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excerpt
Antoine Coypel,
Study of the Blind
(Louvre Museum)
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Acknowledgments
Portions of this book appeared in Raritan Review, Southwest
Review, and Yale Review. For their encouragement and assistance,
I owe many thanks to the editors of these magazines, Richard
Poirier, Willard Spiegelman, and J. D. McClatchy.
This book would not have been possible without the loving
support of my husband, Nicholas Howe. He not only read and
proofread every draft but was also my primary informant about the
visual world, always ready to answer the question, "What do you
see when you look at this?" From the start of this project he was
able to perceive potential even in my most tentative musings. The
integrity and intelligence of his own work is always a source of
inspiration to me. It is a rare privilege to live with a writer
so willing to share his imagination and skill.
From the start, John Hollander has been an invaluable source
of practical advice and intellectual encouragement. It is a
pleasure to thank him for his great generosity. Arien Mack is
responsible for giving me an education in visual perception. She
has guided my reading and answered my questions with patience,
good humor, and grace.
I am thankful to Bernard Block, Brenda Brueggemann, Daniel
C. Dennett, Audrey Jaffe, Andrea Lunsford, Linda Mizejewski,
Melanie Rae Thon, and Susan S. Williams for reading portions of
this book and offering suggestions and anecdotes to help expand
my thinking and refine my prose. My editors, Jonathan Brent and
Heidi Downey, were generous with their enthusiasm and assistance.
I am also grateful to my agent, Mildred Marmur, for her loyalty
to this project and her energetic efforts on my behalf.
Finally, I want to thank my readers: Jeff Bergland, Julie
Carr, Ellen Damsky, Katie Dyer, Shannon Floyd, Rosemary Hathaway,
Beth Ina, Stacy Klein, Karen Kovacik, Cray Little, Maureen Novak,
Irmgard Schopen, and Rick Vartorella, as well as all the people
who read for the National Library Service for the Blind and
Physically Handicapped and Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic.
They not only help me do my work but make my life as a reader and
a writer possible?"
Introduction
Writing this book made me blind. By this I do not mean that
the physical exertion of writing led to a deterioration of my
eyesight. Nor do I mean that this book chronicles any sort of
sight loss which occurred as I was writing it. I am precisely as
blind now as I was when I began this project and only slightly
blinder than I was when my blindness was diagnosed, when I was
eleven. Today I am likely to identify myself as blind; five or
six years ago I would have been more likely to use less precise
phrases, such as "visually impaired" or "partially sighted."
Since I began this book I have learned to use braille and started
to carry a white cane.
But the change in me involves more than using a particular
word to identify myself or adopting certain activities as an
outward manifestation of my condition. The research I did to
write this book made me understand for the first time how little
I actually see. As a child I knew that I did not see what other
people saw. I could not, for instance, read print without holding
the text close to my eyes and using extreme magnification. But I
knew I could see something - light, form, color, movement - and
assumed that this was close enough to what other people saw. As I
wrote this book and forced myself to compare my view of the world
with what I imagine a normal eye sees, what I learned astounded
me. I was shocked, for instance, to discover that a sighted
person sitting in a lawn chair can look down and see individual
blades of grass, weeds, and other plants, perhaps even crawling
and hovering insects, while all I would see is an expanse of
green. It might seem that this discovery would lead to sadness -
what else have I been missing all these years? In fact, it has
inspired a kind of perplexed wonder - what do sighted people do
with all this visual detail?
While writing this book made me blind, it also made me
recognize how sighted I am. Though I see less than 10 percent of
what a normal person does, I would have to describe myself as
intensely visual. Given a choice, I would generally rather go to
an art gallery or movie theater than a concert hall. This is due
in part to the fact that both my parents were visual artists. I
grew up surrounded by their art and an awareness that vision
involves more than merely aiming the eyes at a particular object.
Viewing a painting requires conscious mental effort, an
understanding of the choices the artist made, a knowledge of the
aesthetic traditions and conventions that the artist works within
or against, a familiarity with the methods of applying and fixing
pigments. Similarly, viewing a movie requires the ability to
decode a complex array of visual messages. The pleasure I derive
from visual media, and from the visible world in general,
suggests that although my eyes are blind, my brain is still
sighted. Through nature or nurture, I know how to make the most
of what I see.
But beyond my taste for the visual, I know what it means to
be sighted, because I live in a sighted world. The language I
speak, the literature I read, the art I value, the history I
learned in school, the architecture I inhabit, the appliances and
conveyances I employ were all created by and for sighted people.
I find it easy to imagine what it's like to be sighted. I had to
write this book to learn what it means to be blind.
For a long time I resisted when people urged me to write
about my blindness. When I looked for models in memoirs and other
personal writing about blindness, what I read was distressing.
These works seemed to fall into two categories. There were the
blind whiners, who asserted that blindness is the worst disaster
that can befall a human being, exhorting sighted readers to thank
their lucky stars for the vision they enjoyed and to feel pity
for those pathetic unfortunates who were deprived of it. On the
other extreme were the blind mystics, who kept alive the ancient
myth of compensatory powers and wished to inspire awe in sighted
readers with their coy allusions to second sight and extrasensory
perception. Neither stance seemed appropriate for my experience.
My story lacks the requisite trauma and drama, and the only thing
awe-inspiring in it is the fact that my adaptation to blindness
apparently took place before my condition was diagnosed, and
without specialized training or even conscious effort.
The conventional goal of blind autobiography is to reveal
the humanity that the blind writer shares with the sighted
reader. But like the freak show of the past, these works may only
delineate the distance between the writer and the reader and
emphasize the alien nature of blind experience.
Readers/spectators remain detached, free to bestow pity,
admiration, charity, or scorn, without challenging their own
complacency, without seeing themselves in the lives on display.
But the real problem with these works may lie in their reliance
on linear narrative. Structured around conflict, epiphany, and
resolution, these narratives promote the notion that blindness is
something one either triumphs over or is defeated by. This
presupposes that blindness is somehow outside oneself, separable
from all other aspects of life. My blindness is always there. It
hangs before my eyes no matter where I look, but this does not
mean that I am always looking at it. If I were to list adjectives
to describe myself, blind would be only one of many, and not
necessarily the first in significance. My blindness is as
intrinsically a part of me as the shape of my hands or my
predilection for salty snacks. Some days, and in some contexts,
my blindness is at the forefront of my consciousness. Other days
it is not. When I am trying on gloves or eating potato chips, my
blindness hardly matters at all. It all depends on where I focus
my attention.
The most valuable insight I can offer is this: blindness is
normal to me. As a general rule, I do not spend my days lamenting
my lost sight; most days I don't even think about it. Although I
can imagine what it's like to be sighted, I have trouble
imagining myself as sighted, just as I have trouble imagining
myself as Swiss. To analyze the impact of blindness on my life
would require me to imagine myself living in a parallel universe
of sight. I would have to compare events in the life I have
actually led to events in a life I can only imagine. Whether that
imagined life would be better, richer, or more fulfilling, I can
only speculate. I have chosen, therefore, to write about
blindness rather than to write about my life. My first-hand
experience of blindness and the details of my personal history
are there, but only as a part of the mix. I begin with three
chapters about cultural aspects - blindness in language, film,
and literature. I follow this with three chapters on
phenomenology, attempts to capture in words the visual experience
of someone with severely impaired sight. I conclude with two
chapters about reading, an activity essential to my life as a
writer and central to my identity as a blind person. Although the
sequence of these chapters is not chronological, the arrangement
of material maps a thought process. This process is cyclical
rather than linear. it spirals around its subject in ever-smaller
circles, because, while blindness is always before my eyes, it is
hard to confront head-on. The book as a whole can be taken as a
sort of "coming out" narrative, though one without fanfare or a
specific time line. I show first how the weight of negative
cultural associations once compelled me to conceal and deny my
blindness, and then how a precise examination of my visual
experience, free of myth and misconception, has allowed me to
accept blindness and acquire the skills of blindness, such as
reading braille, as a part of a new, blind identity.
While I am not writing conventional memoir, this book is
still intensely personal. What could be more personal than an
individual's view of the world? I do not pretend to offer a
definitive view of anyone's blindness but my own. Blind readers,
even those who share my condition and level of impairment, may
not see themselves in these pages. If every sighted person's
image of the world is unique, so too is each blind person's
vision. But my goal is not merely to expose my blindness to the
reader's scrutiny; some general insight can come from
introspection. I also hope to turn the reader's gaze outward, to
say not only "Here's what I see" but also "Here's what you see,"
to show both what's unique and what's universal. I invite the
reader to cast a blind eye on both vision and blindness, and to
catch a glimpse of sight unseen.
PART I
Blindness and Culture
CHAPTER 1
Call It Blindness
I tell the class, "I am legally blind." There is a pause, a
collective intake of breath. I feel them look away uncertainly
and then look back. After all, I just said I couldn't see. Or did
I? I had managed to get in there all on my own - no cane, no dog,
none of the usual trappings of blindness. Eyeing me askance now,
they might detect that my gaze is not quite focused. My eyes are
aimed in the right direction, but the gaze seems to stop short of
touching anything. But other people do this, sighted people,
normal people, especially in an awkward situation like the first
day of class. An actress who delivers an aside to the audience,
breaking the "fourth wall" of the proscenium, will aim her gaze
somewhere above any particular pair of eyes. If I hadn't said
anything, my audience might understand my gaze to be like that, a
part of the performance. In these few seconds between sentences,
their gaze becomes intent. They watch me glance down, or toward
the door where someone's coming in late. I'm just like anyone
else. Then what did I mean by "legally blind"? They wait. I go
on, "Some people would call me 'visually challenged.'" There is a
ripple of laughter, an exhalation of relief. I'm making a joke
about it. I'm poking fun at something they too find aggravating,
the current mania to stick a verbal smiley face on any human
condition that deviates from the perceived norm. Differently
abled. Handicapable. If I ask, I'm sure some of them can tell
jokes about it: "Don't say bald, say follicularly challenged."
"He's not dead, he's metabolically stable." Knowing they are at
least thinking of these things, I conclude, "These are just silly
ways of saying I don't see very well."
I probably shouldn't make these jokes. In fact, the term
"legally blind" is not a new, politically correct euphemism. Nor
is the adverb interchangeable with "half," "partially," or
"nearly." Someone is legally blind whose visual acuity is 20/200
or less, or whose visual field is 20 degrees or less, in the
better eye, with corrective lenses. The term seems to have been
coined by the American Medical Association in 1934, then adopted
by the federal government in the Social Security Act Of 1935 as a
standard measure to determine eligibility for new federal
programs for the blind. The definition, controversial since it
was instituted, turns on only two aspects of sight and does not
measure how well or poorly an individual uses residual sight.
There are many who would like to abandon the definition, enlarge
it, contract it, or create new categories. I could tell my
students this, a tidbit of medical and social history. I could
also explain that the legally blind often "see" something, and
often use visual experience to understand the world, and thus
"appear" sighted. I could hand out diagrams of the human eye,
photographs simulating various types of legal blindness. But I do
not. instead, I detail how my condition will affect them. Someone
will have to read me their papers and exams. Or else they will
have to tape their written work, which can be time consuming.
When I look at them I cannot tell if their eyes are focused with
interest or glazed over with confusion, boredom, or fatigue. In
other words, I cannot "read" the class as effectively as other
teachers. I cannot ask for a show of hands, or if I do someone
else must count them. If they want to make a comment they must
break the cardinal rule of classroom decorum drummed in since the
first grade and interrupt me. It may take the entire term for me
to match each of them, whatever it is I see of them, to a name.
Most of this may not matter to them at all. Perhaps they
have other instructors with comparable foibles. Perhaps there's
no need even to mention it. They can tell I don't see well just
by watching me read, holding the page an inch from my eyes,
squinting through Coke-bottle lenses. But I must talk about it to
dispel possible confusion or discomfort. I bring it up so that
the student in the back row with his hand in the air can drop it
and say, "Excuse me, I have a question," and not, "What's the
matter? Can't you see?"
I started teaching in 1991, when I had already been blind
for almost twenty-five years. But it was not until I started
teaching that I felt a need to identify my blindness in public.
For several years prior to my first teaching job I was a social
worker in a women's crisis center. Part of my job involved giving
educational and fund-raising talks about domestic violence,
sexual assault, and other feminist issues. I spoke from memory,
never using notes. I shifted my focus here and there in the way
all the literature about public speaking advises. I learned to
direct my eyes at any sound, to raise them to the ceiling or
lower them to the floor, as if searching for the right words.
Perhaps I came off as stagey, phony, or insincere - but certainly
not blind. The only risky moments during any of these occasions
came during the question-and-answer periods. But usually there
was a host - the chair of the meeting, the teacher of the class -
who pointed to the raised hands. Though I could not make eye
contact (I do not really know what eye contact feels like or
does), I doubt that my audiences ever really noticed. Often the
subject matter made them drop their eyes and stare at their
shoes. Or else they so identified with the topic that they became
distracted by memories, blinded by tears. If I had introduced
myself as blind it would have detracted from my topic. They might
have felt compelled to watch out for my safety - I might be about
to knock something over or fall off the stage. Or else they might
have suspected me of fraud, a rather clumsy deception meant to
milk their sympathy. As with my students, I could have taken the
time to educate them, to explain that blindness does not equal
ineptitude. it does not even necessarily mean an absolute lack of
sight. But I had more important things to say. My blindness was
an irrelevant fact that they did not need to know about me, like
my religion or political affiliation.
In social situations I seldom announced my blindness. And as
long as I was not obliged to read anything, or to identify a
person or a plate of food, people tended not to notice. I passed
as sighted. I appeared to see more than I do. I rarely bumped
into or tripped over objects or people. I aimed my eyes at the
face speaking to me. I recognized friends from their voices,
which looked to them like visual recognition. If someone
buttonholed me I could not send out distress signals to friends
with my eyes. But I could listen for familiar voices, excuse
myself, and move away as if I had seen someone wave to me.
Because I could do these things I had many acquaintances, people
who knew me slightly or by sight, who would have been shocked to
learn that my vision was not normal. The fact that I did not look
people directly in the eye they may have chalked up to shyness,
reserve, or boredom.
Occasionally it was necessary to say something. If I had to
explain why I don't drive, for instance, I never knew how the
person would respond. Some people absorbed the information
without comment. Others found it shocking. Tension would solidify
around us. Their voices would become softer, even hushed with a
pious solicitude. They became self-conscious about language,
hesitant to say, "I see what you mean," or "See you later." I
felt them glance around for whoever brought me, whoever was
responsible for me. Sometimes there was a degree of desperation
in this, an anxiety to turn me back over to the person in charge,
as if this disaster had occurred only in the second it took to
speak the word. I learned to speed-skate around it, to feign
gaiety, to babble my way into another topic, but equilibrium was
hard to recover.
Once, at a party, a man I was speaking to was almost reduced
to tears to learn that I am a blind writer. There was a tremor in
his voice as he kept repeating something about "the word fading."
As far as I could understand it, he was picturing a page of print
disappearing before my eyes word by word, as if written in
invisible ink. It was a vivid image but bore little resemblance
to my reality. Sensing that he was most disturbed by the idea
that my sight loss was still in progress, I tried to tell him
that, unless some other visual condition develops, the word had
already "faded" as much as it ever will. And as far as these
things go, a writer is not a bad thing to be if you can't see.
There are other ways to write, other ways to read. It is easier
for a writer than for a visual artist, a race car driver, or an
astronomer to compensate for sight loss. I might have even
mentioned Homer, Milton, and Joyce, the sight-impaired literary
luminaries most often invoked at such times. I wanted to say,
"This is not a tragedy. This is merely a fact of my life. Get
over it. I have." But he had already receded from me, become
preoccupied with a new, reductive view of me and my restricted
future.
Of course, it's the word blind that causes all the problems.
To most people blindness means total, absolute darkness, a
complete absence of any visual experience. Though only about 10
percent of the legally blind have this degree of impairment,
people think the word should be reserved to designate this
minority. For the rest of us, with our varying degrees of sight,
a modifier becomes necessary. We're encouraged to indicate that
we're not quite "that bad." Better to speak of a visual
impairment, a sight deficit, low vision. Better still to
accentuate the positive and call it "partially sighted."
Sometimes I use these other terms, but I find them no more
precise or pleasing. The word "impairment" implies impermanence,
an encumbrance that could disappear, but my condition has no cure
or treatment. The term "low vision" reminds me too much of "short
eyes," a prison term for child molesters. And anyway, I crave the
simplicity of a single, unmodified adjective. Blind. Perhaps I
could speak in relative terms, say I am blinder than some, less
blind than others.
"But," people object, "you are not really blind," attaching
yet another adverb to separate me from the absolutely sightless.
The modern, legal definition is arbitrary, a convention based on
notions of what visual skills are necessary for an adult to be
gainfully employed or a child traditionally educated. The
definition has more to do with the ability to read print or drive
a car than with the ability to perceive color, light, motion, or
form. If I lived in a different culture or a different age, no
one would define me as blind. I could transport myself on foot or
horseback. I could grow or gather my own food, relying on my
other senses to detect ripeness, pests, soil quality. I would
have trouble hunting; the protective coloration of most animals
and birds is always good enough to deceive me. But I might learn
to devise cunning traps, and I could fish. I could become adept
at crafts - certain kinds of weaving or pottery - that require as
much manual dexterity and tactile sensitivity as visual acuity.
If I looked at people strangely it might be accepted as a
personality flaw. Or else this imagined culture might be one
where a too-direct gaze is considered impolite. In any case, I
could live independently, with enough sight to perform routine
tasks without aid. If I had a sense that others' eyes were
stronger or more discerning than mine, I still would not define
myself as blind. Especially if the culture was the sort that put
the blind to death.
Though in the here and now execution is unlikely, a stigma
exists. So why should I want to label myself in this way? Isn't
the use of the word at all, even with one of the imprecise
modifiers, a form of self-dramatization, a demand for attention
and pity better bestowed elsewhere? Isn't it a dishonest claim of
marginal status, now that marginality is fashionable?
This is precisely why I avoided the word for so long. I was
pronounced legally blind in 1967, when I was eleven, though my
condition probably developed a year or two earlier. I have no
memory of losing my sight. I imagine it took place so gradually
that I was unaware of what I was not seeing. The only outward
sign was that I began to read with the book very close to my
eyes. Everyone assumed that I was simply nearsighted, but tests
did not show this. My cornea and lenses refracted normally.
Remarkably, my doctor did not pursue the matter, even though the
early signs of retinal damage should have been revealed in a
standard eye exam. Apparently such damage was not what he was
looking for. Instead, he jumped to the conclusion that I was
faking, even though I was not the sort of child who would do
that. My parents and teachers were advised to nag me into holding
the book away from my face. For a while I complied, keeping the
book at the prescribed distance, turning pages at appropriate
intervals. Then, when no one was looking, I would flip back and
press my nose to the page. Eventually it became clear to
everyone that this was not a phase that I was going to outgrow.
Additional tests were performed. When it was all over, my doctor
named my disorder "macular degeneration," defined my level of
impairment as legally blind, and told me that there was no
treatment or cure, and no chance of improvement. And that was
all. Like many ophthalmologists then and perhaps now, he did not
feel that it was his responsibility to recommend special
education or training. He did not send me to an optometrist for
whatever magnification devices might have been available then. In
1967 the boom in high-tech "low vision" aids had not yet begun.
He said that as long as I continued to perform well at school,
there was no point in burdening me with cumbersome gadgetry or
segregating me from my classmates. He did not tell me that I was
eligible to receive recorded materials for the blind. He did not
even explain legal blindness, much less the specifics of my
condition - I did not find out what my macula was for several
years. He said nothing about adaptation, did not speculate about
what my brain had already learned to do to compensate for the
incomplete images my eyes were sending. This was not his job.
Since then I have heard accounts of other doctors faced with the
dilemma of telling patients that there is no cure for their
condition. They admit they sometimes see these patients as
embarrassments, things they'd rather sweep under the carpet, out
of public view. But as a child of eleven I did not understand his
dilemma, and I assumed that his failure to give me more
information was a measure of the insignificance of my problem. I
was confused and scared, but also disappointed not to receive the
glasses I expected him to prescribe. I left with no glasses, no
advice, no explanations - nothing but the words _macular
_degeneration, which I did not understand, and, more
significantly, the word blind, which I understood only too well.
But I did not use the word. I was not blind. Blind people
saw nothing, only darkness. Blind meant the man in the subway
station, standing for hours near the token booth, tin cup in
hand, a mangy German shepherd lying on a bit of blanket at his
feet. That was not how I saw myself. Surely there was some sort
of mistake. Or else it was a lie, and as long as I did not repeat
it, refrained from speaking the hateful word and claiming
identity with the beggar in the subway, I could keep the lie from
becoming a reality. Because if I were blind, or going blind,
surely someone would do something about it. I'd read about Helen
Keller. I knew what went on. Shouldn't someone be teaching me
braille? At school they didn't use the word either. They moved me
to the front row, stopped telling me to hold the book away from
my face, and kept an eye on me. From this I understood not only
that the word should not be spoken, but also that I shouldn't ask
for special favors, shouldn't draw attention to my disability (a
word I didn't use either), shouldn't make a spectacle of myself.
I learned to read the blackboard from the motion of the teacher's
hand while writing. If I suspected that I would have to read
aloud in class, I'd memorize pages of text, predicting with
reasonable accuracy which paragraph would fall to me. The
routines of my teachers saved me. Also, by the sixth grade,
reading aloud was usually required only in French class, and then
only a few sentences at a time. Outside of school, if other kids
said, "Look at that!" I determined from the tone of voice whether
they saw something ugly, strange, or cute and would adjust my
response accordingly. On the bus I counted streets to know my
stop. In elevators I counted buttons.
The most I would admit to was a "problem with my eyes,"
sometimes adding, "and they won't give me glasses," indicating
that it was not me but the willfully obstructionist medical
establishment which was to blame for my failure to see as I
should.
Many years later, in Paris, I met a banker who announced to
me, as he shook my hand, that he had un probleme with his eyes.
He explained that this was why he couldn't look me straight in
the eye. I understood that a person in his profession had to say
something. For him, as for a used-car dealer or clergyman,
failure to maintain a direct gaze would affect his business. I
noted, too, that he did not use the words aveugle, malvoyant, nor
any medical term, nor any other phrase I could translate into one
of the current American ones to designate impaired sight. The
imprecision of his phrase allowed for the possibility that the
problem might be temporary, a side-effect of medication, an
adjustment to new glasses. But the tension in his tone gave him
away. He was a French banker of the old school. His suit was that
particular shade of navy, and his repertoire of elegant
pleasantries was extensive. Everything about him was calculated
to affirm, in the most reassuring way, that he could dispatch
even the most distasteful or compromising financial matter with
discretion so deft that it would seem effortless. But his own
phrase, "un probleme avec mes yeux," tripped him up. In his
rehearsed delivery, his haste to move the conversation along, I
recognized the uncomfortable anticipation of the usual responses,
the hushed surprise, the "So sorry for your loss."
Reluctance to use the word blind, even in modified form, is
as common as the desire to keep one's visual problems a secret.
Many people conceal their sight loss for years, even from people
close to them and certainly from strangers. They compose their
faces in expressions of preoccupation. They walk fast,
purposefully; they do not ask directions. Forced to read
something, they pat their pockets for reading glasses they do not
own. When they make mistakes, they feign absentmindedness,
slapping their foreheads and blinking - it feels safer to pretend
they're addled and forgetful than to admit they are blind. And
looking sighted is so easy. For one thing, the sighted are not
all that observant. And most blind people are better at appearing
sighted than the sighted are at appearing blind. Compare the
bug-eyed zombie stares that most actors use to represent
blindness with the facial expressions of real blind people, and
you'll see what I mean.
An astonishing amount of the literature on the "training"
and "rehabilitation" of the blind deals with appearance, the
visible manifestations of blindness. Eliminate "blindisms," the
experts say, the physical traits to which the blind are allegedly
prone - the wobbly neck, uneven posture, shuffling gait,
unblinking gaze. Discolored or bulging eyes should be covered
with patches or dark glasses, empty sockets filled with
prostheses. But the books and pamphlets go further, urging that
the blind, or their sighted keepers, be extra attentive to
personal grooming and choose clothes that are stylish and
color-coordinated. Having nice clothes and clean fingernails may
contribute to a person's self-esteem whether or not she can see
these things. And certainly hints about labeling socks or
applying makeup can be useful. But the advice of the experts has
another message: Blindness is unsightly, a real eyesore. No one
wants to look at that.
So the blind, of all levels of impairment and all stages of
sight loss, find themselves encouraged to sham sight. And even if
there is no overt encouragement from well-meaning family members
or social workers, we know, or sense instinctively, that our
charade of sight is easier than the consequences of speaking the
single word blind. Because the word bears such a burden of
negative connotations and dreaded associations, it can hardly be
said to have any neutral, merely descriptive meaning. Blind means
darkness, dependence, destitution, despair. Blind means the
beggar in the subway station. Look at him slouching there,
unkempt, head bowed, stationary among the rushing crowd.
Intermittently, an involuntary twitch jerks his arm upward,
making the coin or two in his cup clink. Otherwise he is silent,
apparently speechless. A sign around his neck reads: "I'm blind.
Please help." Because blind means "needs help," and also "needs
charity." But the people rushing by barely oblige. They barely
see him. They don't stop to stare, and they certainly do not
expand their vision to allow for any other image of blindness.
Told that there are blind people in all walks of life - medicine,
law, social work, education, the arts - they are not impressed.
They see those successes as flukes, exceptions, the beggar in the
subway as the rule. Those people went blind late in life, after
the habits of their professions were formed, and probably, if you
looked closely, after their major accomplishments were already
achieved. Or else they're not "really" blind. They have just
enough sight to get by. Besides, they probably had special help.
If, behind every great man there is a woman, in front of every
accomplished blind person there is a sighted helper, spouse,
child, or parent leading the way. Helen Keller had Annie
Sullivan. Milton had his daughters.
The blind beggar stands alone. As long as we can manage, we
keep our distance, both because he makes such a displeasing
spectacle and because we know the consequences of claiming
identity with him. Note how few coins there are in his cup - he
might he faking. If he greets the token clerk changing shifts,
his take will plummet. Every visually impaired, partially
sighted, hard-of-seeing person knows the suspicion. And we know
the story of the cop beating the man with his nightstick for the
crime of carrying both a white cane and a newspaper. "My mother
is really blind," the cop shouts. The blind man says nothing. No
chance to explain how his particular condition leaves him enough
sight to read but not the right kind to get around. Too late for
him to say he was bringing the paper home for someone to read
aloud to him. The cop's mother sits in the dark, wishing someone
would read the paper to her. The rest of us compose our faces,
fake it the best we can, and scuttle toward the exit. We bite our
tongues, dare not speak the word aloud, like the true name of
God.
The word blind has always meant more than merely the
inability to see. The Anglo-Saxon translators of the Gospels made
the metaphoric leap from literal sightlessness to spiritual or
cognitive incapacity. Of course they were only following an
ancient lead. Throughout the history of the language and in
common usage today, the word connotes a lack of understanding or
discernment, a willful disregard or obliviousness, a thing meant
to conceal or deceive. In fact, when you stop to listen, the word
is far more commonly used in its figurative than its literal
sense. And it comes up so often: blind faith, blind devotion,
blind luck, blind lust, blind trust, blind chance, blind rage,
blind alley, blind curve, blind-nail flooring, blind date (more
dangerous than you think), duck blind, window blind, micro-mini
blind (when open, they're hard to see), blind taste test,
double-blind study, flying blind, following blind, blind leading
the blind, blind landing, color blind (in the racial sense, a
good thing), blind submission, blind side, blind spot, blindfold,
blindman's bluff, three blind mice (have you ever seen such a
sight in your life?). Pick up any book or magazine and you will
find dozens of similes and metaphors connecting blindness and
blind people with ignorance, confusion, indifference, ineptitude.
An image of a blind man stumbling around an unfamiliar and
presumably overfurnished room is used to depict someone grappling
with a difficult moral problem. A woman flails blindly (not only
sightless but feeble) at an assailant, blinded by hatred and
rage. Other disabilities are used similarly, but not as often. A
politician may he deaf to the concerns of his constituents and
lame in his responses, but first and foremost he is blind to
their needs. Writers and speakers seem so attached to these
meanings for blind they don't even find them cliched. Deny them
the use of the word and they feel gagged, stymied. If you want to
talk about stupidity, prejudice, weakness, or narrow-mindedness,
no other word will do.
To express the opposite of blindness, however, we need at
least two words. Generally, we use the words sight and vision
interchangeably, though recently some eye specialists make a
distinction, using sight to refer to the functioning of the eye
itself and vision to refer to the functioning of the eye and
brain together. Originally vision was used to mean spiritual or
metaphysical perception. Later it became synonymous with sight.
In common usage positive connotations predominate. Seeing, after
all, is believing. We speak of vision as a virtue. We want our
leaders to be at least clear-sighted, if not possessed of "that
vision thing." We hold dear our views, outlooks, and
perspectives. We know a picture is worth a thousand words. We
want to see eye to eye. Of course people who are blind use
language the same way. Though the joke "'I see,' says the blind
man" can always get a laugh out of children and perhaps adults as
well, blind people are as likely as anyone else to say, "I see
what you mean," or "Let me look at that," and without excessive
self-consciousness or irony. The absolute equation of sight with
good and blindness with evil breaks down from time to time.
Seeing may be believing, but sometimes you cannot (should not)
believe your eyes. When we say, "Love is blind," it cuts both
ways. Love makes us oblivious to the beloved's flaws, putting us
at risk of exploitation, abuse, and deception. But it also causes
us to overlook the superficial defects and shortcomings of
physical appearance, financial condition, and social status,
which others may see as obstacles to happiness. Myth and folklore
abound with complex portrayals of the interplay between love and
sight. Willful deities divert themselves by temporarily or
permanently blinding mortals for the sole purpose of watching
them fall in love with inappropriate partners. Sight restored,
there's always a joke on someone, human or divine. Psyche finds
herself united to a man she cannot see. When she finally lights
the lamp and looks at Love, his beauty so startles her that she
spills hot oil on him and he flees. The message: look too closely
at the beloved and some one will get burned.
It's no accident that the eyes are the most often mentioned
feature in love poetry. Beautiful themselves for their gemlike
color and liquid sheen, eyes not only are windows into the soul,
but they also can send elaborate messages of love. They glow with
affection, smoulder with passion, dilate with emotion. When we
gaze into the eyes of the beloved and see a reflection of
ourselves, our narcissistic tendencies are gratified. Now, as in
the past, women spend more time and money accentuating,
highlighting, lining, defining, and emphasizing their eyes than
any other feature. Small wonder that women and men losing their
sight often report anxiety about their sexuality. Women fear that
without sight their eyes will no longer be alluring - no more
bedroom eyes, come-hither looks. Men seldom make passes at girls
who wear glasses. If the girl is blind, she will be that much
more unattractive, or that much less able to control her own
sexuality. On the other hand, there is a particular sexual
folklore which holds that blind women are more desirable than
their sighted sisters. Rumor has it that because a blind woman
lacks one sense, her other senses must be heightened to an
unnatural degree, making her exceptionally responsive,
exceptionally eager to touch, to taste, to smell. On top of this,
a blind woman's insecurities about her appearance should make her
grateful for the attention of any man and so eager to please him
that she would be ready to perform acts a sighted woman would
refuse. And no one could expect a self-respecting sighted man to
marry a blind woman. What good would she be out of bed? Perhaps
for this reason, blind girls in some cultures have been sold into
prostitution. Presumably they were expected to service men even
other professionals would find repulsive to look at. Or else they
could serve the Peeping Tom trade. Customers could enjoy the
particular titillation of watching a woman who couldn't look
back.
For men the loss of sight is devastating in a different way.
The male gaze is supposed to project messages of intention and
desire. But the act of seeing also plays a large part in male
sexual arousal an argument often made to defend pornography. If
voracious and deviant males can get their jollies looking at
dirty pictures, they'll keep their lecherous looks (and hands) to
themselves. Oedipus tears out his eyes even if another organ
might seem more appropriate, given his crime. His act not only
symbolizes castration but makes it unnecessary. What you can't
see, you can't want. And don't forget: masturbation will make you
blind.
Is sex really different for the blind? Like most blind
people, I've been asked this question more often then I care to
remember. I could respond that I have no means for comparison,
since I lost my sight before my sex life began. But I've always
taken the question as an overture, a come-on, rather than a
genuine inquiry. I've heard it asked only in dark corners, in
husky voices whose leering intensity made it clear that my lack
of sight was my major attraction. I'd edge toward the exit,
saying, "Oh, yeah! It's like doing it in the dark."
Since sex with a blind person seems a little kinky, the
sighted life partners of the blind are often viewed askance. They
are assumed either to crave control to a pathological extent or
to suffer from an acute martyr complex. Is marriage to a blind
person really so different? I ask my sighted husband this, but he
can't really answer. He's only ever been married to me. Would he
be threatened by a completely independent wife? Does my blindness
unman him, forcing him to take on the caretaking role
traditionally reserved for females? Behind these questions is the
assumption that blind spouses bring nothing to the union except
utter dependence and, if the sighted spouse is lucky, a cloying
gratitude. Blind people are so needy, so defined by their need,
that they must be incapable of nurture, affection, love, loyalty,
laughter, companionship, comfort, conversation, support,
sympathy, or any of the other qualities people seek in a life
partner. Perhaps I'm deluded, but I have a hard time seeing
myself in this light. I recognize that the pattern of our
everyday life differs from other couples'. We spend a lot more
time together, for one thing. Nick has to do the errands that
require a car, and I try to accompany him whenever possible. But
when we lived in New York without a car, we tended to do these
errands together as well. I usually do the cooking and laundry,
tasks where I can employ my nonvisual senses to compensate for my
visual impairment. Nick typically does the dishes and cleaning,
tasks that require more sight. I rely on Nick to proofread my
writing, but he reads his prose aloud to me, and I alert him to
any flaws I hear. Do we share these activities and divide
household labor simply because I am blind, or does the shape of
our life together conform to other needs? I have no way of
knowing.
But whatever I may claim, many people assume that blindness
must dominate all aspects of a person's private life. And it is
said to have an impact in the public sphere as well. Look at
justice. Observe that she is not blind but blindfolded. True,
it's difficult to depict blindness in painting or sculpture
without representing some unsightly deformity, unless the
blindfold is actually a bandage hiding a gruesome wound. But it
seems more likely that she has willingly renounced sight. She
makes herself blind to extenuating circumstances. Presumably when
justice is off duty she can see. The blindfold could even slip.
She could lift an edge of it and peek if her hands weren't full.
In one hand she holds a book, presumably of law, which she cannot
read blindfolded. Perhaps it's there as a reminder that she could
at any moment rip off the rag and look up the relevant statute.
in the other hand she holds a scale to weigh evidence. But she
cannot see the balance or lack of balance that is registered.
Perhaps she can feel it with the heightened sensitivity that
blind people are supposed to have.
Despite this apparent reverence for the impartiality of the
blind, still, in some states, the legally blind are automatically
exempt from jury duty. Though Justice is blind, the jury should
be sighted. Jurors may have to examine evidence or respond to the
ocular proof of a bloodstain or fingerprint. Attorneys coach
witnesses not only on what to say but how to look while saying
it. "Look at the defendant," the lawyer urges. "Are those the
eyes of a murderer?" True, looks can be deceiving, but in a court
of law they still count for a great deal.
My husband was once dismissed from a jury pool because of my
blindness. A doctor had allegedly misdiagnosed a patient's
symptoms as psychosomatic and failed to test her for the brain
tumor that caused her to go blind. The jurors were asked if the
fact that the patient had ended up blind, as opposed to disabled
in some other way, would have any bearing on their ability to
arrive at an equitable settlement. Nick said, "No amount of money
could compensate for lost sight." Both attorneys, even the one
for the blind plaintiff, wanted him dismissed. They viewed Nick's
close association with blindness as an impairment of his vision,
his ability to make a clear-sighted judgment. He might even upset
the balance in the minds of other jurors with irrelevant details
of the exact nature of this disability.
26 Law, love, language - the peculiar, double-edged sword of
sight never leaves us alone. It's fear, of course. Americans'
fear of blindness is second only to their fear of cancer, and as
ancient as the fear of darkness. So these constant references to
blindness, equating it with stupidity, narrow-mindedness, or
evil, make up a verbal game of chicken. Taunt the fates. Name the
demon you fear and insult it. It's a way perpetually to reanimate
the fear, keep the sense of dread alive. This is why the cliches
seem always fresh. At the same time, calling justice and love
blind is a dire warning. There's more here than meets the eye,
but what meets the eye is still what matters most. Look deeper.
Watch carefully. Don't blink. Use it or lose it.
Fear of blindness leads naturally to fear of the blind. The
competent and independent blind pose a particular threat to the
sighted, and they can't refrain from comment. Every blind person
is familiar with the praise. "You manage so well," the sighted
coo. They go into raptures over the simplest tasks: our ability
to recognize them from their voices, to eat spaghetti, to unlock
a door. People sometimes express astonishment when I find the
light switch or pick up my coffee cup. "It's where it was the
last time I checked," I say. I try not to challenge every
question, however. When someone says, "How did you cook that?" I
assume that they want a recipe or a tip, and not that they are
amazed a blind person could prepare anything edible. I tell them
I turn the soft-shell crabs when they start to pop. I add flour
to the pie dough when it feels too sticky. My mother, who was
sighted, taught me to time vegetables by smell. When the broccoli
begins to smell like broccoli, it's done. When it smells like
cabbage, it has gone too long.
An eye doctor once praised me for the way I lead my life. I
had just given him a copy of my first novel. He said that most
people with my condition become invalids and recluses. I was at
first pleased with this affirmation, but then I thought about it.
He was not so much praising me as defining what he considered
"normal" for the blind. By his definition, the blind beggar does
pretty well - at least he gets out of bed each morning and hauls
himself and his dog down to the subway token booth. If I had
expressed disappointment to that doctor, said I wished I had
continued my education, had published more, or had a better job,
he might have consoled me. "Don't press so hard," he might have
said. "No one expects you to live up to the standards of sighted
people." When the sighted label the accomplishments of a blind
person as "exceptional" or "overcompensating" they reveal their
diminished expectations for life without sight, and a
superstitious belief that should belong to another era. They seem
to secretly suspect an unseen force prompting our responses,
guiding our hands. Since they can see with their own eyes that
there are no strings or mirrors, they are compelled to reinvent
the ancient myths about compensatory powers, supersensory
perception. The sixth sense, second sight, third eye. We are
supposed to have both extra-accurate hearing and perfect pitch,
more numerous and more acute tastebuds, a finer touch, a
bloodhound's sense of smell. We allegedly possess an unfair
advantage that we could use against the sighted, hearing the
secrets in their sighs, smelling their fear. While the tradition
of the blind seer might seem to represent a more respectable and
positive image of blindness, it is still on the outskirts of
normal human experience. Blind Tiresias knows the truth, but he
is seldom applauded when he reports it, and so he leads a life
apart. The blind are either supernatural or subhuman, alien or
animal. We are not only different but dangerous. But when we
express any of this, the sighted scoff: "Don't be silly. I can
see you as you really are. You don't scare me. You're just being
oversensitive."
It's so much simpler to deal with the blind beggar in the
subway. The sighted can pity him and fear becoming like him.
Specifically, they fear the absolute dependence he represents,
dependence on his dog, and on family, educators, social workers,
public and private charities, strangers. This dread may be
particularly pronounced in Americans, driven as we are by ideals
of individual freedom and self-determination. Being blind is
un-American. Our national anthem asks a question the blind can
answer only in the negative. "No. I cannot see it. The dawn's
early light is too feeble. The rocket's red glare was too
fleeting to prove anything to me." The National Federation of the
Blind, the organization most concerned with the civil rights and
political status of the blind, schedules its annual convention to
coincide with Independence Day. To the tune of "The Battle Hymn
of the Republic" they sing: "Blind eyes have seen the vision / of
the Federation way ..." When the National Library Service began
to offer recorded books for the blind in the 1930s, the first
offerings included not only the Bible and some works of
Shakespeare but the American Constitution and Declaration of
independence, perhaps in an effort to educate and patriate a
population already at the farthest periphery of the American
scene.
A major part of the American fear of blindness has to do
with driving. "It's not just your car; it's your freedom," one
car ad proclaimed recently. Thus, if you can't drive, your
freedom, your enjoyment of the great American open road, will be
seriously restricted. Growing up in New York City, I was spared
awareness of this aspect of my disability until I was an adult. I
could get wherever I wanted to go on public transportation or on
foot, as all my peers did. When I left New York, I learned that
in most of America, suburban sprawl and inadequate or nonexistent
public transportation make driving a necessity. And driving is
not merely a matter of getting from place to place. Americans
express their personality through the make of car they purchase
and the style with which they drive it. Sight-impaired teenagers
who cannot join in the automotive rites of passage of driver's ed
classes and road tests experience an increased sense of both
physical and social isolation. The inability to drive sets them
apart, reinforcing their status as abnormal. Because in America
today, and increasingly in the rest of the industrialized world
as well, normal means not only to see, hear, walk, talk, and
possess an average IQ and income, but also to drive.
But the fear of blindness goes beyond a fear of the
inconveniences of personal transport. in the simplest terms, the
fear is linked to the fear of old age and death. Since blindness
equals darkness in most people's eyes, and darkness equals death,
the final equation seems to follow as inevitably as the ones
linking sight and light and life. In this view, blindness is as
good as death. When I was eleven, after my condition was
diagnosed, I wrote a poem about death. Memory has kindly erased
all but the bouncy lines: "I've just been told, I'm getting old.
/ I don't want to die." But I do remember knowing what I was
really writing about was blindness. My fear, only barely
acknowledged, was that, like Bette Davis in Dark Victory, my lost
sight was simply a sign of imminent death. When I allowed myself
to think about it, I had little confidence in my eye doctor.
After all, in his initial examinations he had failed to see my
damaged retinas. Perhaps he had also missed some threatening
disease, which would soon take its toll. I waited, trying to be
as brave as Bette, but nothing happened.
