Sinking
Summer 1983
1 June
How long do you have to be blind before your dreams begin to lose colour? Do you go on dreaming in pictures for ever?
I have been a registered blind person for nearly three years. In the past few months, the final traces of light sensation have faded. Now I am totally blind. I cannot tell day from night. I can stare into the sun without seeing the faintest flicker of sunshine.
During this time, my dreams have continued to be pictorial. Indeed, dreams have become particularly enjoyable because of the colourful freedom which I experience when dreaming. Has blindness, then, made any impact upon my dreams at all?
About six months ago I had a dream in which my sight improved. I could see my son Thomas. There he was, a cheerful, cheeky, lively little boy of two and a half sitting on my knee.
My final eye operation took place on 1 August. Thomas was born on 22 August. When I cannot quite remember how long I have been blind, I ask myself how old Thomas is.
Being present at the birth was a frightening but wonderful experience. They turned on the microphone of the machine which monitored the heartbeat of the baby. I could hear it very clearly as I sat beside the bed. Marilyn and I had been married for little less than a year. The baby’s heartbeat was incredibly fast, coming in little waves of accelerations, in time with the contractions. A lot of the time I did not know what was happening. Marilyn was crying. The bed seemed to be surrounded by midwives and doctors. There were a few quiet moments and then a baby’s cry.
For about eighteen months I continued to have some visual impression of him. Within a few feet, I could tell where he was lying, and what colour his clothes were. I could tell the broad outlines of his face, when he was yawning or waving. All of the finer details were lost, the little expressions around the eyes, the shades of emotion in the early stages. In the summer of 1981, on the beach in Wales, I used to tie a piece of string around his ankle, so that if he crawled more than a few feet away I would be able to find him again. When he could walk, I used to play with him on the steps of the University Library. I could let him off the reins, because even if he disappeared I could hear the sounds of his shoes as he ran across the stone landings on those quiet, Saturday mornings in the winter, when the campus was almost deserted. Sometimes I would run after him in panic, frightened that he might get to the edge of something before I could catch him. As he became more mobile, and my sight grew worse, these outings became increasingly difficult.
3 June
About a week ago I dreamt that I was returning by rail to a town in Normandy. I had an appointment to meet Marilyn in a restaurant which we had visited on a trip to Normandy which we made a year or so before our wedding. I left the station, and paused to examine the map to see where the station was, only to realise that I had left my white cane on the train. What worried me was not so much how I would get around, but the fact that I had lost a piece of my property. I then found myself holding a long metal tube, the sort that is used to prop up a clothes line. I was using this to explore my path, and I noticed that the people in the area around the station were looking at me curiously.
This is the first time I have dreamt of myself as being a blind person. There are a lot of unresolved contradictions. It would be impossible for a blind person dependent upon a cane to forget to bring it with him. I wanted the independent freedom of movement which would make it possible for me to keep my rendezvous with Marilyn in the restaurant, but blindness would take this freedom away. So I had the white cane, yet I did not have it. I could not move without a sort of substitute for the cane, yet I could see the reactions of the people around me. I had lost something which I would need when I met Marilyn. Loss of the cane was not only the loss of my ability to find her, it was the loss of something deeper, potency, the ability to love her.
I began to carry a short, white cane early in 1980, mainly as a signal to traffic when I was crossing the road. When my sight got worse, I bought a slightly longer cane, and then a longer one still. Finally, I bought a full-length cane, five feet long, with a rounded crook on the handle. I never seemed to have the time for any mobility training, although occasionally I wondered if I was developing bad habits in my technique, which could have been avoided with some formal instruction.
On the whole, my experience has been that, if I have a bad habit, it causes me some inconvenience or inefficiency in my movement, and is naturally corrected in the effort to move more freely. In other words, blindness itself imposes an iron law upon the user of the white cane. Lampposts, kerbs and stairways are the best teachers.
Sometimes when I greet people by saying, ‘Nice day!’ they remain unresponsive or even appear surprised. The idea of a nice day is largely visual. A nice day occurs when there is a clear, blue sky. The sun will be shining and it may be reasonably warm, although even a bright clear day in the middle of winter will be called a ‘nice day although a bit nippy’. A sighted person would not call it a nice day, let alone a lovely day if it were overcast.
