Beyond light and darkness
Winter 1983
7 January
Early in infancy we learn to associate our desires with the visual images of the things which satisfy them. So complete is the identification of desire with image that it becomes difficult to distinguish between ‘I feel hungry’ and ‘I want to eat that food which I see there’. One feels hungry, of course, even when there is no food in sight, but once the food can be seen desire for the actual food takes the place of the feeling of hunger, or blends with the feeling, so that one’s energies, attentions, senses of smell and taste are occupied with the anticipation of the perceived food. The internal sensation of hunger is now given an objective reference outside the body. Desire becomes specific. Indeed, the sight of the food can actually make you feel hungry, or make you realise that you are hungry.
This close association between image and desire reminds us that sight is an anticipatory sense. The anticipation of satisfied hunger replaces the sensation of hunger itself. As the need and its fulfilment come into focus upon the image of food, activity is aroused. I stretch out my hand for the food. I enter the restaurant. I buy the grapes. Naturally, sight is not the only sense to be involved in this. The smell of food is very important, indeed, perhaps even for sighted people the smell of food may be more important than the sight. As always, however, sight is the foundation upon which the other senses build. The delicious smell of cooking attracts you to the kitchen and makes you feel hungry, but it is the sight of the food which actually tells you what is for dinner. The aroma, although wonderfully evocative, is often rather general. You say, ‘That smells delicious. What is it?’ Moreover, there are many foods the sight of which is much more stimulating than the smell. It is the sight of a rosy, shining apple which is attractive. The beautiful but subtle aroma of the apple, so noticeable when you open a whole crate or go into the loft where they are stored, may not be noticeable in the case of a single apple, especially when it is in the bowl with other kinds of fruit.
Blindness dislocates this primordial union of desire and image. I am often bored by food, feel that I am losing interest in it or cannot be bothered eating. At the same time, I have the normal pangs of hunger. Even whilst feeling hungry, I remain unmotivated by the approach of food. I know it is there, because somebody tells me. Somebody says, ‘Your soup has come’, or ‘Don’t start yet; the waiter is working his way round the table with the vegetables.’ ‘But what is it?’ I ask. ‘It’s veal cutlet.’ Now I know. But what do I know? I have this sentence, and I believe it, but the visual cues which excite the actual desire and turn it outwards towards the object are lacking.
Something rather similar seems to happen in the case of sexual desire. There is, I think, the same connection between the general but disorientated sense of sexual hunger and the particular image of the one who can satisfy it. The image of that which satisfies is quite inseparable from the realisation of the desire itself. What can we imagine of the sexual feelings of Adam before he met Eve? He knew he wanted something, but he did not know what. When he saw Eve, the restlessness of an unformed longing was turned into the passionate pursuit of a particular person.
So it is possible, I think, for a heterosexual blind man to be bored by women and yet to be conscious of sexual hunger. The trace of a perfume and the nuance of a voice are so insubstantial when compared with the full-bodied impact upon a sighted man of the appearance of an attractive woman. It must take a long time for a man who loses sight in adult life to transfer the cues of sexual arousal from the visual to the other senses. There must be many men in that position who wonder whether they will ever again be capable of genuine sexual excitement.
This dissociation of desire from image is a very curious and unsettling thing.
8 January
If I were to accept this thing, if I were to acquiesce, then I would die. It would be as if my ability to fight back, my will to resist were broken. On the other hand, not to acquiesce, not to accept, seems futile. What I am refusing to accept is a fact.
This then is the dilemma. I am in the presence of an unacceptable reality.
I must be content with little answers. This requires the careful planning of each day, which must be broken into its compartments. Each hour must have its particular skills, its various techniques, its little routines which enable something to be accomplished successfully. Otherwise, I will have a sense of pointless desolation, a feeling of being carried helplessly deeper and deeper into it. This becomes so sharp that I am almost overwhelmed. The sense of subterranean or subconscious weight oppresses me, and I link in my mind the dream image of the huge, water-soaked hulk being dragged down into the depths with my waking reverie about the little coal-truck being driven remorselessly deeper and deeper beneath the infinite weight of the mountain. The common feature is irresistible heaviness.
One fights such a thing by minute steps. One adopts tiny techniques which help one to do tiny things step by step. I will not try to get home; that is too far. But I will get to the end of the next block. I cannot recover my grasp of the dictionaries and the encyclopaedias. Nevertheless, I will find out the meaning of this one word. To read the whole of this book, at this speed, will take an age. Very well, I will not even attempt it. But I will get to the bottom of this page even if it kills me.
I must also fight back by recognising the circumstances in which panic is likely to occur. Let me see if I can set these out in my mind. I never have feelings of panic in my office. I always have a sense of being in an ordered environment, I know where things are, and I have something to get on with. I may sometimes feel sleepy and depressed, as if I can’t be bothered, but I never panic.
