the life of sighted
people in their sightedness.
To gain all the worlds, to believe in the God of all being who is Lord of all
life, we have to put the worlds together. We need each other.
THE END
ϟ
John M Hull:
Honorary Professor of
Practical Theology in the Queen's Foundation for Ecumenical
Theological Education, Birmingham, England;
& Emeritus Professor
of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham
in "The National Journal for People with Disability"
[Melbourne], Vol. 3, No.
2, April/May 2001, pp. 23-26
12.Jan.10
Publicado por
MJA
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