The belief that human experience, both physical and mental,
is essentially visual, and that any other type of experience is
necessarily second rate, leads to the conclusion that not to see
is not to experience, not to live, not to be. At best, the
sighted imagine blindness as a state between life and death, an
existence encased in darkness, an invisible coffin.
As overextended as this logic may be, the fact remains that
the most common causes of blindness tend to occur late in life,
thus close to death. Two-thirds of the legally blind in America
are over age fifty-five. Cells atrophy. Irregular blood pressure
does damage. Even a relatively minor stroke can affect the vision
centers of the brain. Macular degeneration affects 10 percent of
Americans over seventy. Twenty-five percent develop cataracts.
This is not counting glaucoma, diabetes, nor accidents -
projectiles, chemical spills, gunshot wounds. And there is no
guarantee that vision disorders can occur only one at a time.
Live long enough and, chances are, you'll go blind, too. You
won't be alone. As more and more people live longer, the ranks of
the blind will swell. For the currently blind this is cause for,
if not celebration, at least optimism. We imagine the blind
becoming a more and more significant force, demanding services
and rights, changing the image of blindness.
But this optimism is countered by the fact that we seem to
be becoming more and more visually dependent. Television has
replaced newspapers as the primary source for information. Movies
replace novels. Image is everything. But as society becomes
increasingly visual, it becomes more auditory as well. The
telephone and voice mail replace the letter. Technology will also
increase the ease with which large-print, braille, and recorded
materials are made available. Multimedia databases that allow
subscribers to access texts combined with images and sound will
spawn technologies for blind-friendly talking computers and other
appliances. Increased demand will drive down costs. As the desire
to preserve the environment continues to grow, public
transportation will become more fashionable, efficient, and
widespread. If you have to go blind, you've chosen a good time to
do it.
All this should be reassuring, or at least no more
frightening than any other reminder of mortality. But the
possibility of blindness still summons a particular kind of fear.
The currently sighted don't want to talk about it. Many are
unnaturally squeamish about the whole subject, recoiling from any
mention of their eyes, their parts or functions. They're far more
comfortable discussing comparatively cruder organs: the heart,
the bowels, the genitals. They pick up scraps of information and
use them as a shield. "Don't they have an operation to fix that?"
they ask. "Don't they use lasers or something?" Though they may
know someone who had a cataract operation, they have a less than
perfect understanding either of the condition or the procedure,
and they certainly don't want to hear it described in detail. If
the patient had some trouble adjusting to the intra-ocular
implants, or if the retina detached and the laser surgery
restored only partial vision, they shrug and say, "Better than
nothing. He's retired. How much does he have to see anyway?" They
cross their fingers, knock on wood, ward off the evil eye. When
it happens to them, they hope that the techniques will be
perfected and the surgeons will be more careful.
The funny thing is, of all the things people fear - cancer,
murder, rape, torture, loss of limb, loss of loved ones -
blindness is the one that anyone can simulate. Simply close your
eyes. If you are so afraid of future dependence, why not break
this absolute dependence you have on your eyesight? "But," you
object, "real blindness is worse than that. With my eyes shut I
can still perceive light." True. But given the degrees of
blindness you are most likely to experience, you will probably
see more than you do with your lids lowered. So go ahead. Close
your eyes. It is not an unfamiliar condition for you. You
experience it every time you blink. You are the same person with
your eyes closed. You can still think, remember, feel. See? It's
not so bad. You discover not that you hear better but that you
are better able to make sense of sounds. You hear children
playing across the street. After only a minute or two, you find
you can distinguish their different voices and follow their game
from their words. An acorn falls on the roof of the garage next
door. You know, without looking, that it is neither a pebble nor
a pellet of hail. A branch rustles and you know that a squirrel
is running across it, jumping to another branch then down the
trunk and away. You create a mental picture of this and it
pleases you.
Now challenge yourself a little. Drop your pen on the floor.
Even if the floor is carpeted you hear where it falls, you can
reach down and find it. It may take you a couple of tries, but
each time your aim improves. Gravity acts on objects the same way
even when your eyes are closed.
Get up and move around the room. Don't be afraid. You know
the arrangement of furniture. Chances are, you arranged it
yourself. You have a mental map of the room and use it to
navigate. After only a few minor bumps and scrapes your mental
map becomes more detailed and precise. You begin to move with
assurance. You discover you do not lose your balance or become
disoriented. You can reach out and touch a chair or the wall, or
feel the breeze through the window, or hear sounds in other
rooms. The mental map in your head is in motion. You move more
rapidly now. Perhaps you run or skip. It occurs to you that it
might help if you were neater, if you weren't forever leaving
things lying about where you might step on them. Or else you use
your memory in new ways. You discover that you can find your
shoes because you re-create the moment you took them off. In fact
you always take them off there. You are more a creature of habit
than you thought.
Go to your closet. Clothes you thought you could identify
only by color and cut you find readily recognizable from their
texture. And you can dress yourself with your eyes closed. You
have lost none of the manual dexterity required to button
buttons, zip zippers. Finding socks to match may be tricky unless
you arrange your socks in some ordered sequence. Certainly you
can imagine doing so. With a minimal amount of help and practice,
you could do this. In fact you discover that you can accomplish
most of your routine daily tasks with your eyes closed. That may
be how you define them as routine. You can bathe, fix your hair.
You find you don't really need to look at yourself in the mirror
when you brush your teeth. A few tasks may require more thought:
shaving, makeup, manicure, But your brain isn't impaired. You
will come up with something.
And you can feed yourself with ease. You may be surprised by
how easily the spoon finds your mouth, the cup your lip. You've
been putting things in your mouth for many years now. Feeding
yourself was one of your earliest feats of coordination and one
that has long since ceased to be amazing, even to your parents.
This really isn't as terrible as you were always led to believe.
You can make a list of the things that are impossible to do with
your eyes closed, but the list is not very long. And with a
little more thought and perhaps some organizational tricks, you
can take care of yourself and even others - pets, children. Your
problem-solving capacities are as sharp as ever. You are already
figuring out clever ways to arrange food in the refrigerator,
sort the laundry, wash the windows.
You turn on the TV. You have probably already observed that
it is not really necessary to watch the TV - it's aimed at people
who are not as smart as you. You know what's going on even with
your eyes closed.
But maybe you're more in the mood for music. Perhaps you
already keep tapes and CDs in chronological, alphabetical, or
some other order. Perhaps you wish you did and now have an
incentive to do so. or perhaps you enjoy randomness, a
trial-and-error selection. And there's always the radio. You can
tune the dial to find something you like. You may even feel like
dancing. Go ahead. You have cause to celebrate. You have faced
one of your more debilitating fears and seen it for what it is.
Which is not to say that the loss of sight will not be traumatic
or that there are not things about the visible world that you
will miss. But blindness does not in itself constitute
helplessness. You will be as resourceful, capable, and
intelligent as you ever were.
But suddenly you're not dancing anymore. The fear creeps
back and overtakes you. It occurs to you slowly that you will not
be alone in this. Your blindness will affect other people -
family, friends, coworkers, strangers - and you are afraid that
they will not adapt as well as you. You worry that well-meaning
loved ones will start doing everything for you, that they will
refer to your condition as tragic, use hushed tones when they
think you can't hear, display exaggerated cheerfulness when you
can. If you're in school you worry that "special" classes will
not provide you with the education you need. You have the nagging
suspicion that teachers and counselors will want to guide your
choices in ways that do not acknowledge your aptitudes, only your
limitations. You wonder if your employers value you enough to
purchase equipment or hire staff to assist you, and if they will
do so grudgingly and only because the law obliges them. If you
quit a job will someone else hire you? You're afraid that people
on the street will stare at you or offer help when you don't need
it. And when you need help, you're afraid people will mislead
you, take unfair advantage, rob you blind.
Face it. What you fear is not your inability to adapt to the
loss of sight, it is the inability of people around you to see
you the same I way. It's not you, it's them. And it's not because
you have an unduly malevolent view of human nature. Nor are you
guiltily acknowledging this prejudice in yourself. You may not
see it as prejudice. Pity and solicitude are not the same as
prejudice, you assert. The disabled should be a little more
gracious. But the words stick in your throat. You know that's not
the only response people have to the disabled. Once, Nick and I
took a flight from Paris to Dallas. A man carried a young woman
on board and placed her in the seat in front of us. Then he
returned with her wheelchair, which she dismantled for him to
stow in a nearby closet. Then the man left. After takeoff, the
flight crew discovered that the woman was traveling alone, which
was against regulations. The gate agent should have prevented her
from boarding. There was a great deal of debate and bustle,
complicated by the fact the woman spoke no English and only one
or two crew members spoke French. They questioned her at length.
Why had no one stopped her? She claimed that European airlines
were more tolerant of passengers in wheelchairs, so she had not
thought it necessary to announce her condition to anyone in
advance. But they weren't listening. They briefed her on the
airline's responsibilities for the safety of other passengers,
which her presence on board impaired. What had she been thinking?
They did not adopt any of the obvious solutions. They did not
move her to an empty seat in first class where a less-burdened
crew member could serve her without imperiling the comfort of
others. Instead, they opted for what is too often the first
response of the able-bodied to the disabled: they ignored her.
Throughout the long flight they rushed past her, greeting her
requests for help, when they heard them at all, with surly
admonitions about the needs of other passengers and about their
busy schedule. After a while she started to cry. She cried so
hard she made herself sick. We and some other passengers tried to
pitch in. A couple of times Nick carried her to the toilet and
stood guard outside. Inside, I helped her pull her pants
down and up. I propped her up so she could wash her hands and
face, and comb her hair. I can only imagine how humiliating this
enforced intimacy must have been for her. I told her I was blind,
hoping this might relieve some of her embarrassment.
As the flight continued, she displayed astonishing fortitude
and cheered up. She was a swimmer, on her way to the Special
Olympics. She had never been to America before, and her
experiences on this airplane made her understandably
apprehensive. We discussed the treatment of the disabled in our
respective countries. She said her sense was that Americans
tended to warehouse and conceal their disabled. Her exact
sentence was: "Les handicappes sont moins visible aux
Etats-Unis." One's patriotism flares at odd moments. I began to
point out that I had never observed excessive concern for
people's disabilities in Paris. High curbs and cobbled streets
would be hazards to wheelchairs and crutches. I'd never noticed
ramps in public buildings, kneeling buses, braille buttons in
elevators. Once I tried to buy a large-print dictionary, a
request met with the highest degree of Gallic stupefaction in
every book shop I tried. Was it possible that anyone could not
read regular print? But the swimmer was from Bordeaux, where
conditions might be better. And I knew that any claims I might
make about facilities and services in the United States would
seem ludicrous to her after the mistreatment she'd experienced.
And I did not tell her that the airlines have been a
battle-ground for the blind for the past two decades. As the
blind, like other Americans, began to fly more and more, the
airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration adopted
regulations to deal with them. Blind activists have been forcibly
removed from airplanes for refusing to give up their white canes.
The airlines saw the canes as a hazard to other passengers: "You
might poke out someone's eye." in fact, there is a
well-documented case of an emergency crash landing in which a
blind man was the first passenger to find and open an exit door.
Accustomed as he was to navigating without eyesight, a little
smoke and darkness were no obstacle to him. Today, the FAA has
amended its policies, though individual airlines and flight crews
sometimes still discriminate.
On two separate flights I have been asked to exchange seats
with someone sitting in the exit aisle who felt unable to open
the door in an emergency. A former airline employee said they
picked me because I look physically fit and cool-headed. The
first time this happened I made the switch gladly; the exit aisle
has more leg room. Besides, I felt that I was strong enough to
get the door open, and I know I am generally calm in crises. But
the second time I declined, saying, "Better ask someone else. I'm
legally blind." The flight attendant went away without a word.
Perhaps she was thinking of all the bad blood there'd been
between the airlines and the blind and didn't want to mess with
me. I was thinking of the Paris-Dallas flight and the French
swimmer.
At the end of that flight, the crew reassembled around the
swimmer, ready to whisk her through immigration and into the
hands of whoever was in charge, presumably with more reprimands
and warnings. They were profuse in their thanks and praise to
Nick and me and the other passengers who had helped. But they
were not grateful to us for performing tasks that should have
been their responsibility. Nor were they thanking us for
attempting to comfort the victim of their cruelty. They wanted to
forge a connection between us and themselves that excluded the
woman with the wheelchair. They wanted us to know they understood
the ordeal we'd been through, thrown together with such a person.
We, after all, like them, were normal. She was the aberration.
I am ashamed to admit that I did not tell them I was blind.
Because my disability was invisible to them, it allowed them to
assume that I felt about the disabled as they did, that I would
have behaved as they had. I wish I'd said something. I wish I'd
told them off. At the time, I was too disturbed, too depressed,
too frightened. If they treated that other woman so badly, what
would they do to me? Probably they would have simply ignored me
and lavished more praise on Nick. if they couldn't tell I was
blind it must be because he had me so well trained, so well
managed. "What a waste!" they might have sighed together later.
"Such a nice man, throwing himself away on a blind wife."
If the mistreatment of people with disabilities were limited
to overzealous solicitude and an insensitive use of language, one
could be more gracious. But everyone has witnessed the reality.
Special treatment leads to resentment, which prompts ridicule,
which barely conceals hate, and in extreme cases suggests
annihilation. Don't forget that in Hitler's vision of a perfect
world there was no place for the blind, the deaf, the crippled,
the mentally deficient. These views are still held, if, for now,
only in secret. "Don't stare," parents warn a child watching a
blind person with a cane, a deaf person speaking sign language, a
person in a wheelchair. Don't stare. Don't look at that. Close
your eyes and it will go away. Out of sight, out of mind. The
child receives two messages. First, that people with disabilities
should be ignored, pushed to the periphery of society, if not
over the edge. And second, that sight is preeminent, that the
Almighty Eye controls both consciousness and the world outside.
What you can't see can't hurt you, can't matter, doesn't exist.
Which is why I call it blindness. It's also why I now carry
white cane as a nonverbal sign that I do not see as much as I
seem to. But like a lot of blind people who carry canes and
employ guide dogs, these signs are not always understood, and the
word still needs to be spoken. There are a million reasons to
avoid the word, but when you interrogate the reasons, you find
that they are based on prejudice, fear, and lies. Exposing this
must surely benefit everyone. When I identify myself as blind on
the first day of class, it is perhaps presumptuous, because I see
more than the word is generally assumed to designate. But I hope
by using the word I can help my students redefine it and, in some
small way, correct their vision of the world. Of the students who
drop my class after the first meeting, there may be some who find
the idea of a blind professor ludicrous, irritating, or
frightening. But I will never know. The ones who stay adapt. They
stand in my office doorway and identify themselves by name. They
describe what's going on outside the window. They read me the
slogans on their T-shirts. These gestures become natural to them.
I tell them that if they commit a crime in my presence I would
not be able to pick them out of a police lineup. They indulge me
with laughter. I have a conversation with one student about being
a blind writer. He wants to know how I can describe things I
cannot see. I explain how I question the sighted people I know
about what they can see from what distance. We laugh. We talk
about memory, how I can still recall what things look like from
before I lost my sight, and how I use memory and imagination in
the same way any writer does. He is a psychology major. We
discuss visual perception. He tells me he knows a blind painter
and describes how he works. We are comfortable. We exchange these
ideas with matter-of-fact ease. His questions are not
condescending or prying, not the "How ever do you possibly
manage?" of the ignorant and insensitive. Another student talks
about an anecdote I told in class, one of those extended
narratives any teacher uses to make an obscure point. The
anecdote made sense to him, he tells me, then adds, "And while
you were talking, I looked around the room and everybody was just
staring. They were all really into it." And for a moment I see
this, creating the mental picture that goes with the words. The
student sees me do this, but adds no embellishment. His subtle,
unadorned generosity moves me.
This is how it's supposed to be, the whole point about
integration, mainstreaming, inclusion. They accept me and forget
I ever used the ugly word. And perhaps later the word will cease
to seem so ugly.
I am not the Language Police. I have no interest in
dictating how people identify themselves. Though I prefer the
word blind, I respect others who prefer partially-sighted.
Perhaps it doesn't matter what words you use as long as you know
what you mean. On the bus recently a man stopped the driver,
saying, "Yo! There's a little handicap' brother wants to get on."
The word handicap is in disfavor even though, in horse racing or
golf, it is the most skillful competitor who carries the heaviest
handicap. Still, disabled and challenged are more in vogue. But
there on the bus no one challenged the man's use of the word. He
was a big man, over six feet tall. His voice boomed out of his
chest and had more than a hint of a threat in it. I had been
following him down the aisle, and when he turned to yell at the
driver, I was right in front of him. As a New York City native,
my first impulse when I hear any loud noise is to duck, so his
use of a politically incorrect word was the farthest thing from
my mind. Besides, we all knew what he meant. It was early in the
afternoon, an hour when, in this city, everyone on the bus is
challenged in some way: physically, developmentally,
economically, chronologically. Simply by being on the bus we
announce our difference, our specialness, our handicap.
The bus knelt. The handicapped brother got on. I do not see
well enough to give a name to his disability, but I could tell
that he was not in a wheelchair. He was about three and a half
feet tall. His body rocked from side to side as he propelled
himself forward. He belly flopped into a seat, flipped, and sat.
The man who had stopped the bus made no move to assist him
further. But he waited, watching him, and said, "I saved it for
you, brother." His voice was full of defiance, the bravado that
comes from a bond of shared identity. In his words was a
challenge to anyone who dared come between them. The man who
spoke was African-American. The handicapped brother was not. The
bond between them, between us all at that moment, was the bus.
The handicapped brother said, "Thank you," with the deft
graciousness of someone who regularly accepts assistance from
strangers. The other man found a seat. The driver pulled the bus
into traffic. The rest of us settled into a comfortable
contemplation of our shared humanity and mutual acceptance. Those
of us who could, gazed through the window, looking down at the
unchallenged in their cars, complacent in their independence,
their unobstructed door-to-door mobility. Someday some of them
will join us on the bus - sooner rather than later, given the way
some of them drive. When it happens, we will do what we can for
them. We'll give up our seat. We'll announce their stop, reach
for the button to ring the bell, take an extra moment to explain.
We've been riding the bus long enough to sense what's needed. The
bus lurched and stalled in a snarl of traffic. Someone groaned.
Someone laughed. We were not fooled. The bus is no more perfect
than the world outside. But that day it felt right to us. It was
where we all belonged. And eventually, with a shudder, another
lurch, we moved forward, and, unsteadily at first but picking up
speed, we bounced along together.
CHAPTER 2
Blind Nightmares
When I talk about movies, people look at me funny. Since I
am legally blind, they assume that such a visual medium is closed
to me. In fact, I probably see better at the movies than in real
life. For one thing, I always know what to look at. And at the
movies, the world is better lit than in real life, more vividly
colored, less random. The filmmaker's mission is to get the
viewer to see things in particular way. Shots are arranged to
emphasize what's important, and even when the viewer's eye is
allowed to wander around the frame, the composition of the image
compels particular interpretations. Editing juxtaposes diverse
elements in suggestive ways. Music and other sounds are not mere
ambient distractions but set the mood and foreshadow or highlight
action.
Of course, blindness sometimes gets in my way at the movies,
but only in the ways it does in real life. I need to sit very
close to the screen and sometimes must ask a companion to
describe what's happening. I have trouble recognizing faces, even
as magnified as they are on the screen. If the plot depends on a
physical resemblance between two characters, I will understand
that this is going on but will be unable to decipher the
confusion without aid. Sight gags usually elude me. If a
character receives a Dear John letter or ransom note, I will be
unable to read it. But lately I've noticed that filmmakers resort
to various techniques to aid nonreading viewers at such moments:
characters read aloud or summarize, or else there's a voiceover.
I understand color films somewhat better than black and white,
because color gives clues to help interpret images. But the range
of tones in high-quality black and white films, from sheer silver
to gritty charcoal, gives me a sense of texture that is almost as
good.
Horror and science-fiction films pose particular problems. I
can comprehend Godzilla, Frankenstein, or walking corpses because
they more or less resemble things or people in the real world.
But when the space alien or nuclear mutant on the screen bears no
relation to anything in nature, I cannot connect the parts of the
image I see with anything in my experience or memory. In effect,
I end up seeing nothing, though I gather something from sound
effects. I think, "Sounds like a slimy tentacle," or "Sounds like
oozing pus," but I never know for sure unless a human character
on screen attempts to describe the creature. I perceive the color
red vividly and know that it often signifies blood. The amount of
red, accompanied by sounds of dripping, splattering, or gurgling,
allows me to guess at the extent and degree of carnage. Sometimes
the responses of my fellow viewers help; disgust sounds different
from shock or fear. Still, all these monsters and monstrosities
do not inhabit my nightmares afterward because I do not see
enough of them.
If I want to have nightmares I go to
movies about the blind.
When a blind person appears on screen, what I see is very scary.
Movies about the blind generally display such a distressing array
of negative stereotypes that I find it hard not to run screaming
from the theater. The movie blind are a pretty sorry lot; they
are timid, morose, cranky, resentful, socially awkward, and prone
to despair. Actors represent blindness with an unblinking, zombie
stare, directing their gazes upward to give the face a
supplicating look of helplessness. Even characters who have been
blind for a long time seldom seem to have mastered any of the
skills that real blind people employ. They fumble with their
canes and stumble over their guide dogs. The simplest daily task,
such as dialing the phone, gives them no end of trouble. If they
can read braille, they do so inexpertly. Their sighted companions
marvel at the smallest show of skill. They say, "How did you know
it was me?" or "How did you pour that without spilling?" And the
blind reward them by announcing a pathetic longing for their lost
sight, repeating their wish that they could catch one last
glimpse of a lover's face, the old folks at home, a patch of
blue.
Screenwriters and directors go out of their way to remind
viewers of the character's blindness, because blindness is always
understood as central to the character's existence. It is not an
inconvenience to work around but an insurmountable barrier to
normal life. The movie blind seem to have nothing else on their
minds, which is no wonder, since they are rarely gainfully
employed. Usually they live off others or subsist on some sort of
public assistance. When they do have a job, it will probably have
something to do with music, confirming the popular misconception
that the blind are rewarded with a compensatory musical gift. Or
else they will be employed in one of the traditional blind
crafts: chair-caning, broom-making, news-vending, flower-selling.
One notable exception is the blind character Whistler (David
Strathairn) in
Phil Alden Robinson's Sneakers (1992). As a member
of a high-tech security consultant firm, he specializes in
locating concealed cameras, motion detectors, heat sensors, and
other devices, using special equipment to hear high-frequency
hums and whirs. At various moments he uncovers valuable clues
that his sighted cohorts miss. "Don't look. Listen," he advises,
twanging two tuning forks he uses to sharpen his hearing. When
his boss, Martin Bishop (Robert Redford), returns after being
abducted, he cannot say where he's been because he was
transported in the trunk of a car. Whistler helps him re-create
the journey by simulating the sounds he heard. Still, Whistler's
skills are presented as related to a sort of extrasensory
perception that the blind are supposed to have. There's an
implication that if he regained his sight he'd lose the
heightened auditory sensitivity that helps him do his job.
Whistler is a different kind of blind stock character - the blind
seer. His abilities are less acquired skills than divine gifts
offered to compensate for his lost sight. In a way, he is yet
another blind musician, exchanging a piano for a computer
keyboard.
And Whistler, like other blind seers, is not the protagonist
of the film. In some sense the blind man is never the
protagonist, even when played by the star. The viewer is never
called on to identify with or admire the blind man. Rather, the
blind man exists to instruct or illuminate some male companion or
friend. The sighted man, like the viewer, watches the blind man
in various situations, scrutinizes every aspect of his
personality, and comes away with some enriching insight, while
the blind man remains more or less unchanged.
In Martin Brest's 1992 film Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino
plays
Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, who has been blind for some time.
He treats himself and his paid, teenaged companion, Charlie Simms
(Chris O'Donnell), to a blowout New York weekend that he intends
to cap off with his own suicide. Charlie, like the viewer, does
not question Slade's desire to kill himself; the life he's been
leading seems so bleak. As Slade puts it, "I got no life,
Charlie. I'm in the dark here." Darkness might as well be death;
life without sight is hardly living. Charlie manages to prevent
the suicide but cannot dispel Slade's gloom. Still, Charlie
learns a great deal from their weekend together: how to spend
money, how to drive a Ferrari, how to tango, how to dissuade a
blind man from suicide - all skills that may come in handy later
in life. Slade learns only what he already knew: that life, as he
knew it, is over. The wise-cracking, autocratic, take-charge
attitude that served him so well in the military now makes him
offensive. In the final scene Slade returns home and asks his
niece's small children to help with his luggage. He has become a
kinder, gentler blind man, but also diminished, defeated, and
tame enough for a toddler.
Similarly, in Jocelyn Moorhouse's 1992 film Proof, the
sighted protagonist Andy (Russell Crowe) gains a great deal from
his acquaintance with Martin (Hugo Weaving). Martin is the first
blind person Andy has ever known, and his anger and mistrust make
him a powerful negative role model. When they meet at the
beginning of the film, Andy has a menial restaurant job and seems
to have no specific ambition or direction in life. Martin, who is
without visible means of support, lives by compulsively
structured routines. Their acquaintance leads each to change. By
the end of the film Andy is inspired to get a better job and
generally to take charge of himself. Martin's orderly life has
been disrupted, and the viewer senses he will change for the
better, but this change does not come from an active choice on
his part.
Because blind men in the movies exist as passive objects of
speculation for both the viewer and the viewer's on-screen
surrogate, they perform the function that mainstream cinema
usually reserves for women: They exist to be looked at. They are
all spectacle. In treating blind men like women, movies reenact
the castration that blindness has represented since Oedipus. The
viewer contemplates the blind man on screen with both fascination
and revulsion. The sighted man, the true protagonist, reassures
the viewer by taking charge of this walking-talking castration
symbol and diluting the horror he provokes. This must be why
movies pay so much attention to blind men's sexuality. They are
presented either as asexual, cut off from that realm of
experience, or as over-sexed, overcompensating for all they've
lost. Though Slade confides to Charlie his hope to settle down
with one woman, and Charlie obliges by introducing him to his
pretty political science teacher, the viewer may well doubt that
such a relationship will flourish. Slade's womanizing habit may
be too hard to break. He is obsessed with women, to a degree that
even the adolescent Charlie finds excessive. And his sexuality is
not quite normal, because it is guided by his nose. Normal men,
men who watch movies, are aroused by the visual, and Slade at
least remembers this, citing the visual stimulation of "nipples
staring right out at you like secret searchlights." But blinded,
he must get his kicks elsewhere. He identifies the fragrances
worn by the women he meets and tries to draw conclusions about
their appearance, personality, and proclivities. Though blind, he
still has the nose of a real man, and all that that implies. But
in the end, Slade's olfactory skill is just another parlor trick
to entertain the sighted. The nose only knows so much. Beauty is
in the eye of the beholder, especially at the movies, and beauty
without a beholder is a disgraceful waste. In Alfred Hitchcock's
The Paradine Case (1947), a wealthy blind man is murdered, and
his beautiful young wife is accused. Her lawyer, Anthony Keane
(Gregory Peck), sympathizes with the unnatural situation she had
to put up with: "Paradine could not understand the sacrifice you
were making. He'd never seen you." Keane assumes that since
Paradine could neither appraise her beauty nor see the envious
looks of other men, he must have undervalued both her beauty and
her selflessness. This makes Mrs. Paradine (Alida Valli) seem all
the more admirable, all the more innocent. Keane's defense of
Mrs. Paradine presupposes that judge, jury and viewer share his
abhorrence of the mere idea of a blind man coupling with a
sighted woman. The depth of his disgust suggests that the act
violates a cultural taboo. This distaste seems to hover around
any treatment of blind men and sex. Colonel Slade's sexual
liaison with a call girl takes place discreetly off screen
because it would be too unsightly to show.
So most films avoid offending sighted sensibilities and
present blindness as impotence. In Robert Benton's Places in the
Heart (1984) the blind boarder, Mr. Will (John Malkovich), lives
with Mrs. Spalding (Sally Field), but there is never any question
about the chasteness of their relationship. The film toys with
the possibility of an attraction between them, but only to reveal
her virtue and his childlike timidity. Once, he barges in on her
while she is in the bath. A twist on a classical allusion? This
was how Tiresias lost his sight. But since Will is already blind,
the danger and sexual charge of the moment is dispelled. Later,
Will asks her to describe herself. He has feelings for her and
wants to translate those feelings into visual details. But her
description is vague and modest, and makes her think of her dead
husband. So Will can only look on, misty-eyed and remote. The
scene is touching because he does not, cannot, touch her. Proof
questions assumptions about blindness and sexuality, but the
result is the same. Martin shuns the advances of his house-keeper
Celia (Genevieve Picot). He tells Andy that as long as he resists
Celia she cannot pity him. He assumes that if they went to bed
together she would have a reason to feel pity. As long as their
relationship stays nonsexual he can maintain the illusion of
sexual power. But she coerces him into going out with her and
then tries to seduce him in a claustrophobic scene that looks
unnervingly like rape. He escapes but is further humiliated
because she must drive him home. Later, he sobs in bed alone. Her
sexual aggression, a reversal of conventional sex roles,
epitomizes the blind man's presumed plight. For him to surrender
to her would mean giving up his last scrap of independence,
adding insult to injury. The only ray of hope is Andy. The two
men's attraction to each other seems more than merely platonic,
but Martin never acts on it, and Andy goes to bed with Celia. Sex
is for the sighted. When Martin finds a package of condoms in
Andy's car and holds them up to examine them with his fingers,
the toughs in the next car interpret his move as an insult and
get nasty. Martin is messing with something he has no experience
of, and it leads to trouble. He would do better to content
himself with his chastity and solitude, and leave sex to those
who know what they're doing.
Since blind men in the movies have such profound sexual
problems, it is only natural that they should gravitate to the
traditional symbols of masculinity - cars and guns. In Scent of a
Woman, Proof, Sneakers, and Arthur Hiller's 1989 slapstick comedy
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, blind men drive cars. Usually they
take the wheel in an emergency while their sighted companions
give directions. But Colonel Slade wants to drive the Ferrari to
recapture that feeling of power and control he compares to sex
with a beautiful woman. In every case, these joyrides forge or
solidify bonds between blind and sighted men. But the homoerotic
implications of this male bonding are elided by the police, who
intervene before the situation can really get out of hand. Guns
also have a special allure for blind men. Colonel Slade practices
assembling his .45, and there's never any doubt that he could
blow his brains out with it. In Places in the Heart, Will fires a
shotgun at a gang from the Ku Klux Klan. In See No Evil, Hear No
Evil blind Wally (Richard Pryor) and the blind criminal
mastermind Sutherland (Anthony Zerbe) have a showdown with guns.
They tiptoe back and forth across the screen, guns poised to fire
at any sound, until a sighted person arrives to take charge.
Earlier in this film Wally gets into fistfights, aided by his
deaf buddy Dave (Gene Wilder), who gives him oral directions to
help aim his punches.
All these scenes, like brawls, gunfights, and car chases
involving sighted characters, give viewers a thrilling glimpse of
raw masculine power unleashed on the world. But when the man is
blind, the thrill intensifies into something closer to fear -
somebody might really get hurt. Blind men have the familiar
foibles of sighted men, but the thing they lack, the thing that
makes them different, also makes them potentially unruly,
corruptible, dangerous. So the movies always provide a
responsible, preferably heterosexual, sighted male to take them
in hand.
When the blind character is female, the need for a sighted
man to help and protect her is not simply a matter of maintaining
the approved social order. It is a matter of life and death.
While movies occasionally allow blind men some instructive wit
and wisdom, blind women are nothing but need - they need help
with everything from everyone, and at every turn. Their
helplessness is surpassed only by their passivity and
desperation. In Bruce Robinson's 1992 film Jennifer 8, Uma
Thurman plays Helena, a blind woman so delicate and helpless that
she doesn't stand a chance against the serial killer who stalks
her. She lives in a rehabilitation institution with erratic
lighting, an unreliable elevator, and a creepy custodian. This
asylum provides the perfect location for murder but has done
little to help her adapt to her blindness. She has learned to
play the cello, but apparently only well enough to teach her
fellow inmates. Hers is not a talent that she can market in the
outside world. When the killer selects her as his next victim
(how can he resist?), she manages to stay alive only because
there are sighted people on hand to protect her (it takes two
cops and a cop's wife to save her). So her experiences do nothing
to bolster her sense of self-reliance. If anything, she gains
proof of how dangerous the world without sight really is. At the
end of the film she trades an institutional dependence for a
romantic one. As she and her cop-savior John Berlin (Andy Garcia)
literally walk off into the sunset, she clings to him. He
describes the colors of the sunset. "I remember red," she laments
wistfully. Their future together becomes clear: she will
guarantee his complete protection of her with these plaintive
reminders of how defenseless her blindness makes her.
Though this film and others like it follow in the footsteps
of Terence Young's 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark, the picture
these films present of blind women's plight is far bleaker. At
least the blind woman in Wait Until Dark, Susy Hendrix (Audrey
Hepburn), shows resourcefulness and spunk. She calls herself the
"worldchampion blind lady" and boasts to her husband, Sam (Efrem
Zimbalist, Jr.), "I was the best one at blind school today." As
the film progresses she puts her newfound skills to the test and
outwits three villains who conspire against her. The villains
Carlino (Jack Weston), Mike (Richard Crenna), and the murderous
Roat (Alan Arkin) try to trick her out of something she doesn't
know she has - a doll stuffed with narcotics. Through her native
wit and nonvisual senses she surmises that they're up to
something. She detects Roat's presence from the smell of his
cigarettes and identifies him from the sound of his squeaky
shoes. She hears Carlino and Mike wiping their fingerprints off
the furniture and using the window shades to signal to each
other. She uses her white cane to knock out all the lights in her
apartment so that when Roat comes back he will have less of an
advantage over her. But the viewer is never allowed to lose sight
of how vulnerable blindness makes her. Roat uses the same cane as
a weapon against her, lifting and cutting the phone wire without
her knowing what he's doing. Later he transforms the cane into a
kind of shepherd's crook, hooking Susy around her slender neck.
Roat's complete dominion over her is set in relief against the
more benevolent control of her husband. Though Sam does nothing
to help her (in fact he's the one who has unwittingly introduced
the drug-filled doll into their home), his presence is always
felt. Throughout the film he nags her about practicing
self-reliance. He even tells her the correct way to defrost the
refrigerator. Her blindness threatens his masculinity, forcing
him to concern himself with the trifles of women's work. So he
gets a little testy at times. When she drops something on the
floor he watches her grope around for it on all fours. It's a
hard image to ignore, or forget. In the final scene he returns
from a wild goose chase, too late to prevent violence. He finds
his apartment in a shambles, two corpses on the floor, and his
terrified wife cowering behind the refrigerator door. But he will
not go to her, help her to her feet, or even express his
happiness that she is still alive. He insists that she come to
him, stumble through the wreckage into his arms. He resolutely
refuses to coddle her because she is blind but when he sticks to
the resolution even in this extremity, it seems not only
ridiculous but paternalistic. His insistence says, "Where would
you be without me?" And her teary, tremulous embrace says, "Never
leave me alone again."
Unlike blind men in the movies, blind women do not drive
cars and seldom handle firearms. They are too busy worrying about
their appearance. They know they need to be beautiful to attract
and hold protective men, but they lack the visual skill to
evaluate and enhance their own appearance. And just as blind men
look to sighted buddies to help them play with symbols of
masculinity, blind women seek the sisterly aid of sighted women
to learn the womanly art of looking good. In Jennifer 8, Helena
doesn't like appearing in public. She whines, "I feel everyone's
looking at me," apparently assuming that her blindness makes her
unsightly. A cop's wife, Margie Ross (Kathy Baker), befriends
her, dresses her up in red sequins, and makes up her face for a
party. She oohs and coos over Helena, as a little girl would over
her Barbie doll. Margie seems to find Helena's beauty poignant
because Helena is so utterly unaware of the head-turning,
eye-popping effect her appearance has on men. This makes Helena
seem all the more innocent, passive, and defenseless.
In 'Wait Until Dark', Susy also needs the help of a female
companion. But in this case, her own beauty initially presents an
obstacle to forming a bond with Gloria (Julie Herrod), her
teenaged neighbor, who has a crush on Susy's husband. Gloria is
unhappy with her own appearance and resents Susy's loveliness,
especially because Susy worries about it so much. "Oh, no, you're
gorgeous," she reassures her resentfully. Significantly, part of
what Gloria dislikes about her own appearance is the thick
glasses she must wear. Susy's luminous eyes, though sightless,
are unobscured, which only fuels Gloria's envy. Susy needs Gloria
to help her, but the girl's jealous rivalry stands between them.
So Susy denigrates herself. She laments that since she is blind
she can never cook a souffle, select her husband's neckties, or
choose new wallpaper - her blindness impairs her ability to be a
good wife and homemaker. Susy's self-criticism is meant to
convince Gloria that appearance isn't everything. Since Gloria
will grow up to be a better woman than sightless Susy can ever
be, she gladly takes on the burden of aiding her.
But for the viewer, appearance is everything. As plucky as
Susy tries to be in the face of danger, she still looks as
translucently fragile as a china teacup. It's Audrey Hepburn up
there on the screen. Her particular brand of beauty set the
pattern for blind women in the movies, and even her wardrobe adds
to the effect. Late in the film Susy changes her clothes for no
apparent reason. She takes off her earth-toned jeans and
turtleneck - clothes for action - and dons a skirt and jersey in
shades of cream and pink. She is transformed from an agile gamine
into a frail ballerina. The new outfit is remarkably
inappropriate for the final, violent showdown with the menacing
Roat, since it not only inhibits her movement but also makes her
a more visible target in the darkened apartment. But it reminds
the viewer of her fragility and helplessness. Such obsessive
self-preoccupation would label a sighted woman as a dangerous
vamp, but movies seem to expect it of blind women. In Michael
Apted's Blink (1994), Madeleine Stowe plays Emma Brody, a blind
woman whose sight is partially restored by a cornea transplant.
When the bandages are removed, the first thing she wants to see
is her own face. She stumbles from her hospital bed to check
herself out in the mirror. You'd think it would be the last thing
she'd want to do. She was blinded when her mother slammed her
head into a mirror, a punishment for playing with makeup,
tampering with her appearance. "I'll show you! You little whore!"
her mother snarls. She destroys both the child's ability to see
her own image, and the new image she was attempting to create.
This mirror-smashing incident recurs at several crucial moments
during the film. But at first glimpse, Emma's response to her
reflection is less dramatic. Her sight is still too impaired to
see clearly, and she has trouble judging what she sees. She tries
to compare herself to other women, learning to assess what
characteristics are considered beautiful. As her vision improves,
her image disturbs her, because she discovers that she has grown
up to resemble her mother. Still, her longing to see herself
again is too powerful to resist, and she spends a lot of time in
front of mirrors. The serial killer who stalks her seems to know
this; he draws a pair of blood-red eyes on her bedroom mirror
where he's sure she'll see them.
These blind women should quit worrying. Movies suggest that
blindness makes women all the more tempting to men. Men can look
to their hearts' content, and blind women won't conceal
themselves or look back. They cannot reject, repel, or resist the
male gaze. And their wandering eyes can't stray over their
lover's shoulder to scope out a better man. The blind woman
provides a titillating experience with which every male moviegoer
can identify. This view of blind women provides the killer in
Jennifer 8 with his motive. Though sighted, he grew up in a
school for the blind where his blind mother was a teacher. When
puberty struck, and he made advances toward blind girls, they
rejected him. His rage over this rejection kindled his desire to
exterminate all blind women. Blind girls are never supposed to
say no.
In Blink, Emma complicates this image. She explains to a
friend that blind women are sexy because they cannot be
intimidated or repulsed by any flaw in the man's appearance, so
their own fantasies can take over. She says that when she was
blind she could pull the man "into whatever I was fantasizing. I
was in control. It could really be anyone." The blind woman's sex
appeal works on two levels. First she satisfies her lover's
latent scopophilia. Then she turns him into a dream man. But this
appeal may not be for everyone. Detective John Hallstrom (Aidan
Quinn) brags to his buddies who imply he's attracted to Emma,
"You think I'm gonna waste this body on some ball-busting blind
broad who can't see it?" For these two to get together, something
will have to change. For Emma to make a full transition from
blindness to sight, she must undergo a sexual initiation, which
is, for some viewers, painful to watch. Blind, Emma is
freewheeling. She brags about her many conquests, flirts with her
doctors, even jokes about being a prostitute. But becoming
sighted means giving up her wanton ways and becoming a one-man
woman. For one thing, she learns that attraction occurs through
the eyes. When she rejects her amorous ophthalmologist, she
explains, "My eyes are filled with someone else." When she is in
bed with John, he demands that she open her eyes, even though the
light still hurts them. He wants to banish any images of other
men from their bed. Later, during a spat, he accuses her of being
"the type of woman who needs a man you can control." She responds
by smashing a mirror, reenacting the incident of her own blinding
and destroying the image his words project - the blind woman who
seeks to control men through her own fantasies. There's a brutal
message here. As appealing as blindness may make a woman, there
is still something kinky, unwholesome, unnatural about that
appeal: normal sex, sighted sex, is performed with the eyes open,
with the male gaze in charge.
Incompetent, dependent, potentially unruly, sexually deviant
- is this really how the sighted see the blind? I can only
speculate. While Hollywood did not invent these stereotypes, the
repetition and intricacy of these images seems to reveal
something disturbing about some filmmakers' vision of the world.
The blind are a filmmaker's worst nightmare. They can never be
viewers, can never be enlightened and dazzled by the filmmaker's
artistry. So filmmakers treat the blind the way we all deal with
nightmares: they belittle them, expose their weakness, make them
at best pitiable, at worst somewhat unsavory.