For me, the wind has taken the place of the sun, and a nice day is a day when there is a mild breeze. This brings into life all the sounds in my environment. The leaves are rustling, bits of paper are blowing along the pavement, the walls and corners of the large buildings stand out under the impact of the wind, which I feel in my hair and on my face, in my clothes. A day on which it was merely warm would, I suppose, be quite a nice day but thunder makes it more exciting, because it suddenly gives a sense of space and distance. Thunder puts a roof over my head, a very high, vaulted ceiling of rumbling sound. I realise that I am in a big place, whereas before, there was nothing there at all. The sighted person always has a roof overhead, in the form of the blue sky or the clouds, or the stars at night. The same is true for the blind person of the sound of the wind in the trees. It creates trees; one is surrounded by trees whereas before there was nothing.
The misunderstanding between me and the sighted arises when it is a mild day, even warm, with a light breeze but overcast. To the sighted, this would not be a nice day, because the sky is not blue.
I will have to make my comments about the weather more specific. I must remember to say that it is nice and mild today, or that it is a pleasant breeze.
Last night I had a beautiful, refreshing dream, in which I was walking along a river valley. There were fine homes, holiday bungalows, built along the river bank. I was on a walking holiday. I experimented, looking this way and that, finding out if I had sufficient range of sight to take in the whole of the valley and the landscape. Although it was not perfect, I found that I could get a sufficient sense of the place to move freely and to enjoy the scenery. I was saying to myself, ‘There you are, you see! In good light and in these conditions you can still manage fairly well.’
In 1976 and ’77 I could still see well enough to enjoy going for long, solitary walks in the Worcestershire and Shropshire countryside. The Severn Valley was a favourite walk. I used to go by bus or rail. Getting on the right bus was a problem. I could go into the coach station in the city centre and find the exact bay for the bus I wanted, or I could stand at the bus stop near my home and stop every bus that came along, asking the driver if he was going my way. I tried to make out the numbers of the buses by using a little telescope, but often the bus was upon me before I could work it out. Reading the maps was still possible with magnifying glasses. I liked walking beside the river, because it was almost impossible to get lost, although it was necessary to pay fairly close attention to the ground immediately in front. I often used to say to myself, ‘Provided it doesn’t get any worse, I can still manage.’
I have been having that thought for at least ten years. I could still manage, provided it did not get any worse. Even after I was registered blind, I could work my way from the office to my home by following the bright, double yellow parking lines painted on the edges of the University roads.
I would still be alright, if it stayed like this. When it got worse, I could still get home at night by following the street lamps one by one. I felt like a sailor far out at sea on an inky, black night, with one star to guide me. When I reached the lamppost, I could dimly make out the next little light. I could still manage, provided it didn’t get any worse.
My dreams seem to be lagging about six years behind reality.
21 June
During the first couple of years of blindness, when I thought about the people I knew, they fell into two groups. There were those with faces, and those without faces. It was a bit like wandering round the National Portrait Gallery. Here are rows of portraits, but here is a blank. You can tell where it used to hang by the outline of the wallpaper, and beneath the space is a little label giving the name. Perhaps this portrait is on loan elsewhere, or perhaps it is being repaired.
The people I knew before I lost my sight have faces but the people I have met since then do not have faces. I used to find the contrast between the two groups of people disturbed me. I could not relate one set to the other set. I knew how I knew the first lot – by their faces. How could I ever feel that I really knew the second lot?
As time went by, the proportion of people with no faces increased. Whole rooms are now bare, and the portraits which remain are covered with dust. Is it possible that some day I will come to visit the gallery and find the door locked, with a notice which says, ‘This exhibition is permanently closed’?
It is three years now since I have seen anybody. Strangely enough, I have fairly clear pictures of many people whom I have not met again during these three years, but the pictures of the people I meet every day are becoming blurred. Why should this be?
In the case of people I meet every day my relationship has continued beyond loss of sight, so my thoughts about these people are full of the latest developments in our relationships. These have partly covered the portrait, which has thus become less important. In the case of somebody I know quite well but have not seen for several years, nothing has happened to take the place of the portrait, and when I think of those people, it is the portrait which comes to mind.