I must carefully consider the implications of the Christmas set-up at home. Because of the pressure on sleeping space, I had had to give up my study, which I did gladly. But then I had nowhere to go, nowhere to get on with some little piece of work which would keep my brain ticking over. I must also have been affected by the fact that the whole house, from top to bottom, was littered with unfamiliar objects, children’s toys all over the floor, suitcases and relatives to be bumped into. The unusual number of people in the house adds to the problem. I have to concentrate just that little bit harder to make sure that I have instant recognition. All this makes me feel that I am in an environment which is slipping out of control. I start to feel that it is swimming around me, that the unpredictable is confronting me at every step. It makes me realise the inflexibility of the blind, or I should say the inflexible kind of life which is imposed upon people by blindness. Familiarity, predictability, the same objects, the same people, the same routes, the same movement of the hand in order to locate this or that: take these away, and the blind person is transported back into the infantile state where one simply does not know how to handle the world, how to enter into it and to control it, how to exist in a relationship with that world, where the hard-won balance between trust and fear threatens to be upset, and one is overwhelmed by the thought that the world to which one seeks to be related is unrelatable to, because either it is unreal or unavailable. It is inhabited by beings to whom it does belong, the sighted. The world which remains is then one’s own body, the introspective consciousness. This is a world into which the sighted cannot penetrate, a place where some kind of inner control can be established. This is to go back beyond infancy into the unborn state, where one is free-floating without distinction, enclosed at the end of the tunnel, without a world and finally without a self.
The alternative to this is to establish some sort of environment, a study, a room, a route, a passage, some kind of territory. I wonder if this whole thing can be thought of in terms of territorial rights.
Blindness takes away one’s territorial rights. One loses territory. The span of attention, of knowledge, retracts so that one lives in a little world. Almost all territory becomes potentially hostile. Only the area which can be touched with the body or tapped with the stick becomes a space in which one can live. The rest is unknown.
I am also haunted by the thought that it must be much more awful for those who, having lost their sight, go on to lose hearing as well.
People sometimes ask me if I would like to feel their faces, but the face when felt is quite different from the face when seen. One of the most significant features of the face, the eyes themselves, cannot easily be touched. Moreover, the significance of the face-to-face position is becoming dim. It is the sight of the face which requires it to have a certain position. In the sighted world, it is a mark of courtesy and attention to turn one’s face towards the person who is speaking, but in the blind world it does not matter. A blind person, after all, only knows you have been listening to him when you reply, not by whether you were looking at him while he was addressing you. The relationship, in other words, is no longer symbolised by the mutual position of the faces. Sight deals with spaces, with areas, and hence with positions.
What is the sexual significance of this? The face-to-face position is important in the lovemaking of sighted people, because it indicates the attention of the one turned fully upon the other. It represents the mutuality and the personal nature of the sexual exchange. There was a film about prehistoric people. One of the most dramatic scenes was when a couple making love abandoned the position, which the film shows as being universal, in which the male partner is behind the female, for the face-to-face position.
This is portrayed as the development of mere sexual intercourse into an act of communion between two persons. For the blind lover, however, the face-to-face position can no longer have the same significance for personal communion as it must have for the sighted partner. I do not think that a sighted person could easily accept this. It is such an infringement of this powerful convention about the relationship between personality and the body. How does blindness affect lovemaking? Must not the blind lover become more primitive? Must he not regress, as it were, to the situation described in the film as being pre-personal? On the other hand, is it not possible that the blind person, dependent so heavily upon touch, smell and taste, might develop new gentleness and sensitivity in that situation which is tactile all over?
Another aspect of this is the horror of being faceless, of forgetting one’s own appearance, of having no face. The face is the mirror-image of the self.
Is this linked with the desire which I sometimes feel quite strongly to hide my face from others? I find I want to hold my chin and to cover my mouth with one hand, pressing my hand against my nose, as if I was wearing a mask. Is this a primitive desire to find some kind of equality? Since your face is not available to me, why should my face be available to you? Or does it spring from a sense that the face has been lost? Am I somehow mourning over the loss of the face? Am I trying to regain the assurance that I have got a face by feeling it with my own hands? I want to touch my very lips as I am speaking. Other people’s voices come from nowhere. Does my own voice also come from nowhere?
I often want to rest my chin upon one of my pointed fingers, so as to remind myself always to point my face in the direction from which the sound or voice is coming. I need to do this even when in deep conversation with one person. Am I afraid that my head will develop that characteristic blind person’s wobble?