Besides, what would a favorable depiction of blindness look
like? A "realistic" blind person on screen would have so mastered
the skills of blindness that there would be no need to draw
attention to them. If she used a white cane or read braille she
would do so with such ease that some viewers might not even
notice. The blindness would become invisible - the character
would look sighted. So why make her blind, the filmmaker asks.
Because in fact movies with blind characters are not about
blindness at all. They are about sight. Bringing blindness into
the picture allows the filmmaker to explore ideas about the
virtue and necessity of seeing correctly. This is why so many of
these films revolve around the idea of the blind eyewitness. It
also explains the many instances of visual mistaken identity,
where characters and viewers are deceived by their eyes. Viewers
find themselves at times uncertain about what's happening on
screen. They are dazzled by glaring lights, startled by the flash
of a gunshot. Images are obscured and distorted by semidarkness,
shadows, mist, fog, steam. In the first scene of The Paradine
Case, Mrs. Paradine shows her husband's portrait to the police
inspector. "I think the artist caught the blind man's look quite
wonderfully," she says. It is the first mention of Paradine's
blindness, and we would like another peek at the portrait. But
Hitchcock won't let us have it. We feel his admonition to open
our eyes and pay attention. These films offer a cautionary tale
for the sighted viewer. They say, "Don't be blind. Be careful
about what you see. Seeing well is survival."
On some level all movies are about seeing, which is why I
can see better at the movies than in real life. The filmmaker
shows me what to see and teaches me how to understand it. When
the filmmaker shows me a blind person, I know that I must
understand blindness as a metaphor, as the element at one end of
a continuum about seeing. And at the opposite end of that
spectrum there is often a man with a camera.
In the movies, references to photography and cinema invite
viewers to find parallels between the action of the film and the
activity of the artist who made it. As many writers have
observed, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) tells a story
about movie viewing and moviemaking. Because L. B. Jeffries
(James Stewart) is a photographer, he is particularly adept at
constructing stories about his neighbors from the glimpses he
gets through the window. He notices the telling details others
miss. He uses his camera, equipped with an enormous telephoto
lens, to isolate and highlight things imperceptible to the naked
eye. He succeeds in revealing the crime because he sees better
than anyone else and knows how to show what he sees to others.
Ultimately it is through the eye, enhanced by the art of the
photographer, that all truth flows. Of course Hitchcock is not
without some ambivalence about the moral implications of his
characters' actions and his own art. Characters debate the ethics
and legality of Jeffries's voyeurism. Jeffries's nurse Stella
(Thelma Ritter) refers to Jeffries's camera as "that portable
keyhole" and reminds him that Peeping Toms once got their eyes
put out with a red-hot poker. It is no accident that films about
blindness often include references to photography. And filmmakers
offer both positive and negative views. In Wait Until Dark, the
fact that Susy's husband is a photographer may at first seem a
random choice. But throughout the film, photographic
paraphernalia keep cropping up as plot devices and props. The
apartment has blackout curtains so Susy can make a light-tight
environment where her blindness is less of a handicap against her
sighted antagonist. Similarly, she manages to temporarily blind
Roat by splashing his eyes with photographic chemicals. This
reinforces the idea that, though Sam is not there to protect his
wife, the tools of his trade act as his surrogate. If Sam were an
accountant, Susy would end up dead.
In Jennifer 8 the caretaker of the blind institution takes
pictures of Helena taking a bath - Tiresias all over again. The
viewer is treated to a glimpse of the forbidden, while
simultaneously enjoying moral indignation at the pervert with the
camera. But this self-reflexive ambivalence is erased later, when
a photograph reveals the identity of the killer. It is a class
picture from the blind school, with one sighted boy glaring
angrily at the camera. Both killer and motive are instantly
recognized. The picture tells the whole story.
Proof explores these ideas with more sophistication by
offering the paradox of a blind photographer. Martin has bought
the sight-mongers' bill of goods, which equates sight with truth.
He believes that the camera will help him to see, that the
photographs he produces will give him access to the truth. He
takes pictures, and asks sighted people to describe them in a few
words. Then he affixes braille labels to them. He tells Andy, who
is particularly skillful at describing photos in succinct
phrases, "This is proof that what I sensed is what you saw - the
truth." Martin is obsessed with the truth because he believes
that his blindness cuts him off from it. And because sighted
people can choose to lie about what they see, he trusts no one.
The film seems to set out to prove the sight equals truth
equation wrong, and to show how the equation, not his blindness,
damages Martin's life. But over and over, sighted characters use
photographs to acquire information or manipulate Martin. Celia
finds some pictures of Andy. Although the images are only
fragments of his face and body, she arranges them into a sort of
cubist collage portrait of Andy, which tells her both what he
looks like and how important he's becoming to Martin. So when he
comes to the door she recognizes him. Since Andy has seen a photo
of her as well, this first meeting is charged with their advance
knowledge of each other. Later Celia uses an embarrassing photo
of Martin to coerce him into going out with her. Finally, a
picture provides the ocular proof that Andy and Celia betrayed
Martin. It shows that they were in the park together when they
claimed they were not. The film justifies Martin's faith in
photography. What he needs is not a new definition of truth but
more trustworthy sighted interpreters. He is betrayed by words -
the wrong word with the right picture. The image itself cannot
lie.
In Wim Wenders's 1991 futuristic fantasy Until the End of
the World, Dr. Farber (Max von Sydow) invents what Martin might
consider a dream come true, a camera that will help the blind
see. His son Sam (William Hurt) travels the world, recording
images for his blind mother, Edith (Jeanne Moreau). The camera,
which looks like a pair of virtual reality goggles, works by
recording the activity of both the eyes and the brain. But it's
not as easy as it sounds. It requires concentration and effort,
and Sam develops sight-threatening eye strain. Also, some people
are better suited to the task than others. Sam's companion Claire
(Solveig Dommartin) takes over for him and produces better
recordings. Back at the laboratory, these recorded images are
enhanced and improved, with the aid of supercomputers and a
number of scientists, physicians, and technicians. For Edith to
view the images, the person who recorded them must simultaneously
review them, transmitting brain waves and adding the element of
memory to the mix. The computers hum and whir, lights flash,
scientists bark instructions. The images appear on multiple
monitors, overlaid with grids, undergoing modifications and
refinements. Edith lies on a couch, a few electrodes taped to her
forehead, her head encased in a giant horseshoe form lined with
blue-white lights. She covers her face with her hands. She sees
with her mind's eye.
Wenders celebrates the complexities of the human visual
system and perhaps predicts the outcome of real research in
artificial sight already under way. His musings are not merely
metaphoric, so Edith's blindness is presented in a somewhat more
"realistic" way than in other films. Moreau portrays a woman of
great personal dignity and strength rather than the fragile,
whimpering blind girl that viewers may have come to expect. Also,
Edith's blindness does not seem to have prevented her from
leading a productive and fulfilling life. She had a career as an
anthropologist, a fact we learn before her blindness is
mentioned, when Sam gives Claire a recording of Pygmy music that
Edith made. And though Edith readily offers herself as a guinea
pig for her husband's experiment, she seems motivated as much by
her loyalty to him as by her desire to see again. The obsession
with her blindness belongs to Dr. Farber, not to her. When the
experiment succeeds, Edith is at first elated, then somewhat
saddened and disoriented by what she sees. Her friends have aged.
Cities she once knew are now unrecognizable. Sight is not all
it's cracked up to be. Was all that effort really worth it? Does
visual experience truly define human existence?
Edith never articulates these questions. Her tact prevents
her from being so ungracious. And anyway, she soon dies. Research
resumes after only a brief interval, though now blindness ceases
to be its object. The sight-recording camera has a side benefit:
it can record a person's dreams. This causes some consternation
among Farber's coworkers. Gaining this kind of access to
someone's subconscious can have distressing consequences. As
Claire and Dr. Farber begin to watch Sam's dream on the screen,
she protests, "We don't have the right," and covers her eyes. But
a moment later she peeps through her fingers. As it turns out,
there's no need for so much concern. The dream images are too
personally coded to have much significance to others. For the
dreamer, however, they hold an obsessive fascination. Claire,
perhaps because she is so good at seeing, becomes addicted,
replaying her dreams over and over. When her addiction becomes
life-threatening, she's forced to go cold turkey - a heartrending
spectacle. Gene (Sam Neill), who narrates the film, writes a
novel about Claire's experiences. She reads it, and his words
cure her "disease of images."
The debate of words versus images rages on. But it seems
unlikely that Wenders is truly disillusioned by his medium, or is
considering abandoning images for words. The film is about the
end of the world, a post-apocalypse future that could or should
be prevented. Besides, the dream images Wenders produces are
extraordinarily beautiful, and he went to considerable technical
trouble to achieve them. They look like Pointillist paintings in
a psychedelic palate, or sonograms in Technicolor. Viewers must
struggle to identify what's on the screen while reveling in the
sheer pleasure of color, motion, and changing form. Wenders's
film moves from a meditation about the nature of sight to musings
on the function of cinema. He rearticulates the desires of
avant-garde filmmakers since the beginning of the medium and
offers a preview of a possible cinema of the future, where images
on the screen would do more than merely illustrate narratives. He
asks: Should cinema reflect the filmmaker's vision of the world,
or reproduce his dreams, and through them, the dreams of the
collective subconscious?
Notice how blindness falls out of the picture. Edith sees,
questions the value of seeing, and dies. She no sooner raises
troubling questions about sight, from the perspective of someone
who not only lived but thrived without it, than she ceases to
exist. Why does she have to die, I wonder? The answer is both
chilling and clear. When filmmakers contemplate a blind person
who might reject the miracle of sight, they stare their worst
nightmare in the face. Such blind people not only can never be
viewers, never fall under the sway of the filmmaker's art, but
worse than that, they don't seem to care. Their indifference
threatens filmmakers' very means of expression. In dispatching
Edith so quickly, Wenders is simply being more honest than most
filmmakers in acknowledging the threat that such an independent
blind person poses. For most filmmakers, death is too good for
the blind. They prefer to downplay the threat, diminish the blind
and celebrate their complete dependence on the sighted. But the
consistency and relish they display as they do this expose their
own desperate needs. They need the blind as a cornerstone to
frame their own reflections about visual experience. They need
the blind to provide the shadow for their elevated claims about
their own means of expression. They need the blind to show the
viewer what really matters. The larger the need, the greater the
threat. I wish that filmmakers could kick the habit and do their
self-reflexive self-aggrandizement without picking on the blind.
I am being naively paranoid, of course. The film industry is
no more (or less) anti-blind than the culture as a whole. If
sighted moviegoers tolerate negative stereotypes and accept the
assumption that vision is a virtue equivalent to wisdom, it may
be because there is no blind viewer in the theater to challenge
them. But perhaps someday soon, things will change. In the 1980s,
some movie theaters, video producers, and TV stations began
offering audio description for the blind. Through an earphone,
the blind viewer receives the regular soundtrack enhanced with
descriptions of characters' actions, facial expressions, and
costumes, as well as of props and surroundings. The literature
that touts these services always makes the same claim. At last,
the blind will have complete access to this central facet of our
culture. They will widen their frame of reference and be able to
take part in discussions of current hits and classic favorites.
So far only a few movie theaters offer audio-described
screenings, and a similarly small number of videos are released
in this format. But as Americans age, swelling the ranks of the
blind, availability and quality will have to rise.
As far as I know, none of the films that I discuss here are
available with audio descriptions. I try to imagine how certain
scenes would be described.
"Audrey Hepburn is now down on all fours searching
ineffectually for something she dropped. She looks ridiculous."
"Uma Thurman stumbles down the stairs clinging to the
banister. She looks pathetic."
"Al Pacino stares blankly straight ahead. He looks
demented."
At what point would the writers responsible for these
descriptions, or the announcers who read them, begin to gag on
their words? Will actors and directors began to imagine other
ways to represent blindness? Will screenwriters rethink their
facile assumptions about blindness when they imagine an audience
with first-hand experience of it? Will blind audiences start
boycotting certain films, exerting economic pressure to enact
social change? Perhaps certain negative stereotypes will cease to
be tolerated in mainstream cinema. On the other hand, perhaps an
underground industry in blind snuff flicks would emerge to supply
that small minority of viewers who get their jollies watching
helpless blind people dominated by all-powerful, all-seeing
versions of themselves.
But I cannot see the future. So I picture this instead. A
blind woman escapes from the peep show where she's been held
prisoner for many years. She successfully stalks the wealthy
movie mogul who owns the peep show - a lucrative sideline to his
mainstream filmmaking. She torments him for a while. She leaves
braille notes around his mansion, and ominous messages on his
answering machine: "Someone's watching you." When he is
sufficiently terrorized, she confronts him in a dark and
cluttered Hollywood production studio. After some heated words,
there's a scuffle. The lights go out. We hear him crashing over
things. He stumbles into a projector and somehow turns it on. It
emits a machine-gun rat-a-tat, and a slender, flickering beam
that illuminates nothing. There's the slippery sound of celluloid
unspooling, and a few inarticulate cries of horror from him.
"What's happening?" he shrieks from the darkness. "My neck! I'm
choking ... I can't breathe ... I..." Some sounds of convulsive
struggle - death throes. Then nothing. After a second, the
projector is switched off. The woman speaks a few scornful
parting words: "Serves you right, you sightist scumbag!" Then
there's the calm tap-tap of her cane as she makes her way to the
door. The End. Roll credits.
I would call my movie Blind Justice or, perhaps, Get Sighty.
What's the matter? Does it seem too implausible, too far-fetched,
too vindictive? Does it deviate too much from the image of blind
helplessness and passivity you're used to seeing at the movies?
Lighten up, you want to tell me. That image in no way reflects
your view of the blind. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I should
just stay away from things I can't understand. But don't let me
stop you - the last thing I want to do is interfere with anyone's
visual pleasure. Just don't be surprised, the next time you see a
blind person groping and whining on screen, if the image causes a
twinge of unease and a sudden urge to look over your shoulder to
see who might be watching.
CHAPTER 3
In Oedipus' Shadow
That Hollywood movies should employ such negative
stereotypes of blindness is not surprising. Other groups - women,
ethnic and racial minorities - often complain of similar
treatment. Furthermore, Hollywood did not invent negative images.
The movies only enlarge upon attitudes already in the culture at
large. This does not mean that I believe every sighted moviegoer
shares the views projected on the screen, nor that these views
shaped my self-image or contributed to my early reluctance to
call myself blind. The only film surveyed in the last chapter
that I saw at a formative age was Wait Until Dark, which appeared
in 1967, the same year my blindness was diagnosed. I remember
that I did not fully understand the movie; the detail about the
drugs in the doll eluded me. It may be that I had not yet learned
that for me to get the most out of a movie, I need to sit in the
front row next to someone who can describe what I can't see. In
any case, I remember being scared, but not necessarily by the
cultural assumptions it displayed about blindness.
Even at the age of eleven I would have looked to literature
to begin to gauge cultural attitudes about blindness. I was a
reader, and while my newly diagnosed blindness impaired my
ability to read with ease, I still would have found in books
whatever I needed to know. And though I had not yet read the
play, I probably was already familiar with
Oedipus - the
forefather of all representations of blindness.
If we believe Freud, we know that Oedipus' story stays with
us because it enacts conflicts and desires we have all supposedly
experienced, at least subconsciously. A man kills his father and
marries his mother. But why does he have to blind himself? After
all, his self-imposed sentence demands only exile. Of course when
Oedipus decreed exile as punishment he was the last person he
suspected to be guilty of those crimes. Once the truth is out
it's understandable that he should want to toughen up the
punishment, and dispel any suspicions of favoritism. Suicide is
out of the question - the coward's way out. Clearly he must do
something to show his outrage, horror, and shame. He must make an
enduring spectacle of himself so that onlookers will have an
example of what happens when taboos are violated. But gouging out
his eyes seems histrionic excess. Couldn't he lop off some other
organ or limb and make the same point? Of course it's not as if
the act is exactly premeditated. Finding Jocasta's corpse,
Oedipus lashes out at the last remaining person to blame for what
has happened - himself - using the first weapon that comes to
hand - the brooches on her robes. To stab himself in the leg, or
even in the groin, would not have the desired effect. So he goes
for his eyes.
It's only after the fact that the act becomes the one truly
fitting punishment for his crimes. He deprives himself of the
sense that not only gave him access to the world but also
stimulated his desires and got him into trouble. Since he was
"blind" to his own guilt, he must relinquish his sight.
it's the kind of justice the Olympians are famous for. The
symmetry is perfect. An almost unimaginable act of
self-mutilation is the only appropriate response to crimes that
are horrifyingly imaginable, at least as latent impulses. Though
the imagined connection of blindness to sin probably predates his
legend, Oedipus makes the sin distressingly and memorably
specific. And the oedipal image of blindness has had remarkable
staying power. Even a random survey of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century fiction written in English reveals the same
notion, which links blindness to some sort of illicit sexual
union, to a tragic reversal of fortune, and to the complete loss
of personal, sexual, and political power.
For a mercilessly faithful retelling of the Oedipus story
consider Anita Shreve's 1989 novel
Eden Close. [1] Eden is
blinded as a teenager in a mysterious incident in which an
intruder (presumed but never proved to be her estranged
boyfriend) sexually assaults her but is interrupted by her
adoptive father, Jim. The two men scuffle over Jim's gun. The gun
goes off, killing Jim and blinding Eden. Twenty years later other
truths are revealed. It turns out that Jim is actually Eden's
biological father. His secret lover left the infant on the Close
family doorstep for Jim and his wife, Edith, to raise. On the
fateful night, there was no intruder. The sexual act that was
interrupted by gunfire was between father and daughter, and the
assailant was the twice-betrayed wife. As with Oedipus, secrets
about a child's origins lead to murder, and blindness punishes
incest.
Other works borrow form the Oedipus story with less
literal-minded fidelity. In Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre (1847),
Mr. Rochester loses his sight when his house burns down. [2] We
understand that his blindness is divine retribution for the sin
of wishing to marry Jane when he already has a wife in the attic.
The mighty man is brought low. Once all-powerful, and rather
arrogant about it, he is left feeble and exiled from his ruined
home. It's a reversal of fortune that readers find satisfying, in
part because Rochester's blindness lasts only about three years.
Permanent blindness would be too harsh a punishment for a
Christian God who is supposed to temper justice with mercy. So
Rochester loses only one eye, and the other one is left inflamed.
The inflammation clears in time for him to see for himself that
his first-born son "had inherited his own eyes, as they once were
- large, brilliant and black" (457). Rochester's eyes,, which
were his most striking feature, and the emblem of his unruly
spirit, are reproduced in his child. But now that Jane is there
to keep an eye on things, there is little chance the child will
repeat the mistakes of his father.
In Rudyard Kipling's novel
The Light That Failed (1900),
blindness punishes political rather than sexual sin. [3] The
protagonist, Dick Heldar, goes blind as the delayed aftereffect
of a blow to the head sustained during a stint as a war
correspondent in the Sudan. Just before Dick receives the blow
that blinds him, he kills an Arab who is scuffling with his
friend Tropenhow. Significantly, during that scuffle, Tropenhow
managed to gouge out the man's eye. At the end of the novel, Dick
returns to the scene, this time taking a fatal bullet to the
head. He pays for that fallen enemy, losing first his sight then
his life. The novel has larger implications about the evils of
one culture's exploitation of another. Dick's sketches for the
illustrated newspapers are popular and help launch his career as
a painter. Back in England, he discovers that art lovers can't
get enough of his paintings of desert war scenes - the best of
British soldiery suppressing the Arab heathen. Dick expresses his
unease about the way his work caters to the "blind, brutal,
British public's bestial thirst for blood" (70). Tempting the
fates, Dick defines the public as not only bestial and brutish
but also blind, dependent on artists like himself to show what
they want to see - their own brutality projected onto the enemies
of the Empire. Kipling seems to suggest that the blindness which
ends Dick's career is retribution for having exploited people who
resisted British domination.
When blindness comes as divine retribution for heinous
crimes, its effects alter the lives of everyone around the
blinded person. Blindness inverts, perverts, or thwarts all human
relationships. The exiled Oedipus is utterly dependent on his
daughters. As she pleads for her father, Antigone is obliged to
expose herself to public view in ways that would have been
considered not only unusual but unnatural for a woman of her
time. His dependence and exile tears his daughters from
conventional domestic life and makes marriage impossible.
For Jane Eyre, Rochester's blindness allows her to rise to
power. When Jane returns to Rochester, she seems eager to
establish that, though she has come back, it is under new terms.
On their first evening together she becomes playfully maternal,
fixing his supper, and combing his hair, grooming his eyebrows,
which are still singed a year after the fire. With
uncharacteristic coquettish skill, she entices him into a game of
twenty questions about the time she's spent away from him.
Although Jane asserts that all her teasing has the beneficial
effect of "fretting him out of his melancholy" (444), it's hard
not to sense that she enjoys her new power over him. In fact, his
dependence on her makes him all the more attractive. She tells
him, "I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you,
than I did in your state of proud independence" (451). She even
attributes the happiness of their marriage to the fact that he
was blind for the first two years of it: "Perhaps it was that
circumstance that drew us so very near - that knit us so very
close, for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.
Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye"
(456). Jane's lingering insecurities about her own appearance are
erased when her husband must see the world (herself included)
through her eyes.
In The Light That Failed, Dick's blindness not only ends his
painting career but upsets the natural balance of all his
relationships. Before blindness Dick enjoyed a remarkably
intimate friendship with Tropenhow, his mentor and neighbor. He
introduces Dick to dealers and nags him about his lack of
discipline. When Dick starts leaving his studio to visit Maisie,
his childhood sweetheart, Tropenhow worries that a woman's
influence will spoil Dick's work. Dick is similarly preoccupied
with protecting his friend from romantic entanglements. When he
notices that his model Bessie is developing a romantic interest
in Tropenhow, Dick separates them. But Dick's blindness disrupts
this perfect male camaraderie. Tropenhow feels compelled to help
dress and feed his newly blinded friend, and to tuck him into
bed. He does this gladly at first, but as things heat up again in
the Sudan, he becomes eager to return to the front. Dick's
absolute helplessness makes him ask too much of the friendship.
Dick's blindness threatens Tropenhow's masculinity, making him
contemplate abandoning his manly pursuits to care for his friend.
So Tropenhow must call in a woman. He tracks down Maisie, who is
now studying painting in France, and persuades her to come back
to take charge of Dick. When she learns of his blindness, she
makes the journey, but she refuses to stay. Kipling intends her
refusal to seem a betrayal, and her desire for independence to
seem a childishly selfish denial of her true female nature. As a
blind reader, I suppose I should have additional sympathy for
Dick at this moment. But his moodiness and dependence compel me
to deny any identification with him and make Maisie's rejection
harder to condemn.
Only Bessie, an opportunistic former streetwalker, is
willing to take on the burden of the blind man. Although she has
no affection for him, she readily latches onto Dick as a meal
ticket. And in a sense she is indirectly responsible for Maisie's
flight. Dissatisfied with Dick's portrait of her, and angry at
him for preventing her romance with Tropenhow, Bessie destroys
the painting, scraping out her own face. When Dick shows Maisie
his masterpiece, she is horrified, but not merely at the wanton
destruction. Looking at the spoiled painting, Maisie is forced to
see as blind Dick does. His vision has been blotted out, scraped
away. Apparently everything he looks at is rubbed out, ruined
like the portrait. Coming face to face with this graphic
representation of Dick's blindness makes the prospect of living
with it seem even more frightening to Maisie.
So while blindness brings Rochester and Jane closer, it
drives Dick and Maisie apart. Without love, friendship, or
career, Dick feels that he might as well be dead. Like Oedipus,
he rejects suicide as a "weak-kneed confession of fear" (276).
But being a man of action, he cannot sit alone and idle in
London, waiting for his life to end. So he returns to the Sudan
and makes himself an easy target for an enemy of the Empire.
These are the old stories of blindness. They make me weary
and a little afraid. They take Oedipus at his word, and start
from the assumption that blindness is both an outward sign of
hidden sin and a punishment worse than death. They show no life
after blindness, offer no hope to the blind, except that the
condition might prove impermanent or that death might come quick.
Oedipus does not adapt to his blindness. He could take his cue
from Tiresias, who often bemoans the burden of his clairvoyance
but seems comparatively unhampered by his lack of sight. But
Oedipus never gets used to his condition. Time passes, but it
seems that Oedipus still wakes each day shocked anew to discover
he cannot see. And this is the whole point. If Oedipus got used
to the idea of his lost sight, much less adopted new methods of
getting around or recognizing people, then his blindness would be
less of a punishment. He would cease to be the instructive and
frightening spectacle he voluntarily made of himself.
When authors begin to entertain the notion that blindness
may be something else, a character-testing physical hardship
without moral implications, the Oedipal gloom brightens a bit. In
his novel
Blindness (1926), Henry Green suggests that loss of
sight constitutes a change in life that evolves through stages.
[4] And the titles of the novel's three sections - "Caterpillar,"
"Chrysalis," and "Butterfly" - imply that the result of this
evolution is a fully matured lifeform, natural, independent, even
beautiful. The protagonist, John Haye, is a wealthy and rather
callow adolescent, blinded in a random accident. A boy throws a
rock that shatters the window of the railway carriage in which
John is riding. His literary education has made him well versed
in the standard tropes of blindness, and he finds them now both
inadequate and stupid. He alludes self-consciously to the
"traditional living tomb" metaphor for blindness (378), mocking
the idea that blindness equals something less than living. At
church he complains at the way the rector preaches "about
blindness in the East, opthalmia in the Bible, spittle and sight,
with a final outburst against pagans" (437). While a sighted
reader may find these musings oversensitive, I find myself
nodding my head. And I secretly applaud when he rebels, at least
in imagination, against the stereotype of blind passivity. He
imagines himself imprisoned for murdering the boy who threw the
stone that blinded him: "He would make the warder read the papers
to him every morning, he would be sure to have headlines: BLIND
MAN MURDERS CHILD - no. TORTURES CHILD TO DEATH; And underneath
that, if he was lucky, WOMAN JUROR VOMITS" (380). But for all his
irritation at the unthinking assumptions and language of the
sighted, there is nothing in his experience to tell him what
blindness really is.
The people around John have a much clearer image of
blindness. They see it as infantile helplessness and a loss of
sexuality. John's aging Nanny enjoys the chance to baby him,
feeding and reading to him as she did when he was a child. Mrs.
Haye, John's widowed stepmother, observes that a "girl would not
want to marry a blind man" but holds out the hope that they might
"still find some girl who had had a story, or who was unhappy at
home" (387). Apparently only a girl made desperate by her own
sullied reputation or an unsuitable home life could overlook a
man's blindness. Mrs. Haye goes on to muse that "he could have a
housekeeper. Yes, it was immoral, but he must have love, and
someone to look after him" (388). Since, as she assumes,
respectable marriage is now out of John's reach, he may have to
settle for an unsanctioned liaison with a servant. At the same
time, however, Mrs. Haye sees an advantage in keeping John
dependent and isolated. If John stays single, she could stay on
as the mistress of the estate she loves.
John is conscious of all this speculation and has worries of
his own about his prospects, especially those having to do with
women. He takes up briefly with Joan Enwhistle, the daughter of
the local defrocked rector. Having lost her mother at an early
age, she lives in scandalous squalor with her embittered,
alcoholic, and somewhat abusive father in a ramshackle cottage in
the woods. Although Joan "would seem to fit Mrs. Haye's
requirements, both having "had a story" and being "unhappy at
home," John's protectors see her as spectacularly unsuitable.
This general disapproval makes Joan all the more attractive to
John. Naturally John's courtship is inept at first. He worries
that his missing eyes and unsightly scars will repel Joan. But
soon he tries to use his blindness as a lure. Presumably he has
read Jane Eyre and senses that his helplessness and utter
dependency will seduce her. On their walks together he spouts
gloomy complaints about darkness and solitude, and he stumbles
against Joan on purpose so she will have to take his arm. Knowing
that in the conventional language of love the eyes are always the
focal point, he brings the discussion around to hers, which, as
she points out, he has never seen. Undaunted, he responds:
"Perhaps not. But I can feel them just the same."
"Do you?"
"Yes, they are so calm, so quiet. Such a lovely blue."
"But they are dark brown."
"Oh then your dress does not match?"
"No, I suppose not."
"But what does that matter? They are such lovely brown eyes.
And sometimes, they light up and burn perhaps?"
"How do you mean?"
"Well ... But have you ever been in love?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe they are burning now?"
"N-no, I don't think so."
"How sad. And mine, if they had not been removed, would have
burned so ardently." (457)
As Green lampoons the eye-centered cliches of love he also
demonstrates how mismatched this couple really is. But it is the
gulf of class and education between them, rather than John's
blindness, that makes union impossible. When John asks Joan to
describe the landscape, she shows that she lacks the aesthetic
sensibilities he longs for in a companion, saying, "I don't know
what you see in views" (446). John tries to romanticize the
squalor of her life, assuming that "it must be wonderful to be
poor" while admitting, "Poor people are always much happier than
rich people on the cinema. The cinema used to be the only way I
had to see life" (458).
Joan is understandably insulted by his willful naivete. And
she finds John's juvenile musings on art and literature too
reminiscent of her father's drunken rants to take seriously. So
John must come to terms with his blindness on his own. He wants
to be a writer and recognizes (citing Milton) that blindness need
not hamper his art. In fact, it gives him what he lacked before -
a subject. He now has something to show the world: "He would
start a crusade against people with eyesight. It was the easiest
thing in the world to see, and so many were content with only the
superficial appearance of things" (502). Slowly, John learns to
recognize blindness as a different way of perceiving. He becomes
a connoisseur of voices and even learns to detect the presence of
people without hearing them speak or move. More significantly, he
learns that trying to translate every sound, taste, or sensation
into visual terms is pointless and inaccurate. He even asserts
that "sight was not really necessary; the values of things
changed, that was all. There was so much in the wind, in the feel
of the air, in the sounds that Nature lent one" (442).
Mrs. Haye and John move to London in the hope that the
cultural energy of the city will help him begin his writing
career. Understandably, John suffers a setback. The constant
noise of the city torments his newly sensitized ears, and the
unfamiliar surroundings and people challenge his newfound skills.
He briefly regresses into helplessness and gloom. But at the end
of the novel he undergoes the final phase in his transformation
from sighted youth to blind man. He imagines "a white light that
he would bathe in" (503) and then "a deeper blindness closed in
upon him" (504). After this fit or hallucination passes, John
writes to a school friend, "I have had a wonderful experience,"
and wonders, "Why am I so happy today?" (504). Green inverts the
Christian trope that configures baptism as a washing away of
unholy blindness, and salvation as an ascent into divine light.
John has been reborn into a new sense of blindness. If the note
of optimism at the end of the novel seems a bit shaky, still
Green's reimagining of blindness is a radical departure from the
Oedipal tradition in which blindness must be a life sentence of
despair and dependency with no hope of respite or parole.
Of course Green is not simply writing about one young man's
adaptation to blindness. He is using blindness to suggest all
sorts of random accidents and quirks of fate that may force
individuals to test their own resources and challenge the
assumptions of their culture. Similarly, in his story "The Country of the Blind," H. G. Wells writes blindness into a
parable about human intolerance. [5] At some unspecified time in
the distant past, a small group of "Peruvian half-breeds fleeing
from the lust and tyranny of an evil Spanish ruler" (439) settle
in an upland valley in the Andes. The valley is cut off from the
outside world by a landslide, but it offers sweet water, fertile
spring-irrigated soil, and a mild climate. Then a strange disease
afflicts an entire generation of children, who all go blind.
After fifteen generations pass, the whole community is blind, but
they have adapted their environment and habits to their
sightlessness. They sleep in the warm daylight hours and work the
fields at night. They pave their pathways with different textures
and notched curbs so they can keep track of their location. Their
non-visual senses are finely tuned: they learn to read intonation
rather than expression and can hear gestures, even footsteps in
grass. They favor soft-textured garments with raised stitching
for tactile identification. They track their llamas by scent.
Memory of the world beyond their valley has faded with their
sight, and they believe that the world ends with the steep cliffs
that surround the valley. But some scraps of belief from their
Christian past are retained and reinterpreted in their philosophy
and religion. For instance, they believe birds to be angels
because they can hear them sing and flutter but can never lay
hands upon them. Heaven for them is not the vast and
awe-inspiring domed sky but a protective stone ceiling,
exquisitely smooth to the touch but too high for anyone to reach.
Theirs is a perfect and self-contained world, a "cosmic
casserole" with a stone lid.
Into this blind paradise wanders a sighted traveler, Nunez,
who falls off a mountain and slides into the valley on an
avalanche. He's heard the legend of this place and goads himself
into delusions of grandeur by repeating the proverb: "In the
country of the blind the one-eyed man is king" (452). He assumes
that his sight will give him a natural advantage over this race
of mutants. But he is wrong. He underestimates their perfect
adaptation. When he runs away from them, they track him with
ease. When he tries to impress them with descriptions of what he
sees, they ridicule him as a fool. Their language has no words
for seeing. Because he stumbles, speaks nonsense, and lacks keen
hearing, smell, and touch, they determine that he must be some
sort of newly formed humanoid creature, a sort of full-grown
baby, spontaneously generated from the rock. But they put up with
him, keeping him around as a kind of jester and heavy lifter.
Then he falls in love. The girl, Medina-sarote, is beautiful
by sighted standards, but within blind culture she falls short of
the mark. Her voice is not soft enough, her features are too
clear-cut, her long eyelashes are considered a disfigurement, and
her skin lacks "that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the
blind man's ideal of feminine beauty" (459). Despite her
shortcomings, her father is reluctant to throw her away on this
unusual stranger. Others in the community fear that the union
will corrupt the race. The elders determine that what makes Nunez
act so strangely are the things he calls eyes. Clearly they act
as a mental irritant, so if they were removed, he would become as
normal as the rest of them. Medina-sarote urges Nunez to have the
operation. He argues that it is his vision, his ability to see
her, that makes him love her. But his desire, and the longing to
be a normal citizen rather than a tamed freak, seem to persuade
him. Finally, however, the sacrifice proves too great, and
desperation drives him to scale the sheer walls of stone to
escape.
In Wells's parable, the blind stand for human beings in
general, prone to judge what's normal by their own experience,
and ready to eradicate difference to achieve harmonious
conformity. Wells startles readers out of complacency by
subverting their expectations that blind people in the real world
are in fact helpless, passive, and dependent. To imagine a world
where sightlessness would be the norm, shaping every aspect of
life, allows for the possibility that blindness might not be the
dire disaster that Oedipus spends his life proclaiming.
In his novel
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), J. M.
Coetzee also constructs an allegorical narrative about human
intolerance. [6] Set in an unspecified time and place, the novel
recounts the struggle of the Magistrate, the civil administrator
of a frontier outpost, who finds himself first in complicity then
in conflict with an oppressive Empire waging war against the
native people of the region, the Barbarians. And at the novel's
center, there is a blind person. She is a young Barbarian girl,
maimed and blinded by the Empire's crack interrogator, Colonel
Joll. He blinds her by forcing her to stare at the prongs of a
white-hot metal fork until the intense light damages her retinas.
Left behind when the other Barbarian prisoners are set free, she
serves as an instructive spectacle, ocular proof of the Empire's
power to alter a person's fundamental being without leaving
exterior marks. But her blindness also delivers a more personal
message to the Magistrate. During his first conversation with the
Magistrate, Colonel Joll explains why he wears dark glasses:
"They protect one's eyes from the glare of the sun," he
says. "You would find them useful out here in the desert. They
save one from squinting all the time. One has fewer headaches.
Look." He touches the corners of his eyes lightly. "No wrinkles."
(1) Joll, an expert manipulator of symbols, wears the
traditional sign of blindness to represent his own
clear-sightedness. The desert sun is too illuminating and can
dazzle and even harm the eyes. Though the Magistrate disdains the
"paltry theatrical mystery of dark shields hiding healthy eyes"
(4) he still gets the message. There is a danger, Joll says with
his glasses, in looking too closely at the way the Empire treats
the Barbarians. Later, the Magistrate senses that, in blinding
the girl as he does, Joll has inscribed the same message for him
and "until the marks on this girl's body are deciphered and
understood I cannot let go of her" (31). In contemplating her
literal blindness he is forced to confront his own figurative
blindness, his unthinking obliviousness to the Empire's
oppressive practices. But as the Magistrate questions the girl,
he learns she is not completely sightless:
"I don't believe you can see," I say.
"Yes, I can see. When I look straight, there is nothing,
there is -" (she rubs the air in front of her like someone
cleaning a window).
"A blur," I say.
"There is a blur. But I can see out of the sides of my eyes.
The left eye is better than the right. How could I find my way if
I could not see?" (29)
When I first read this passage it was with a shock of
recognition unlike any I'd known before. The girl's blindness is
exactly like mine. That central blur that will not wipe clean is
before my eyes, too. In fact, until I read Waiting for the
Barbarians I had no language to describe my visual experience
beyond saying that I didn't see well. The simple analogy to the
blur on a window both gave me a way to describe my blindness and
helped me see my blindness more precisely.
I suspect my identification with this character exceeds what
Coetzee intended or wished. After all, one of the features of
allegory is the way it forces readers to perceive characters as
representations of abstract concepts. So what does this blind
character represent? Significantly, she does not call herself
blind, insisting on the sight she has and the prospect of
improvement. It is the Magistrate who insists on calling her
blind, and her blindness is part of the fascination she holds for
him. She is alien to him in every way, being not only Barbarian
and female but also blind. Her otherness at once attracts and
repels him. He repeatedly tries to imagine her visual experience:
Am I to believe that gazing back at me she sees nothing - my
feet perhaps, parts of the room, a hazy circle of light, but at
the center, where I am, only a blur, a blank? (31)
I take her face between my hands and stare into the dead
centers of her eyes, from which twin reflections of myself stare
solemnly back. (41)
Since she cannot see the center, where he is, he calls her
"blind" and discounts what she can see - the periphery. He knows
that when she looks at him he is effaced. So when he looks at her
he sees only an impenetrable and reflective surface. He is
reminded of "the image of a face masked by two black glassy
insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my
doubled image cast back at me" (44). When he looks at her, he
sees Joll, Joll's handiwork, and more horrifying, his own
unwitting complicity in that handiwork. Slowly he begins to
recognize that his own paternalistic protection of her is only
the inverted mirror image of Joll's torture. He is concerned with
what the girl represents, but the girl herself eludes him. She
remains a cipher, a vacancy, a blank.
What the Magistrate does not fully understand is that the
Barbarians inhabit the periphery. They provide the outlines by
which the center is defined. They are the "other" that gives the
Empire its identity. When the Magistrate alters his vantage point
and shifts his gaze off center, everything changes. He leads an
expedition into uncharted Barbarian territory to return the girl
to her people, and he begins to "see" the Barbarian girl as she
really is. On the journey, her nomadic heritage shows, and her
blindness does not hinder her. She sits on her horse with such
ease that she can fall asleep in the saddle. The brackish water
and rugged road food do not make her sick. When a storm comes up,
she knows how to calm the horses. Then they meet a group of
Barbarians, and the Magistrate tries to communicate what has
happened to her. He discovers he does not know the Barbarian word
for "blind." "Blind" is his word, from his context, bearing
cultural associations that do not translate. In her language and
context another word might be necessary. His words define only
his experience of her and discount her own. He uses "blind" to
mean "helpless victim of oppression" and "object of pity." When
she refuses his labels she delineates the distance he still has
to travel in order to understand both her and the complexities of
his own situation.
In the real world, many blind people, like me, have some
visual experience. Coetzee uses this fact to complicate and
subvert the allegory he constructs. After all, he could have made
the girl completely blind.When he does not, she slips free of the
allegorical categories of his narrative. Facile binary
oppositions - sight/blindness, civilization/barbarism,
center/periphery, us/them - are for the Colonel Jolls of the
world. For people like the Magistrate, who clings to abstract
ideals about equality, responsibility, tolerance, and justice,
simple categories and oppositions prove inadequate.
Certainly for Coetzee, as for Wells and Green, blindness
begins to lose some of its Oedipal connotations. The meaning of
blindness becomes harder to pin down once authors put forward the
idea that it could mean different things to different people. In
his story "The Blind Man," D. H. Lawrence goes even further. [7]
Maurice Pervin lost his eyes in the Great War and now lives in
isolation with his wife, Isabel. Maurice is prone to bouts of
brooding (what Lawrence hero is not?), and Isabel finds the
isolation difficult. Still, as a couple they enjoy a "wonderful
and unspeakable intimacy" and share a "whole world, rich and real
and invisible" (347). Unlike Jane Eyre's marriage to Rochester,
their happiness is not the result of the blind man's complete
dependence on his wife. Maurice still manages his farm and
performs many routine chores. And his blindness has not impaired
his masculinity. He is a big man, massively built, taciturn and
sensitive. He has a natural affinity for the animals in his care
- the horses, the cattle, and a large, half-wild cat. His
blindness seems to have heightened his physicality, instincts,
and sensitivity. Like Henry Green's hero, John Haye, Maurice
discovers that trying re-create the world in remembered images
does no good. Rather, he embraces his blindness as a new form of
consciousness:
He did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept
this sheer immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world
he was happy, he wanted no intervention of visual consciousness.
in this state there was a certain rich positivity, bordering
sometimes on rapture. Life seemed to move in him like a tide
lapping, lapping, and advancing, enveloping all things darkly. It
was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen
object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try
to remember, to visualize. He did not want to. The new way of
consciousness substituted itself in him. (355)
As if all this lapping and enveloping were not enough, he
hints vaguely at certain compensations of blindness, but true to
his nature, he cannot articulate what they are. Isabel attempts
to explain it too: "I agree that it seems to put one's mind to
sleep. But when we're alone I miss nothing: it seems awfully
rich, almost splendid, you know" (361).
Into this connubial paradise wanders a sighted rival. Bertie
Reid, a celebrated barrister and distant cousin of Isabel's,
arrives for a visit. He is quicker, livelier, and more
conversational than the blind man. But he is also, by his own
definition, "neuter" (359) and, though capable of gallant
adoration of women, wary of physical contact with them. Still,
Isabel is glad to have him around. Apparently all that
"unspeakable intimacy" gets a bit hard to take at times. Also,
she has begun to worry that the child she is expecting will upset
the careful balance of her marriage. So she is happy to have an
old friend's advice and sympathy. She seems to hope that
Maurice's blindness will have softened his distaste for Bertie or
made Bertle more patient with Maurice. But the two men are such
opposites that the tension between them seems insurmountable at
first.