It distressed me considerably when I realised that I was beginning to forget what Marilyn and Imogen looked like. I had wanted to defy blindness. I had sworn to myself that I would always carry their faces hidden in my heart, even if everything else in the gallery was stolen.
If I do want to recapture the face of someone very close to me, I do it through visualising a particular photograph, an actual photograph that I can remember very clearly from my sighted days. When I try to conjure up the memory of a loved face, I cannot seem to capture it, but the straight edges of the photograph seem to fix the mobile features firmly in my mind, so that I can imagine myself gazing at the image. Some people tell me that this is a happy situation. I will always remember Marilyn as being young. She need never be troubled by the thought that I will see her getting older. I am not so sure about this, since I find it hard to believe that ignorance can ever be better than knowledge.
The difference between those who have faces and those who do not becomes more poignant when I think of my own children. I have a lot of visual memories of Imogen, now aged ten, mostly based on photographs, but with the occasional vivid life situation thrown in. I have only a few rather vague impressions of the face of Thomas, now nearly three, which are based upon the first six or nine months of his life, while I still had a little residual vision. Of Elizabeth, now sixteen months, I have no visual images at all. The place on the wall which should carry her portrait is completely blank.
What difference does it make? I am not aware of any difference in my present relationships with these three children which could be affected in any way by the fact that they stand in different relationships to my blindness. They are all alike now.
23 June
About a year after I was registered blind, I began to have such strong images of what people’s faces looked like that they were almost like hallucinations. This went on for six or twelve months. I would be sitting in a room with someone, my face pointed towards my companion, listening to him or her. Suddenly, such a vivid picture would flash before my mind that it was like looking at a television set. Ah, I would think, there he is, with his glasses and his little beard, his wavy hair and his blue, pin-striped suit, white collar and blue tie. There are his polished shoes and his briefcase, standing neatly beside his chair. Now this image would fade and in its place another one would be projected. My companion was now fat and perspiring with receding hair. He had a red necktie and waistcoat, and a couple of his teeth were missing. This in turn would fade.
Sometimes I would become so absorbed in gazing upon these images, which seemed to come and go without any intention on my part, that I would entirely lose the thread of what was being said to me. I would come back with a shock, realising that there was nothing to indicate which of these images was closer to reality. There was simply nothing there at all. The voice would return, and I would feel as if I had dropped off to sleep for a few minutes in front of the radio.
Several times in my life I have been temporarily without sight, often in eye hospitals. I have had this strange experience of getting to know the nurses through their voices and inevitably forming some mental image of them, only to find when sight returned that I was completely wrong. So I have good reason to believe that the images I have formed of the people whom I have met as a blind person are probably quite false. Moreover, I shall never have the opportunity of correcting them by discovering the truth for myself. Gradually, however, this tendency to project images is fading.
One of the results of not knowing what people look like is that the element of anticipation in a new relationship is diminished. When a sighted person makes a new acquaintance, sight alone enables him or her to form certain impressions and to get ready to meet a certain kind of person. The new acquaintance may strike one as being wise, friendly, remote, dignified, bewildered, and so on. The blind person, on the other hand, does not know what he is meeting. To say that this removes the possibility of facile first impressions is itself facile. The first impressions which the blind person does receive of a new acquaintance, of the voice, the touch of the hand and so on, may be equally misleading, and if one followed the strange logic which tells us it is better to be without any information which might mislead us, we could conclude that we would be better off with no information at all. We are constantly forming hypotheses about a new acquaintance, not only during the first few moments of the encounter but throughout the years of that relationship. The blind person simply has a lot less information to go on when forming these hypotheses. One of the results is that it takes a blind person longer to get to know somebody. That, at any rate, is my experience, but perhaps I am not a very skilful blind person.