When they are alone together, Maurice disarms Bertie by
letting down his guard. He questions Bertie about Isabel, hopeful
that she may have confided secret concerns to her old friend.
Then he asks the sighted man to describe the scars on his own
face. Bertie defines them as a "disfigurement, more pitiable than
shocking" (363), a distinction so subtle that it seems to assert
the sighted man's superiority. Then Maurice asks permission to
touch Bertie's face. But this touch is not the delicate flutter
of braille-reading fingertips. Maurice wraps his beefy hands
around the smaller man's head, knocks his hat off, then paws his
shoulders, arms, and hands. Maurice envelops Bertie in pure
contact, announcing that Bertie is not only shorter than he
expected, but that his head and hands feel tender and young. As
disconcerting as this manhandling is, Maurice then urges Bertie
to touch his face, in particular his scarred brow and empty
eyesockets. When Bertie reluctantly complies, Maurice presses
Bertie's hands against his face. Maurice then trembles "in every
fibre, rocking slightly, slowly, from side to side. He remained
thus for a minute or more, whilst Bertie stood as if in a swoon,
unconscious, imprisoned." This mutual laying on of hands leaves
Maurice elated, exclaiming, "Oh my God ... we shall know each
other now shan't we?" (364). He announces to Isabel that he and
Bertie are now friends. But Bertie is left feeling like a
"mollusk whose shell is broken" (365). The encounter not only
unmans him but unsights him. With a single, traditionally blind
gesture, Maurice takes the measure of his rival and finds him
lacking. Then, by forcing Bertie to experience his face as the
blind do, through touch, Maurice forces him to recognize his own
sensual deficiencies. Maurice triumphs in this physical intimacy
while Bertie is shattered by it.
Lawrence uses blindness to explore a favorite theme about
sensuality versus intellect. Deprived of one of his senses,
Maurice revels in the four that remain. He defies the
sense-privileged who would be foolish enough to pity him, or his
wife. In "Cathedral" (1981), Raymond Carver retells Lawrence's
story, presenting another rivalry between a sighted man and a
blind man. [8] In Carver's version, the blind man, Robert, is the
interloper. The sighted narrator's wife used to work for Robert,
and since then they've kept in touch, exchanging taped letters in
which the wife confides many secrets. The narrator is somewhat
resentful about this correspondence, unsettled by the idea that
the blind man may know more about his wife's true feelings than
he does. Also, his wife admits that she once let the blind man
touch her face, and the event was significant enough that she
wrote a poem about it. So the narrator is apprehensive about
Robert's pending visit: "My idea of blindness came from the
movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed.
Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my
house was not something I looked forward to" (209). And he
contemplates the plight of Robert's dead wife:
I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must
have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was
seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day
after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her
beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on
her face, be it misery or something better. (213)
The stilted quality of his language reveals the hackneyed
conventions to which he subscribes. Blind people cannot hope to
enjoy a happy love life because they get no emotional or sexual
stimulation from their eyes.
But Robert does not conform to the stereotypes. He's jovial
and rather pushy, insisting on calling the narrator "Bub." Also
he smokes and wears a beard, which the narrator believed are not
things blind people do. Robert's failure to fit the narrator's
image of blindness only irks the narrator more. But by the end of
the evening, things change. As the wife dozes on the sofa between
the two men, they watch (hear) a TV program about Gothic
architecture. It occurs to the narrator that the blind man may
not know what a cathedral is. But when he tries to translate the
images he sees on the screen, he discovers he lacks the language
to do justice to the task. In offering to help the blind man
overcome his limitation, he confronts his own. So Robert suggests
he draw a picture, and, as he draws, Robert takes hold of his
hand to follow the motion of his drawing. Perhaps it's only the
Scotch and dope they've consumed during the evening, but both men
are satisfied with the experiment. They are even exhilarated. For
a final twist, Robert tells the narrator to close his eyes. He
does, and keeps drawing, with the blind man's hands still on his.
Then he said, "I think that's it. I think you got it," he
said.
"Take a look. What do you think?"
But I had my eyes closed. I thought I'd keep them that way
for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.
"Well?" he said. "Are you looking?"
My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that.
But I didn't feel like I was inside anything.
"It's really something," I said. (228)
It is significant that the collaborative sketch is of a
cathedral rather than a supermarket or suspension bridge. This
may remind the reader of all the biblical stories in which
blindness occurs as a test of faith or in which sight is restored
as a reward for conversion. But in Carver's story a different
kind of enlightenment takes place. The sighted man feels an
obligation to blind himself temporarily in order to experience
another way of being. The touch of the blind man, and the effort
they share, liberate him from the confines of the visible world
and the limits of his own language, experience, and imagination.
Robert and Maurice, like Oedipus, still serve an instructive
function. But their instruction is of a more active, hands-on
variety. They invite sighted readers to experience the world with
more than one sense, and to question the assumptions of their
sight-centered culture.
In the century and a half since Bronte published Jane Eyre,
the real lives of blind people have undergone radical
improvements in terms of education, opportunity, and civil
rights. So while this admittedly random sampling of
English-language fiction from this period shows the tenacity of
the oedipal image, it also reveals this cultural evolution. Since
Mr. Rochester would have been unable to learn braille or other
techniques even if he had wanted to, it is understandable that he
should equate blindness with helplessness. Carver's blind man has
received enough twentieth-century education and training to
travel independently and hold down various jobs. Also, he is the
only one of all these blind characters whose sight loss was not
caused by injury or disease. For all we know, he has been blind
since birth, so it seems only natural that he should be able to
show the narrow-minded sighted man a thing or two. Still, there
is something decidedly weird about even these latter-day blind
people, something darkly mysterious, otherworldly, vaguely
unnatural. They live lives apart, not quite as outcasts, but not
exactly in the mainstream either. The Oedipal family resemblance
is still there - something about the eyes.
As a blind reader, I am not so naive as to expect that
fiction should provide me with role models, but it's bard not to
cringe at traditional representations of blindness as a
life-ending tragedy. And while the notion that a blind person can
bring enlightenment to sighted peers shows progress, it still
makes me weary and somewhat alarmed. So I admit a certain surge
of triumph when Lawrence's blind man takes the annoying sighted
man in hand, when Coetzee's blind Barbarian rejects sightist
labels, when the citizens of Wells's country of the blind dismiss
sight as a troublesome mental irritant. I like it when blind
characters get uppity. It is in these moments that they begin to
chip away at the lingering remnants of the Oedipal image. But I
recognize that some sighted readers may shudder at these examples
of blind assertiveness or shrug them off as far-fetched fictional
invention. I could assert that when blind characters ask sighted
characters to describe what they see, they remind readers that we
are all blind when we read. The visions we "see" as we read are
not what's before our eyes, but what's behind them. So blind
characters serve as the reader's textual surrogate, asking the
author's language to show us a vision of the world. But if this
were true, any author with a self-reflexive bent would throw in a
blind character to hold a mirror up to the reader, saying, "Look
at me. I am you." And this would be merely another version of the
old story - the blind man as instructive spectacle, useful to
everyone but himself.
PART II
Blind Phenomenology
CHAPTER 4
The Mind's Eye
At the 1992 Matisse exhibition at New York's Museum of
Modern Art, a man said to me, "You're standing too close to that
painting. You have to stand back to really see it."
He was right. I was standing about a foot from a canvas
large enough for most people to view comfortably from a distance
of several yards. When I look at a painting from a sighted
person's distance, macular degeneration, my form of blindness,
obscures or distorts the center of the canvas. My peripheral
vision is unaffected, so the edges of the canvas are more or less
visible. To get a general sense of the overall composition, I
scan the painting systematically, moving my oversized blind spot
around it, allowing different regions to emerge into my
peripheral vision. My brain slowly identifies the forms and
assembles the picture bit by bit. In effect, my mind sketches an
outline, or a map: "To the left, there's a table with a basket of
fruit. To the right, there's a window with a view of the sea."
To add detail to this rough sketch growing in my brain, I
must get very close to the painting, as close as museum guards
allow, even closer when they look away. This is where I spend
most of my time in art galleries. I edge closer and closer, then
stand, usually off to one side, leaning forward, scanning small
sections one at a time. But as I approach, the details of
texture, depth, and illumination become only so much paint to me,
an arrangement of different pigments differently applied. With my
face a few inches from the canvas, every painting, even the most
representational, becomes an abstraction. Paint is paint. But
paint is also the point, isn't it? Looking at a work of art is
seldom simply a matter of identifying the objects or people
depicted there. Up close, I can appreciate the tricks of the
painter's trade, understand how a seemingly random daub or
dribble ends up meaning something so precise. I recognize that a
stroke of purple may represent the shadowy side of a cathedral
tower, a cherry blossom reflected in water, or the sheen on a
fold of brown velvet. But the sketch in my head lets me know what
this stroke of purple means in the context of a particular
painting. I observe that the most "realistic" eye, the kind which
seems to follow the viewer's movements around the room, may be no
more than a swirl of brown with a thin comma of white laid over.
Up close, Monet's waterlilies are wonderfully crusty, while at a
distance they look almost liquid. I enjoy these discoveries and
marvel at the artist's skill and ingenuity. While my too-close
vantage point makes representational paintings seem abstract,
with abstract works I sense not only movement and energy but
depth and form. The sprays of paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas
become a dense, webby mass. Ad Reinhardt's flat planes of color
resonate afterimages, vibrate with ghosts of form. Mark Rothko's
exquisite colors bleed beyond their frames, staining the wall and
the air around them.
Varnished canvases give me trouble. Puddles of brilliant
white obscure the faces of Rembrandt's dark Dutchmen or drape
portions of Rubens's corpulent nudes. But since this white part
moves when I move, I know to disregard it. I shift my position
and slide my gaze back and forth, watching what emerges.
Of course my method of looking at painting takes time and
space. I perform a slow minuet before each painting, stepping
forward and back, sweeping my gaze from edge to edge. Considering
the crowds at most museums nowadays, it may seem surprising that
I ever manage to get as close to the paintings as I need to. But
current museum practices aid me. People tend to cluster around
printed texts displayed at the entrance of each gallery or by
particular paintings. Other people rent tape-recorded tours that
direct them to certain works, so they bypass others. As they
congregate before the texts and prescribed canvases, it leaves
space open elsewhere for me.
The man at the Matisse show who told me that I was standing
too close was one of these tape-recorded tour-takers. He had to
lift his earphones to speak to me. And before I could formulate a
response he had wheeled and hurried on to the next correct
vantage point, the next preordained view.
So I didn't get a chance to tell him that I am blind. I
suspect that it would have stopped him in his tracks. The visual
arts are for the sighted, he might have told me. The idea of a
blind person in a museum sounds like the punch line to a bad
joke. Though, as far as he could tell, any number of his fellow
earphone-wearers could have been blind. Why not? Certainly it is
no challenge to a skilled blind person to follow recorded
directions, to move from room to room with a crowd of similarly
directed people. In fact, a blind person accustomed to reading
books on tape would probably get more out of the taped tour than
would the average sighted person.
"But," the man would object, "when I stand in front of a
painting I know what I'm looking at. The tape only supplements
what I'm seeing. When I look at the painting I see it. I don't
piece it together like a jigsaw puzzle, like you do. I just see
it. You're doing something else. Your brain creates some
secondhand version of the painting. You do not experience the
painting itself."
To such people there is a right way and a wrong way to see.
The dialogue that goes on between my eyes and brain seems
something distinctly different from sight. It is not vision but
revision, something altered, edited, changed by my mind, subject
to my values, expectations, and even moods. I see what I sense is
there, what I know is there, what I hope is there, not
necessarily what actually is. For the sighted, seeing is both
instantaneous and absolute. To see is to take something in at a
glance and possess it whole, comprehending all its complexities.
Sight provides instantaneous access to reality. The eye is the
window on the world. It's a perfect little camera, with a lens
that automatically focuses the image on a light-sensitive film.
Aim, focus, presto - nothing to it.
The sighted can be so touchingly naive about vision. They
apparently believe that the brain stays out of it. Or at best,
they extend the camera metaphor and envision a tiny self seated
inside the skull, passively watching images as they are projected
on a movie screen, then pushing the buttons and pulling the
levers that will make the body respond appropriately by speaking,
running, reaching, or closing the eyes. A few can describe vision
with more specialized language. They explain that light of
different frequencies and intensities reflected off an object is
refracted through the eye's cornea and lens to hit the retina,
where it initiates a chemical change in the photoreceptor cells,
which triggers an electrical impulse to the ganglion cells, which
send an impulse to the optic nerve, which relays the message to
the lateral geniculate nucleus, which conveys it to the primary
visual cortex and other regions of the brain, where different
aspects of the image (color, motion, form) are assessed. And
thus, you see. Still, despite fancy language, the idea remains
the same. The image that hits the retina is presumed to be what
you see. That initial image is described as having a constant,
inviolable integrity. The visual process is said to work
something like a fax machine. Whatever shuffling and rearranging
of the image that takes place inside the brain, you end up with
the same image you had at the beginning. The sighted preserve
this absolute faith in the image despite everyday experiences
when their eyes deceive them or when they see more (or less) than
actually meets their eyes.
For example, picture this. You are waiting to meet a friend
in a crowded train station. You are able to spot him from across
the large waiting room, a distance of perhaps forty yards or so.
The next day you are there again, waiting for someone else. Your
friend of the day before also shows up and walks toward you, but
you do not recognize him until he is much closer, perhaps only a
yard or two away. Why? The image projected on your retina is
pretty much the same. And you're alert to it, actively scanning
the crowd. Your friend's image is there in your eye on Tuesday as
it was on Monday. You should see him, but you don't.
Or picture this. You are pitching in the final game of the
World Series. You must throw a strike. You look at the catcher.
You focus on his glove, the precise spot in his glove where you
want the ball to hit. As you do this, you do not see the fans in
the stands, even though (since these are not your home fans) they
are waving banners, hats, towels, seat cushions, and generally
trying to distract you. You do not see the hitter at the plate or
the umpire crouching behind the catcher, or even the catcher,
just that spot in his glove. You don't see those other things
even though their images appear on your retinas. Why? Your eyes,
unlike cameras, are not equipped with zoom lenses that can alter
the field of view and allow you to zero in on the catcher's mitt
that way.
Is this just a manner of speaking, a way to spice up the
postgame interview by re-creating the suspense of the moment? Or
are there really instances when stress, fatigue, illness, and
emotion (not to mention drugs or alcohol) distort or alter what
you see? A smoke alarm sounds in your favorite restaurant and, in
your haste to escape, you see nothing between you and the Exit
sign, though the lights are still shining and your eyes can see
the waiters and other diners overturning tables as they rush
toward the door. When you describe the experience, you will blame
your eyes, not your brain, and call it "blind panic." Some
enchanted evening you will see a stranger and be "blinded by
desire," utterly unconscious of all the other people and objects
in that crowded room even though all these things are right
before your eyes.
"So occasionally the brain plays tricks," the man at the
Matisse exhibition might argue. "Sometimes the brain ignores,
even dumps, part of the image that the eyes receive and
highlights, even enhances, other parts. But this only happens
under certain circumstances. The rest of the time I see exactly
what's there. I see everything that's there. My vision is both
impartial and democratic. My brain doesn't intervene or intrude.
it merely receives and responds." To this I would say, "Look
again."
Try this. Picture the world as I see it. My world has a hole
in its center. The central region of my retina, the macula, no
longer functions. So when light entering my eyes hits the
retinas, only the cells on the periphery, and a few good cells
scattered around the center, send messages to the brain. In the
most common form of macular degeneration, now called
"age-related" but once called "senile" or "wet," abnormal blood
vessels form behind the retina. These leak and damage the
delicate photoreceptor cells. In my form of the condition (which
is rare and, some feel, so different from the common form that it
deserves a different name), there were no leaky blood vessels. My
photoreceptors seem to have been genetically programmed simply to
give up the ghost. I have no memory of this. it happened when I
was about ten years old, and probably very gradually, perhaps
even cell by cell. Whatever the cause, the damaged cells do not
regenerate or grow back. As my most recent ophthalmologist put
it, patches of my retinas are entirely "worn through." The
affected area is small. The whole macula measures about 5
millimeters across its diameter. But it contains a higher
concentration of photoreceptors than the peripheral areas. More
important, the macula is densely packed with the sensitive cone
cells that allow for the perception of fine details. So I lack
not only central vision but also the visual equipment designed to
perform such tasks as reading print or recognizing a face. In
effect, I have an extremely large blind spot in the center of my
visual field. Every human eye has a blind spot. It is the place
where the optic nerve meets the retina, where there are no
photoreceptors. The reason you do not see your blind spot most of
the time is because it is out of the central region of vision.
Also, since you have two eyes, there are two blind spots, but
they do not overlap. When something is obscured by the blind spot
in your left eye, your right eye will see it. And your brain
knows the blind spots are there and always have been. Your whole
visual system works around the fact of your blind spot, so you
can disregard it. My blind spot is simply larger and more central
than yours. You can crudely simulate macular degeneration by
putting a blob of toothpaste in the center of your eyeglasses, so
wherever you aim your eyes you see only toothpaste. But this is
not exactly what I see.
With effort, I can force myself to see my blind spot. When I
stare directly at a blank wall, this flaw in my retina does not
appear as a black hole or splotch of darkness. When I am very
tired I see an irregularly shaped blotch, which throbs slightly
and is either an intense blue-violet, or a deep teal green. More
often, I see a blur slightly darker in color than the wall
overlaid with a pattern of tiny flecks. Depending on lighting
conditions these flecks are bright white, sometimes edged in
violet or a golden yellow. Sometimes the flecks are less vividly
colored, and the wall appears like a surface of water dappled by
a breeze or soft rain. These flecks or dapples vibrate, pulsate,
shiver but stay closely packed and never migrate from the central
region. Around this movement, in the periphery of my visual
field, there is calm. When I look at a simple object - a white
3-by-5-inch index card on my desk, for example - it disappears.
More accurately, the beige wood color of the desktop flows into
the central blurry region of vision, while flecks of white
pulsate above. The card seems to disintegrate into tiny,
quivering particles, to dissolve into the desktop and the air. If
I shift my eyes slightly in any direction, the card reappears. It
seems to emerge from the desk's surface, to differentiate itself
from the pale wood grain. I shift my gaze back and it's gone.
When the object is larger and there's a higher degree of contrast
between it and the background - a 5-by-8-inch paperback book -
its disappearance is less complete. When I aim my eyes at its
center, only the top two thirds disappear, while the lower two
inches or so remain. Also, the colors of the cover design
disintegrate into pulsating flecks, invading the pale surface
around it. I see the book losing solidity, becoming translucent
while a cluster of vibrating speckles dance just above it. It's
something like what they do on the TV news to protect the
identity of a courtroom witness or accused criminal. The person's
face is blotted out by a moving pattern of tiny squares. But for
me the pattern is less regular and moves faster.
My blind spot always occupies the central region of my
visual field. The wider the field, the larger the blind spot.
When I look at my hand from arm's length, it vanishes. When I
bring it close to my face, only the fingertips are gone. To see
the picture on the cover of the book I bring it close to my eyes.
With the book an inch from my face the blind spot is only about
the size of a silver dollar. I can see enough of the picture to
identify the book.
I cannot perceive a straight line, because wherever I aim my
eye, the line appears severed. The line that designates the edge
of an object bows, wobbles, or oscillates from side to side. The
more straight lines in the object, the more distortion. A
bookcase with its uprights and shelves full of books is a haze of
motion. The color of the shelves bounces up and down, bleeding
into the color of the books, which vibrate from side to side. A
filmy veil seems to hang over it, blurring the spines of books
into a smudgy, variegated haze. I look down. A sheer,
white-violet fog hangs over my computer keyboard, slashed here
and there with streaks of yellow. My fingers pierce the fog as I
type, sinking in up to the first knuckle. One of my cats sleeps
on my desk. Every curve and contour of her body oscillates
outward, forming a translucent ghost cat emerging from the real
one. All around there are pulsating speckles of violet and gold,
dazzlingly at odds with the cat's immobility. When I touch her,
the shadow cat grays my hand.
As solid objects seem to dissolve or shimmy, insubstantial
shadows and patches of light acquire solidity and form. The
shadow in the corner could be a pair of shoes. Bright specks of
light shining through prismatic glass blocks appear as scraps of
colored paper. Lamplight reflected off a polished table might
make me gasp spilled milk to me.
I "see" more than I'm supposed to. Ophthalmology textbooks
predict that people with macular degeneration will in fact see a
black (or perhaps white) hole in the middle of what they're
looking at. Ophthalmologists are not necessarily well versed in
the neurology and psychology of vision. What goes on in the brain
is someone else's province. Research to identify the specific
functioning of cells in the retina, and the corresponding nerve
fibers and neurons in the brain, is relatively recent and
somewhat inconclusive. But it allows me to speculate. The
scintillating motion, vibrant speckles, shadowy emanations, and
changing forms may have to do with the few remaining good
photoreceptors scattered over the macula. When I stare at an
object, the few functioning cells in my maculas may be dutifully
sending reliable messages to the brain, oblivious to the blank
space, the vacant silence that surrounds them. If these are cones
(I know I must have some since I see color), the brain pays more
attention. There is a one-to-one ratio of cones to ganglion
cells, while several rods synapse on one ganglion cell. Each cone
has a private line to the brain. Also, a disproportionate amount
of cortical space is devoted to the central region of the retina.
Whatever messages get through from those last few holdouts are
scrutinized by a large number of neurons. My brain receives these
messages without the millions of other messages that should
corroborate or enhance them. My brain takes what little it has to
go on and does the best it can. It hedges its bets. There might
be a white index card there on the desk, my brain tells me. Then
again, maybe not.
Leaving aside this neurological speculation (which is
probably more whimsy than fact), I surmise that my general visual
experience is something like your experience of optical
illusions. Open any college psychology textbook to the chapter on
perception and look at the optical illusions there. You stare at
the image and see it change before your eyes. In one image, you
may see first a vase and then two faces in profile. In another,
you see first a rabbit then a duck. These images deceive you
because they give your brain inadequate or contradictory
information. In the first case, your brain tries to determine
which part of the image represents the object and which part
represents the background. In the second case, your brain tries
to group the lines of the sketch together into a meaningful
picture. In both cases there are two equally possible solutions
to the visual riddle, so your brain switches from one to the
other, and you have the uncanny sensation of "seeing" the image
change. When there's not much to go on-no design on the vase, no
features on the faces, no feathers, no fur - the brain makes an
educated guess.
When I stare at an object I can almost feel my brain making
such guesses. And there are usually more than two alternatives.
Before my eyes, the hazy blur that conceals the object oscillates
and shudders, taking on new colors and contours. I "see" my
brain's confusion as it mulls over the amorphous shapes before my
eyes. The red coffee mug on my desk becomes a green mug, then a
green ball, then a black box, then ... But this is not what I
really see. In my attempt to specify my own visual experience, I
distort it. The effort required to fixate on an object long
enough to "see" this brain activity (if that's what it really is)
wears me out. The pulsating speckles put me on edge. My head
aches. I am using both my eyes and brain in an unaccustomed,
unnatural way. This hole in my vision has been there a long time.
I've learned to work around it. Normally, I am more or less
unaware of my blind spot. Or else I disregard it. I know objects
have form and solidity, sharp edges, stability. I know that the
central area of my visual field is unreliable, plays tricks, so I
focus my attention elsewhere. My peripheral vision is unimpaired.
Out there on the edge of the image, there is stasis and
certainty. I move my attention off center, viewing the world
askance. I ignore the center, move around it. My gaze
circumambulates the object, tracing its contours. If I want to
see the index card, I aim my eyes at the coffee mug behind it.
The mug disintegrates, but the card lies still, flat,
rectangular, identifiable. I can lay my hand on it. If I want to
look at the cat, I stare at the book. I move my eyes to the far
side of the cat, up and around her. Of course, peripheral vision
is not as accurate or precise as central vision. You cannot read
with peripheral vision. Hold a book off to the side and stare
straight ahead. You will see the general shape of the book, be
aware that there's print on the page, but unless you cheat and
glance that way, you will have trouble making out the words.
Peripheral vision exists to give you a general sense of your
surroundings - the forest, not the trees. It allows you to see
things coming at you from all sides, and to avoid obstacles as
you move through space. When I walk, my lack of central vision is
less noticeable because it is less necessary. My blind spot
precedes me like a giant flying jellyfish. Large objects - fire
hydrants, people, cars - fall into it several yards away, then
reappear a few feet in front of me. I aim my eyes straight ahead,
straight into the floating blob, but I remain conscious of what
surrounds that blank center. When I look down I cannot see my
feet or what's directly in front of them. So I lift my eyes, and
my feet and what's in front of them emerge from my blind spot
into my peripheral vision. I get a general sense of an obstacle
here or directions there, though I can't necessarily identify it
as a rock or a roller skate.
People often ask me directions - apparently I look like I
know where I'm going. My directions tend to mystify people
because they're too topographical. I may not know street names,
but I retain a memory of the contours of land, of architectural
features, of landscaping. Peripheral vision is not only the
side-to-side view but what's overhead and underfoot. I give
details about the periphery of the route, where trees or
buildings close in overhead, where the sidewalk narrows or
widens. I tell people to keep going to the top of the hill, or to
cross the street at the corner when the street begins to bank to
the right. Since bodies of water tend to be low points, I say,
"Head toward the river," even in cities where this is not a
commonplace idiom. Sighted people are apparently oblivious to
these aspects of their surroundings. They keep their eyes gripped
in taut focus, scanning for road signs, house numbers, numbing
their other senses. I say, "There's a red awning, a blue door."
They're speechless. My landmarks are not theirs. And when I ask
directions they say, "It's over there," gesturing in a general
direction. "You'll know it when you see it." It's a wonder we can
get anywhere.
Expectation plays a large role in what I perceive. I know
what's on my desk because I put it there. If someone leaves me a
surprise gift, it may take a few seconds to identify it, but how
often does that happen? At home, at work, on the street, and in
stores, museums, theaters, parking garages, airports, train
stations, even unfamiliar cities, there is a finite number of
objects that I am likely to encounter. I can recognize most
things through a quick process of elimination. And that process
is only truly conscious on the rare occasions when the unexpected
occurs, as when my cats carry objects out of context. A steel
wool soap pad appears in the bath tub. I see it as a rusty,
grayish blob. Though touch would probably tell me something, it
can be risky to touch something you cannot identify some other
way. I wait for it to move. When it doesn't, I sniff. It smells
faintly metallic and vaguely soapy. Is it a massive hair clog
regurgitated by the drain? This seems implausible. I think, "What
is that?" and then, almost in the same moment, I come up with a
better question, "What's it doing there?" and know the answer.
I once encountered a rabid raccoon on a sidewalk near my
house. I learned what it was from a neighbor watching it from his
screened porch. What I saw was an indistinct, grayish mass, low
to the ground and rather round. It was too big to be a cat and
the wrong shape to be a dog. Its gait was not only unfamiliar but
unsteady. It zigzagged up the pavement. I moved my gaze around it
as my brain formed a picture of a raccoon. The raccoon in my mind
had the characteristic mask across its face, a sharply pointed
nose, striped tail, brindled fur. Nothing in the hazy blob at my
feet, no variations in color or refinements in form, corresponded
with that image. Its position was wrong. The raccoon in my mind
was standing up on its haunches, holding something in its front
paws. And what does a rabid raccoon look like? Was it foaming at
the mouth?
Without my neighbor's information I wouldn't have gone
through this mental process. I could tell that it was an animal,
and probably not a pet. That's all I needed to know to proceed
with caution. But I still might have guessed it was a raccoon. In
this part of the world there are only so many animals it could
have been. Groundhog, woodchuck, raccoon, my brain would have
proposed, but not sloth or koala.
But such unexpected encounters happen so rarely that they
become anecdotes. In the normal course of events I encounter only
those objects, animals, and people that I can predict I will. If
I see them as wobbly shadows, or semi-translucent blobs, it
hardly ever startles me. And the fact that I can distinguish one
shadow from another is no miracle. I cannot see people's faces
well enough to recognize them, but often I know them from their
posture or gait. At the supermarket I distinguish the Cheerios
from the Wheaties because one hazy blur is yellow and the other
is orange. But in a way, you do this too. Marketing experts chose
that color to catch your eye, and the eye of your three-year-old,
who can't read the words yet. Also, while I actively seek that
color to identify the brand, you and your child may be responding
to subliminal messages about sunshiny cheerfulness. Otherwise,
all cereal boxes could be white.
The unimpaired human eye provides the brain with such a
surfeit of visual information that only a certain amount
consciously registers at any moment. In effect, your brain
privileges certain aspects of the retina's images and disregards
others. Each eye sends the brain a billion messages per second.
Together the two eyes transmit twice as much information to the
brain as the rest of the body combined. With all this information
flooding in every second, the perceptual system seems designed to
adapt readily to losses and distortions, whether because of eye
damage or other circumstances.
Consider depth perception. You see the world as
three-dimensional even though the image on your retina is
two-dimensional. Part of the reason is that you have two eyes.
The brain fuses the eyes' two images so you don't see double. But
it also analyzes the slight differences between the two images
and calculates the spatial relationships between objects. Thus,
you see some objects as closer to you than others. You also see
some parts of objects as jutting out toward you while other parts
recede. Close one eye. Why doesn't the world suddenly look
two-dimensional? Because your brain takes into account other
aspects of the image. A ball looks different from a flat disk
because of the play of light and shadow off its surface. In this
world, light tends to shine down on objects, so the upper contour
of a convex object will reflect light while the lower contour
will show shadow. Your brain assesses these variations in color,
and you see a three-dimensional form. Similarly, your brain
responds to other "pictorial" cues to depth. Nearby objects look
bigger than faraway ones because they overlap or obscure parts of
the faraway objects. Even when you have one eye closed, your
brain still has an array of clues to go on. Your brain evaluates
these, and you perceive depth. For this reason an artist can draw
a picture observing the rules of linear perspective and create
the illusion of depth, even though the surface is flat.
The human eye, though capable of a variety of visual tasks,
is relatively delicate, easily injured, subject to all sorts of
diseases and disorders. For our species to survive, the
perceptual system had to be adaptable. For about a century,
scientists, conscious of this evolutionary fact, have devised
ingenious ways to test how much distortion the human visual
system can tolerate. Typically, researchers would mount prisms in
eyeglass frames or goggles. These prisms would, for example, turn
the world upside down or shove it off center by several degrees.
in a relatively short amount of time, the subjects (who were
sometimes the researchers themselves) could walk around without
bumping into things, lay their hands on objects, even read and
write. They "saw" the world as normal again. Of course, when a
researcher designs an experiment and performs it on himself, the
results may be skewed. And even the neutral subject of such an
experiment, told to walk around the room with goggles on, will
struggle to adapt in a way very different from what happens when
someone wakes up one morning to find the visual world radically
altered. Still, the implication of all this research is that the
human perceptual system tends to be resilient, flexible, and
adaptable. You may experience visual adaptation on a small scale
when you wear eyeglasses with a new prescription. For the first
few minutes or more, you may see the world spinning at a dizzying
speed every time you move your head. Then you get used to it.
Your brain adapts without your even having to think about it.
Our brains have been adapting to new visual conditions since
infancy. Each phase of physical, cognitive, and motor development
necessitates the mastery of new visual and perceptual skills. For
instance, as the baby's head grows and her eyes move slightly
farther apart, her brain has to make minuscule adjustments in
order to keep the eyes' two images perfectly fused. As the baby
learns to crawl and then walk, her brain will adapt to a whole
new set of visual situations. Feats of eye-hand coordination also
involve the brain's capacity to make determinations about motion
and space. When she goes to school and begins to read, she will
develop not only the ability to distinguish between characters
but also the skill to move her eyes in an orderly way from left
to right, as well as the finesse to focus the eyes first on the
page and then on the blackboard.
Perceptual development takes about the first ten years of
life. But it may not stop there. Certain people in certain lines
of work seem to train their perceptual systems to perform
specific visual tasks that other people would find impossible.
Such people may have only average eyesight but seem to see more,
more quickly and more accurately. Senator Bill Bradley claims
that during his basketball playing days he trained himself to use
his peripheral vision more accurately, as a way to give himself
an advantage on the court. He would walk past a store window with
his eyes aimed straight ahead and try to identify the objects on
display. Then he would go back and check. Over time, he claims,
he actually expanded his visual field. In fact, the placement of
the eyeballs in the skull limits how far a person can see in any
direction. The maximum angle of vision for humans is 180 degrees
from side to side, and 70 degrees from top to bottom. But most
people do not consciously register at the farthest reaches of
their visual fields. Bradley saw no more than other passersby or
players, but he heightened his sensitivity to what was going on
in the periphery. He taught his brain to recognize objects or
people from minimal details - a flash of motion, a wavy line.
If Bradley's story raises eyebrows, it is because normal
vision is supposed to be immediate, spontaneous,
now-you-see-it-now-you-don't, not a continual game of "Where's
Waldo?" To the blind with some sight, however, Bradley's story
makes perfect sense. Relative to the type and degree of our
conditions, we learn to interpret the world through minimal
visual information. We learn to combine these imperfect and
incomplete images with our other sensory perceptions, plus what
we know about the laws of nature, and call it the world. But when
we do this, when we make claims about our adaptation to subnormal
vision, is when we become most alien. The idea that some people,
through habit or even conscious effort, can use visual
information and skills differently, seems to indict the averagely
sighted as lazy, slack, perhaps even stupid. Because we get by
with less, wringing meaning out of mere scraps of images, we seem
to wag our fingers at the sighted for their wastefulness.
The sighted seem more comfortable thinking of someone like
Ted Williams. Some years after Williams retired from baseball he
performed an informal experiment to prove that he could actually
see the seams of the baseball as it hit his bat. A hitter with a
"good eye" will swing only when the ball appears to be in a
particular region of the strike zone. He looks for the white blur
of the ball to cross that imaginary line, but other details about
the ball do not necessarily register in his brain. Williams saw
the ball as more than a blur. He saw the orientation of the ball
- where the seams were relative to the bat - at the split second
of impact. Optically speaking, the image on the retina of both
hitters would be the same, but Williams's brain apparently got
more from the image. Hitters on a good streak often describe the
ball as looking bigger than usual. Williams seems to have seen it
this way all the time. A lifetime of practice presumably trained
his brain to evaluate the image on his retina at a higher rate of
speed. Practice makes perfect, but practice cannot turn an
average hitter into a Ted Williams. Williams probably had better
than average vision. He was a fighter pilot too, a job that
usually requires acuity of 20/20 or better. Still, half of
baseball is go percent mental. A great hitter like Williams
combines great physical, and in his case visual, resources with a
high level of intellectual discernment. But vision, the sighted
assert, is a God-given gift rather than a well-honed skill.
Superman was born with X-ray vision; he didn't pick it up along
the way. And the vision that separates some - the artist, the
scientist, the leader - from the rest of humanity is always said
to be innate and a little bit otherworldly. The sighted seem to
want to preserve the mystery. Intelligent and highly educated
people are often a bit vague about visual processes. A friend who
teaches visual perception reports that her students, who are
preparing for careers as clinical psychologists, often find the
subject perplexing and irrelevant. If you can see, you don't need
to know why you see. And if you see more than other people, you
should accept the gift without question. Visionaries do not
always choose their own fates. The exceptional vision that the
gods occasionally bestow dictates what path to follow. As Branch
Rickey said of Ted Williams, "How can a man with eyes like that
not be a great hitter?"
Your eyes are supposed to make you who you are. If you are
clear-sighted, you are probably also level-headed and open-
minded. So what do my eyes make me, I wonder. Does the fact that
everything I see seems on the verge of disintegration mean I'm in
a constant state of anxiety about imminent loss? Does the
scintillating motion that I perceive in static objects mean I'm
actually in contact with the seething energy of subatomic
particles? Or else, since my gaze erases everything in its path,
does it make me harbor a delusion about my own divine power?
Perhaps I ask for this. All my speculation about how I see
more than I should given my marred retinas is beside the point.
In most circumstances I rely very little on sight. A cat still
sleeps on my desk. To see her well enough to identify which of my
two cats she is, I must look at her very closely. I lower my face
toward her so that my entire visual field is full of cat, and my
distorting blind spot affects a smaller area. I move my gaze
around, taking in the details of her markings that will allow me
to know which one she is. But I do this only because I am writing
about my vision, attempting to specify how my perceptual system
works. Under normal circumstances I would simply touch her. The
fur of one cat has a slightly coarser texture than the other.
When a surprise gift appears on my desk, I can stare at it,
watching it transmogrify before my eyes, or I can pick it up and
handle it. Touch takes a second but seeing takes more time, and a
kind of concentration better directed elsewhere. Since my sight
is so unreliable, I tend to ignore it altogether or to trust it
only when what I see is confirmed by something else I know.
The notion that one might deliberately ignore sight seems to
threaten sighted people in a way that I cannot fully understand,
since there are situations when sighted people do this too. As a
teenager I studied at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary
Dance. My lack of central vision was not the hindrance that one
might assume. Though teachers and choreographers often
demonstrate positions and steps, they also give oral
instructions. Once a dancer learns the vocabulary of a particular
technique, directions and corrections can be communicated in
words. Also, part of a dancer's training involves giving up an
absolute reliance on sight. My best teachers regularly made the
class turn away from the mirror or close our eyes while
performing an exercise. There is a risk for a dancer of becoming
too dependent on the mirror, since there is never a mirror on
stage. But more important, a dancer has to know, without looking,
what her body is doing at all times. She may be obliged to enter
the stage in the dark, to find her position and begin moving
without the luxury of sight. Even when the stage is lit, the
angles of particular lights may hit the dancer's eyes in ways
that make it impossible to see the floor or the edge of the
stage. When she is dancing with a partner or as part of the corps
de ballet, she must be conscious not only of her own body but
also of the bodies of the dancers around her. Part of this
perfect unity comes from rehearsal, of course, but in a live
performance, with live music, the tempo may not be exactly the
same as it was in rehearsal. Adjustments must be made without
looking. There can be no shifting eyeballs, no sideways glances
to see where someone else is. A dancer develops eyes in the back
of her head, on the soles of her feet. To illustrate this point,
one of our teachers used a negative example. She would mime one
of those ludicrously inept people you encounter at parties or
standing in a movie line, who back into you, apparently unaware
that you were standing there. "Can you imagine?" she'd say as we
laughed, vowing never to be like that. "Not knowing there was
someone behind you!"
A good baker smells when the bread is done. An auto mechanic
hears the trouble in the engine - isn't that why they call it a
tune-up? You can fasten a necklace at the back of your neck
without looking, shampoo your hair with your eyes closed and find
the light switch in the dark. "But when I do those things I'm not
renouncing sight," you may argue, "I just sometimes get by
without it." This hits on a dilemma that faces the blind like me
who have, in the phrase of experts, "some usable sight." The
phrase is troubling because it seems to denote a hierarchy with a
visual elite (20/20 or better) on top and the blind with
absolutely no sight on the bottom. Also, the phrase is imbued
with the notion that there is a right and wrong way to use sight.
Do you always make the best possible use of your sight?
You may never need to ask yourself this question. But if
your sight fails, if your acuity dips below the magic 20/200
line, or your visual field narrows to less than 20 degrees, you
will hear the question all the time. We live in an age of
high-tech low vision innovations. Optometrists can prescribe
dozens of different aids designed to help patients perform all
sorts of visual activities. But unlike the eyeglasses you may
already be used to wearing, no single device, or even a gambit of
gadgets, can completely compensate for the sight you've lost. The
handheld magnifier you use to read the newspaper does not help
you read a street sign or do embroidery or watch TV. To be an
informed consumer of all the equipment now on the market, you
will have to think of vision in a new way. Vision is a series of
discrete activities, not a constant, seamless, pervasive ebb and
flow of information. What's more, you will need to prioritize,
decide which activities are worth performing visually. Otherwise
you may leave the doctor's office laden with cumbersome and
expensive paraphernalia but little guidance on how to deal with
the world without sight.
I use some low vision aids. For example, I have a pair of
reading glasses with a magnifying lens mounted on the right side,
which allow me to read print (mostly large print) when I get very
close to the page. I also have a closed-circuit television system
that projects a magnified image of books and letters. My computer
allows me to work in print as large as I like. From time to time
I investigate other devices. Every month something new comes on
the market, but I do not buy everything that's available. For one
thing, most low vision aids are very expensive, and health
insurance companies are still rather stingy about them. Still, I
could afford to buy them for myself. The question is: Do I need
them? I could get a pair of glasses with small telescopes mounted
on the lenses which would allow me to make out a person's face.
These would be custom-made, with the telescopes carefully placed
and permanently focused at a predetermined distance. My doctor
suggested that such glasses might be useful in the classroom, so
I tried on a pair. Since these were not made for me, it took a
while to figure out how to make them work. Eventually I managed
to see my doctor's face as he stood in the doorway, about ten
feet from me. In fact, I could see his face only about as well as
I would if he were sitting across a table from me. His features
were merely a hazy smudge on his face. I could, however, see his
lips move, which was an undeniable improvement. But the glasses
also created an extremely disconcerting distortion. While I saw a
closeup of his face through the telescopes, I simultaneously saw
his body at the proper distance. He appeared like a truncated
cartoon figure, and I found myself laughing uncontrollably. Over
time, I could have gotten used to the distortion. But I would
still have to decide at what distance to have the telescopes set.
Ten to fifteen feet would allow me to see the students in the
back row in a small classroom, but not those in the middle or
front rows. Would I have to get three different pairs and keep
switching? And for what - the pleasure of knowing that a student
in the back row is snoozing or that another's lips move while
he's speaking? I know these things already.
Fortunately, my optometrist was not offended by my rejection
of available technology, much less my laughter. He knew that an
aid one person finds indispensable another will find useless,
even though both share the same type and degree of blindness. Not
all eye care specialists are so gracious. Some are perplexed,
even annoyed by blind patients who reject visual aids. Few offer
or even possess much information about nonvisual skills for the
blind, such as braille or white cane use. Patients, especially
those who bring with them myths and prejudices about blindness,
can end up with the impression that it is better to do something
with the eyes than without, no matter how cumbersome and
expensive the equipment required. Eye specialists are committed
to the mission of preserving sight and preventing blindness.
Blindness is the enemy, to be kept at bay at all costs. When a
patient rejects visual aids for nonvisual techniques, many eye
specialists take it as an insult, as ingratitude, or worse yet,
as a defection to the other side.
In 1991, researchers at a clinic of the National Institutes
of Health implanted tiny electrodes in the brain of a woman who
had been blind for twenty years. When they stimulated the
electrodes, the woman "saw" colored dots, as if before her eyes.
In the not so distant future these researchers and others will be
able to implant a greater number of electrodes. These will be
attached to tiny TV cameras mounted in eyeglass frames so the
user would "see" the world as patterns of dots similar to the
array on a stadium scoreboard. These researchers are quick to
point out that this artificial vision is meant to "aid reading
and mobility, not restore normal vision to the point you could go
into an art gallery and appreciate a Rembrandt." I admire the
unnamed woman who volunteered for this experiment. The research
has far-reaching implications that will benefit many more people
than the few blind individuals who might choose to have the
operation done. At the same time, like many blind people (even
those with no sight at all) who can read and get around through
nonvisual means, I find news of such research unsettling. If such
artificial vision won't let you see a Rembrandt, is it really
worth getting a hole cut in your head?
The newspaper accounts of this experiment included no
references to the woman's feelings about what she "saw."
Psychologists and physicians who have studied blind people whose
sight has been restored by an operation (usually a cornea
transplant) often report that patients eventually experience some
degree of depression. Some end up rejecting sight and the
advantages that sight provides. They continue to read braille
rather than print, to identify objects through touch, and to sit
in the dark. The usual explanation for this depression is that
learning to see is such a daunting task that it leads to
discouragement. Or else they are overwhelmed with regret for the
long lost years of darkness. The thought never occurs to the
sighted researchers who have devoted themselves to the study of
vision that the depression may be due to another cause. After a
lifetime of hearing about the miracle of sight, the reality may
be disappointing. The visible world may turn out to be uglier
than expected.
If I got my sight back, I would be able to read print
effortlessly and would learn to drive a car. I doubt that I would
get depressed, but I probably wouldn't be continually elated
either. I have a pretty good idea about how seeing works. As it
is, by some people's standards I rely too much on sight. Since I
never underwent official rehabilitation training for the blind,
my nonvisual skills are not as well honed as they could be. For
instance, I have only recently begun to learn braille and am
nowhere near proficient. I have also recently begun using a white
cane to indicate to sighted people, especially those driving
cars, that I do not see well. But in many situations I find it
more convenient to leave the cane at home and maneuver through
space using my peripheral sight. My closets, cupboards, drawers,
and refrigerator do not always stay arranged so that I can find
things without looking. And I make mistakes. I talk to the
sweater lying on the couch, thinking it's a cat. I try to pick a
scrap of shiny gift wrap off the carpet and find that it is only
a patch of reflected light. So I make resolutions, vow to improve
myself, as you probably do. The difference is that my resolutions
tend to turn on the debate about when to use and when not to use
the sight I have.
I used to thread a needle using vision. I would hold the
needle in my left hand, between my thumb and index finger. I
could not see its eye, so I felt for it with my finger, then
turned the needle until the eye was facing me. I took the thread
in my right hand, with about an inch protruding between my thumb
and index finger. Behind a magnifying lens I would aim my eyes a
little to one side of the needle. I could see its straight,
silvery sheen. I drew the thread to that line of light and slid
it upward to where I knew the eye to be. When I felt it miss its
mark, I would try again, guiding the thread a millimeter to the
left or right. Eventually the end of the thread would catch. I'd
carefully make the thread perform slow, regular undulations until
I felt it pass all the way through the needle's eye.
I don't do this anymore. Now I know better. I ask someone
else to thread the needle for me. Or I use a self-threading
needle. More likely, I take the garment to the dry cleaners and
pay someone to sew on the button or mend the tear. It may seem
ludicrous that I ever did it at all. Threading a needle is a
daunting task even to the visual elite. But for the blind in the
sighted world, where blindness is the enemy, synonymous with
ignorance, indifference, and sin, the simple question - to see or
not to see - takes on substantial significance.
Sight is perhaps not my primary sense, but I still use it. I
know my vision is not trustworthy, so I tend to seek
corroboration from my other senses for what I see. But I don't
know how to turn it off. Besides, I like what I see. Color, for
instance, gives me great pleasure. On gray winter days I long for
vivid colors, as I sometimes crave certain tastes. I suspect that
I don't see color as well as the average viewer. My retinas don't
have many cones, the photoreceptors that allow for color
perception. But the colors that I see fascinate and refresh me. I
close my eyes and imagine colors, summoning up memories of
particular hues. Perhaps I am practicing. Although whatever
caused my maculas to degenerate has probably done all the damage
it ever will, there is no guarantee that something else might not
go wrong. Everything I know about the retina tells me it's a
wonder anyone can expect to have an undamaged one for a lifetime.
And there is so much else that can happen to the eyes. If I lost
the sight I have, I would miss it. But to mourn that loss as I
mourn the loss of loved ones would be to buy the assertion that
human experience is always, first and foremost, visual. I see
through that now.
Perhaps I had no business at the Matisse exhibition. Perhaps
I should give up my affection for the visual arts and seek
aesthetic enrichment only in concert halls and opera houses. But
I have been going to museums and art galleries since childhood.
When I was growing up in New York, such field trips were a
routine part of my education. And since both my parents were
visual artists, looking at works of art always seemed a natural
part of life. It requires concentration and patience, but for
now, this effort still seems worth it.
I stand before the two versions of The Dance. The man with
the earphones tells me that I am standing too close, then moves
on before I can ask him, "Do you make the best possible use of
your sight?"
"What?" he would probably say. "Do I what?"
It's too bad. We might have had an interesting conversation
about vision or art or something. "When you look at this
painting, what do you see? How do you know that's what you're
supposed to see? What makes you so sure?"
I let him go. He's right; I am standing about a foot away
from the wall. No one else is standing this near. Matisse is not
a painter who inspires close examination. The world he paints is
devoid of the kind of fine detail that demands such intense
perusal. Still, there could be other reasons to stand at this
viewing distance. I might be a painter examining brush strokes at
close range. Except that I don't even seem to be looking at the
painting. I have my eyes aimed at the wall between the two
canvases. I might be a gallery owner, examining how the canvases
are framed or the precise shade of the wall on which to hang such
works. In fact, I am, out of the corners of my eyes, trying to
gauge the difference between the two versions. In the version I
have never seen before the dancers seem redder, but the other
colors seem about the same. These colors please me. The green in
particular has a freshness that I find very satisfying. I step
back to where you're supposed to stand. I aim my blind gaze at
the center of the first version, and it is ringed by dancers. I
have known this painting since childhood, and my appreciation of
it is naive and rather personal. The figure in the lower left
resembles one of my teachers at the Graham school, perhaps
because her pose is the most dancerly. And the circle is a
powerful symbol to me. I move closer again, because it is the
green that gets to me today.
Behind me, all along the bench below the window, sit people
wearing earphones. I do not know whether the recorded message has
told them to sit there or whether they are just resting, letting
the tapes play out. The sound of the tapes hovers around them
like a swarm of whispering bees.
In the future, art lovers won't need to rent those machines.
Museums will hang tape players or perhaps video screens by every
canvas, and people will select which ones to plug their earphones
into. These devices will become more and more interactive,
allowing people to select from a menu of possible topics, perhaps
even ask questions. "Why is that one red?" I would ask, or, "Tell
me something about this green." And CD-ROM and multimedia
technologies soon will allow me to view this entire show, or any
museum collection, on my home computer screen. I could boot up an
image of this painting, zoom in on any detail, access volumes of
historical, biographical, and critical information, all from the
privacy of my own home.
I do not question the value of all this technology, and I
will probably make use of some of it. But I will still come to
museums. I assume that they will be less crowded, more peaceful,
with no one there to bother me and tell me how to look at art. It
is late in the afternoon. The crowd is thinning. I will leave
soon, missing more than half the show. The work I need to do to
see these paintings is physically wearying and mentally taxing.
But I linger. "Red," I think, looking at the unfamiliar version
of the painting. "Red changes everything." It makes the outline
of the dancers less distinct, which gives a slightly greater
sense of motion. This may just be me. Red and black is a tricky
combination in my eyes. Red print on a black background registers
as pure black to me. I am uncertain if the redder color of the
dancers in that version will have the same effect on another
viewer. I have come to this show alone, and there's no one around
to ask.
I take a final look. I know I probably don't see what I'm
supposed to see. I'm sure that I don't see what you do. But I
don't delude myself either. I know that what I see, or think I
see, is primarily a product of my brain working around my visual
limitations and doing the best it can. You may believe you see
something else. I live with my uncertainty and you with your
unwavering faith. We may never see eye to eye on this. But I can
live with that, too.
CHAPTER 5
Here's Looking at You
Of all the normal visual experiences that sighted people
take for granted, the one I find most confusing is eye contact. I
could live with this confusion except that sometimes eye contact
seems a matter of life and death. For instance, one day I was
listening to tabloid TV and heard a woman talking about shooting
the man who molested her child. She said that before she pulled
the trigger she wanted to look him "dead in the eye." She wanted
to see for herself whether he regretted what he'd done. To do
this she had to step right up to him, an arm's length away,
endangering herself. But, she said, she had to do this, had to
take those few extra seconds to look him in the eye. She
explained that if she'd seen any sign of remorse, she wouldn't
have fired it. But there was nothing in his eyes. No remorse.
Only fear. So she killed him.
I try to picture this. What does remorse look like, I
wonder. Like a Method actress I summon memories of actions I
regret. I touch my face to feel my expression. My brows knit,
lifting the outer corners of my eyes, while my mouth droops,
deflating my cheeks. What this may be doing to my eyeballs I
cannot tell. Fear, I know, stretches the skin around the eyes,
revealing a lot of white. If the child molester had only managed
to alter his expression in some way, make his eyelids quiver,
perhaps squeeze out a tear, could he have saved himself? Would
the mother have been taken in? More likely she would have seen
the insincerity in his look and shot him anyway. And she didn't
give him that much time. The whole incident could have lasted
only a few seconds. He saw her, or at least saw someone step out
of the shadows into his path. It's possible that he didn't even
recognize her. He probably wasn't expecting to see her there, and
so drew a blank. And when he saw the gun in her hand it didn't
make much difference who she was. Then she shot him. No time for
him to lift his gaze and look her "dead in the eye" and see what
she wanted. And what exactly would he have seen? Question,
accusation, hatred, rage.
And there's more. In that final split second of eye contact
the mother wanted something else to occur. She was not merely
reading his look, deciphering the thoughts going on behind the
precise configuration of his features. She was also attempting to
inscribe something there, an image of her face, and in her face,
a reflection of her child's face. Apt, from her point of view at
least, that the final image should encompass the reason for
death, and (as she saw it) its justice - the mother of his victim
and his executioner all in one. She said something about sending
him to his maker. She wanted him to carry her image along with
him. It would stand between him and his God, to obscure their
view of each other and prevent the possibility of eye contact
between them. It could also serve as a label identifying his
crime, just in case his maker was looking the wrong way when he
committed it. Mother, executioner, maker, destroyer. All there in
a blink of an eye.
The interviewer did not question the mother about her need
to make eye contact before she shot the child molester. Had it
been me, I might have asked: "Didn't you see what you wanted to
see? Isn't this detail in your story meant to arouse sympathy by
implying that you were provoked into shooting him by the way he
looked at you?" The interviewer assumed that a majority of
viewers would find the mother's explanation of those few seconds
plausible. A look can be a provocation. A look can speak volumes.
Apparently it can say, "I hurt your child and got away with it,"
in a way that cannot be mistaken for, "I regret what I did.
Please don't shoot me." Apparently most viewers would take this
for granted. They might debate whether her act was justified, but
they would not doubt that some meaningful and unambiguous
eye-to-eye communication took place.
Eye contact is a mystery to me. My macular degeneration
makes it impossible for me to see such detail as features on a
face. When I try to look someone in the eyes, he disappears. If
the person is close, in intimate space, the upper third of his
face hazes over. I may see his lips move, but I cannot see his
eyes. If he is across a table from me, my impaired central vision
decapitates him. A haze hangs above his shoulders. To see him, to
make his head solidify into a discernible form, I shift my eyes
slightly to one side. I aim for his ear. The haze resolves into a
head shape. But the sidelong glance lacks detail. I see a shadowy
T of eyes, nose, and mouth. I cannot tell whether the eyes are
open or closed. I can't tell whether he's looking at me. Besides,
this off-center gaze can make me seem shy, distracted,
suspicious, bored, or untrustworthy. I shift my gaze back,
centering my eyes on his, or where I know them to be. I hit my
mark - bull's eye - but I see and feel nothing. Still, nine out
of ten people sitting across the table from me would call this
eye contact. At the precise instant I see them the least, they
believe me to be engaged in the most significant visual exchange.
Faking eye contact is not terribly hard. As I've noted
before, sighted people are not always that observant. Also, when
your eyes are lined up with the eyes of the person across the
table, your ears are conveniently aligned for optimum
stereophonic listening. So you can hear eye contact even if you
can't see it. Some sighted people can tell the difference,
however. When I was a dance student at the Martha Graham School,
one of the elements of the choreographic repertoire that gave me
a lot of trouble involved the gaze. Sometimes a dancer was
required to meet the gaze of a dancer across the stage or to
fixate on an object. This had to be done with enough intensity
and precision so that the whole audience could tell what each
dancer was looking at. My teachers there were trained to spot the
minutest detail of a dancer's movement or physiognomy and so were
never fooled by my charade. They commented on the way my gaze
wavered or seemed to fall short of the target. I perceived this
as yet another feat of muscular control to master and would
practice in front of my friends. "Now you've got it," they'd tell
me, and I would will my muscles to memorize the sensation so I
could re-create it on command.
The eye seems irresistibly drawn to other eyes. There's
evidence that certain cortical cells in our brains respond
specifically to eyes and eye-shaped patterns. Eye contact
produces measurable physiological arousal: increases in brain
stem activity, galvanic skin response, even heart rate. infants
learn to make eye contact with their mothers long before they can
see much else. When adults play peek-a-boo with babies, they help
both develop the skill and show that eye contact is an important
and pleasurable activity. As babies grow up they learn to detect
subtle changes in the eyes they look at. Toddlers can detect,
with amazing accuracy, the precise object of another's gaze.
Sometimes when I'm talking to someone, shamming eye contact, my
eyes may involuntarily shift to one side. Though this shift may
be only momentary, the person almost always feels compelled to
look where I seemed to have glanced. I sense a survival mechanism
taking over. This abrupt but minuscule movement that shifts my
iris off center and exposes more of the white part seems to send
a subliminal message: "When you see the whites of my eyes, be
afraid."
Obviously there was an evolutionary imperative for our
species to develop a mechanism to detect when another creature is
looking at us, and to ascertain whether that creature wants to
fight us, eat us, mate with us, or flee from us. But is the
system really sensitive enough to detect, from the eyes alone,
all the fine gradations of emotion between hostility, hunger,
lust, and fear? Because I can perform tricks with my eyes, people
tell me that I don't "look blind." To look blind is to stare
blankly straight ahead through immobile, unblinking eyes. In
fact, this expression is more the exception than the rule. Like
most blind people, I blink and move my eyes. Blinking is a
reflex. The eyelids close and open, spreading a saline solution
over the eyes to cleanse and lubricate them. This can happen
whether the eye functions or not. Also, like most blind people, I
lost my sight after I had already developed the habits of seeing,
such as coordinating the movement of the two eyes and aiming them
at the source of sound.
It has been more than a quarter of a century since I could
make eye contact, and I have no memory of what it feels like. And
while I have no direct experience of it, I understand its
significance from the way people speak and write about it. A
great deal of contemporary literary and film theory explores the
power dynamics of the gaze, and who controls it. Any novel I pick
up will make some mention of fleeting glances, longing looks,
sullen stares. In my own fiction, I write about it too.
Frequently some reference to eye contact provides a convenient
shorthand for a range of complex emotional interplay. To write
"they exchanged a look" or "he caught her eye" conveys a lot in a
minimum of words. At times, however, I find these phrases
annoyingly hackneyed and imprecise. I start detailing the whole
facial expression, calibrating the lift of brows and lids, the
twitch of lip muscles, the curve of cheek. My goal is to make my
reader involuntarily re-create the character's expression and
thus catch some tremor of the emotion that produces it. But too
much of this can encumber action or distract the reader. More
often than not I put, "When he glanced at her she looked sad,"
and let it go at that.
I question sighted people about the phenomenon, but what
they tell me is often confusing. A friend tells me a story about
a class he's teaching. He asked a difficult question, and no one
wanted to answer. "All of a sudden they won't look at me - forty
pairs of eyes aimed in forty different directions." Of course, I
know what this feels like, or rather, sounds like. In my class
such questions are greeted by a vibrating silence. Unfortunately,
reluctance to answer sounds like shock and also like rapt
attention. Boredom and irritation are noisier. I try to picture
my friend in his class, his question hanging in the air. My
picture is rather crude. Since I cannot imagine forty pairs of
eyes, much less forty faces distinctly discernible from one
another, I play myself an interior movie, a panning shot of face
after face after face. Each face is aimed in a different
direction and wears a different expression. One is uplifted, the
eyes pointing to the ceiling, the lips pressed together, the brow
creased - thoughtful contemplation. The next face is lowered, the
lids at half-mast, eyebrows bearing down - perplexity. The third
face is behind a book, fingers riffling pages - the search. Then
there's the face of bored stupefaction, slack-jawed,
droopy-lidded. I know this is not what my friend saw. In fact,
all his students may have had their faces aimed at him, and the
faces may have been without expression. Only the eyes swiveled to
aim at different spots: ceiling, floor, wall, window. And though
the eyes were staring, they were probably blank, reflecting the
blankness of the brain behind them, glazed, dazed, unblinking,
and unseeing - the way blind eyes are supposed to look. I marvel
at my friend's ability to see this, take it in at a glance. His
eyes scan the class for eyes with an answer. "You there, in the
third row. You look like you know." What does that look like?
Again, my imagination draws something broad, stagey - an
expression meant to be read from the back of the house. I picture
the student leaning forward in his seat. His hand lies across his
open book. Tension in his arm suggests he's about to raise it.
His face is thrust forward, his lips slightly ajar, his eyebrows
hoisting his lids high.
The problem with my picture is that I focus too much on
peripheral details - the posture of the body, the arrangement of
the limbs, the twitching and stretching of facial muscles - and
too little on the eyes themselves. When the sighted describe
facial expressions, the eyes are more central and more active.
Eyes glow, twinkle, sparkle, shimmer, smoulder, and flicker,
projecting emotions the viewer readily understands. But what I
know about the visual system tells me that the eyes cannot do all
this. They receive and respond to light but cannot emit it. The
"flash of recognition" or "spark of understanding" the teacher
sees in his student's eyes is merely a trick of lighting. The
lids rise, in wonder and surprise, exposing more of the slick
surface of the eyeball to reflect light back to the beholder.
Illumination. The downcast eye beneath half-lowered lids cannot
catch and throw back the light and so seems dull and
unenlightened. The eyes themselves are passive. Without the
context of the mobile face around them, and the play of light
upon them, they remain unchanging and vacant. But in the language
of the sighted, where seeing is believing, the eyes must be the
focal point of every expression. All the wrinkles and crinkles of
emotion occur only to funnel meaning into the eyes.
But I miss the point. In my friend's story the students are
withholding their gaze. It's as if they suspect the teacher
possesses some mesmeric power: "Look into my eyes. Speak!" Or
else they fear, if eye contact is made, he will be able to see
inside their heads to discover that they have not done the
reading. As in the exchange between the mother and the child
molester, eye contact seems more than a process of seeing and
being seen. The students avert their gaze, attempting to cut off
communication, while the teacher tries to coax the gaze out of
them. Can he also, when contact is made, perhaps transmit
something to them, inscribe the answer through the eyes into the
brain? Or could they read the answer he's looking for in his
eyes?
I try a new picture. I imagine that each eye emits a silvery
beam of light, like the flickering beam of a film projector. The
classroom becomes a network of intercepting shafts of light. The
teacher sends his own twin beams into the web. If he is lucky, he
makes contact, attaching his beams to those of a student.
Combined in this way, the light becomes more opaque, more
palpable. Contact. A circuit is created between them, and through
it impulses are transmitted, messages sent and received.
But that's science fiction. Real life doesn't look like
that.
On the radio, Liane Hansen interviews the photographer
Howard Schatz about his book Homeless: Portraits of Americans in
Hard Times. He photographed the people on the streets where he
met them but used a black drape to blot out any details of their
surroundings. He explains that he did this to oblige viewers to
look at the people, to see them eye-to-eye and thus, to
understand them. He knows how it is. People are afraid to look
too closely at the homeless. They avert their eyes and walk by.
They fear that making eye contact with such people might have
unpleasant consequences. Disturbing messages could pass through
the eyes of the homeless person into the eyes of the passerby:
"Brother, can you spare a dime?" Schatz hopes that his
photographs can force the encounter people try to avoid. He wants
viewers to confront the homeless, contemplate their plight, and
perhaps even do something about it. He not only acts as an agent
for this confrontation but also sets an example by donating the
proceeds of his project to a relief organization.
Schatz interviewed his subjects and tells their stories. A
printed text accompanies most of the photographs. A few pictures,
however, have no text. Apparently some pictures tell their own
stories. Of one, Hansen says, "It's in his eyes."
I wonder about this. What exactly is visible in the eyes
that makes words unnecessary? If a picture is worth a thousand
words, why include any text at all? Isn't the book itself context
enough to compel the viewer to understand each photo in a
particular way? Is it possible that you could take anyone - a
factory worker, a banker, a movie star - dress him in rags,
photograph him before a black backdrop, supply a printed tale of
woe, and achieve the same effect? Conversely, could you take a
homeless man, dress him in pinstripes, attach a story of
privilege and Ivy League degrees, and make that convincing too?
True, malnutrition, stress, fatigue, and illness can leave
visible traces in skin, teeth, and hair. Hard times can dull the
luster of the eyes and contribute to a variety of eye diseases.
But in a different context, with a different text, couldn't these
visible characteristics be understood differently?
Of course, Schatz and Hansen are engaged in the difficult
task of describing a visual phenomenon to an audience that cannot
see it, an audience temporarily blind. It is understandable, if
discouraging, that they fall back on certain figures of sighted
speech which point to the eyes as not only the focal point of
every face but as the site of all significant experience. The
eyes at once interpret and inscribe, emote and receive, project
and absorb. The blind, excluded from this constant, kinetic
interchange, must take the sighted's word for this.
Schatz uses language more precisely when he describes the
encounter that inspired the project. He saw a woman sitting on a
sidewalk in San Francisco. It was in the early 1980s, before most
Americans developed the habit of walking by the homeless every
day without seeing them. The woman had a sign which read "Hard
Times" and a cup for donations. Schatz recalls that she was "made
up poorly - either she did it without a mirror, or she did the
best she could." He was struck by the irony. She went to the
trouble to apply makeup, presumably to make herself more
attractive to passersby, but ended up looking worse. Except that
it was precisely this poor paint job that attracted the
photographer's eye. He also noticed that she "looked straight
ahead, as if she weren't there. As if she weren't to be seen."
She was staring into space, looking at nothing, failing to see
what was before her eyes. Her face mirrored the faces of the
people passing, pretending not to see her. The blank stare. The
blind gaze. It occurs to me that maybe the woman was blind. Maybe
that's why her makeup was so bad. It is estimated that a
significant number of America's homeless population has some form
of untreated or undiagnosed eye trouble. Impaired sight may make
it difficult to fill out forms or get a driver's license or
follow directions or make eye contact during a job interview.
Employers, landlords, social workers, and cops may read these
difficulties as signs of mental incapacity or laziness. Thus,
people who might be eligible for services for the blind, or aided
by a pair of glasses, may end up on the street. But there is no
way of knowing if the woman Schatz saw was one of these. He goes
on: "I couldn't keep my eyes off her and of course I felt
terrible doing this." Although he had a camera with him, he could
not take this woman's picture because it "would have been too
exploiting." She would not meet his eye, make the contact that
would permit him to preserve the moment and give dignity to her
suffering by forcing others to see it. His desire to make people
"look, eye-to-eye, and understand" was thwarted because she
withheld her gaze.
That's the picture I'd like to see, but I doubt I could see
all that in a picture. My experience of photography, especially
black and white, is sketchy at best. I need the context of a
label or title to make the shades of gray resolve into something
meaningful; color pictures give me an extra clue to go on.
Photographs offer me an opportunity to simulate eye contact. I
hold a fashion magazine cover close to my face, move my gaze
around, piece together the arrangement and shape of the features
of the model pictured there. Even if I could meet her eyes with
mine, I know that this is not what people really look like. The
photo has probably been retouched, flaws airbrushed away. And the
photograph is static. The slippery, liquid sheen off the eyeballs
is arrested. There's no blinking. I sense something between us,
the shiny transparent surface of the magazine cover itself. But
it's the best I can do. To get this close to a live person I
would have to know her intimately. I try to line up the photo's
eyes with my own. She has a direct gaze. The whole eye is
visible, the pupil and iris lined up in the center of the eye.
Professional models and movie actors learn to create the illusion
of the direct, eye-catching gaze. They aim their eyes precisely
at the lens of the camera. They may even learn what many portrait
painters know, that most people have a dominant, or lead, eye.
The dominant eye points directly at the viewer while the other
eye appears slightly off center. Eye dominance is usually related
to handedness, so right-handed people generally have a dominant
right eye. It's easy to determine which of your eyes is dominant.
Make a circle with your thumb and index finger. With both eyes
open, line up this circle with an object across the room. Now
close first one eye, then the other. When your dominant eye is
open, the object will appear in the center of the circle. When
the other eye is open, the object will jump out of alignment.
I study the model's eyes. I cannot tell which eye is
dominant because I cannot see both eyes simultaneously. To see
one eye, I aim my gaze a little to the right. Now her eye seems
to be aimed at something over my left shoulder.
I assume that since she is on a magazine cover, her eyes are
beautiful - "easy on the eyes," someone might say. They are very
blue, perhaps unnaturally so. With a magnifying lens, I can make
out the pattern of flecks and strands in the iris. Apparently
this pattern is as unique as fingerprints. Automatic teller
machines and similar devices will soon he able to use this
information to verify a customer's identity. Perhaps an adept
viewer really can read the model's story in this pattern, as a
fortune-teller reads palms. Her pupils seem a bit dilated. The
pupil opens and closes in response to light, but it also dilates
when the person is excited or sexually aroused. When you look at
someone with dilated pupils, your own pupils may involuntarily
dilate in response. As the pupil widens, more light floods the
eye. You are dazzled by the other's beauty. The word "pupil"
comes from the Latin for "little doll," perhaps a reference to
the miniature reflection you see when you look into someone's
eyes. So when the pupil is enlarged, there is a better backdrop
for your image, and you get excited. in fact, the effect of a
dilated pupil has nothing to do with such narcissism and can
occur spontaneously whether or not you are "making eyes" at
someone. Researchers show their subjects photographs of people.
The photos have been retouched so that the pupils look enlarged.
The subjects report that the people with the enlarged pupils
looked more friendly, attractive, or sexy. And this is not news.
For centuries European women used drops, derived from a plant in
the deadly nightshade family, to dilate their pupils and make
their eyes more alluring. Accordingly, the drug was called
belladonna.
I'm not sure what message I'm supposed to derive from this
model's dilated pupils. Since the magazine is aimed at a
hetero-sexual female audience I guess she's supposed to look
friendly, eager to share her beauty secrets with me. Her eyes are
large and relatively wide-set. Apparently beauty in eyes has to
do with the spacing between them as well as with the color and
shape. Human beings have eyes in the front of their heads because
we evolved as predators. The relative proximity of one eye to the
other allows humans and other land predators to spot and track
prey. The eyes of our prey - deer, rabbits, birds - are farther
apart, making it easy to scan for predators. Does this mean that
a wide-eyed beauty is appealing because she looks like prey,
vulnerable and tasty? When someone's eyes are too close together
they are said to look stupid, brutish, and even sinister, prone
to violence.
Though all this is a matter of millimeters, apparently it
registers subliminally whenever you look at and into someone's
eyes. The way eyes look matters enough to filmmakers that they
will budget tens of thousands of dollars to create special eye
effects. Actors may use drops to dilate or constrict their
pupils, wear contact lenses to tint the irises, or employ other
devices to make their eyes appear supernatural, bestial,
deranged, or blind. These effects are expensive and
uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous, for the actors. It hardly
seems worth it for such a little thing. But of course the eyes on
the movie screen are magnified hundreds of times, and the eyes of
the audience naturally gravitate toward them. So the character's
true self must show in the eyes.
In real life, however, eye contact is not a matter of
careful, prolonged scrutiny. It occurs in the twinkling of an
eye. It can be done from great distances, at high rates of speed.
A friend of mine was driving on an interstate. He passed a car
that had been pulled over by a state policeman. As my friend went
by, the cop looked at him and made a gesture, perhaps to indicate
that he should pull over.
But the gesture was ambiguous, my friend says. Several
interpretations seemed possible at that rate of speed, and the
gesture might have been directed at another motorist. My friend
drove on. He got off the highway at the next exit. He drank
coffee for a while. When he guessed that it was safe, he got back
on the road. The same cop nabbed him for failing to pull over
before.
"But officer," my friend protested, "I didn't know what you
wanted. I wasn't even sure you were signaling to me."
"You knew," the cop said, handing him the ticket. "You made
eye contact."
Now there's something I'd like to see. Is it really possible
for a person in a car traveling sixty-five miles an hour (or
more, depending on whose story you believe) to focus on and hold
the eyes of someone standing still by the side of the road?
Whether the cop's claim would stand up in court - in the eyes of
the law - I do not know. My friend paid the fine without protest.
Though even sighted people may be skeptical about this
story, it implies that some people may learn to be better at eye
contact than others. A cop's life may depend on his ability to
pick up minute signals from the eyes he sees. Flight attendants
and bank tellers receive training in interpreting the way people
make or resist eye contact. Self-defense literature for women is
full of advice about eye contact. It is risky to bestow it
unthinkingly, because a casual glance can be misconstrued,
interpreted as an invitation. On the other hand, it is equally
dangerous to appear distracted, to have an unfocused gaze. This
can be seen as vulnerability. Authors go on to advise that if a
woman is attacked, she should look her assailant straight in the
eye and attempt to stare him down. The fleeting gaze can seem
weak and spur the urge to dominate.
When I question sighted people about eye contact in ordinary
social situations, the diversity of their answers staggers me. So
many factors play a role. Some claim that eye contact between
strangers is more common in large cities. A friend complains that
when she moved from a large east-coast city to a small
southwestern town, she missed the casual eye contact she enjoyed
back home. Another city-bred friend tells me he was so warned
against meeting the glances of strangers that he finds it
difficult to make eye contact even when it would be safe and
appropriate. And though the eyes are supposed to speak a
universal language, a great deal seems to get lost in
translation. When a man makes eyes at you from across a crowded
room, are you attracted or repelled? When a woman fails to return
your gaze, is she lying or shy? How do you know? When you're
speaking to a group of people, when do you try to catch someone's
eye? How long do you hold it? Why? I know people who seem to have
a complete set of guidelines, specific answers to all these
questions. There are others who admit to being as stymied by the
whole issue as I am.
I've heard tell of something called "eye sex," but the
people I ask about it give me few answers. Either they giggle
with adolescent prudery or give me what I assume to be a knowing
look - "If you gotta ask, you'll never know." I wonder about it
when I ride escalators and subways. What sort of propositions are
being sent to me as I stand there, oblivious. Worse yet, what are
my eyes saying back?
Friends discuss the phenomenon called "gay-dar" and assert
that they can detect a person's sexual orientation simply from a
look. This look transcends such superficial features as
hairstyles, clothing, posture, speech, and mannerisms.
A friend of mine who has been hard of hearing since birth
tells me that her sisters used to criticize her for staring too
intently at people who were talking to her. When she was in
graduate school, a classmate initially interpreted her
too-intense gaze as a sign that she was a lesbian when in fact
she is not. Is that what her sisters were worried about?
There are cultural differences as well. In some Asian
cultures, the direct gaze is considered rude, while the downcast
or averted gaze is deemed respectful. For this reason, Westerners
- missionaries, traders, soldiers - sometimes labeled Asians they
encountered as inscrutable, deceitful, or treacherous. Do Asians
wishing to do business in the West practice looking people in the
eye?
And why call it contact when no actual contact takes place?
But everyone I ask is adamant about that. It is not a purely
visual experience. I am told that it is a unique and absolutely
unmistakable feeling, as palpable as a touch, an electric charge,
a jolt. Perhaps it is precisely because the exposed eyeball is
the one part of the body even lovers do not touch. You gaze into
your lover's eyes but do not caress them. Apparently an atavistic
fear of losing the eyes makes people squeamish. They flinch
reflexively if a projectile comes too near. Even watching someone
else touch their own eyes, inserting contact lenses for example,
can make some people look away. When the Three Stooges poke each
other in the eyes, viewers may laugh. But they also eye each
other nervously to make sure no one tries the gag at home. When
Christ wanted to restore the sight of various blind men he
encountered, he touched them on the eyes. Perhaps he did this (or
his disciples recorded it this way) to make the act all the more
remarkable to onlookers, wincing at the sight. The blind men did
not flinch as they would have at another's touch. Blind faith
becomes sighted salvation. So, when you look someone in the eye
and call it contact, do you hope to evoke that story? Do you
really believe the touch of your eyes has the power to convey,
convince, convert, control?
The whole subject of eye contact, with all its complex and
subtle meanings, fills me with anxiety. But not for myself. I've
gotten by this long without it. I worry that the sighted delude
themselves and put themselves at risk. Because when most of them
look into my eyes they see me as sighted. If eye contact matters
so much, surely it should be harder to fake. Perhaps it is only
the expectations of the sighted. When I aim my eyes in more or
less the right direction, the sighted see it as close enough. But
if a mere millimeter could make an inquiring look into a menacing
stare, shouldn't my fraud be instantly obvious?
Be honest. Look at me when I'm talking to you. Do you really
see all that you say? Or is it a convenience of language to
ascribe to my eyes those qualities, emotions, messages you derive
from the rest of my face, our surroundings, or the words I speak?
Aren't you projecting your own expectations, interpretations, or
desires onto my blank eyes? And if you're really being honest,
really looking closely, my eyes are no more vacant than a sighted
person's eyes. My eyes and your eyes send back only reflections.
of course this hypothesis comes full circle. If I see your eyes
as blank, it is only because I am projecting what I see (or don't
see) onto you. But only you can say for sure. Go ahead. Take a
good look. Pull the wool off your eyes. Tell me what you see.
CHAPTER 6
A Portrait of the Artist by His Blind Daughter
When my father read what I had to say about eye contact, he
disagreed. He recounted three separate anecdotes in which he had
been able to read other people's thoughts from the look in their
eyes. This was unlike him, I thought. His response seemed
uncharacteristically sentimental and illogical. But it reiterated
the notion that visual experience is relative. There are
different levels of visual skill. If Ted Williams could read the
English on a baseball, I had to believe that my father was
someone who could read the language of the eyes.
My father believed that he could teach anyone to draw. He
said drawing was simply a matter of learning how to see, then
learning how to put that on paper. It was a matter of eye-hand
coordination. What the eye takes in, the hand puts on the page.
He said, "You look at the object. You draw the object. You look
at what you've drawn. Look at the object. Draw what you see." He
described a triangle - the object, the artist, the drawing - and
a process of revision. Drawing is not just a matter of seeing,
but of re-seeing. Drawing the object makes the artist see it a
new way, and seeing it a new way makes the artist draw it
differently.
Actually what my father would have said was, "Look. Draw.
See," pointing with his long, large fingers from the object to
the sketch pad, then back to the object. He poked the air with
his finger as if jabbing the object. Then his extended index
finger would join the others and he would scoop at the air, cut
the space between the object and the artist, ushering the object
nearer, pulling it onto the paper. Then he would extend his index
finger again in a straight line from the side of his eye, out
into space.
Any portrait of my father would have to highlight his hands.
They were huge, his most distinctive feature. They were so broad
across the base that they seemed too big for his wrists, as if
grafted on from some other body. His fingers were long and thick
as hot dogs, but not at all fat or fleshy. The bones were visible
under the skin. They did not seem thicker than other finger
bones, but it was as if there were more of them in each finger.
Though his hands were large, his gestures were always precise and
efficient.
I must have witnessed my father perform his drawing gesture
a million times. Sometimes he was standing behind a student at an
easel or a sketch pad. Sometimes he was the one drawing, a small
notebook or a scrap of paper before him on the table. "Look.
Draw. See," his gesture would say with such precision and
eloquence that words were superfluous. My father was frequently a
man of few words. Not that he was reticent or disliked
conversation; in fact he liked to talk, enjoyed telling and
hearing stories. But when something really mattered, words were
not always the best way to communicate it.
My father said, "Draw this cup." I drew the cup. He said,
"But that's not what you see."
I said, "I know." I meant, "I know it's not what I see," or
perhaps, "It's not what I see. It's what I know."
We were talking about my blindness. When my father asked me
to draw the cup, he wanted me to show him my blindness. He knew
when I looked at the cup I saw something, but not the cup. I
could draw the cup because I knew the cup. I'd held it in my
hand. I'd probably just drunk coffee from it. In conventional
representations of blindness, the hands are always highlighted.
They reach into the darkness for some unseen object or obstacle,
trace the traits of recognition in someone's face, or graze the
raised dots of braille. Even though I can see something, touching
always makes things more real to me. When I lay hands on
something it looks more solid, its outlines appear more distinct.
My brain coordinates what my eyes see with what my hands feel.
When my father wanted me to draw the cup, I should have
tried touching it with my left hand and drawing it with my right.
With one hand I could have traced the cup's shape and felt its
texture. Then with the other hand I would have translated those
sensations into lines on paper. Drawing in this way would be less
a matter of eye-hand coordination than one of hand-hand, one hand
taking in, the other putting out. In between, there's the brain.
I could draw the cup even without touching it because I knew
something about cups in general, and something about drawing, its
rules and conventions. I knew that to represent my perspective of
it, looking down at it on the table, I should draw an oval to
represent its lip, not a circle. I knew too that to represent its
three-dimensionality I could employ shading techniques. The light
was shining on it from above, so there should be shading on the
lower parts of the drawing, curved to suggest the cup's curves.
I said none of this, however. I knew how to draw but I
didn't know how to talk about it. And I knew I couldn't see, but
I didn't know how to talk about that either, how to represent it
in words or images. How old was I when this happened? Sixteen?
Eighteen? I said, "This pencil isn't soft enough," and tried it
again with charcoal, because I knew what I saw was - what? -
fuzzier than reality. But the charcoal sketch was still not what
I saw. So I smudged it with my hand. I drew three fingers around
it in a sweeping circular motion, smudging and erasing the lines
I had just made. Eye-hand coordination. I was showing him with my
hand what my eyes do to whatever I look at. I held up my hand to
show him. The lines of the drawing were on my fingertips. It was
a gesture of truce, because the smudging of the drawing must have
seemed a gesture of defiance, destruction, erasure.
I was probably on the verge of tears. My father could always
make me cry. But they were generally tears of frustration, not
tears of pain. Tears from the eyes, not from the chest. My eyes
betraying me again. My father saw tears as self-pity, a weakness,
a character flaw. I was at least sixteen and had known this about
him for a long time. It only made my eyes brim fuller.
Years before this, my parents used to draw me. From an early
age I've known how to sit still. I would sit on a chair in the
middle of the kitchen. They would sit at the table facing me,
behind their sketch pads. Behind them I could see my reflection
on the black window. I was a small, elongated ghost hovering over
the New York cityscape at dusk. The sky was what's called
midnight blue, though it actually occurs at dusk. It was a shade
between royal and navy blue, with a little green in it. The green
would have been from the smog. Through my reflection on the
window I would have been able to see windows in other apartment
buildings lit up as night fell - the yellow lights of other
kitchens, the blue flickers of televisions. Over this my
reflection hovered, motionless and translucent. I may have been
thinking that this reflection allowed me to see myself as my
parents saw me while they drew. If it were possible, I could peel
that transparent image of myself off the glass, press it onto a
sheet of paper and make my own self-portrait.
The time I'm thinking of I would have been eight or nine. I
was not blind yet. My condition was not diagnosed until I was
eleven, though it's possible that my retinas were already
beginning to degenerate. My father was still living with us. My
parents weren't talking while they drew. I could hear my father's
breathing, the scratch of pencils. There was an atmosphere of
competition in the room, as if they were racing. But it was not
exactly tense, not as tense as it could be. Every few seconds
they raised their faces to look at me, in those quick artist's
glances. Their gazes hit me with unfailing accuracy. Since I was
dressed for ballet class, where I had been before supper, I might
have been thinking about how a dancer "spots" turns. You're
supposed to find a spot to look at and hold it with your eyes as
your body begins the turn. Then when you can't hold your head in
that direction any longer, you snap your head all the way around
and find the same spot again with your eyes. It's supposed to
take only a split second, and when you do it right you don't feel
that you've moved your head at all because you're still looking
at the same thing. It feels like you only blinked. And it keeps
you from getting dizzy. To the audience watching, it looks as if
the dancer's head miraculously does not move because the dancer's
gaze seems to hold the gaze of the viewer. Some dancers practice
spotting turns looking at the reflection of their own eyes in the
studio mirror. You have to be good to do this. You have to be
turning in exactly the same place each time, so your eyes will
always end up in exactly the same spot in the mirror. I used to
spot turns using a rivet that held the mirror to the wall. These
were the sorts of things I could see then.