The fact that the blind person has less data would seem to suggest that his hypothesis about a new person ought to be more vulnerable. Although spared misleading visual impressions, he is having to make do with fewer facts. Whether my first impressions of people are less reliable now than when I was sighted, I am unsure. I often interview candidates for University entrance with one or two colleagues. After the interview, we compare notes. I am relieved and a little surprised to find that my opinion of the candidate seemed to be no less accurate, or that I have picked up similar impressions. The sighted interviewers can add certain details. They can remark that the candidate had shifty eyes or was of untidy appearance. These almost always turn out to be consistent with various impressions of character or personality which I had formed from speech alone.
Another strange feature of not knowing what people look like is the effect this has upon reported speech. When I am describing an encounter with someone, I may want to say, ‘He looked blankly at me’. I feel a little sensitive about this, because I cannot help thinking that the sighted person to whom I am talking would know that I could not possibly know how my friend looked at me. To say, ‘He responded in a blank manner’ is absurd and pedantic. I am trying to suggest the pause which I noticed before my friend replied: the sense that I had that he was taken aback, was briefly at a loss for words, did not quite know what to say. There actually was a brief blank in the conversation. To say, ‘He paused before replying and seemed to be at a loss’ would be perfectly accurate, but to use the brief, concrete idiom of sighted exchange is so natural and vivid. What am I to do?
Another result of all this is that the face no longer has the central place for me which it has in normal human relationships. The face is merely the place from which the voice comes. I look towards the face with conscious effort, for there is no real reason why I should do so. I can often tell when people are looking at me, because their voices sound different if projected directly at me, and I am often able to glance at someone in a group when he or she has glanced at me and spoken. I do this, however, purely for effect, to show that I am listening. I no longer have any natural sense of needing to be face to face.
Sometimes I ask one of my sighted friends to give me a quick impression of what somebody else looks like. I am often interested in a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a new acquaintance. This is particularly true if my new acquaintance is a woman. What colour is her hair? What is she wearing? Is she pretty? Sometimes I long to know. I remain, after all, a man, reared in a certain sighted culture, conditioned to certain male expectations. Perhaps I should change, and be less influenced in my judgement of women by my male conditioning, but it is painful to have this change forced upon me by mere blindness.
It makes a difference to the way I feel about a new female acquaintance if a colleague, having caught sight of her, remarks on her beauty or her plainness. There is a double irrationality in this. In the first place, my feelings should not be so dependent upon a woman’s appearance. I know that, and I apologise. But I still feel it. The second thing is that it is surely a deplorable lack of independence on my part to be so affected by a criterion which can be of no significance to me.
What can it matter to me what sighted men think of women, when I, as a blind man, must judge women by quite different means? Yet I do care what sighted men think, and I do not seem able to throw off this prejudice.
The crucial thing in any new acquaintance is the sound of the voice. I am continuing to learn more and more about the amazing power of the human voice to reveal the person. With the people I know very well, I find that all of the emotion which would normally be expressed in the face is there in the voice: the tiredness, the anxiety, the suppressed excitement and so on. My impressions based on the voice seem to be just as accurate as those of sighted people. There is the disadvantage, however, that my friend must speak. If I were sighted, I would have access to a certain privacy, I would catch an unintended communication through the fleeting expressions of the face, especially the lips and the eyes. As a blind person, I do have access to unintended nuances of the voice, and can often hear many things which the speaker may not know are there, but it is always in the context of something which was intended, namely, the speaking itself. So I am more dependent upon other people revealing themselves to me.
The capacity of the voice to reveal the self is truly amazing. Is the voice intelligent? Is it colourful? Is there light and shade? Is there melody, humour, gracefulness, accuracy? Is it gentle, amusing and varied? On the other hand, is the voice lazy? Is it sloppy and careless? Is it flat, drab and monotonous? Is the range of vocabulary poor and used without precision and sensitivity? These are the things which matter to me now. Increasingly, I am no longer even trying to imagine what people look like. My knowledge of you is based upon what we have been through together, not on what you look like.
There is a further development. Not only do I not know or care what you look like (although I still have a few qualms and doubts in the case of women), I am beginning to lose the category itself. I am finding it more and more difficult to realise that people look like anything, to put any meaning into the idea that they have an appearance. In recent weeks I find myself practising the thought that people do have an appearance. I am experimenting, by rehearsing in my mind the different kinds of appearance which somebody might have. This is quite different from the vivid, compulsive projections which I had during that earlier period. I am now trying to remind myself that there is something about this person, something which means little or nothing to me, and to which I have no independent access, yet something which is as true about this person as anything else. This person looks like something. He or she does have what they call an ‘appearance’ of some kind.
When I was about seventeen I lost the sight of my left eye. I can remember gazing at my left shoulder and thinking, ‘Well, that’s the last time I’ll see you without looking in a mirror!’ To lose the shoulder is one thing, but to lose one’s own face poses a new problem. I find that I am trying to recall old photographs of myself, just to remember what I look like. I discover with a shock that I cannot remember. Must I become a blank on the wall of my own gallery?
To what extent is loss of the image of the face connected with loss of the image of the self? Is this one of the reasons why I often feel I am a mere spirit, a ghost, a memory? Other people have become disembodied voices, speaking out of nowhere, going into nowhere. Am I not like this too, now that I have lost my body?
14 July
I have had moments of this much-discussed blind experience ever since I lost the sight of my left eye in my seventeenth or eighteenth year. It took the form of a sudden, vivid awareness of an object on my blind side, within a few inches of my head. Stepping out to cross the road, I would recoil from something immediately on my left. Glancing around, there would be something like a parked van with a set of ladders extending from the roof, which I had not noticed.
I have since discovered that this phenomenon is now generally called ‘echo location’. It was after the first few months of complete blindness that I became aware of it. As long as any sight at all remained, I was not aware of experiencing echo location. I first noticed that walking home over the campus in the quiet of the evening I had a sense of presence, which was the realisation of an obstacle. I discovered that if I stopped when I had this sense, and waved my white cane around, I would make contact with a tree trunk. This would be no more than three, four or five feet from me. The awareness, whatever it was, did not seem to extend beyond this range, and sometimes the tree would be as close as two feet. It was through sensing these trees, and verifying their exact location with my stick, that I gradually realised that I was developing some strange kind of perception. I learned that I could actually count the number of these trees which I would pass along the road leading down to the University gates. The sense did not seem to work on thin objects like lampposts. It had to be something about as bulky as a tree trunk or a human body before I sensed it.
As the months go past, sensitivity seems to be increasing. I find now that I am quite often aware of approaching lampposts, although it is true that, if I am expecting one, it is easier to sense it. I do occasionally walk into lampposts which I have not detected at all. When I am aware of echo location, it is infallible, in the sense that I cannot remember having had the experience only to find that there was nothing there. Unfortunately, the experience itself does not always occur, so I can only use it as a sort of red light. I must stop when I sense something, but not sensing something does not mean that I can go ahead.
Not only have I become sensitive to thinner objects, but the range seems to have increased. When walking home, I used only to be able to detect parked cars by making contact with my cane. These days I almost never make contact with a parked car unexpectedly. Nearly always, I realise that there is an obstacle in my path before my stick strikes against it. This is in spite of the fact that I am now using the very long cane. I think the range for detecting parked cars must be approximately six to eight feet. Another feature of this experience is that it seems to be giving me a sort of generalised sense of the environment. There is one part of my route where I must step aside to avoid an upward flight of steps. I am expecting these, of course, since I come this way every day. Nevertheless, I am now aware of their approach, and not merely of the lower, closer steps but of the whole massive object, looming up and somehow away from me. The phenomenon seems to be partly dependent on attention, since at home I can easily walk into the edge of doors, having had no warning of their proximity. Possibly in a house where sound is muffled by carpets and curtains, echoes would be less easily perceived?
The experience itself is quite extraordinary, and I cannot compare it with anything else I have ever known. It is like a sense of physical pressure. One wants to put up a hand to protect oneself, so intense is the awareness. One shrinks from whatever it is. It seems to be characterised by a certain stillness in the atmosphere. Where one should perceive the movement of air and a certain openness somehow one becomes aware of a stillness, an intensity instead of an emptiness, a sense of vague solidity. The exact source of the sensation is difficult to locate. It seems to be the head, yet often it seems to extend to the shoulders and even the arms. Awareness is greater when the environment is less polluted by sound, and in the silence of my late evening walk home, I am most intensely aware of it. In a crowded noisy street, the experience is less noticeable, and if I am travelling on somebody’s elbow, I never seem to notice the experience at all. Presumably, I just switch off whatever it is.