When my parents glanced up from their drawing it was like
that, quick, instinctively accurate. It was almost palpable, more
felt than seen, the soft, mass-less impact of their gazes hitting
parts of my body. It was as if each look plucked at a part of me
and drew it away onto the page. My mother's gestures were larger
than my father's. Her arm moved in large sweeps around the pad.
My father was drawing with his hands only. My mother's drawing
was also larger and freer than my father's. She covered the page
with me. I was a collection of lines and curves. I was the pose
I'd taken, a physical attitude suggestive of emotion and
personality. She omitted shading and detail. I had no face, only
a line to indicate the vertical drop of my nose. My hands were
mittens. My legs trailed off the page without ending in feet. And
yet it was unmistakably me.
My father's drawings were smaller and darker than my
mother's, with more lines and cross-hatched shadows. He did
studies - parts, not the whole of me. He captured the curl of my
fingers hanging at the end of my hands. He rendered the shape of
my knee cap, the bones of my ankle. Looking at these drawings
gave me a slight twinge of the uncanny, the odd sensation of
viewing images of myself with objective detachment. But I'd seen
many of their drawings of me and was used to it. I did not think,
"So this is how my parents see me," because I already knew that
even when you draw what you see it is not mere transcription.
These drawings revealed how they saw me at a particular moment in
a particular frame of mind. Each chose aspects of me to highlight
and others to downplay or leave blank. And each drew for
different reasons. My mother drew to lose herself in form, to
capture the essence of form in a few loose lines. My father drew
to think on paper, to think about structure - the way bones fit
together, the way flesh coats bone. My father was a sculptor, and
drawing was a way for him to work out problems in two dimensions
before he tackled them in three. But my mother could also render
anatomical detail when she chose. And my father could do
free-form quick sketches, catching the essential in three or four
sweeps of his hand.
My blindness makes me see impressionistically. The forms I
perceive are suggestive of objects. There are no sharp outlines.
What matters is light and color. If I were a painter, would my
blindness dictate my aesthetic style? Degas had macular
degeneration late in life. It prompted him to take up sculpture.
But was there something prescient in all those soft-focus
impressions of ballet dancers and racehorses? Or do those
paintings reveal an earlier onset of the condition than even the
artist realized? Some people believe that the work of certain
painters reveals their vision disorders. It's possible to
distinguish between an early Rembrandt and a late one because
detail in his later work becomes fuzzier. Many believe that this
difference was due to the development of cataracts late in the
artist's life. But this assumes that painters paint only what
they see, without highlighting, enhancing, exaggerating, or
distorting elements of the visible world to make a point. It
seems to me that Rembrandt's understanding of the world became
more complex in his later life, so the crisp, crystalline clarity
of his early work no longer suited his purpose. It is risky to
confuse literal vision - the ability to receive and process
visual
stimuli - with figurative vision - the ability to have,
manipulate, and communicate ideas. Are we to believe that artists
who painted on Egyptian tombs had no depth perception? Did all
the Impressionists suffer from damaged retinas and clouded
lenses? Did the Cubists all share the weird visual distortion
that shattered every form into fragmented planes and muted all
colors to murky blues and browns?
I grew up in Abstract Expressionism. My parents' work, and
the work of all their friends, fell into that category. I grew up
believing that representational art was for children, the stuff
of schoolbook illustrations and TV cartoons. My parents and their
friends would have approved of this assessment as an apt summary
of the history of Western art. Realism, Impressionism, Cubism,
and all styles of representation were necessary phases that art
had already passed through. Growing up among these artists, I
also knew that the same painter who splattered or splashed paint
on canvases could also draw a picture of an eight-year-old girl
that looked like an eight-year-old girl, or a cup that looked
like a cup.
My father's sculpture is made of metal. The early work was
in scrap iron, reshaped, arranged in patterns, and welded
together. The later work was made of aluminum sheets and I-beams,
bent and folded, the pieces welded together or suspended from
each other with fine cable. His work is about natural forces -
implosion, radiation, torque, the collision of energy and its
aftermath. He made these forces static and gave them form and
dimension. My father's art makes the unseen seen. I cannot see a
piece of his sculpture all at once, in a glance. I see a segment,
then another. I slide my gaze around the sculpture, piecing the
segments together in my mind. I slide my hands along surfaces, my
hands confirming what my eyes tell me. My brother and I had a pet
mouse when we were little. I let it loose on one of my father's
sculptures once. It ran down the long slow curve of I-beam. The
spherical pads on its feet gave it traction. I liked to think he
enjoyed the trip. I like to imagine my father's sculptures as
movement underfoot, an undulant path, cool and slightly
grainy-textured.
From my father's work I learned that there is no one way to
look at sculpture, no optimum vantage point or viewing condition.
one cloudy day the sun broke through briefly to illuminate
several of the pieces in his back yard. I was sitting in the
kitchen and saw this through the window. The aluminum surfaces
drew the light to them and suddenly shone with an intense
silver-whiteness, in high contrast to the green grass behind
them. I saw this silver light slice the air, as if the sunlight
were sketching something against the green. My flawed vision made
it all shimmer. The intense white outlines quivered as if with
nervous energy, on the verge of blurring outward, blanching out
the green. "Look," I said to my father. And he glanced over his
shoulder through the window. It was the same glance he used when
he drew. He showed no particular pleasure or surprise at what he
saw. If anything, he showed quiet satisfaction that the things
were still working, still doing what they were designed to do.
A reviewer once asked of my father's work, "Is it art or is
it craft?" It's an unfair charge often leveled at sculpture. In
painting, craft seems invisible, at least to the untrained or
willfully ignorant eye. But in sculpture, craft seems all too
apparent. To my father, there could be no art without craft.
Craft was what made the thing stand up and hold together. Craft
was where you saw or didn't see the hands of the artists, in the
way they textured clay or plaster, effaced chisel marks and
casting seams, or concealed nails, bolts, and welds.
Craft can also mean tricks, illusion, sleight of hand. Late
in his life my father used to send out greeting cards that, when
pulled from the envelope, would pop up or open out and turn into
paper sculptures. Sometimes they had a seasonal element. Around
Valentine's Day I'd unfold a square card - and find a symmetrical
heart dangling by a thread. More often these cutouts were forms
like his sculptures, rectangular beams bent and suspended from
each other at gravity-challenging angles. To make these things,
he usually gave himself a problem to solve, which then became the
problem for the recipient to decipher. He would draw shapes on
paper with his knife, fold and twist the shapes, then flatten and
refold the whole. His challenge was to cut out the shapes without
cutting anything away. The challenge for the recipient was to
figure out how those shapes fit the vacant places left behind.
The cards had few words, if any: "Happy Birthday," "Love." They
were unspoken conversations, challenges: "Look at this. See how I
made it?" The only way I could tell how he'd made them was to
take them apart, untwist and unfold them back into two
dimensions. I could not tell with my eyes alone; I had to take
them in hand and undo his handiwork. So I left them alone. I
would keep them on my desk for a week or two. I'd pick them up
and run my fingertips along the cut edges, feeling the severed
fibers where his knife blade had drawn the lines and let the form
inside the flat paper spring free.
When my father looked at sculpture he looked at craft first
and art second. He would walk around the sculpture, his arms at
his sides, his huge hands hanging from his wrists, his fingers
curling upwards. He prowled around the sculpture in his long,
loose-limbed stride. He bent at the waist, craning his neck
upward. He was looking for flaws in craft. He looked for seams
showing, sloppy welds, nuts or bolts or cables attached
inefficiently, imperfectly polished surfaces. If he found no
flaws he would step back and look up, assuming the pose of the
art viewer. He would see the whole form, and whatever the
sculptor meant to say with it. He would not articulate any of
this. He would absorb it in a glance, approve or disapprove, then
move on.
When viewing sculpture, my father observed the rule about
not touching, though he didn't approve of it. One of his own late
pieces, called Multi-Position Sculpture, subverted the
convention. It could be displayed a number of different ways. My
father wanted viewers to lay their hands on it, lift it up and
push it over, and rediscover the form upside down or sideways.
Before a gallery opening my father was rolling it over and over
around the room. A young man hired as a guard saw this and
stepped forward as if to intervene. He probably didn't know that
this was the point of the piece, or that my father was the artist
and therefore had the right to touch his own work. Or else he
heard my father's labored breathing and wanted to lend a hand.
But the authority in my father's movements stopped him
mid-stride. Though already barrel-chested from emphysema, my
father was still vigorous and always looked like he knew what he
was doing. The guard pivoted on his heels and strolled
nonchalantly into the next room.
There are now galleries and museums that offer tactile tours
for the blind and visually impaired. They select pieces that
sightless viewers can touch or trace with their hands. My father
would have approved of this, though he would have found the logic
flawed. Why limit such tours to only certain pieces, and only
people who cannot see? If the craft is sound it should stand up
to touching.
My father had an unerring ability to spot flaws. I never had
a pimple he didn't mention to me. "Your sleeves are too short,"
he'd say. When are my sleeves not too short, I'd wonder. I
inherited my long arms from him.
I inherited my flawed vision from his mother, whom I barely
knew. My grandmother died when I was nine. She lived in Syracuse,
far enough away that we saw her only on brief holiday visits.
What I know about my grandmother comes mainly from my mother,
since my father had little to say about her. The one word he
always used was "hypochondriac." My grandmother used her ailments
and infirmities as a way to manipulate the people around her, to
keep her sons close to her. When my parents got married, for
instance, a mysterious, undiagnosed illness kept my grandmother
from attending the wedding. It turned out later that she was in
fact well enough that day to visit a friend out of town. As far
as I know, she did not develop macular degeneration until late in
life. My father perceived her blindness as a part of her
self-pity and hypochondria, because there were times and
situations when she seemed to see more or better than on other
occasions. Her flawed central vision impaired her ability to read
print but did not hinder her ability to maneuver herself through
space or to find and recognize familiar objects. Like me, she was
imperfectly blind, and her blindness was imperfectly understood.
So she seemed to be blind only when convenient. When she asked my
father and his brother to read aloud to her, or run errands and
perform tasks that she had once done by herself, he felt
resentful when he complied or guilty when he did not.
My father never said any of this to me. I do not know
whether he saw his mother in me, in our shared flaw. Perhaps he
saw the risk that I might become like her, dependent, fearful,
and needy. His doubts about the severity of his mother's
blindness hurt me, and it hurts me to put them into words now. I
know that my early feelings about my blindness were shaped by
what he thought about his mother, even though he rarely voiced
these thoughts above a grumble. I intuited that it was not a good
idea to talk about my visual impairment. To talk about it would
be to expose my flawed vision to his view. To complain or ask for
help might come out sounding like self-pity. I knew my words
would betray me somehow. Also, like a lot of children with
disabilities, I may have felt the need to protect my parents from
knowing the ugly truth about my defect. If I could preserve the
illusion of normalcy, I would remain unflawed in their eyes. My
father would not need to think about the defective gene he'd
passed on to me.
At the same time, however, my father knew I couldn't see,
and he was curious about my ability to mask my lack of sight. He
admired the artifice, the illusion of sight that I presented. I
used my memory and senses differently from other people. He asked
me how I did it. "How did you know that was there? How did you
find your way?" But I couldn't always say. My adaptation to my
blindness had taken place gradually as my vision declined and
then became entirely unconscious. "Draw the cup," he said,
because he genuinely wanted to see what I saw and what I
couldn't. But I could only draw a version of what he saw, then
blot out the image with a sweep of my hand.
My grandmother left us both another legacy as well. When my
father was a child he suffered from extreme asthma and other
respiratory complaints. His mother's desire to protect him from
these conditions was almost completely debilitating. To break
free of his mother's anxiety about his health, and to shake her
image of him as a sickly child, my father became an extremely
athletic adolescent. He took up mountain climbing, skiing, and
canoeing. Then he took up metal sculpture, bending and shaping
raw metal with his bare hands. Whatever my father knew or
understood about my blindness, he resisted any impulse he might
have felt to disable me with paternal protection. My blindness
never limited his expectations of what I could do or become. I
think he would have liked it had I pursued a career in dance.
Dance was an art form he admired - sculpture set in motion and to
music. When I started college he briefly encouraged me to become
an engineer because I had an aptitude for physics and math and
shared his interest in understanding how things work.
But I think he always knew that I would become a writer.
Words were not his medium, but he valued the art and craft
involved. He particularly liked it when I started writing about
blindness. He appreciated the attempt to make the unseen seen.
Still, he never gave up the hope that I would one day show him
rather than tell him, draw a picture rather than put it into
words.
For me to see anything, there must be light and color. To
draw a picture of what I see, it would have to be in color,
colored chalk perhaps. I would draw a picture of this room and
then smudge it with my hand, in a sweeping circular motion like
cleaning a windowpane of frost or steam. The forms would still be
described in a general way. There would be large masses of pure
color and areas where colors would blend. Then I would use a
pencil or maybe a stick of charcoal to draw outlines, wavering
lines, and not all of them where they should be, but irradiating
from each object, like ripples on the surface of water. Over all
of this I would spatter flecks of paint, probably using a
toothbrush. The paint should have some sheen to it; maybe acrylic
would work. The flecks would be white and yellow or white and
blue or maybe blue and gold. There might be a few spots of red
irregularly scattered. Sometimes the speckles would coalesce into
a single blob at the center of the image. This can be an intense
white, a yellowish gold, a violent magenta, or a sooty black. The
distortion - the smudging, the flecks or blob of color - should
be most pronounced toward the center of the image and less
pronounced toward the edge of the page, which would appear almost
unaltered. But at the edges the color would be less intense than
at the center. Then the whole image would have to seem in motion.
I see nothing as static. The black lines designating the outlines
of objects would expand and contract around the objects like a
bellows. The flecks of color would be quivering, shivering,
scintillating in a high-speed pulsation. And there would have to
be a sense of the whole image swirling in a spiral around a
vortex at the center. It would be like looking down into the eye
of a tornado, the whole image on the verge of draining out
through the central black hole of my blindness.
I do not have the craft to paint this picture. Words are the
best I can do. The words are inadequate. I know why my father
mistrusted them. Words are only the restless prowl around and
around the thing I want to name, a spiral search from the
periphery toward the center. But words are at least a point of
departure, something to go on.
My father probably could have used my words to create an
image of what I see. But I doubt he would have tried. The result
would have been too complicated, too messy to have the right
effect. Drawing what you see requires some selection, the ability
to highlight what matters most and leave the rest blank.
Color matters to me. My father and I talked about it
sometimes. We speculated about how it is that I see color. Though
I have very few cone cells, I still perceive color accurately,
especially vivid colors viewed one at a time. I sense that my
emotional response to color is excessive: I gravitate toward
colors, find myself irresistibly drawn to them. I can fixate for
many minutes at a time on a single colored object - a flower, a
plastic cup, a parked car - with a tense, unwavering attention.
Once my father said, "Admit it. The only thing you liked
about going to baseball games as a kid was the green grass." And
he was right. Though I grew to love the game, as a child I loved
only the sight of all that grass. There's a moment when you walk
out of the ramp into the bleachers where all you see is green,
green as far as the eye can see, horizon to horizon green. It's
like a long deep inhalation of cool air on a hot day. It makes
something tingle just below my collarbone. Green. Even the word
makes me shiver.
I associate certain colors with people. I associate my
father with a particular shade of blue. My father would have
scoffed at the idea of people having favorite colors, or even
that certain colors might be better suited to certain people than
to others. It didn't work that way for him. Color was somehow
universal property, universally accessible. I associate this
shade of blue with my father because it was a shade of spray
enamel paint that he tended to use on the furniture he made or
rehabilitated for himself. It was a national brand found in every
hardware store. The blue is a medium intensity with a certain
amount of gray in it. Or it used to be. One day I arrived at his
house and noticed his blue table was a shade or two darker and
quite a bit less gray.
"They changed the formula on me," my father said, noticing
me notice the change. I was surprised that the change seemed to
perturb him. I had never imagined that he'd deliberately chosen
that color, consciously selected it from the other colors
available. I'd always assumed it was just the first can that fell
under his hand.
I used to tell him about my visits to the eye doctor. I go
to a clinic at a teaching hospital. My retinas are worth looking
at, I'm told - not your run-of-the-mill retinas. Though macular
degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people over
fifty, it is relatively uncommon in younger people. When I was
diagnosed at the age of eleven, I was examined by more doctors
than I could count. Everyone wanted to get a glimpse. Now I am
examined by two or three student doctors with a teacher-doctor
giving a play-by-play. I am a model patient. I've been through
this eye exam many times. I know how to sit still for long
periods of time with my eyes unblinking. I am almost too good at
this. The teacher-doctor says, "Normally the patient would blink
quite a bit, and maybe jerk away from you when you do this." She
goes on, "See how the cells are worn away, worn through to the
choroid." She talks about my retinas like they're fabric, given
to wear and tear. It's as if an excess of seeing has chafed the
surface, frayed it soft thread by thread. Her words make the
process sound too dry, even though my form of the disease is
known as dry macular degeneration, as opposed to the wet version,
which afflicts older people. If I could touch them, I imagine, my
retinas would feel like a spongy, gelatinous scum, thin and
sticky. The slightest touch would make some cells lift off on my
fingertip or slide off center.
The teacher-doctor says, "Note the pigment clumping
throughout. There are some beautifully deformed blood vessels
around the nerve head." My damaged retinas are beautiful, a
textbook example, but better than a textbook. One of the students
gasps when she sees them. Anyone else listening to this might be
disturbed. I'm used to it. They stare into my eyes, losing
themselves in the contemplation. It's an act of extreme intimacy,
but they speak of me as if I am not there. They are looking at a
part of me I cannot see, at the part of me which makes it so I
cannot see. I listen to their words, trying to imagine what they
see, but remain detached. I know that if I speak, it will startle
them. My words would make them jerk back into an awareness that I
am in here behind my damaged retinas, on the other side of my
blindness. But I know they're only doing their job. They're
learning something that may help them better understand my
condition. It would be wrong to distract them.
My father never went to the eye doctor with me. That was
something I always did with my mother. I think he would have
liked to sit in on an eye exam. He would ask to have a look, have
the parts named and explained. "Pigment clumping. Where? You mean
these blood vessels here?" Afterward maybe he would have drawn me
a picture to show me what he'd seen. Would I be able to see the
picture?
My father was resolutely unsqueamish, so my eye exam would
not faze him. He loved all those TV science programs showing
open-heart surgery or arthroscopic images of inner organs. Once,
he wanted to remain conscious during a lung operation. He wanted
to he able to look inside his chest, or at least hear what went
on. His doctor was speechless. No one had ever made such a
request. Even if hospital policy allowed it, he imagined that a
person would faint to see his own chest split open, his own ribs
spread apart, lungs ballooning, heart throbbing. Surely the sight
of it would be too much, and that kind of disruption in the
operating room could imperil the procedure. And he didn't know
the half of it. My father would have been watching him, noticing
every inefficient movement, every failure of craft. The doctor
refused, but knowing my father's interest he offered my mother
one of my father's ribs, which had been removed during the
operation. She declined the offer while my father was still under
anesthesia. I think my father never forgave her. But I'm glad she
didn't take the rib. He would have made my brother and me look at
it, touch it, so we would not become squeamish. I imagine him
bending it between his large hands. I imagine him feeling the
rough edge where it had been sawn off. I imagine him commenting
on the color, the weight, then saying, "Here, you hold it." I
imagine what it would feel like, my father's rib, lighter than
expected, rougher textured. I would probably own it now.
I am at the point in the eye exam that I would most like my
father to see. They are shining lights through magnifying lenses
onto my retinas. I am starting to feel tired because I've had my
eyes open a long time. When you get your eyes examined at a
teaching hospital, especially when you have a disorder they don't
see every day, you have to go through everything three or four
times. But this is the part of the exam that I have been waiting
for. Sometimes when the angle of the light or the lens is right,
I have an extraordinary hallucinogenic experience. An intense
wash of color slides over my eyes. First it is purple then it is
a deep teal green. These colors are so intense, so beautiful, I
am almost beside myself. This is probably a spontaneous
electrochemical reaction triggered by the intense light hitting
cells on my retina, something like the afterimage of a photo
flash. It's almost a tactile sensation, almost painful, almost
overwhelming. It is close to an out-of-body experience. Or else I
find myself more intensely in my body, in my brain. I am all
subjectivity now. No one else can see this. I experience an
entirely private vision, a light show all my own. The doctors
recede from my conscious awareness. The words they are speaking
become meaningless to me, a random hum of sound, so much white
noise. I am alone, alert, enthralled. I am on the verge of tears.
"Do it again," my brain says. "Please, do it again."
After an eye exam I go home and lie in a dark room for
several hours. It takes a long time for my eyes to recover from
the dilation drops. And I feel tired, my nerves worn thin. I lie
in the dark thinking about those colors, re-creating them in my
mind. I do not think sighted people experience color the way I
do. I don't think it means as much. For sighted people, color is
just garnish, so much parsley on the plate.
But maybe not all sighted people. One time I called to ask
my father about it. "Teal?" he said. He didn't like the word.
"Aquamarine?" I thought, but that would be too dark.
"Turquoise," I said, "but with more green in it."
"Green," he said. I sensed him mixing pigment in his mind,
an imaginary palette in one hand, a brush in the other plucking
up tiny dabs of paint. Paint was not my father's medium, but he
knew how it worked. The purple was easier to explain. "It's like
the purple light on the Empire State Building at Easter," I told
him. "And it has that quality of colored light. It's not opaque
like paint. It's like colored light, or colored water washing
over the curve of my eyeball. Colored water with light shining
through it."
Our phone conversations were notoriously vexed. It was when
I felt most acutely how little words meant to him. It was better
when he called me because then he had something to say. When I
called him, I was always interrupting something. But this topic
seemed to interest him; it was a problem to understand. I was
surprised that he didn't find my extreme emotional response to
color sentimental or wrong-minded.
Weeks or months later I was at his house wearing a nylon
wind breaker that was a vivid blue violet. He looked at it
suddenly and said, "Is that the purple?" I was startled to
discover that the color I'd described on the phone was at the
front of his mind, as it was at the front of mine.
"Not quite," I said. "It's a little too blue. That purple
has more pink in it."
In his mind he was mixing pigment, adding pink, dab by dab
to the color I wore. "It's still a good color," he said. "It
draws the light."
It's an expression I've always liked. I like the idea that
some colors take a more active role, make a concerted effort to
be seen. Some colors do seem to pull light to them, swirling it
around themselves like an airy cape. Light feels magnetically
attracted to some colors, making them irresistible to the human
eye. In a sense it's how color works. Colored surfaces absorb
some wavelengths of light and reflect others, so the human eye
perceives a particular color. Other mammals have little or no
color perception - dogs and cats, for instance. They don't need
color. It's unclear whether humans need color, whether it serves
any evolutionary function. And yet most of us perceive it, even
me.
"Color," my father told me once, "is why I gave up
painting."
But in the last year or two of my father's life he took up
painting again. Cancer, emphysema, and tuberculosis had depleted
his body's power to work with metal. He could paint sitting down.
He set up an easel in his kitchen where he worked when he felt
like it. He worked on several versions of the same painting. One
of them is very small, a 4-by-6-inch canvas, which I like because
I can hold it in my hand very close to my face - the best way for
me to see anything. The canvas is painted a medium gray. Over
this there are regular, rectangular slashes or oblongs of bright
blue, yellow, white and black. At the periphery of the canvas
these marks are large, almost an inch long. Moving closer to the
center, or rather a spot a bit below and to the left of center,
the slashes become progressively smaller. The slashes are angled
in a regular way so they seem to be swirling around this central
point. There is an illusion of concavity, as if the viewer is
looking into a cone. To a sighted person I think this painting
looks like an explosion arrested the moment just after
detonation. The slashes of color are the splintered fragments of
what was some structure moments before. But to me, it looks like
a stylized representation of what I see. The splinters of color
are the speckles of my flawed vision which float over whatever I
look at. The blue is not quite right. But the yellow and the
white are perfect. if I could peel the pattern of slashes off the
canvas and press it onto a sheet of clear plastic, I could hold
it over any image and say, "This is what I see." It's not quite
right. The slashes of color and their diminishment toward the
center are all too regular and precise. Also, though the illusion
of the swirling, spiral motion is right, there is not the
pulsating shimmer at the center. But it's close enough. A point
of departure.
In the last months of my father's life he became a man of
even fewer words. He was breathing through a mask. I think it was
a relief to him that there was at least one person in his life
who could not see the changes in his body. I knew he was thinner
and more stooped. But my blindness smudged these flaws to a hazy
blur. Sometimes I could see the tremor in his hands, but it was
easy to attribute this to the constant tremor at the center of my
vision. I think he sensed this. Seeing himself through my flawed
eyes, he did not feel as changed.
But even I noticed how the hands themselves had changed.
They had grown thin, delicate, almost fragile. Fifteen years
earlier when I was visiting him after a cancer operation, I must
have looked frightened to see him in the ICU. Despite
postoperative grogginess and pain, he read my look and reached up
to touch my hand. Instantly I was reassured. It was the same hand
it had always been. I would know those hands anywhere. But these
new hands seemed to belong to some other body. It was as if the
extra bones I'd always imagined each finger contained had been
removed. Even he seemed ill at case with them. He held objects
gingerly, as if unsure whether these new fragile fingers could
hold on.
But he knew the changes in his voice alarmed me even more
than what I could see of his transfigured body. Up until that
time his voice had been more or less the same as long as I could
remember. His shortness of breath now made speech arduous. Fits
of coughing interrupted every other sentence. And when he could
speak, his voice quavered, cracked, and wheezed. Then I began to
notice, first on the phone, and then in person too, that he was
speaking in shorter and shorter phrases, units of three to five
syllables. I was startled to think that he could break down his
thoughts and deliver them this way. And I was moved by his desire
to protect me from the truth about his condition. Then I found
myself doing it too. As we spoke, I mused that to write them, our
conversations would become slim columns of a few words - breath -
then more words, the lines clinging to the left margin, drawing
meaning from the blank space around them. I was reminded that my
father thought of poetry as the more efficient medium - the spare
elegance of line set off by white space, the austerity of crafted
imagery, the rigors of form. I have always been a prose writer. I
fill the line from edge to edge with words, the lines zigzagging
down the page in flat coils, the restless prowl around the thing
unnamed at the center. But we'd had that debate years before. Our
last conversations were slowed to the pace of his breathing,
pared down, the inessential left unspoken.
That's the final memory I can put into words. Here's a very
early one.
Everything in my father's studio was lethal. So naturally my
brother and I loved it there. There were piles of scrap metal -
jagged, rusty edges teeming with tetanus. There were the various
welding torches, metal cutting tools, the grinding wheel. We used
to wheel each other around on a metal stool on casters, our shoes
clattering on the tin floor. And when our father was working he
was generally oblivious to our noise and the risks we so
gleefully ran.
When he was done working, sometimes we would make something
together. He would let us pick through the piles of scrap,
finding shapes we liked. Then we would assemble the pieces, and
he would help us weld them together.
I still have one of these sculptures. It stands about
fifteen inches high. At the top there is an elongated triangle
folded slightly to a point at its center. This is balanced on a
straight tubular shaft, which is attached to a circular base
about four inches in diameter. There is a second triangle,
similarly folded, which braces the shaft and anchors it to the
base. It is an efficient design. There are only four welds. And
the welds have held up even after all these years of handling. I
am my father's daughter. The durability of those welds makes me
proud.
The only piece I specifically remember selecting was the
circular base. I remember imagining the sheet of metal left
behind with this circle punched out of it. Or maybe there was a
large sheet with many circular holes, like a slice of very
regular Swiss cheese. The folds in the triangle look like my
father's idea. It's a form I recall from models and designs for
sculptures much later in his life. The arrangement of the pieces
had its own logic. The trick was to get that top triangle to
perch on the slender shaft so that it would create the illusion
of precarious balance.
To weld, my father put a welding mask over my face, then
stood behind me, guiding my hands with his. I think I must have
held the torch with both hands. He held my right hand deftly
between thumb and third finger, using his index finger to point
where I was supposed to aim. His left hand held the pieces in
place with tongs. My hands were tiny inside his - a puppet's
hands inside a giant's. He guided the motion of my hand with the
slightest pressure of thumb or finger. His index finger pointed,
prodding the air over the place I was supposed to look. To do
this, he had to adjust his angle of vision, imagine himself
viewing the arrangement through my eyes, and aim his pointing
finger accordingly. It was a new complication on eye-hand
coordination. For him it was like holding his torch with tongs,
with chopsticks. And he was probably calculating contingencies,
planning what he would have to do if I dropped the torch.
I couldn't have been more than five when we did this. I was
not blind yet. The deterioration of my retinas probably had not
even begun. But blind or not, who but my father would put an
oxyacetylene torch in the hands of a five-year-old?
I'm afraid for my younger self now, but I was not afraid at
the time. Mostly, I was enthralled by the flame, its light and
color. It was brilliantly white, even through the mask. It was
white edged in gold, edged in blue or blue-violet. Its form was
like a slender paintbrush twirled to a sharp point. I see this in
memory and feel the weight of the torch in my hand. I hear the
whoosh of the gas through the nozzle. My hand moves inside my
father's hand. His index finger lifts and points. I look where he
points. I draw the flame to the point. I see the metal change as
the flame hits it. I follow the motion of the flame with my eyes.
It makes the air around it shimmer. It makes everything around it
grow dark, dim. A brilliant blue afterimage trails it across
space.
It was one of our first conversations about art, about
craft, about vision. Like most of our conversations, this one was
essentially wordless, conducted hand-to-hand, my small hand
inside his. Through the selection and arrangement of pieces, he
saw my idea, what I wanted to create. Through his hands, I felt
how to draw that idea out of myself, how to give it form and
dimension, how to make it hold together, how to make the
connections fast and lasting.
PART III
Blind Reading voice texture identity
CHAPTER 7
Voices in My Head
Of all the variables that blur the distinction between
blindness and sight, perhaps the most important turns on the
question of what constitutes normal use. How do you use your eyes
during the course of a normal day? Different people answer that
question differently, and this affects the way they perceive
their own vision, or lack thereof. A visual condition that
completely debilitates a bank teller may hardly inconvenience the
pastry chef at all. For me, the normal daily activity most
impaired by blindness is reading. In fact, my lack of visual
acuity, my inability to perceive fine detail, is precisely what
defines me as legally blind. To do the reading I need to do, I
choose from an array of technologies and methods, each with its
own pleasures and drawbacks. While reading by other means may be
part of what makes blind experience seem so alien, one blind
reading method is gaining popularity with the sighted. Will this
make a difference in the way the sighted view the blind?
At a dinner party recently I heard a woman talking about her
long commute to work. She estimated that she spent close to
fifteen hours a week driving to and from work, not to mention
regular road trips required by her job. She listed the little
comforts that make her commute bearable - the optimum temperature
setting, the necessary adjustment to the seat back, the best way
to minimize road glare. She listened to music sometimes but said
that it's often too soothing, making it easy to doze off.
Besides, no matter what tapes she brought with her, they were
never quite the ones she wanted. And she couldn't count on the
radio to meet her moods. She listened to talk radio, but only in
small doses. The opinions of hosts and callers could enrage her.
And the all-day murder news stations were even worse. So she
started to listen to books on tape and found them a pleasing
solution. She evaluated the various companies that produce them,
favoring those who do not try to glitz up the text with mood
music or sound effects. She refuted the general assumption that
all books on tape are abridged, listing numerous
nineteenth-century classics she'd heard in their entirety. She
said that when she was in the middle of a big novel she would
actually look forward to getting into the car. Sometimes she even
sat in the parking lot for a few extra minutes, eagerly listening
to the end of a chapter. She knew people, she said, who listened
to books on tape while they jogged or exercised or did housework. Increased demand, she predicted, will continue to improve the
product, making a wider range of titles available.
Then she said, "But, of course, it's not really reading."
She probably said this because there were English professors
present, and she feared that they would dismiss the practice as
lamentably middlebrow, if not philistine. I doubt she knew that I
was legally blind, or that my primary method of reading is on
tape.
I know more and more sighted people who admit to reading
recorded books. Books-on-tape sections in bookstores and
libraries proliferate, and publishers simultaneously release
recorded and print versions of their books. Celebrities record
themselves reading their own tell-all memoirs - O. J. Simpson, to
name only one. Big-name actors record everything from classic
poetry to self-help manuals. Obviously none of this would happen
if there was not a growing market for it. But when people admit
that they have listened to a book on tape, there is always some
degree of shame, or at least sheepishness, always a disclaimer:
"Well, I listened to it. I wouldn't say I really read it."
Why the shame? I need to know. Reading is fundamental to who
I am and what I do. I seem to be reading something every hour of
the day - my own work, research materials, student papers,
letters, recipes. Most of the time I do this reading aurally.
Reading books on tape is not merely a pastime for me. When I
teach literature and writing courses I read recordings of both
the required texts and the students' work. I am supposed to be
teaching students something about reading and writing. But if I
am not really reading, what can I hope to impart to them? When I
read visually, my retention is better than when I listen to a
taped text. For me, reading visually means deciphering every
word, syllable by syllable. So any text that I manage to get
through, I have essentially memorized. It is impossible for me to
do a cursory visual reading. Reading a recorded book can make
cursory reading all too easy - in one ear, out the other. But I
head off the risk by listening to things two or three times. I
find that I can rarely listen to a book while doing something
else. To walk around outside wearing earphones would be
dangerous. And if I am doing exercises or cooking dinner, the
mental instructions I occasionally give myself make me lose track
of the text. To get the most out of a taped book I must sit
upright with my eyes open. When I prepare to teach a text, I
follow along in the print version as I listen, marking passages
that I will want to discuss in class. Actually, to say I follow
along is something of an overstatement. Even with magnification,
my eyes cannot move fast enough. I tag along, recognizing new
paragraphs from pauses, turning the pages when I'm told. When I
read student papers I listen to them once, then again, moving
through the magnified text with a pen in my hand, stopping the
tape to write comments and corrections as I go. Naturally, all
this takes time. But is my experience of these texts still
inferior? Should my students feel shortchanged? Should I feel
ashamed of myself for calling this reading?
It's not as if it's such an alien experience. Many of us
were read to as children, by parents, baby-sitters, and teachers.
For most, it was a happy experience, combining the pleasures of
brightly colored storybook pictures, the warm proximity and
undivided attention of a beloved grown-up, and the drowsy comfort
of bedtime. But reading aloud to children is more than simply a
safe soporific. it is also how most of us began to learn to read.
Even infants, who cannot understand the words read to them, start
to internalize the sounds and rhythms of spoken language. As they
mature, they acquire first-hand knowledge of written language as
well. They absorb the fact that sounds are represented by
letters, and that letters cluster together to form words, which
can be strung together with spaces between them to form
sentences. They learn that reading is done in a particular
direction and that pages are turned when the words run out.
So when adults admit to enjoying listening to recorded
reading, it seems a form of regression. It's something they
should have outgrown. The child learns early that reading, real
reading, adult reading, is done silently and alone. My husband,
Nick, recalls when his sister, fifteen months his senior, first
learned to read to herself. She sat in an armchair, the book in
her lap. Her eyes moved systematically, her gaze absorbing the
words off the page. She turned pages. But she made no sound. It
was clear to him that she was reading; he'd seen his parents read
this way. But she no longer had to do it aloud. He wanted her to
read to him, but suddenly she had the power to refuse. Nick
recalls this as his first experience of jealousy. He was equating
the ability to read silently with maturity and autonomy, and he
felt betrayed that his sister had received this extraordinary
gift while he was left out. It was then that Nick understood that
reading to oneself was not merely a trick to please teachers and
parents but also a necessity in a world where adult readers might
be too busy or tired to read aloud.
Books on tape perhaps satisfy an impossible longing. With
them you can have storytime any time, wherever you please. You
can fill the intimate space of your car with it. You can carry it
around with you, your Walkman stereo earphones whispering to you,
while you walk, jog, do the ironing, ride the train. Tune the
earphones carefully enough, and you will "feel" the voice not so
much in your ears as up there in the crown of your head, a
constantly chattering companion to your every activity. You can
wrap yourself in a comforting cocoon of narrative, which provides
continuity to your disjointed day.
But is it really reading? Reading is a private, silent
almost secret act. A large part of the pleasure of curling up
with a good book comes from the fact that reading offers a refuge
of silence and solitude from the noise of the world. The reader
encounters the text alone. The printed symbols on the page enter
the eyes and are translated by the vision and language centers in
the brain into something meaningful. When a text is read aloud,
it is essentially a theatrical performance. The audience absorbs
the text through the mediation of the voice reading it.
Intonation, inflection, and phrasing all contribute. The voice
interprets the written text in ways the audience cannot help
being conscious of. Even the most neutral, unpolished reading
adds a third dimension to the encounter between reader and text.
Once Nick was reading a storybook to the three-year-old
daughter of a friend. After a few pages she stopped him, eyeing
him suspiciously, as though he were perpetrating some fraud.
"You're reading it wrong," she said, though she acknowledged that
he had not left anything out and was turning the pages at the
right points in the story. The problem was, in Nick's rendition
the bear-hero spoke with a southern drawl, while when her mother
read it (the right way) the bear had no such affectation. Nick's
reading was "wrong" because it was at odds with the reading she
was used to.
That's what people object to about books on tape. No matter
how well-spoken or polished the readers are, they can still add
something to the text that is not supposed to be there. But when
you read to yourself, don't you sometimes hear a voice? It
probably doesn't happen all the time. You probably need to be
reading something that gives you pleasure, or something that
gives you trouble, forcing you to slow your reading to a pace
closer to speech. But isn't there, at those moments, something
like a voice in your head? Whose voice is it - yours, a parent's,
your first-grade teacher's, a favorite actor's? Are there
different voices for different texts, different voices for
different characters? There's no reason why you shouldn't hear
voices when you read to yourself. You learned to read aloud
first, either to sound out the words or to "see and say." You
know, too, that language was oral before it was written, and that
writers, good writers anyway, are conscious of the rhythm and
texture of spoken language. When you close your eyes and make a
mental image of something, blood flow increases to the vision
centers of your brain in much the same way as when you open your
eyes and look at something. Similarly, when you imagine a sound -
a voice reciting a line of verse, a phrase of music, a jackhammer
pulverizing pavement - blood rushes to the auditory centers of
your brain, as if the sound were outside rather than inside your
head. When you read, perhaps this is what's going on. Neurons
fire. Juices flow. Electrochemical changes occur. You begin to
"hear" something, not quite a voice, but a shadow of a voice. You
might even feel something, a tickle in your throat, a twitching
in your tongue and jaw muscles, as if that interior voice were
really on the verge of pressing outward, down through larynx and
lips, to make itself heard.
But these voices are essentially in your control. You can
decide whether a certain character should have a gruff or mellow
voice. And you can tune down or turn off the voice altogether if
you choose. This is what you prefer about reading to yourself, or
if you are a closet listener to books on tape, think you should
prefer.
Is it a question of control, then? I have an advantage in
this regard. Though I am dependent on others to read to me, I can
choose from a wider range of voices than can people who get only
those books on tape which are commercially available. I rely on
two free services for the blind - the National Library Service
for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, and Recordings for the
Blind and Dyslexic. The NLS employs professional recorders and
has extremely high production values, but it is sometimes
difficult to order exactly what you want. At RFB&D, the readers
are all volunteers and the sound is slightly less polished, but
ordering is easier. Sometimes the same texts are available from
both services, so theoretically I should choose the voice that
sounds best to me. I also hire readers to record student papers
and exams, as well as books and periodicals that are not
available from the services. In this too I could exercise more
control than I do. I could audition voices for specific qualities
of pitch and timbre. I could also supply readers with lists of
preferred pronunciations - _skedule not _shedule, to-may-to not
to-mot-o. When they are reading student work I may tell them to
announce paragraph breaks and punctuation, since I may have to
correct this. But otherwise, I generally tell my readers to "read
it straight," to make no special effort to add emphasis through
intonation, pacing, or inflection. No need to "do the police in
different voices." This is not theater, only reading.
I also have readers tape my own writing, as a part of my
editing process. Like a lot of writers, I hear a voice or voices
when I write. Or at least I have an idea of how my prose is
supposed to sound. I may want the stress to fall on a particular
word in a sentence, and could put it in italics. But a copyeditor
might find this obtrusive, or a reader could ignore it. I do what
I can with sentence structure and punctuation. Listening to a
tape of my work in progress I hear flaws - unintentional
repetitions, awkward constructions, clumsy phrasing, graceless
syntax. Did that last sentence have one too many beats? Does that
parenthetical phrase disrupt the rhythm? I also listen for
larger, more global aspects. Do I dwell too long on a certain
section or scene? Does the pace bog down in the middle? Is the
ending too abrupt? When the voices of my readers are in sync, or
at least in harmony with the voices in my head, I feel that I
have succeeded. If not, I revise. But for this method to work, I
must not overprime my readers to the idiosyncrasies of my style
or to the special requirements of a particular piece of work,
just as I cannot publish work with instructions. So I don't say,
"Read the first four pages in a near-neutral monotone. Pick up
the pace on page six. Watch out for hissing sibilants on page
seven, but make those plosives really pop. Hit the last two pages
at a breathless gallop. Then pause before the final paragraph and
take it slow, allowing a subtle throb of emotion to come into
your voice on all highlighted words."
Every writer knows that you have little sway over the voices
in your readers' heads. Those voices have accents, tonalities,
and tendencies different from yours. For all you know, they may
lisp or stutter. And because of these varied interior voices,
your readers may miss something or hear more than you intended.
You can do only so much. And besides, anyone who has ever
studied, taught, or thought about literature, or attended a
production of a play, knows that numerous interpretations of any
text are possible. I know plenty of literature professors who
routinely read and reread passages aloud to their students, as a
way to make a point plain. They raise and lower the volume on
certain words, quicken or slow the pace, adding nuances of
interpretation that in print would require elaborate underlining,
italics, and other clues. "Hear that?" they say in effect, rather
than, "See what I mean?" But this doesn't prevent a student from
reading the same passage with different vocal highlights to make
a contradictory point.