It is a sort of guidance system which comes into operation when absolutely necessary, and when the cues are somehow available, but it is not always easy to distinguish it from other experiences. When I come to the end of a block, I can often tell. Is this because of the movement of the air, the breeze which one often feels at the corner, or is it the reverse of the experience of presence? Have I, without realising it, been aware of the presence of the walls and fences, suddenly encountering an absence when they end?
On one of my walks, I pass beside a five-foot-high fence made of vertical, metal bars. This gives way, at a certain point, to a solid brick wall. I find that if I pay attention I can tell when I have left the fence and am going along the wall. There is, somehow, a sense of a more massive presence.
I gather from conversations that this experience is essentially acoustic and is based upon awareness of echoes. This certainly fits in with my experience, but at the same time it is important to emphasise that one is not aware of listening. One is simply aware of becoming aware. The sense of pressure is upon the skin of the face, rather than upon or within the ears. That must be why the older name for the experience was ‘facial vision’.
1 September
‘Well, I’ll see you around.’
‘Nice to see you again.’
‘I see what you mean.’
When I use expressions like these, some of my sighted friends are surprised. They laugh, perhaps teasing me, and say, ‘You don’t really mean that, do you John?’ I explain that, when I say I am pleased to see you, what I mean is that I am pleased to meet you, pleased to be with you, glad to be in your presence. I explain that this is surely what anybody, blind or sighted, would mean by that expression. In the same way, I explain, when I say that I see what you mean, what I mean is that I understand you. Your words make sense to me. This is what anybody must mean by that expression, since the meaning itself is invisible.
When you are blind you do become aware of how much of our language is dependent upon images drawn from sight. It is natural that sighted people also become sharply aware of this when talking with a blind person. ‘What is your point of view?’ ‘Do you have any observations?’ ‘I just don’t understand the way you look at this.’ ‘Now look here my friend!’ ‘I’ve looked everywhere for it.’ ‘I’ll see if I can help you.’
In expressions like these, attitudes, intentions, demands and references to knowledge and understanding are all suggested by the use of visual metaphors. There is an intimate connection between seeing and knowing. Blindness leads to ignorance.
Must disabled people refrain from using that part of the language which makes metaphorical use of the disability from which they suffer? How absurd this would be. It would impose a new, linguistic disability upon people already disabled. When somebody in a wheelchair says that he or she is thinking of standing for parliament, I don’t draw attention to the disability by commenting wittily, ‘You mean you will go in your wheelchair to parliament’. If one of my friends remarks that she bumped into so and so the other day in the High Street, I do not, as a rule, guffaw and ask, ‘Did you hurt him?’
It is true, nevertheless, that beneath the little irritations of these exchanges between blind people and their sighted friends there lies a genuine problem. The whole structure of our ordinary, everyday conversation presupposes a sighted world. This can be easily noticed if you compare conversations on the radio with those on the television. So when the sighted person draws attention to a little oddity in the use of a visual metaphor by a blind person, beneath this lies a subtle shift in the whole character of communication between the sighted and the blind. There is a language of blindness.
9 September
This evening, at about nine o’clock, I was getting ready to leave the house. I opened the front door, and rain was falling. I stood for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of it. Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience.
I hear the rain pattering on the roof above me, dripping down the walls to my left and right, splashing from the drainpipe at ground level on my left, while further over to the left there is a lighter patch as the rain falls almost inaudibly upon a large leafy shrub. On the right, it is drumming, with a deeper, steadier sound upon the lawn. I can even make out the contours of the lawn, which rises to the right in a little hill. The sound of the rain is different and shapes out the curvature for me. Still further to the right, I hear the rain sounding upon the fence which divides our property from that next door. In front, the contours of the path and the steps are marked out, right down to the garden gate. Here the rain is striking the concrete, here it is splashing into the shallow pools which have already formed. Here and there is a light cascade as it drips from step to step. The sound on the path is quite different from the sound of the rain drumming into the lawn on the right, and this is different again from the blanketed, heavy, sodden feel of the large bush on the left. Further out, the sounds are less detailed. I can hear the rain falling on the road, and the swish of the cars that pass up and down. I can hear the rushing of the water in the flooded gutter on the edge of the road. The whole scene is much more differentiated than I have been able to describe, because everywhere there are little breaks in the patterns, obstructions, projections, where some slight interruption or difference of texture or of echo gives an additional detail or dimension to the scene. Over the whole thing, like light falling upon a landscape, is the gentle background patter gathered up into one continuous murmur of rain.
I think that this experience of opening the door on a rainy garden must be similar to that which a sighted person feels when opening the curtains and seeing the world outside. Usually, when I open my front door, there are various broken sounds spread across a nothingness. I know that when I take the next step I will encounter the path, and that to the right my shoe will meet the lawn. As I walk down the path, my head will be brushed by fronds of the overhanging shrub on the left and I will then come to the steps, the front gate, the footpath, the culvert and the road. I know all these things are there but I know them from memory. They give no immediate evidence of their presence, I know them in the form of prediction. They will be what I will be experiencing in the next few seconds. The rain presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once, not merely remembered, not in anticipation, but actually and now. The rain gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another.
If only rain could fall inside a room, it would help me to understand where things are in that room, to give a sense of being in the room, instead of just sitting on a chair.
This is an experience of great beauty. I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me. I feel that the rain is gracious, that it has granted a gift to me, the gift of the world. I am no longer isolated, preoccupied with my thoughts, concentrating upon what I must do next. Instead of having to worry about where my body will be and what it will meet, I am presented with a totality, a world which speaks to me.
Have I grasped why it is so beautiful? When what there is to know is in itself varied, intricate and harmonious, then the knowledge of that reality shares the same characteristics. I am filled internally with a sense of variety, intricacy and harmony. The knowledge itself is beautiful, because the knowledge creates in me a mirror of what there is to know. As I listen to the rain, I am the image of the rain, and I am one with it.
16 September
I dreamt that we were on an ocean liner. We were struggling towards the stern of the ship. I was with someone, I could not tell who; it could have been Marilyn. We were fighting our way through bars, cocktail lounges, along little corridors, up and down flights of stairs, past cabins and finally emerged on the deck at the very stern. There we were, out in the open air, and saw the great swell of the ocean. There were no waves, but a long steady swell of masses and masses of water, sea, sky and wind. The ship was hurrying along through all this. Somehow, we were transported over the stern of the ship and now I found myself with two women on another ship. I didn’t know, or don’t remember, who the two women were, but there were three of us. This second ship was sinking. Or was it still the same ship? We were still in the stern, but now the deck was vertical, and the ship was sliding down. Perhaps three-quarters of the vessel was now beneath the water. We were clinging to the upper part of it. The other ship was going away, leaving us further and further behind. There we were, now clearly marooned on this second ship. Now there came a feeling of the enormous weight of the huge bulk of the waterlogged vessel, a vision of it going down under the water, becoming lost in the deep-green murky depths, where it was getting darker, colder and more silent. There was no storm, it was not a wild sea. There was a vast, sullen swell and the weight of the ship’s hull underneath us. Every time a great swell came along the vessel would become just a little more waterlogged, a little heavier, and would settle down a little further. Now we were more or less on eye-level with the swell, and it was a question of which surge would engulf us. A terrible sense of dread and hopelessness filled the dream.
My mind was full of the knowledge of that irresistible weight, dragging everything down and down, while the freedom and light and speed of the ship upon which we had been travelling was receding, always receding. The gap was widening all the time and one was left in the silence of the green sea while the weight was pulling one further and further down. I woke with a feeling of horror as if I had received a portent so ominous that it filled my whole life.
The ship that moves away with its light and speed is the world of the sighted. My family, my loved ones, and I are pushing our way through it. We are stranded, increasingly cut off. We are immobile, waterlogged. I am being dragged down and down into something unimaginable from which there will be no return. One world will disappear. The world into which I am being dragged with my loved ones will engulf us. There will be no return. Blindness is permanent and irreversible. I know now that my dreaming self is, after all, not deceived. My life is in crisis.