I won't deny that listening to texts can be frustrating. The
professional voices at the NLS or the commercial publishers are
sometimes too good. Their well-rounded tones are polished to such
a rich luster that I find myself listening to nothing but their
voices and lose track of what I'm reading. The volunteer readers
at RFB&D and my students and assistants have other vocal foibles.
Some voices are hard on the ears. They are too shrill or too
gruff. They may slur sounds or mispronounce things. Some impose
quirky cadences on everything they read. Others crack or quaver,
inserting high emotion where it may not belong. They get head
colds, sore throats, dry mouth, tongue-tied, sleepy, bored. Once
I listened to a tape of Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which the
reader's habit of reading to small children was audible in his
phrasing. There was a certain disingenuous "And then guess what
happened" quality. When we got to "the horror, the horror," I
almost couldn't go on. Sometimes one text may be read by two or
more readers. It can take a few seconds, even minutes, to adjust
to the new voice. Also, it means that the new readers may be
obliged to pick up a book they have never read and start in the
middle. On a tape of Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, a new
reader assumed a slightly ironic tone, which was not quite
appropriate. The suggestion of a smirk in his intonation
distorted the sound slightly and distracted me. A voice in my
head piped up, "You've got it wrong. This is a serious part."
Eventually, however, the reader's voice lost its curled-lip
tightness. His pace quickened. Words slipped from his lips
without any self-conscious preprocessing. He sounded intrigued.
This kind of tone shift happens often, and it always pleases me.
I hear the voices becoming interested, engaged, engrossed. They
want to know what happens, how the story plays out. A woman
reading Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg" got a girlish giggle in her
throat. Her mirth made it hard to get her words out, but it was
also contagious. Sometimes a healthy skepticism tightens readers'
tones. Sometimes wonder or fear makes them breathy. They let out
little snorts of indignation or small coughs of triumph. Sadness
drags down the corners of their mouths and deepens their pitch.
There are a few universal responses. I've noticed that all
readers reading for the blind, both professionals and volunteers,
have trouble with the word "blind" when it's used in its
pejorative figurative sense. Their voices put it in quotation
marks, then in italics, distancing themselves from the usage. I
was reading a work of sociology in which the author relied
heavily on such phrases as and "blind to the needs," "blind to
the concerns," "blind to the obvious solutions." The woman
reading, a pro, became increasingly tense with each repetition.
The word stuck in her throat. She might have been distressed
simply by bad writing. Didn't the editor see the repetition? But
other flaws in the prose did not affect her voice in the same
way. It was as if having to pronounce the word "blind" made her
conscious that her audience might prefer adjectives that don't
equate stupidity with sight loss.
Am I projecting? Do I hear only what I want to hear, only
what coincides with my own emotional response? The last time I
visited the unicorn tapestries at the Cluny Museum in Paris, a
group of schoolchildren was coming in as I was leaving. A girl
let out an "Ooh!" of delight, and it brought a tear to my eye,
because it seemed the most appropriate response to seeing those
tapestries for the first or even fiftieth time. But she might
have made the sound to impress her teacher, or in response to a
secret her friend was telling her. I have to be careful not to
make too much of voices. I try not to make the types of
assumptions about the voices I hear that sighted people make
about people's facial expressions. Does a downcast gaze mean
someone is shy, respectful, or devious? Does a hushed tone mean
that the reader is awed, aroused, or annoyed? When words catch in
a reader's throat it may only mean that she needs a drink of
water.
I also try to avoid making a mental image of the strangers
who read books on tape. Though in daily life I often rely on the
sound of a voice to recognize someone, it is not a surefire
method. When an acquaintance approaches me at a party, my brain
will register the presence of a shadowy body of a certain size
and shape. When she speaks, other details of her physiognomy will
seem to emerge from the cloudy form before my eyes. Just as I
will not recognize an unfamiliar object on my desk until I can
touch it, I need to hear a voice before a person's indistinct
image resolves into someone recognizable. But voices can be
deceiving. I used to be acquainted with a man whom I encountered
about twice a year at parties. Whenever we met I had to resist
the urge to compliment him on his weight loss. In fact he had not
lost weight; he was thin and had always been thin. But he had a
fat voice. It was a voice of a man who was not only overweight,
but oversized. It was a thick voice that seemed to boom out of a
cavernous chest, resonating through a thick coating of flesh. But
when I looked at him I saw a thin man, or rather, an elongated
shadowy man-shape. When he spoke, the uncertain, smudgy outlines
of his body seemed to swell. Before my eyes he ballooned in every
direction. Even his head got larger. Only when he stopped
speaking could I force his image to deflate to something
approximating his actual size.
I've noticed that listeners to National Public Radio
frequently write in to comment on the shock of seeing a
photograph or TV image of one of the network's familiar voices.
They seem not only surprised but indignant to discover how Bob
Edwards or Cokie Roberts or Nina Totenberg actually look. I sense
that sighted people are much quicker to create mental images from
voices, because images matter so much more to them. What
assumptions I make about the people whose voices I hear are
rather rudimentary and general. Older voices, both male and
female, tend to be deeper than young voices. The sounds acquire a
grainy texture. But I know many older people with very youthful
voices, and vice versa. So when I start listening to a tape, I
may think, "Female over fifty from the Midwest." But I'm
conscious I may be wrong on all counts. And I usually won't
hazard a guess about hair, eye, or skin color, educational level,
marital status, or socioeconomic background.
There is a voice who reads for the New York unit of RFB who
sounds to me like Lauren Bacall. The voice has overtones of what
a friend calls "Park Avenue lockjaw" combined with a rough-and-
ready huskiness. I have no idea if it is Bacall - RFB readers do
not identify themselves by name. And I make no mental image of
Bacall bent over a book in a recording studio. But I enjoy the
voice anyway. She lends glamour to whatever she reads. Besides
these passing fancies about possible identities, personalities,
or emotions, I hear more substantial things as well. I've heard
Faulkner read by southerners who readily take on all the
dialects. But I've also heard him read by Yankees. After a few
awkward pages, their voices seem to slip effortlessly into
Mississippi cadences. Their inflections lilt a little, even in
parts not written in dialect. They pause to breathe, breaking
blocks of unpunctuated prose into comprehensible conversational
units. I doubt that they are entirely conscious of this. They
read the words as written and it comes out that way. Faulkner's
prose seems to fall naturally into a certain rhythm and roll. I
am awed by the power of writing that can mold a voice in this
way. I'm not sure I would know this about Faulkner if I were not
accustomed to hearing his work read aloud.
Reading an edition of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir
intended for English-speaking students, the native French reader
reads a footnote in English, "Here the author is being somewhat
ironic," and emits an involuntary "Humph." She is responding, I
suppose, to the obviousness of the irony - who could miss it? -
or else disagreeing with the editor's assertion. I wish she would
say more. Her voice and the certainty in the "Humph" suggest that
she's someone worth listening to. I rewind. I hear the irony in
the passage, or is irony the right word? Isn't it something more
subtle than that? The reader reads the footnote and humphs again.
I echo the sentiment.
I listen to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" read by a
woman with a southern accent, which seems a bit at odds with the
Minnesota setting of the story. [1] In the final scene, the
protagonist, Dexter Green, a poor boy who made a fortune with a
chain of speciality laundries, converses with an acquaintance,
Devlin. Devlin brings news of the marriage of Judy Jones, the
wealthy beauty who tormented Dexter in his youth:
"Awfully nice girl," brooded Devlin meaninglessly, "I'm sort
of sorry for her."
"Why?" Something in Dexter was alert, receptive, at once.
"Oh, Lud Simms has gone to pieces in a way. I don't mean he
ill-uses her, but he drinks and runs around -"
"Doesn't she run around?"
"No. Stays at home with the kids." (133-134)
The reader pronounces the phrase "run around" as "run
round." This startles me. I check the print text and see that
it's a mistake. But it makes me think. The phrase, as this reader
speaks it, has an old-fashioned coyness, a discreet but knowing
unwillingness to specify particular acts. The phrase winks, at
once disapproving and condoning. And it seems exactly right for
Judy Jones and the society she inhabits, which tolerates a
certain degree of sexual misconduct, even from unmarried females,
as long as marriage is the outcome and social hierarchies are
rigidly preserved. The Judy Jones whom Dexter remembers did run
'round, with every boy in town. But part of her appeal for him
was her poignant awareness that her "runnin' 'round" was
tolerated only because her social status was so lofty. Girls who
were less beautiful, less rich, less socially prominent (girls
from Dexter's background) could not run 'round without risk. I
try not to make too much of this slip of the tongue. Another
reader might not even hear it. When I teach the story I may not
even discuss this passage, except to remark on the perfect
aptness of the name Lud Simms, or the way Fitzgerald reveals
Dexter's uncharacteristic agitation through his testy repetition
of other phrases in the dialogue that follows. But still, this
momentary halt in my reading helps me rearticulate something in a
new way, with a new accent.
For better or for worse, reading this way almost always
feels like a shared experience. I feel myself not merely a
passive audience but engaged in a kind of exchange. Readers are
not reading to me; we are reading together. I have a sense of a
continuous back-and-forth commentary in which I bounce my own
ideas off the readers' ideas, or what I perceive of their ideas
from their intonations, mistakes, involuntary grunts and sighs.
This is precisely what confounds the sighted reader who thinks of
reading as a private and intensely personal act, a solo flight
with no copilot to look over your shoulder, make snide comments,
or gush about the view. But I can't help myself. This way of
thinking about reading comes from the habit of listening to
people I know read aloud to me. My mother read to me throughout
her life, before and after I lost my sight. She loved to read
aloud and had an extraordinary ability to read for prolonged
periods at startling speeds. Hers was the first voice I ever
heard, and I must have imbibed some of her pleasure for reading
long before I knew what reading was. Also, I inherited her voice;
there were many people who could never tell us apart on the
phone. So when she read aloud to me it was akin to hearing my own
voice reading. She read the newspaper to me, selecting articles
she knew would interest us both. Or perhaps it's more accurate to
say that she shaped my interest through the articles she chose to
read. She preferred to read me long novels or massive biographies
of writers and artists. We seldom talked about these books during
or after the reading, but part of the powerful connection between
us came from our shared experience of them.
From my mother I learned that knowing what someone is
reading at a given moment can give you access to that person's
thoughts and state of mind. When the reading is shared and
simultaneous, that access feels all the more immediate. One of my
college roommates read me several novels by Henry James. Perhaps
she was just being nice, but she claimed she would have done this
even if I were not there because reading James's prose aloud made
it easier to comprehend. Breaking his long sentences into
manageable units of speech, holding his words in her mouth then
giving them voice, gave her mind the necessary breathing room to
absorb his meaning. Reading these books together also allowed us
to share observations and interpretations as we went along,
almost paragraph by paragraph. When Nick reads to me, usually a
big novel or epic, the text becomes a topic of conversation
throughout the day. The initial impressions one has during the
course of reading, the ideas one revises or rejects as reading
continues, become mutual property between us. We share the
process of reading, a real-time event in the intimate space where
ideas first take shape.
I require my writing students to turn in taped readings of
their own work. This is not only a convenience, allowing me to
return their work in about the same amount of time a sighted
teacher takes. But also, reading their work aloud is supposed to
make them more conscious of flaws in their prose. I notice that
frequently, particularly after reading a longer piece of work,
they feel compelled to speak to me at the end of the tape. They
find they have something to explain or disclaim. "I tried to do
it another way first, but I think this works better," they say.
"Reading it over I see the ending is kind of abrupt." I don't
discount the possibility that these outpourings are staged pleas
for me to go easy on them, but I also think there is something
about having just read aloud, for an extended period of time,
that makes them unguarded. I sense that they are not so much
speaking to me as thinking aloud. I feel myself invited briefly
into the mysterious space between the writer and the text. It
always sounds like it's late at night when this happens. Their
voices are soft, muted. Roommates and pets are all sleeping.
Street noise is reduced to the infrequent shush of a passing car.
I imagine them sitting alone, in the circle of light from a
solitary reading lamp. The text lies in their laps. Or else they
read it off the computer screen, the reading punctuated by an
occasional tap-tap-tap of the scroll command. Outside the circle
of light, in the general darkness, I hover, a receiving presence.
I describe this to one of my reading assistants and he is not
surprised. He says that often when he finishes taping something
for me he feels compelled to speak to me, to express an opinion
or elicit mine. He goes on to say that, if I were to give him the
same text to read to himself and tell me what he thought, it
would be different somehow. Reading something aloud makes him
notice different things. But also, the responses he has feel raw,
unembellished, connected somehow to the realm of spontaneous
utterance rather than considered contemplation. It's as if the
act of reading aloud seems to open a more immediate line of
communication. From his lips to my ear.
Of course, everything I describe only illustrates that
reading books on tape is fundamentally different in every way
from reading to oneself. So perhaps people who read this way are
right to offer disclaimers. Our brains process aural and visual
information differently, so the reading medium can affect the
message. Public speakers know that what you can expect a reader
to follow may leave an audience in the dark. Speechwriters adhere
to rules and guidelines with an ear to future sound bites, while
a political position paper can deliver the same idea in a greater
number of syllables. I am listening to texts that were written to
be read silently. I interpret the text, the voice reading the
text, the experience of the person reading the text, piling layer
on layer over and around the text, like so many scarves and
sweaters. Can I really claim to experience the text at all?
And then there's the whole problem of reading illustrations,
diagrams, charts, tables, photographs, reproductions, maps, and
other visual aids that may be a part of the text. Some standard
math and science textbooks are available with raised diagrams so
that sight-impaired students can trace graphs and figures with
their fingertips. But for the vast majority of illustrated books,
readers must provide a description. A reader says, "on the facing
page there's a portrait of Rene Descartes. His face is very
intelligent and sensitive." This comes as no surprise. Everything
I know about Descartes would lead me to believe that he was
intelligent and sensitive. But what aspects of his face these
adjectives are meant to designate, I do not know. I am glad to
know there's this image in the book, that Descartes rates a
portrait, but beyond this, I'm unimpressed.
In a textbook on visual perception, the reader says,
"There's a simple line drawing, a cartoon really, of a rabbit.
And apparently, if you look at it the right way, some people see
a duck." Since I am reading a chapter on optical illusions, I
know what's going on. I may even develop a theory about why this
reader sees the rabbit first while another would see the duck,
and how the image could be altered to change each reader's
experience of the illusion. If I had the print version in front
of me and could magnify it sufficiently, I could experience the
illusion for myself. But I might miss the graphic illustration of
how it works on someone else.
If you listen to enough books recorded specifically for the
blind, you sense which readers are accustomed to describing
things to the blind and which are not. Some describe images in a
systematic, supposedly neutral way, with so much detail that it
becomes difficult to imagine what is represented. Others skip to
the chase and explain the point of the image. A reader says,
"There's a bar graph on the bottom of the page which shows ..."
She pauses to assess the diagram, then concludes with some
annoyance in her tone, "exactly what the author said in the last
paragraph." This reader was beginning to get impatient with the
author's reliance on graphs, charts, and figures and was ready to
drop all pretense that there was something in these images that a
blind reader could not gather from words alone. Granted, writers
in certain fields must conform to convention in their use of
images. A pie chart is worth a thousand words. But when all these
images must be translated into words for a blind reader, the
authors' insecurities begin to show around the edges. It's as if
they assume that readers will only skim unless the bribe of a
three-color image is offered to make them linger.
Some books offer particular challenges in this regard. John
Berger's Ways of Seeing has a vast number of images -
reproductions of paintings, photographs, advertisements. [2] In
some cases the images are presented without text, as pictorial
essays. The sequence and juxtaposition of the images is supposed
to create a nonverbal argument, leading the reader to an
inevitable conclusion. The RFB&D readers on the taped version I
listen to are up to the task. One in particular seems very well
versed in the terminology of traditional art history. She's able
not only to pronounce artists' names correctly but also to
identify works of art even when the painters and titles are not
given in the caption or text. She describes one image as "thickly
painted" and another as "a fresco" when it would be impossible to
tell this from the reproductions in the book, suggesting that
she's already familiar with the works. And she seems to enjoy
describing the images. She revels in it. Her voice becomes
excited, even agitated. At points she speaks so rapidly that I
have to slow down the tape to understand her. Her language is
lush with adjectives. I'm a bit startled at first. Her enthusiasm
is such a switch from the usual "nothing but the text, ma'am"
neutrality I'm used to. But then I start to enjoy it. Why should
she repress her pleasure? It's infectious. I'd love to visit the
Louvre with this woman. I picture her stopping for long moments
before each painting, pointing out details here and there, making
broad, sweeping gestures in the air. A small crowd would gather,
attracted by her enthusiasm. A tour given by Berger would
presumably be more laconic. "Look at that," he would say. "Now,
look at that. See what I see?"
At times the reader's interpretations are somewhat at odds
with Berger's. In the third chapter Berger presents a detail from
Ingres's La Grande Odalisque next to a photograph from a girlie
magazine, then suggests that the expressions of the two women are
"remarkably similar" (55). The reader describes Ingres's model as
looking "alluring, seductive and knowing," while the woman in the
photograph is "merely pornographic." When she reads Berger's
assertion she pauses for a second, perhaps to look back at the
images, but does not revise her own interpretation. What am I to
make of this? Should I denounce the reader for her elitist
assumption that because Ingres's painting hangs in the Louvre the
nudity depicted has redeeming social value? Should I applaud
Berger for revealing both works' intention to titillate? Neither
the reader nor Berger tells me what I really want to know about
the two facial expressions. Could the resemblance be merely
coincidental, considering that there are a finite number of
expressions that facial features can assume? I wish I could bring
in a third party to settle the matter. Then I find myself
wondering about the photographer and his model. Is it possible
that the photographer purposefully posed the model in this way so
his photo would prompt this comparison? Did the model assume this
expression because she'd seen it once on a painting in a museum
and wished to give her occupation dignity by conforming to
conventions of the Western artistic tradition? All this
speculation is beside Berger's point. But I get Berger's point, I
follow his argument, I know what he means even though I can't see
it. And I enjoy the book immensely, though at least part of my
pleasure comes from the sometimes ludicrous disjunction between
reader and author.
But did I really read this book? Or did I get only a
second-hand hybrid version from someone who did not always see
eye-to-eye with the author? It could be said that there are books
which are simply not appropriate for blind readers. Ways of
Seeing and similarly image-heavy works are required reading in
courses in art history, sociology, psychology, cultural studies,
film theory, and other disciplines. RFB records books according
to requests from student subscribers, so I imagine that there are
other blind readers with similar questions about this text. For
us to get closer to a definitive reading of Berger's book,
perhaps we should watch and listen to the BBC television
production and hear what role the soundtrack plays in shaping
viewers' responses.
Despite all these potential problems, limitations, and
distortions, books on tape are here to stay, for both blind and
sighted readers. More and more people adopt this form of reading
all the time, for a variety of reasons. The two free book
services have long recognized that sighted people could also
benefit from books on tape; people with physical disabilities are
also eligible. In 1995, Recordings for the Blind added the words
"and Dyslexic" to its title because almost 60 percent of the
borrowers are dyslexic or have some other type of learning
disability that prevents them from reading print. Even sighted
people without any print disabilities may resort to books on tape
occasionally or under certain circumstances. People recuperating
from surgery or illness may find regular reading postures
impossible or may find it more soothing to listen than to read to
themselves. And for many others, as the commercial producers
advertise, books on tape allow busy people the opportunity to
read while doing something else.
Future technologies will make live readers less necessary.
Personal computers have had voice synthesizing capabilities for
some time. As they are now, these artificial voices are not for
the faint of heart. They tend to read in a tinny monotone, giving
equal value to every syllable. In his memoir Second Sight, Robert
V. Hines says that his computer sounded like a foreign diplomat
with a head cold. I asked a friend whether the voice in her
computer was male or female, and she could not say for sure: "I
don't even want to think about it." The program I use gives me a
choice. The voice I prefer is decidedly male and has an earnest,
well-meaning though slightly adenoidal quality. The female voices
on the menu sound like the male talking falsetto, the computer
performing vocal drag. Another program I've used consistently
mispronounces my name, but so do many humans. When it encounters
a word or phrase in capital letters, it spells it out letter by
letter at breakneck speed. I have e-mail correspondents who rely
heavily on capital letters for emphasis. My computer's readings
of their messages become so much alphabet soup. But like many
people who use voice synthesizers, I've adjusted. I've even grown
rather fond of it. For one thing, unlike human readers, it never
gets tired. It will read me the same sentence over and over
without so much as a sigh of protest. I've come to think of it as
plucky - even fearless - as it forges ahead through foreign
languages, dialects, and technical jargon without complaint or
apology. I have it read me this paragraph. It sounds like it's
blushing.
Voice synthesizing technology improves all the time.
Designers recently discovered that with the simple addition of
appropriately timed pauses, as if for breath, synthesized voices
become more understandable. Apparently, human listeners derive
meaning from the spaces between words and sentences as much as
from the words themselves. Program the voice synthesizer to do
this, and it suddenly sounds more human. My computer reads a
period as a full stop and a comma as a half stop, which coincide
with my sense of how this punctuation works. But the pause it
makes for a semicolon is almost indistinguishable from the pause
for a period. Also, being rather literal-minded, it reads a dash
as an eighth stop, and rushes breathlessly on. Most humans read a
dash as a longer pause, a break in the rhythm of the sentence,
like a phrase in parentheses. On top of all this, the computer
also pauses at the end of every line of text whether or not
there's punctuation there. To bypass this problem I change the
font size so the pause occurs at a different point in the line,
then I try to ignore these breaks. But when I ignore these pauses
there's a risk that I will also miss hearing when a pause is
needed.
Patience helps. As with all new technology, kinks get ironed
out over time. Very soon, users of synthesized voices will have
greater control. The voices in computers will be digital
recordings rather than artificially produced synthetics.
Multimedia systems already allow users to create audiovisual
productions, including recorded voices. You can, for a simple
example, add "vocal Post-Its" to a document, digital recordings
of your own comments and queries that can be activated when a
reader clicks on a particular portion of the text. Your colleague
or correspondent can hear your voice while reading your words, as
if you were right there reading over his shoulder.
One day I will be able to customize my computer's voice by
loading digital recordings of actual voices - my own, my
friends', celebrities'- into the hard drive. I'll be able to
alter and enhance aspects of these voices, to add or delete
accents, emphasis, and tonal qualities. I'll time the pauses to
correspond to my punctuation. Then, using a CD-ROM or a scanner
and a few deft keystrokes I'll produce perfect (to me, anyway)
multivoiced readings of any text I choose. But even when this
glorious future gets here, I might still listen to books read by
human beings, live or on tape. I hope to one day become
proficient enough at braille to recapture an almost-forgotten
pleasure, that of reading silently, alone, without anyone's voice
in my head but my own. But I suspect that even then I would still
want occasionally to pop a cassette into a player and have
someone read to me. For one thing, I don't think I would stop
having others read me my own prose so I can hear for myself
whether it stands up to someone else's voice. But I will also
probably listen to other things, too. I have come to value the
random encounter of this kind of reading, the happy chance that
allows me to hear something new and unexpected even in a text I
thought I knew.
As the popularity of recorded books grows, the prejudice
against this method of reading will lose its grip. Sighted
readers will quit apologizing, and the blind will have one less
stigma to overcome. Still, this method may never be palatable for
some. And if those people lose their sight, I worry about them.
If they disparage this method in advance, denigrating it as yet
another distressing sign of the decline of literate culture, they
doom themselves to the kind of despair that the sighted presume
is always the lot of the blind. And when they complain about
being forced to read this way (as many do), they play into that
prejudice which insists that for a thing to be done right it must
be done with the eyes. When I hear these complaints, I want to
say, "Don't let them put those words in your mouth." Behind the
eyes is the brain, where imagination, intellect, and memory
reside. That's where reading happens. The ears and eyes are
merely pathways. And then there are the readers to consider.
Reading aloud to someone is an act of generosity that should
never be under-esteemed. It requires time, energy, voice, and
imagination. Readers allow the text to inhabit their minds for a
time, then give it voice. Such generosity never fails to move me.
CHAPTER 8
Up Close, In Touch
There is pain above my right eye, between my eyebrow and the
tear duct. It is a dull, constant pain, an ache rather than a
throb, not excruciating by any means. If I continue writing as I
am, my nose skimming the page, my eye peering through a heavy
magnifying lens, the pain will deepen and spread, migrating to my
forehead and the other eye. My neck and shoulders will start to
ache too, since I am in a rather cramped position. But that pain
is only muscular. I can relieve it by stretching and shifting my
posture. The pain around my eye may be muscular too. Muscles
squeeze the lens tight for close focus. The standard remedy for
this kind of eyestrain is to look at a distant object. The
muscles that compress the lens, making it thick for reading and
writing, will relax for distance vision. But when I look up, the
image through the window seems chaotic. There is a shifting
scintillation of light and color. it is a windy day, and tree
limbs shift with each gust. Sunlight is reflecting off the smooth
surface of leaves. On top of this, there is the ever-present
quivering motion that comes from my marred central vision. But
today my vision seems worse than usual. For some reason my brain
will not resolve what I see into anything meaningful. If I had
not just been writing, my brain would be able to sort out the
different aspects of the image and perceive a comprehensible
impression - not what a sighted person would see, naturally, but
familiar enough for me to say, "That's part of the tree. That's
part of the neighbor's house." But now, because (as I surmise)
I've had my eyes clenched in extreme close focus, they seem
unable to shift back, so everything appears blurry and
indistinct. In fact, I have trouble seeing beyond the window
itself. The verticals and horizontals of the frame and panes
shimmy wildly. outside the window, the wind blows harder, and I
feel a little seasick as the motion increases.
But if I work at it, concentrating on a known, stable object
- the white trim along my neighbor's roofline - I can feel my
focus shift. The chaos resolves into recognizable (to me, anyway)
shapes. I can distinguish different objects from one another,
light from shadow, inside from outside.
But I don't always have the patience for this. I have
another thought and dive back toward the page, pressing my
magnifying glasses up on my nose. At first, the regularity of
black marks on white paper is a relief after the chaos outside.
But after another sentence or two the pain is back. This pain is
familiar to me. I think that it is there most of the time when I
read, lurking in the background of consciousness. But it is
certainly not the worst pain I've ever known. And it's nothing
compared with the debilitating agony that migraine sufferers
describe. In general, I can ignore this pain. It occupies only as
much attention as the mosquito bite on my left ankle, or the
patch of dry skin on my right elbow. A tear forms at the corner
of my right eye. I blink to spread it over the eyeball, and this
is soothing. But I know that if I keep at this, the pain will get
worse. There is a point of no return, beyond which the usual
remedies of blinking or looking out the window will not help.
Then, somewhere in my nervous system a switch is thrown, and the
pain swells. At its worst, it will feel as if a rigid shaft
pierces my head, twisting with the slightest movement. If I let
the pain get to this point I will be dizzy when I stand up,
almost nauseated. I may black out for a second - blackness will
well up around me, swallowing me whole from the ground up. If I
let it go that far, drugs will dull the pain but won't erase it.
I will find it hard to focus, hard to look at light, hard to
think of anything else. The pain will be with me for the rest of
the day, perhaps even tomorrow.
There is urgency now. I should stop, or at least move to the
computer since I can type without focusing. Or I could just close
my eyes, but even then I feel the same tautness inside. Besides,
I want to finish this thought, commit this idea to paper while
it's still fresh. I bargain with the pain: I'll stop, I promise,
just let me get to the end of the paragraph. Another minute,
another sentence, one more word.
I bring this on myself. The damage to my maculas impairs my
ability to perceive detail, such as the letters in the words I am
writing. To read them at all I must bring my eye very close to
the page. I augment the physical proximity with a magnifying
lens. I used to use handheld magnifiers, but now I wear eyeglass
frames with a magnifying lens mounted on the right side. The lens
enlarges everything six times normal size. This magnification
means that my blind spot, which obliterates whatever is directly
before my eyes, affects a smaller portion of the enlarged word.
So if I stare at the middle of a word (the dd in "middle," for
instance) I can see the m at the beginning and the e, even the le
at the end. It looks like m-le. As I move my eye to the right
while my pen tip begins the next word, my blind spot erases the
end of the word: mid-.
I use only my right eye when I read and wear no lens over
the left. I used to wear a patch over that side of my glasses,
but I discovered that I didn't need it. My left retina is more
degenerated than my right, so as my pen travels across the page,
everything to the left of it fades to blankness - my blind spot
erases what I've just written. Occasionally my left eye still
seems to think that it should be doing something. Sometimes
there's an odd muscular twitch, or I feel my eye drift out of
alignment, giving me double vision, ghost lines of writing
veering off at crazy angles. if it gets bad, I hold the lid
closed with a finger. Of course, I don't have to write this way.
When I type I don't have to focus my eyes on anything. And the
computer allows me even more magnification. At the moment I'm
typing at 36 point. This L is about half an inch tall. To read
what I've just written, I still must get very close, about two
inches from the screen, and to proofread it (to be sure there are
two e's in screen) I put on my glasses and move in closer, my
nose brushing the screen. Now my blind spot effaces only parts of
letters, everything below or above the median line.
I also own a closed-circuit TV reading device, which allows
me even greater magnification. The machine has a tiny video
camera pointing at a movable easel below. I put a book, a page of
manuscript, a letter, or a form under the camera, and an image
appears on a TV screen at eye level. I can magnify the text up to
a hundred times original size, and reverse the image from
positive to negative, so the print appears white and the
background is black. This reduces glare, making reading more
comfortable. I can also mask portions of the text, isolating one
paragraph or one line at a time. Using the machine to write
requires adjustments in eye-hand coordination since I must look
up at the screen to see what my hand is writing below it. Still,
the device is handy for filling out forms and computerized grade
sheets. It allows me to use phone books and dictionaries. But I
cannot use it to read for a long period of time. The flashing
movement of words on the screen, caused by the sliding table the
text lies on, sometimes leads to a sort of motion sickness,
familiar to users of microfilm readers. A different kind of pain.
Oddly, even with all this magnification, I find it necessary
to be very close to the text when I read. It feels unnatural to
read from a distance. There are aids that would force me to back
away from the text. I could, for instance, get a pair of
eyeglasses with miniature telescopes mounted in the lenses. These
would be set to allow me to stand at a podium and read a text
without holding it up in front of my face. The problem would be
that glasses set for that distance and that angle of vision would
not work if I wanted to read a book while lying on the couch. The
solution then would be several pairs of glasses, and for the time
being I'm unconvinced that the advantages outweigh the
inconvenience and expense.
The fact is, reading close is such an old habit I'm not sure
that I can shake it this late in life, or even that I should.
Contrary to popular belief, reading from a closer than average
distance does not necessarily damage the eyes. Eyestrain won't
make you nearsighted or farsighted; it may simply indicate to
your eye doctor that you have developed one of these, or some
other condition. Changes in the curvature of the cornea or the
shape of the lens or the eyeball occur genetically or as a result
of the body's aging process, not as a side effect of reading
habits. Besides, the notion of a correct distance for reading is
only a measure of what's average. If your visual acuity measures
20/20, it means when you stand 20 feet from the eye chart, you
can read what the average person reads from that distance. When
George Snellen created his familiar eye chart in the middle of
the nineteenth century, he chose twenty feet as the base unit for
no better reason than it was the length of the typical classroom
of his day. And perhaps the catchy ring of the phrase "20/20" was
irresistible.
Thus, though my up-close reading posture deviates from
convention, it probably won't make my eyesight any worse. So it
shouldn't matter. Except for the pain. The reason reading becomes
painful to me is that my eyes are focusing at the maximum for
prolonged periods of time. The angle at which the light enters
the eye tells the brain how far the object of interest is from
the eyes, and the brain automatically adjusts the muscles that
control the lenses to refract the light onto the retina. My
lenses and the muscles that contract and relax them are more or
less normal. They do what they're told, oblivious to the defect
in the retinas behind them. With my head pressed close to the
computer screen this way, the focusing muscles receive the
instruction to focus as if for extremely close reading - the fine
print at the bottom of a contract, the ingredients list on a
medication label, the OED. The pain I feel is the same as a
sighted person feels when reading a dictionary for a long time.
When I first heard the expression "close reading" as an
English major in college, I felt a tremendous sense of
affirmation. This was the Yale English department, where close
reading was something like a religion, and hearing the phrase
made me feel that I belonged. I always read close. I always read
every word, every syllable, every letter. So the literary
practice, to read every word, to dwell on them, to contemplate
not only their meanings but connotations, resonances, and
history, came very naturally to me. Close reading presupposes
that the text is worth taking time over. Close reading is a task
of discovery, recovery, uncovering, detection, dissection -
struggle. Sometimes close reading is even painful. Since all
print is fine print to me, I must always read it closely. Fine
print is not only the part that gives you headaches but also the
part that only the truly patient, diligent, and discerning reader
can decipher. I felt physically well-suited, if not predestined,
to be a close reader.
Around this time I met my husband, Nick. He recalls that the
first time he saw me I was reading in the library. The book was
in French, and he could tell (his vision is normal) that it was
not a textbook but a recently published novel. It was my unusual
posture that attracted his attention. My nose was scraping across
the page, the covers of the book folded around my face. He
thought, "if reading is that difficult, it must really matter to
her." Was this love at first sight? Not exactly. But Nick's first
glimpse of me revealed something fundamental about who I was. As
an aspiring writer and student of literature, reading was not
only the way I spent most of my time but the central activity of
my life. Reading mattered more than anything. And he probably
recognized a kinship, a shared passion, or at least our common
education. As a graduate student in the same department he
perhaps saw in me the physical embodiment of close reading.
But the literary scholar who can dwell for hours on a single
passage can also skim junk mail, scan the box scores for a
particular team, and speed-read a pile of student midterms.
Competence in reading involves more than holding the text at a
distance that does not lead to eyestrain. Efficient reading means
that the eyes move across and down the page in an orderly way,
with a minimum of regressive or backward movements. The eye of a
normally sighted, competent reader does not track along the line
but moves in short jumps, or saccades, fixating briefly on small
groups of characters before jumping to a new location. During the
microsecond that the eye fixates on a single word or group of
words, the brain processes the characters whose images fall on
the center area of the retina, which is most sensitive to detail.
At the same time, peripheral areas of the retina give a general
preview of what's coming. Your peripheral vision can make broad,
general distinctions about the size and shape of the words that
follow the one in your central vision. You combine this general
preview with your knowledge of the language you're reading, and
the context of what you're reading, make an educated guess about
what's next, and jump ahead. The most proficient readers can both
process a large number of characters at each fixation and jump
over a large number of characters with each saccade. And they
rarely need to look back to verify what they've just read.
When I read, I keep my eyes staring straight ahead and move
either the text or my head. Since I am always reading magnified
text, my eye can process only about three characters at each
fixation, while yours may process as many as a dozen at a time.
And while my eye moves forward a character or two at a time, your
eye may leapfrog fourteen or fifteen characters in a single
saccade. Since I have next to no central vision, I rely on my
peripheral vision to give me the general features of the letters
and words. But the information is vague. The cells on the
periphery are not sensitive to detail in the way cells at the
center are. I can distinguish tall letters from short ones and
straight lines from curves, but I lack the kind of cells that can
definitively discern the orientation of these features relative
to each other. An a could be an o, which could be a c, which
could be an e. It's all too easy to confuse an r with a t or even
an f. I regularly reverse or invert some letters - b and d, p and
q. My tendency toward double vision makes minims multiply. I
suspect every n might be an m, every u a w.
Thus, my problem with reading is not simply that my
oversized blind spot erases every character as I look at it. I
also lack the visual equipment to allow me to make definitive
judgments. As I stare at a word, it changes. I move my gaze
around each letter, and it seems to reconfigure before my eyes.
In quick succession a series of alternatives present themselves.
The word "road" could easily be "toad," which could be "tool."
"Wood" could be "weed" or perhaps "ward," or even "word."
The only constant in my reading is the fickleness and
instability of the text. I am plagued by uncertainty. As I
progress through the sentence, each new word makes me question
the ones before. I glance back. A word I thought I'd recognized
has now changed. My brain says, "If that 'word' is actually
'wood,' then that 'tool' must actually be 'toad!'"
If I manage at all it is because I started my reading career
fully sighted. Part of learning to read involves the ability to
process incomplete information. For instance, you don't always
need to see the whole word to recognize it. Typically, readers
learn to aim their eyes at the beginnings of long words, and skip
the endings. In English, grammatical information about verb tense
or noun number generally occurs at the ends of words, and you can
usually extrapolate this from the context. Similarly, if you're
given a text in which only the top half of the letters is
visible, you could still make out the words. Mask the upper half,
and you'll have a tougher time. This is true because there are
eight letters in our alphabet with stems or dots above the middle
line, and only five with tails below it. We gamble on statistical
probabilities. My brain, like yours, is programmed to make the
most of minimal information. Still, what I do is child's play
compared to your fluency. I read so slowly, with such difficulty
and inaccuracy, that I can hardly claim to read at all.
Fortunately, there are other ways to read - books on tape, for
instance, which I began to rely on in my early twenties, and
braille, which I have learned in the past few years.
Like most of the truly important inventions in human
history, the braille code is elegantly simple. The braille cell
is made up of six raised dots, arranged like the six in dominos,
two vertical columns of three. All the letters of the alphabet,
plus special symbols for certain common words, consist of from
one to all six of these dots. Each character is the right size to
fit even a child's fingertip, so the reader moves the finger
smoothly from left to right. The braille alphabet is easy to
memorize, and it's hard to mistake one letter for another. In the
first lessons of my braille book there were spacers between
words, a solid row of dots, both to indicate where a word ends
and to help guide the finger along the correct line. This made it
hard to get lost. Of course, I was aided by already knowing how
to read. I knew that certain combinations of letters are
impossible, and I could guess what was coming. And at first, I
knew only five letters. "Decade" was my first big word -
immensely satisfying. I admired its weightiness and utility.
Sadly, the rest of my vocabulary - "bed," "bad," "bead" -
afforded few opportunities to use it. Later on the same page I
encountered my first two-word phrase, "Bad Ada," which gave me a
lot of trouble. There was no spacer after "bad," so I didn't
recognize the space between the words and kept trying to read it
as one word: "badada," which made me think of "banana" except I
didn't know n yet. Finally, going over and over it, the space
became apparent. My whole finger could lie between the first d
and the second a. Thus dissected, the phrase announced itself. I
read the phrase over and over, laying stress first on one word,
then the other.
For a while, Ada and Abe were my only characters, and, of
course, Dad. With the addition off, g, and h, their world was
enriched, littered with new and disparate objects. Also, the
characters became capable of complex actions. "Ada beaded a bag,"
for instance. Suddenly emotional depth was possible too, and
motive, cause and effect. I read, "Dad had a bad headache," which
explained a lot. The page before he had "fed Abe a bad cabbage."
Cabbage was an important commodity to these people. It was also a
satisfying word to read, as was "baggage." I recalled the
satisfaction I had in first grade in sounding out longer words,
the sense of successfully mastering so many letters, so many
sounds. And I liked the letter g, a square of four dots. It felt
thick, solid, substantial.
It pleased me to discover that the braille alphabet bears
little resemblance to the Roman one. Connecting the braille dots
does not yield a Roman letter. Also, vowels that are hard for me
to distinguish visually (a could be e could be o) are absolutely
unmistakable. Consonants I frequently reverse visually - b and d,
p and q - have little in common in braille. Of course now there
were new confusions: f is the mirror image of d, w the mirror of
r. U is m turned upside down. Some letters surprised me: m is
simpler than the Roman letter; n is more complex. As I progressed
page by page through the alphabet, reading words, then sentences,
then short passages of peculiar prose, I encountered pitfalls, K
and l were not difficult in themselves, but now there were no
longer spacers between words. Suddenly letters that I identified
with ease two pages before seemed foreign. The dots refused to
fall into discernible patterns. It seemed impossible to determine
where one letter ended and the next began. The letters seemed too
close together. There seemed to be no space between words, much
less lines. I picked up dots from the line below. But gradually I
sorted things out. With each new complication - capitals,
punctuation, numbers, single-spacing - utter, baffling confusion
took hold. Everything I thought I'd mastered disappeared. I felt
lost, adrift in a chaos of random and capriciously disarranged
dots. I was compelled either to go back to a page I knew I could
read or to leave it entirely and return later. Eventually,
clarity and order returned. The letters felt larger, the spaces
between them generous, the spaces between words and lines airy
and relaxed.
When I learned all the letters of the alphabet I read this:
"Congratulations! You have now mastered the entire braille
alphabet." I was startled, then enthralled. I read it again. For
the first time in decades I felt in absolute and stable contact
with the text. This had nothing to do with the precarious
guesswork I'd called reading since I lost my visual acuity. This
was certain, unequivocal. I touched the words. Meaning flowed
into my brain. Suddenly, my mind rushed ahead to imagine the
thousands of texts I wanted to read and reread in this way. I
moved on to study Braille II, the system of contractions and
special signs that makes braille less cumbersome. I found the
contractions so intuitive, so akin to the personal shorthands
that people use taking notes, it hardly required memorization.
Frequently, the initial letter or letters are used to stand for
the whole word, so p stands for people, ab for about, and imm for
immediate. other contractions omit the vowels: grt means great,
rcv means receive. Braille readers, like sighted readers, don't
read every letter. This is not to say that reading braille is
perfectly analogous to reading print. The finger does not saccade
as the eye does, and it's necessary to stay in touch with the
text. Still, proficient braille readers can skim text in much the
way sighted readers do, reading only the first sentences of
paragraphs or only the central three or four words of each line.
As I read I found that context allowed me to speed up, my finger
barely grazing articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. As soon
as I could identify a word from the first few letters, my finger
glided rapidly over the rest and on to the next word.
In the beginning, I found myself leaning close to the page,
as I would with print. But soon I leaned back, way back, the book
pushed away from me, my forearms stretched out comfortably on the
table. This became a source of pleasure in itself, because
reading had always been up-close and closed-in. When I read
visually, my nose brushing the page, or aurally, a recorded voice
in my ears, I am sometimes oppressed by claustrophobia. Now I
felt refreshed by the space around me. I stretched out on the
couch, the book on my lap. I leaned my head back. I closed my
eyes. The muscles of my lips and tongue twitched, whispering. My
progress was slow but steady. My brain did not backtrack as it
would reading print. I recognized each letter or contraction,
then it stood still, steadfast, unwavering. The frantic
uncertainty of reading print was gone. And there was no pain. The
anxiety that another word would be one too many, the nausea and
dizziness creeping toward the surface of consciousness - none of
this now. Occasionally my wrist cramped, and I learned that I was
pressing too hard. My touch became lighter, more fleeting, and
the pain went away. I was serene, floating. A tranquil faith
sustained me letter by letter, word by word.
Why did I wait so long to learn this? If braille is such a
pleasure, and if it seems to hold out the possibility that I can
read fluently and without pain, why didn't I learn it sooner?
After all, when I lost my visual acuity in the mid-sixties, the
sight-enhancing technologies available today were not yet
invented. And surely as a child of eleven I would have picked it
up quickly. I was in school; braille could have been a part of my
regular curriculum. Learning it as an adult, I often had to
juggle to fit practice time into my schedule.
In fact, when I lost my sight, my mother made inquiries
about braille instruction for me. We were told that I had too
much sight. The inference was that only the totally blind could
become proficient at braille. A person with any sight at all
would be tempted to cheat, to read the pattern of raised dots
visually rather than through touch. It was an odd thing to say,
since many sighted people have learned braille, teachers and
family members of blind children, for instance, not to mention
sighted braille transcribers. In fact, though Louis Braille was
blind, his writing system was a modification of a system designed
by a sighted French artillery officer, Captain Charles Barbier de
la Serre. Barbier's code was originally intended as a method of
night writing so that officers at the front could write and read
messages without signaling their location to the enemy by showing
a light. But I didn't know this then. As it turns out, I cannot
see braille. When I stare at a page of braille it looks blank at
first. I move my gaze around it and detect a few speckles of
shadow. These seem to shiver and shake, to move and multiply. It
takes a lot of magnification and a good deal of effort for me to
make out any pattern there.
But at the time, no one so much as showed me a page of
braille. My mother may have been too quick to accept that
person's advice. Or perhaps she did not describe my condition
adequately. She tended to shy away from the ugly words
"blindness" and "macular degeneration" and use the more neutral
"vision problem" instead. Like many parents of newly blind
children, she was eager for good news. This made it easy to
translate "cannot learn braille" into "does not need braille,"
which was reassuring. If I did not need braille then my vision
must not be "that bad." And for my part, I accepted this
misinformation without question. I was eleven. I didn't want to
be blind. The only blind person I'd ever seen was a beggar in the
subway. And I had faith that adults generally looked out for my
best interests and that experts knew what they were talking
about. Besides, they were only reinforcing my uncertainty about
my new status as blind. How could I be blind if I still saw as
much as I did? It made me feel ashamed for even asking. They
seemed to be saying that asking for braille was like wanting a
wheelchair for a skinned knee. I had sight, so I should use it to
read print, because that's how sighted people do it. If it was
difficult, I must simply try harder. If it hurt, it must be the
kind of discomfort that leads to some ultimate good.
I was only too eager to oblige. Being a good student and a
good girl were defining principles of my identity. From the
beginning I'd found being good in school to be the best way for
me to earn attention and praise. Being good in school meant
making it look easy. When something was hard, you simply had to
try harder. I had also been studying ballet from the age of about
five and had absorbed a different version of the same idea. If it
hurt to extend your leg on the barre, you simply had to keep at
it. Contributing to this was the fact that my mother was not
particularly patient about any form of illness or injury. When I
was nine I broke my wrist twice in the space of about six months.
The second time, I remember feeling that my mother was angry at
me, though probably she was angry at the adults who were supposed
to be supervising me when I broke it. In any case, I was not
inclined to complain about the pain of the fracture or the
inconvenience of the cast.
Generally speaking, I was not much of a complainer. To my
parents' credit, I was raised with an acute sense of all that I
had which others did not. I grew up in New York City, in the
neighborhood now called the East Village. Though my apartment
building was solidly middle-class and my school was private,
poverty was only a few blocks away. And it was the 1960s. In the
left-leaning artistic circles of my parents and their friends, to
ignore the economic and social inequities all around us was to be
part of the problem. Good liberals do not complain about the
petty annoyances in their lives when there is true suffering in
the world.
Driven to excel, and socialized not to complain, I dealt
with my lost sight accordingly. Since macular degeneration had no
cure or treatment, complaining about it would only make me more
troublesome and less lovable. Offered no means of coping with my
condition (the word "blindness" was to be avoided), I did
everything I could to conceal it. And because reading was my one
regular activity in which my defect was most visible, I avoided
drawing attention to it. I never said, "I can't read that." I
never talked about the pain. At school, I learned to listen very
carefully, conscious that my teachers tended to repeat whatever
the textbook said and read aloud whatever they wrote on the
board. I dreaded reading aloud myself, since my halting delivery
and frequent errors would reveal my defect. So I would memorize
passages from assignments in advance, then volunteer to "read"
aloud what I had learned by heart. I did my homework with a
magnifying glass but did not bring it to school. I remember once
doing homework at a friend's house. We were reading David
Copperfield, and I was ashamed when she finished the assignment
long before I was a third of the way through. It was bad enough
that reading the way I did left me with ink on my nose. Now this?
So I closed my book, pretending that I was done too, and finished
the reading later.
All this was denial, of course. When my eye doctor first
pronounced me "blind," he failed to detach the word from the
tangle of prejudice and fear that I had internalized without
question or understanding. And what made me blind anyway? A mere
technicality based on a notion of a correct distance for reading.
Because my acuity dipped below the arbitrarily chosen 20/200 line
of legal blindness, all I had to do to stave off the horror was
to hide, disguise, or downplay my difficulties. With this
mind-set, reading braille was out of the question.
I was not alone in this denial. The adults around me did not
observe my struggle and never suggested that I might do well to
look into braille. People see what they want to see, and they
wanted me to be the child I had been before or, at worst, a child
only mildly inconvenienced by an incurable and imprecisely
defined visual impairment. If I had been reading braille they
would have been obliged to see me as blind. I was probably the
first legally blind child my teachers had ever encountered, and I
doubt that any of them had received training about visual
disabilities. And since I was not complaining, as far as anyone
could tell, there was no need to take special measures on my
behalf, beyond occasionally allowing me to approach the
blackboard or take extra time to read tests. I continued to do
well in school. Though I read slowly, my comprehension rate was
very high, probably because I read everything word for word. I
was good with numbers, and I had a strong memory and a knack for
learning languages. My only grade that dropped after I lost my
sight was for handwriting, because I could no longer write on the
lines.
The thing about denial is that it doesn't feel like denial
while it's going on. I do not remember feeling unusual or
unfairly afflicted while I was in school. I needed more time to
do homework than anyone else, but I accepted this and watched
less TV. In eighth grade I was surprised to discover that
everyone else did not take aspirin two or three times a day as I
did, but this did not seem something to worry about. I worried
about the same things my friends did - friendships, boys, our
changing bodies. I did not consciously work to conceal my
blindness from my friends, but it was just often easier to
pretend that I saw what they did. When a friend said, "Look at
that boy," it was too much trouble to say, "I can't see him." I
could tell from her tone of voice whether he was ugly or cute,
stupid or cool, and respond as prompted. My early experimentation
with drugs and sex might have been an attempt to escape pain or
feelings of inadequacy, but at the time it was just what everyone
else was doing. I know I kept a lot from my parents. What
adolescent doesn't? Occasionally I felt I was sparing them the
unpleasant truth that their star student daughter was actually
struggling. Their marriage was disintegrating; they didn't need
more stress. This made me feel virtuous, independent, and mature.
Still, as normal as I may have felt, I know I had unresolved
and unspoken feelings about my blindness and the effect it was
having on my life. This denial had a psychic cost. When I was in
high school I played Annie Sullivan in my school's production of
The Miracle Worker. I was chosen for the part because I was a
good deal taller than the girl playing Helen Keller. Naturally I
was glad to have the lead role, but the play forced me to
confront things I had been working hard to hide. In an early
scene Annie writes a letter describing her struggles with Helen.
Sullivan suffered from the eye disease trachoma, which had caused
her to go blind as a young girl. By the time she went to work for
the Kellers she'd had several operations, which had restored most
of her sight. Still, her eyes troubled her most of her life. To
represent this biographical fact, my director had me write on
stage as I did in real life, bent over the writing desk, my face
an inch above the paper. I also had to rub my eyes and sigh over
eyestrain. This scene bothered me, perhaps because I didn't feel
I was acting. I felt I was exposing my own visual defect to
public view. And since the scene was meant to establish that
Annie was handicapped, therefore deserving the audience's
sympathy, it felt like complaining, special pleading, something I
felt I was not allowed to do.
Other aspects of the play were even more unsettling. I and
the girl who played Helen did not learn how to pull our punches
in our fight scenes until the time of the actual performances.
Rehearsals often left us battered and bruised. Once she bit my
arm so hard it drew blood. Once I slapped her face so hard that
her ears rang for several days. All this violence got to me. I
was not a violent girl, and I felt guilty hitting someone who was
both younger and smaller than I was. But as I started to develop
a sense of the character, I was startled by how easily the
violence came to me. In most interpretations of the role, Annie
Sullivan is something between a surrogate mother and a crusading
saint, freeing Helen from the isolation of her disabilities with
the gift of language and transforming her from a wild child into
the ultimate good little girl. But in my interpretation Annie was
doing battle with Helen's disabilities. What motivated my actions
was not the desire to nurture or liberate but the impulse to
dominate and destroy.
Part of this came from the fact that I had grown up
resenting Helen Keller. Her story is often presented to children,
especially girls, as a model of ideal behavior and a goad to be
grateful. "Look at Helen Keller," her biography seemed to
admonish. "She was deaf and blind and yet you never heard her
complain." When I lost my sight, the Helen Keller credo took on a
sharper, more personal edge: "Why should you feel sorry for
yourself? Look at Helen Keller. She was not only blinder than you
are but deaf as well, and you never hear her complain." No wonder
it felt good to knock her around. But I also had reasons to envy
Helen Keller. She had Annie Sullivan, after all, an adult
companion who seemed to exist solely to aid her, to understand
her needs, to help her communicate, to teach her the manual
alphabet and braille.
The eruption of all these emotions took its toll. At some
point during rehearsals I had a brief bout of "hysterical
blindness." For about a day and a half I saw nothing. It was not
darkness but more like what I see when I close my eyes in
daylight. It was beige rather than black. I could distinguish
light from shadow, but little else. When it first came on, it was
late in the day, and I figured that it was just an extreme form
of eyestrain. But when I woke the next day and still saw nothing,
I was frightened but not quite surprised. I had never been
entirely convinced of my eye doctor's assurances that my retinas
would not deteriorate further. Or else, I surmised, my already
weak eyes had succumbed to another disease. In any case, it did
not surprise me that the blindness which had only been a
technicality had now become a reality. And with this thought
there was a certain sense of relief. Now maybe I could release
myself from the imperative not merely to get by but to excel.
Maybe I could give myself a break, take a breather. Or maybe I
was just glad I wouldn't have to be in that play.
I kept my new condition a secret, telling only my best
friend. It was a weekend, which made it easier to hide what was
going on, and I was by then a virtuoso in this kind of deception.
To distract me, my friend and I went to see a revival of M with
Peter Lorre. She read me the subtitles, which she would have had
to do anyway, since I can't read subtitles and don't know German.
And she described the action in appropriately horror-hushed
tones. To this day I cannot hear Peter Lorre's voice without
thinking of that time.
By the next morning my vision was returning, but my friend
persuaded me to come clean about it. I went to the eye doctor,
and he determined that my vision was unchanged. No additional
treatment, either medical or psychological, was prescribed.
The retrospective gaze distorts and simplifies events. There
were a good many other factors that contributed to my
psychological state at that time - the breakup of my parents'
marriage, to name an obvious one. Still, it is shocking to me now
that the adults in my life failed to read such a clear "cry for
help." But I recognize that denial has the power to sustain
itself even in the face of the most blatant truths. I would like
to say that the event woke me to the idea that if you really need
something it's best to ask for it in plain English. But I can't.
Rather, I think it was one of those moments that makes an
adolescent harshly and somewhat unjustly aware of the
shortcomings of adults. Even good parents, teachers, and doctors
make errors of omission. I was sixteen and stubborn, and I
thought I knew how to get by on my own. I went back to life as
usual. But after The Miracle Worker I gave up acting. No point in
playing with fire.
By the time I went to college I was less self-conscious
about exposing my flawed vision to public view. I had no choice.
I needed the good lighting and quiet of libraries to get my work
done. And though there were then no legislation or university
policies to mandate accommodations for disabled students, I
became adept at asking professors for what I needed - handouts
and exams in black ink rather than mimeograph purple, for
instance. I bartered with friends and classmates for help with
reading. My roommate read me the textbook for the psychology
course we took together. In exchange, I helped edit and type her
papers.
While in college I encountered my first low-vision
specialists. Suddenly there was an array of new visual aids and
equipment, and eye doctors with a new attitude. They did not
simply say, "There is no cure," but went on to add, "Try this. It
might help." They allowed me to articulate the exact nature of my
sight impairment without feeling that I was whining. One even got
me to talk about the pain. Still, I was blind to print. As much
as their aids and attitude helped, my trouble reading print
shaped my educational choices in many ways. As an English major I
tended to study poetry rather than prose - fewer words, more
white space. I had to give up studying Russian because, though
everything in the elementary classes came in large print, the
texts in advanced classes were all in regular size, and the less
familiar Cyrillic alphabet became impossible to decipher. I took
math instead of history because there was less to read.
I know things could have been much worse. If I had been born
a generation or two earlier I might have ended up in a
residential school for the blind, even with the sight I had.
There I would have learned braille as a matter of course. But not
all such schools had the academic standards of Boston's Perkins
Institution, where Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller were educated,
so I might have learned little else. in the worst cases, such
schools left students utterly unprepared to compete in the
sighted job market or to pursue higher education. Their isolation
from their families and peers made them socially inept, without
confidence or self-esteem. Inadequately prepared for the real
world, many retreated to other institutions for the blind, to
subsist on substandard wages and charity, making brooms and
caning chairs.
In some sense I fell into the gap between two educational
trends. It was a historical accident that I lost my sight at a
time when braille was out of favor due to its association with
the wholesale institutionalization of the blind but before
low-vision technologies had become available to replace it. I
cannot say that learning braille when I was eleven would have
solved all my problems. Braille versions of all my textbooks
would not have been readily available, and braille transcription
was then very slow. Besides, I can hardly make claims of missed
educational opportunities. I was a child of privilege who went to
private schools. The advantages of small classes and
individualized attention must have counterbalanced the
disadvantage of my sight impairment. I got through school. I
graduated cum laude from Yale, won prizes for my writing, and was
named the best English major in my class. I write, I teach, I
publish. Except for a little pain which I've learned to control,
what's my gripe?
I accept this argument up to a point. Since I have now
learned braille, perhaps I should let bygones be bygones. And I
would, except that the fact that I've gotten by so long without
braille is due, in large measure, to nothing but pure, blind
luck. A lot of blind children, then and now, are not so lucky.
Visually impaired students now read print with the aid of a vast
array of sight-enhancing equipment. Highly motivated students can
succeed at this, but children who are less willing to put up with
the pain and difficulty may not. These children, and those with
no sight at all, can use recorded books and voice-synthesizing
equipment to read. But most recorded books do not announce
punctuation or paragraph breaks, much less spelling, so a child
who reads only aurally will have a rather sketchy understanding
of written language. Also, recorded texts can be difficult to
scan, skim, review, reread, and study. Braille would offer a
solution to these problems. And surely the physical pleasure and
sense of autonomy that braille reading can bring must increase
the likelihood of a child's academic success. But many school
districts lack the resources to hire accredited braille
instructors to teach the few children who might benefit. Teachers
need little or no special training to teach children to use a
closed-circuit TV reading system, a mini-telescope, or a tape
player. Also, educators argue, many totally blind children have
other disabilities that make braille too difficult. More often
than not, parents who want their blind children to learn braille
must take the initiative and pay for the training themselves.
But these parents may encounter misinformation and
resistance. Throughout my life, whenever I met a new eye-care
specialist I would ask the question again, careful to frame it in
the most casual way, "Do you think I should try to learn
braille?" And the question has always prompted the same
uncomfortable astonishment, "No need for that! Here, try a
stronger magnifier. Upgrade your computer. Have you looked into a
closed-circuit TV?" When I started doing research to write about
braille, a social worker who wanted to give me a "realistic" idea
of the difficulties involved told me braille is another language.
I happen to enjoy learning languages, but this is beside the
point. Braille is not a language, merely a transcription system.
She also asserted that I would probably never learn to read as
rapidly as I can listen to a tape. This may be true, but I have
since learned to read braille at the same speed as I can read
print. And at the very least, I argued, I, or anyone, might want
to use brailled cards in the Rolodex or recipe file. I could
braille notes for class, labels for tapes and file folders. The
social worker countered with statistics about how few blind
adults ever master braille, particularly those like me who have
already adopted other methods of reading and writing. I could
have cited other studies which demonstrate that any instructor
who assumes in advance that the students will fail, guarantees
that they will. But I was running out of steam. "You'll get
discouraged. It takes a lot of practice," she warned, all but
wagging a finger.
I'm not alone in this. Many newly blind adults find braille
instruction offered only as a last resort. State services for the
blind are happy to shell out thousands of dollars for low-vision
and voice-synthesizing equipment, but they balk at suggesting
braille instruction. Ageism is a part of this. People above a
"certain age" allegedly have lost both adequate tactile
sensitivity and the cognitive where-withal to learn new things.
The certain age is younger than you think. A friend who is losing
her sight was told she fell into this category, and she is only
in her forties. Agencies frequently require clients to take
"braille readiness" classes or to undergo other types of
prescreening. Since they can expect home delivery of their
talking book machines and magnification devices in a few business
days, why bother with braille?
It's always the same message I received as a child. Braille
is hard, even harder than reading print. What's more, braille is
a part of the dim and dire past, not the desirable present, with
all its sleek electronics and high-powered optics. My desire to
learn braille cast me as an eccentric Luddite, opting for an
archaic system rather than embracing available technologies. I
could point out that current and future technologies will also
aid braille users. I could attach a braille printer to my
computer system and produce both print and braille drafts of my
own work. With a scanner and a CD-ROM, I could produce braille
versions of all sorts of print material. I could get a
"refreshable braille display board" that would reproduce whatever
appears on my screen in a changing, tickertape-like braille
display. This technology is especially useful to the deaf-blind,
who rely exclusively on braille. Connecting their system to the
internet gives them a freedom of communication that Helen Keller
could not have imagined. Annie Sullivan lives on as
microcircuitry and hardware.
But this is beside the point. What I've come to learn is
that in the view of many sighted people, even many in the
"blindness field," braille is not only archaic but unnatural.
They can understand reading enlarged print because they can do it
themselves. They can even understand what it's like to listen to
a taped or synthesized voice reading, because they listen to the
radio and read their children bedtime stories. But reading is
something best done with the eyes. This is the philosophy behind
all low-vision technology and a great deal of rehabilitation
services for the (let's not call them "blind" anymore) visually
impaired. "Whenever possible," they assert, "let them read
print!" The model name of my closed-circuit TV system is Optelec
20/20. It's there in large print right below the on/off switch,
holding out the promise of a return to the lost paradise of
normal, print-reading sight. The individual who can still read
visually, albeit laboriously, painfully, and only with a
ponderous array of aids, is to be admired. She is an example to
normally sighted people, who take their vision for granted. And
more than that, she seems to have triumphed over the age-old
enemy - blindness. But when she picks up a braille book and
closes her eyes, she becomes not only a failure in that fight but
an alien being. To read with the fingertips seems to the sighted
like trying to hear through the nose. Confronted by this
otherness, the sighted shake their heads or shudder with
disbelief.
The resistance that I and other incompletely blind people
encounter in our desire to learn braille has finally to do with
issues of identity. If the ability to read print is what
distinguishes the sighted from the blind, the way we read defines
who we are. In wishing to learn braille I seemed to be abdicating
my identity as a sighted person with a visual impairment and
taking on a new identity as a blind person who rejects the sight
she has. This willful rejection of sight and the sighted method
of reading is as distressing to some sighted people as it would
be to watch me purposefully put out my eyes.
Fortunately, they're not all so melodramatic. The tricky
thing about learning braille is finding the right people to ask.
The social worker who finally got me started studying braille
gave me a textbook and showed me how to move my hands across the
page. This was not officially her job. She had just finished
demonstrating closed-circuit TV systems and low-vision computer
hardware. Braille came up in conversation, and my first "lesson"
took less than two minutes. Her matter-of-fact blitheness
staggered me. It was so at odds with the usual, disapproving,
"Why would you want to do that?" response, the usual, "Who do you
think you are?" tone. Though this woman was an expert in all the
latest sight-enhancing technologies, braille did not threaten
her. To her, braille was worth trying, another means to the same
end. At last I'd found someone to give me a straight answer, to
say, "If you want to, you can do this. No big deal."
And she was right. I can do this. It took patience and
practice, like many worthwhile things. But the effort paid off. I
worked my way through the book she gave me and enrolled in a
correspondence course with the Hadley School for the Blind. I
found myself reading the braille labels on my recorded books. The
first time I read my name in braille made me muse on identity
again: "This is me in braille." I gathered information about
different types of brailling equipment. I bought a braille
label-maker and started labeling tapes, computer disks, spice
jars. I ordered a braille book catalogue from the library and
perused it carefully. Choosing the first book to read in braille
seemed an important task. I chose Emma, for the slow pleasure of
Austen's prose.
On a trip to France I went to Coupvray, a remarkably
unspoiled village a half-hour train trip from Paris. I visited
the saddler's workshop and cottage where Louis Braille was born,
where at the age of three he accidentally blinded himself, and
where, during summer vacations from the Paris Institute for the
Young Blind, he perfected his code. I went to pay tribute to
someone who contributed something of value to the world. But I
also went seeking some sort of identification, inspiration, or
clue to live by.
As on all such quests there were obstacles to overcome. For
one thing, the guardian did not quite know what to make of us.
Usually visitors to this place come in large groups with advance
warning. And they tend to be blind. Neither my husband nor I
"look" blind. Nick had a camera around his neck and took a lot of
pictures. I was not carrying a cane. And I looked at things, from
a too-close vantage point usually, but still experiencing them
visually. So he gave us a somewhat modified version of the
standard tour, interrupting his set speeches for the blind with
ad libs for the sighted. He dropped the "in front of you" and "on
your left" and simply pointed. Sensing in our seeming-sightedness
an only passing interest in Braille, he focused attention on the
museum's careful preservation of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century rural life. One small room upstairs is devoted
to artifacts of the period having nothing to do with Louis
Braille or his family. There are household utensils, furnishings,
children's toys, someone's wedding dress - the same mishmash of
heirlooms displayed in similar local-hero museums all over the
world. The guardian seemed proud of all this loot and took
pleasure describing the function of various objects to people who
could see what he meant.
But unlike most museum guards, he was also happy to let us
touch things. In the main room downstairs he invited Nick to try
to lift the large kitchen table. "Solid oak," he told us. "Made
to last." He had me touch the stone sink, worn smooth by the
heavy buckets slid over it day after day. We ran our hands over
the stone fireplace, the bread oven, the shelf on which cheese
was made (we were in Brie country).
We visited Braille's father's workshop, where in 1812 the
three-year-old Louis climbed up onto the workbench, took hold of
an edge tool, and tried to cut a piece of leather as he had seen
his father do. His hand slipped and he injured his eye. The
actual workbench is still there and the tools on a rack behind a
sheet of glass. On one wall there's a painting, L'Accident, by
Andre Harfort, representing the event. The artist freezes the
moment just before the accident, when Braille's blindness might
have been prevented. A cherubic, curly-headed child clambers
onto the rough table, his chubby hand reaching toward an array of
lethal implements. It is uncertain which tool it was, our guide
told us. it might have been a sort of paring knife or perhaps a
hole-punching awl. He pointed these out. We looked. No touching
here.
The guide was at pains to erase any suspicion of parental
abuse or neglect. By all accounts Braille's parents were
responsible, attentive, and loving. They successfully raised
three other children without incident. Louis's accident must have
occurred in the blink of an eye, when the father's back was
turned. "It could happen to anyone," I said.
In that room it occurred to me why the average
history-hungry sighted sightseer would shy away from this place.
The painting on the wall, the rack of tools under glass - which
must be seen but not touched - are dire warnings to parents to
keep an eye on their children. In effect, this is a monument to
Braille's blindness, to blindness in general - the random
accident that could indeed happen to any child, any adult, any
time. Today, medical science might be able to preserve some of
the sight to an eye injured as Braille's was. And antibiotics and
other treatment would prevent the infection that destroyed the
sight in Braille's uninjured eye. But sighted visitors to this
place are forced to confront the extreme fragility of their own
sight. This is not to say that blind visitors are insensible to
the pain of the child, or to the fear and guilt of the parents,
but somehow the story of the place might not cause us the same
distress. Some high-flown rhetoric seemed called for. Our guide
recited a neatly symmetrical platitude, something to the effect
of, "It was a tragedy for one little boy, but a boon for
mankind." He evoked the familiar myth of compensation, which
attempts to console the sighted with the promise that lost sight
will be repaid in some way or another. We nodded piously and
moved on.
Upstairs, in the former loft bedroom, the boon for mankind
is on display. There are varieties of brailling equipment, some
early braille documents, plaques and certificates commemorating
various events, a few photos, letters Braille wrote to his
mother. There's a set of dominos, apparently Braille's own,
fueling the theory that the idea for the six-dot configuration
came from that game. Though at the time I had only begun to study
braille, I was pleased to discover that I could read the braille
labels on display cases. I had not expected this. The system of
contractions and special symbols in Braille II differs from
language to language. So, for example, the symbol for "and" in
American braille represents "cedilla" in French. But these labels
are in Braille 1, the original uncontracted code. All the words
are spelled out in their entirety. The first label that I read
said, "Offert par la ville de Chicago" (Gift of the city of
Chicago). The case contains some early braille writers
manufactured in America. I told our guide how I was only in the
process of learning braille, so reading these labels was very
exciting to me. Also, the fact that they were in French, the
language of Louis Braille himself, made it that much more
thrilling. I only wished there were more labels to identify all
the objects in the room, the whole house, making the museum
completely blind accessible. But then our guide might have been
out of a job. And he was beginning to grow on me. He confided
that he'd never gotten the hang of braille. I told him that it
was much easier than I'd always heard, and he seemed interested.
I sensed that my information meant more to him because I seemed
sighted. But for whatever reason, he said he would perhaps give
it another try.
In another case there was a certificate from the guidebook
Europe Off the Wall designating the museum as an official
off-the-wall destination. I felt a little miffed at this. Louis
Braille is undeniably the most important cultural hero for blind
people all over the world, and this place hardly seemed quirky
enough to merit such a designation. Equally irksome was the sign
at the end of the street, which read "Visitez la Maison Natale de
Louis Braille" and pointed the way not with an arrow but with a
hand holding a white cane.
These things seemed tasteless jokes at blind people's
expense, but I was probably being oversensitive and humorless -
flaws often attributed to the blind.
The guide and I engaged in chauvinistic hyperbole. We agreed
that Braille deserved to be considered a national treasure,
bringing glory to France. After all, I pointed out, the name
Braille is a household word around the globe, like Pasteur and
Descartes. The French were slow to recognize Braille, but when
they did, they did it up right. In 1952, a hundred years after
his death, they exhumed his remains from the Coupvray cemetery
and transferred them to the Pantheon. There was a procession
through three arrondisements, dignitaries from all over the
world, pomp and circumstance as only the French know how. Helen
Keller made a speech.
Coupvray kept Braille's hands, however. In the cemetery, an
urn containing the bones of his hands sits on top of the original
marker. This division of his skeleton strikes me as not only
ghoulish but of another age. After a century of near neglect,
France made amends by treating Braille's remains as relics,
transforming him from an innovative inventor into a kind of
saint.
The impulse to beatify Braille bothered me too. This is not
to imply that Braille was not, as the memoirs of people who knew
him all report, pious, morally irreproachable, gentle,
soft-spoken, and reserved. But to perceive Braille's invention as
the result of miraculous divine intervention, rather than the
fruit of deliberate and determined intellectual effort, denies
the man his due. But I sensed it was best to steer clear of
questions of theology here.
The house is built into a hillside. From the loft room we
walked out onto a kind of terrace overlooking the countryside.
The guide and I talked of other things - the region, the weather,
the surprise that such a peaceful place is so near to the
metropolis. It was certainly very peaceful here. I closed my eyes
and inhaled. It was June. The sun was warm, the light breeze
cool. The air was rich with blooming chestnuts, lilacs somewhere,
a climbing rose over the back wall. For Louis Braille these
scents would have been mingled with the heady aromas of worked
leather, wood smoke, bread-baking, cheese-making, as well as the
odors of a less sanitary time. And it would have been noisier
here. There would have been other artisanal workshops on this
street, perhaps a cooper, a wheelwright, and a blacksmith. There
would have been the clip-clop of horses' hooves, the
jingle-jangle of harness, the rattle of carts, a general clash
and clatter of men at work.
It occurred to me that the place I should visit is the
original Paris Institute for the Young Blind, where Braille spent
most of his life, but it was torn down while he was still alive.
On rue St. Victor, the street where it once stood, there is no
sign or marker, which is surprising in that plaque-happy city.
Standing outside Braille's house I tried to imagine the shock
that the ten-year-old Louis must have felt to leave this familiar
place for the new smells and sounds of Paris. And the institute
was such a horror. The centuries-old structure was honeycombed
with winding passages and unexpected stairways - treacherous
quarters for the blind. The stone walls oozed moisture and
mildew, the air was rank and unchanging. The food was meager, and
the drinking water was drawn directly from the Seine. Disease of
all sorts was rampant. Braille contracted tuberculosis there as a
young adult, but unlike many of his peers, his was the lingering
kind. The inmates of the institute were subjected to rigorous
discipline and aggressive religious and moral instruction, with
very little physical or mental recreation. Contact with their
families and other outsiders was carefully restricted.
In 1822,Captain Charles Barbier de la Serre came to present
his night-writing code to the institute. He was a career military
officer of aristocratic background, presumably full of
indignation that his code had been rejected by the army, forcing
him to offer it instead to this nearly destitute and decidedly
distasteful institution. Children at the institute read texts
with embossed Roman characters. Since they had to trace each
letter with their fingers, reading was slow and inefficient.
Barbier's code used patterns of raised dots to represent phonetic
units, which would reduce the number of characters required for
each word and make reading quicker and more accurate. Among the
collection of children selected to test the Barbier system was
one skinny, pale, thirteen-year-old boy with reddish brown curls
above a high "spiritual" forehead. This boy, when prodded to
speak, not only criticized Barbier's code as inferior to the
embossed texts already in use but actually enumerated its flaws.
Though the directors of the institute went to the trouble to
test Barbier's code, they were not eager to adopt a new system.
That would necessitate special training for teachers and a large
expenditure to create new texts, and support for the education of
the blind was sporadic at best. So Braille's criticism of Barbier
could be perceived as preserving his status as prized pupil
because it saved the institution the trouble and expense of
making a change. Except that he could have done this and kept his
mouth shut. As I learned a century and a half later from Helen
Keller, prize pupils don't complain. This was even truer for him
than for us. Any assertion of individuality was risky for a child
in his circumstances. And Barbier must have been an imposing
figure, with a voice accustomed to giving orders. To him, this
boy Braille, this son of a saddler, this runty bag of bones was
the sort of boy one routinely ignored except to have him stoop to
give one a leg up onto a horse.
But Braille spoke up anyway. As he analyzed the flaws in
Barbier's code it set into motion the thought process that would
lead to his own code. Two years later Braille perfected his own
system. He used six dots instead of Barbier's twelve. He made
each character represent a letter in the alphabet so that a child
who learned to read would also learn to spell. And he made
provisions for punctuation, numbers, and musical notation. When
he proposed his code to the institute's directors they rejected
it too. They cited the same economic objections they had to
Barbier's system (the same objections still raised against
braille instruction today). But what seemed particularly
threatening about Braille's code was that he produced it himself.
When the blind learned to write at all, they used a sort of
stencil to make Roman letters. But they could not read what they
wrote. Braille's code was easy to write, requiring only a couple
of simple tools. It would allow blind children to send messages
to each other and to read them without sighted intervention. To
give blind children a method of communication that their sighted
custodians would not be able to oversee meant trouble. Who knew
what messages those blind children might write - "Teacher is a
big meany," or worse, "We have nothing to lose but our chains"?
It was not until 1847 that Braille's code was authorized for use
in the institute. During the twenty-three-year interim, students
secretly used and trained each other in the forbidden code even
though discovery meant punishment, even expulsion.
What I find most remarkable about Braille's life involves
more than the fact of his invention, as elegantly ingenious as
that is. Barbier and others were experimenting with raised-dot
writing systems. Sooner or later someone would have come up with
one that worked as well as Braille's. But Braille did more than
merely figure it out first. Powered by the conviction that his
code would aid the blind in previously unimagined ways, he stood
up to sighted authority and said, "What you offer is good. What I
offer is better." And he continued to repeat the assertion
throughout his life. Where does that kind of courage come from?
How does a boy like that summon the strength of character even to
think such thoughts? That's what brought me to Coupvray. My visit
made me contemplate all he gave up. Despite the many hardships
and restrictions, the education that Braille received was
unprecedented for a blind child, or even a sighted child from his
background. He not only learned to read, write, and cipher but
also took music lessons from conservatory professors who donated
their time to a few exceptionally gifted inmates of the
institute. Braille could have taken that training home to
Coupvray, to a post as organist and perhaps even choirmaster at
the church of St. Pierre, and lived out his days in comfortable
respectability and serene seclusion. Standing on the terrace
outside his home, even I could feel the lure of that life.
But Braille stayed on at the institute to teach the next
generation of blind children. By day he followed the authorized
curriculum. By night he gave clandestine instruction in his
forbidden code to students willing to risk their own security to
learn it. And all the while he kept his foot in the door of the
institute's directors, kept insisting that they take his
invention seriously.
Saint, subversive, revolutionary, entrepreneur - the man
still eludes me. Visiting his home did not answer those
questions. So I'm left to think about his legacy. Braille gave
the world an ingeniously simple method for the blind to read. He
also provided the blind with a means to communicate in writing
without the mediation of a sighted reader. And he set an example
for the blind who follow him, urging them not to settle for what
the sighted say is suitable. When they say new technologies make
braille obsolete, it's necessary to read between the lines. Do
they really know what's best just because they can see?
On my desk at this moment there is a computer, a
closed-circuit TV, and a number of magnifiers meant to allow me
to read print visually, however ineptly, and thus to preserve
what the sighted presume to be so valuable - my identity as
sighted. There are also three different tape recorders that allow
me to experience texts aurally when the inefficiency and strain
of reading visually becomes intolerable. Braille will not replace
these things. But braille offers me a freedom I have not known
since childhood. With braille, I can take a book under my arm and
read it anywhere, without electricity, without a mediating voice
in my ear, without pain.
In the recent past, when I gave a public reading of my work
I would print out the material in a very large type size. I would
have one of my reading assistants make a tape of the text, then I
would listen to it over and over while I stared at the printout.
Since I must read with the text an inch from my eyes I would have
to face my audience in profile and throw my voice over my
shoulder. This could he tricky when there was a microphone. I
needed extremely good lighting. Sometimes I'd have to request
extra lamps be brought in, which delayed the start of the
reading. And I had to read sitting down. The strain of prolonged
visual reading made me literally unsteady on my feet. And at some
point there would be pain. I would feel a sharp jab to my right
eye, and with it, a brief flash of black or violet would obscure
the text before me. This might make me catch my breath and pause
in the middle of a sentence. But since I had memorized the text,
I could keep going. My audience did not necessarily see the pain,
but they certainly saw the struggle, and this may have distracted
them from what I was reading.
With braille I am able to read standing up. My whole face is
visible to my audience. I don't have to worry about lighting. I
can read in the dark if I need to. And I can focus on my
performance, my articulation and tone, without having to steel
myself against the anticipated pain. My blindness is less visible
to my audience. They don't need to watch my struggle. They can
simply listen to my words. For this pleasure alone braille is
worth the effort it has taken to learn it.
I have come full circle. I return to the question which
began this book: Do I have the right to call myself blind when I
see as much as I do? In learning to read braille, in visiting
Braille's birthplace and seeking inspiration from his life, I
announce my blindness without apology. When I read braille in
public then comment on the color of the carpet, or when I carry a
white cane into an art gallery, some may denounce me as a fraud
or traitor. Others, I hope, will revise their image of blindness.
And it's about time. That image is older than Oedipus and could
use a new coat of paint. This new image of blindness is blander
and more mundane, a mere matter of seeking practical solutions to
everyday inconveniences. It will force us to abandon the old
cliches that equate blindness with ignorant despair, and sight
with virtuous wisdom. Surely it's time for some new metaphors. in
the meantime, you see things your way and I'll see them mine. But
when we close our eyes, maybe we'll see everything the same.
The End
NOTES
Chapter 3:
In Oedipus' Shadow
-
1. Anita Shreve,
Eden Close (New York: Signet, 1989).
2. Charlotte Bronte,
Jane Eyre, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975).
3. Rudyard Kipling,
The Light That Failed (New York: Carroll
& Graf, 1986).
4. Henry Green, Nothing, Doting,
Blindness (1926; rpt., New
York: Penguin, 1993).
5. H. G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind," in The Country
of the Blind and Other Stories, ed. Michael Sherborne (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
6. J. M. Coetzee,
Waiting for the Barbarians (New York:
Penguin, 1980).
7. D. H. Lawrence, "The Blind Man," in The Complete Short
Stories, vol. 2 (London: William Heinemann, 1955).
8. Raymond Carver, "Cathedral," in Cathedral: Stories (New
York:
Knopf, 1983), 209-228.
Chapter 7:
Voices in My Head
-
1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
(New York: Scribners, 1960).
2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting
Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Of all the works I consulted to write this book, these are
the ones I found most useful and stimulating. When available, I
have listed identification numbers for the National Library
Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped NLS) and
Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic (RTB).
-
Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York:
Random House, 1990. RFB #CD528.
-
Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mind Blindness: An Essay on Autism and
Theory of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
-
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting
Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. RFB #DV744.
-
Bickel, Lermard. Triumph over Darkness: The Life of Louis
Braille. Sydney: Allen & Unwin Australia, 1988.
-
Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1991. RFB #DT143
-
-
Goffman, Irving. Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice
Hall, 1963.
-
Goldstein, E. Bruce. Sensation and Perception. 3rd ed.
Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1989.
-
Gregory, R. L.
Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. 2nd
ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. RFB #AN315.
-
Hine, Robert V. Second Sight. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993. NLS #RC37336.
-
Hull, John M. Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. NLS #RC33014.
-
Humphrey, Nicholas. A History of the Mind: Evolution and the
Birth of Consciousness. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
-
Keller, Helen. The World I Live In. New York: D.
Appleton-Century, 1938
-
Koestler, Frances A. The Unseen Minority: A Social History
of Blindness in the United States. New York: David McKay, 1976.
RFB #AR794.
-
Mack, Arien, and Irvin Rock. Inattentional Blindness.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
-
Majeska, Marilyn Lundell. Talking Books: Pioneering
and Beyond. Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, National
Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, 1988.
NLS #RC 27607.
-
Matson, Floyd. Walking Alone and Marching Together: A
History of the Organized Blind Movement in the United States,
1940 to 1990. Baltimore: National Federation of the Blind, 1990.
NLS #RC31066 A and B.
-
Neal, Helen. Low Vision: What You Can Do To Preserve - and
Even Enhance - Your Usable Sight. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1987. NLS #RC 26617.
-
Perry, Elizabeth C., and F. Hampton Roy. Light in the
Shadows: Feelings About Blindness. Little Rock, Ark.: World Eye
Foundation, 1982. NLS #RC19874.
-
Potok, Andrew. Ordinary Daylight: Portrait of an Artist
Going Blind. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980. RFB
#BF216.
-
Rayner, Keith, ed. Eye Movements in Reading: Perceptual and
Language Processes. New York: Academic Press, 1983. Rock, Irvin.
An Introduction to Perception. New York: Macmillan, 1975. RFB
#AJ597.
-
Scott, Robert A. The Making of Blind Men: A Study of Adult
Socialization. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1969. NLS #RC
25905.
-
Sullivan, Thomas J., and Derrick T. L. Gill. If You Could
See What I Hear. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. NLS #RC 35991.
-
Trevor-Roper, Patrick. The World Through Blunted Sight: An
Inquiry into the Influence of Defective Vision on Art and
Character. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1970.
-
Zeki, Semir. A Vision of the Brain. Oxford: Blackwell
Scientific, 1993.
ϟ
Georgina Kleege é uma escritora americana
e professora de inglês na Universidade da Califórnia, Berkeley. Kleege
foi diagnosticada como legalmente cega, com degeneração macular, aos 11
anos. É especialmente conhecida pela sua coletânea de ensaios autobiográficos de 1999, intitulada
'Sight Unseen', onde compara a sua visão do mundo com a visão de cegueira
prevalente.
Livros de que é autora:
֍
More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (Monografia, 2017)
֍
Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (Não ficção Creativa, 2006)
֍
Sight Unseen (Não ficção Creativa, 1999)
֍
Home for the Summer (Romance, 1989)
ϟ
Sight Unseen
-excerpt-
Georgina Kleege
Yale University Press
Copyright 1999
ISBN 0-300-07680-0
12.Mar.2026
Publicado por
MJA
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