The disappearance of the face is only the most poignant example of the dematerialisation of the whole body. People become mere sounds. This leads to something else. Just because there is nothing to mediate between the intangible sounds of voices and the immediate contact of bodies, body-contact becomes all the more startling. A handshake or an embrace becomes a shock, because the body comes out of nowhere into sudden reality.
This comes home vividly in the experience of drinking very cold water from a tap. The impact is so immediate. All of a sudden, it is there – water! It slaps against the lips, swamps the face, floods the mouth and the stomach with its sharp presence, with no warning or preparation. It just comes, smack. So is the transition from speech to body contact in the human relations of the blind person. So, for the blind, other people have become both more abstract and more concrete, with an abrupt transition from one to the other. This takes us back to the problem of the sexual relationships of the blind. Perhaps the blind lover is both more abstract and more concrete, perhaps he is both more primitive and more sophisticated, in different ways. Perhaps this is what they mean when they say that true love is blind.
2 February
Last night I had a nightmare so vivid that it woke me up. I dreamt that Elizabeth, who will be two on 23 February, was not in her cot. Instead it was full of flowers, beautiful flowers. They were in a formal arrangement, like wreaths on a gravestone. I went to Marilyn and said, ‘Where’s Lizzie?’
Marilyn said, ‘She’s dead.’
I was appalled, and broke down in tears, crying out, ‘What happened? I didn’t know. Tell me!’
Marilyn was very calm. She said, ‘It’s no good making a fuss. She’s buried.’
I was furious. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and shook her fiercely, shouting out, ‘What do you mean? How dare you! Is she not only dead but buried, and I not even told?’
Marilyn pointed out of the window. There was a grassy plot, like a cathedral close or a cloister. Over this a slow procession was moving on foot. ‘There they go’, Marilyn said. ‘There’s the funeral procession’.
So I woke up.
This dream was very visual. The colours were brilliant, people’s clothes, the green of the grass and the bright colours of the flowers. There was no trace of blindness. Who is running my children’s lives? How would I even know? Did the dreamer get the names wrong? Was it, perhaps, not Lizzie and Marilyn but other people whom I have also lost? Was it Imogen who was dead, lost first through divorce and distance and lost again through the isolating effect of blindness? The many faces of loss are terrifying.
4 February
Today the family went to Coventry Cathedral. Marilyn and Thomas went together to buy tickets for the special exhibition, while I remained in the coffee bar. Marilyn asked if there were a concession for disabled people, adding, ‘My husband is blind’. As soon as she had got the tickets, Thomas said to her, ‘Why is your husband blind?’ Marilyn, in telling this to me later, said that she was most taken aback at this question, and could not help wondering if she should have said what she did say in his hearing. She replied, however, ‘Because Daddy can’t see.’
He then asked, ‘Is Daddy your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why can’t he see?’
‘Because there’s something wrong with his eyes.’
Marilyn told me that Thomas did not pursue this any further, but later, as we were walking around the cathedral itself, he came over to me. This was the first time I had been alone with him, although Marilyn had already told me what had happened. ‘Daddy’, he asked me, ‘are you blind?’ I took him in my arms, and said, ‘Who’s been telling you that?’
This was a foolish and evasive answer and I do not quite know why I said it. In some obscure way that I cannot fully understand I felt ashamed. I was fearful that some change in my relationship with him might take place. Anyway, he now knows I am blind. Does he, however, know what blindness is? What conclusions will he be able to draw from his knowledge that I am blind?
Marilyn told me that yesterday whilst Thomas was playing with Lizzie he closed his eyelids very tightly, saying to her, ‘When I close my eyes you can’t see me.’ He kept his eyes closed for some seconds, while Lizzie stared at him, wide-eyed with wonder. Finally he opened his eyes and said triumphantly, ‘There!’ This is a vivid example of the assumption of reciprocity. One assumes that the other is like oneself. Not to see is the same as not to be seen. The active and the passive forms of speech are collated. Not to see is thus to be unobserved. A blind person is invisible. A person who closes his own eyes is also invisible. No one can see him. If one does not use sight, one is not available for sight. The argument from reciprocity runs like this: I can see Daddy; Daddy is therefore not invisible; therefore Daddy can see.
It would be all too easy to dismiss this as a piece of infantile reasoning. We should remember the so-called ‘illusion of privacy’, a feature of the behaviour of many blind adults. It refers to the difficulty of remembering all the time, when you are blind, that you can be seen. It is so hard always to bear in mind the astonishing range of this faculty which other people are said to have. The blind person has to remind himself all the time, when tempted to scratch his bum, that he is visible.
This is not the case when hearing is lost. I have never heard of a child who put his fingers in his ears and shouted, ‘You can’t hear me.’ One of the reasons for this, I think, is that the organ of hearing and that of speech are located separately on the head or the face. The organ by means of which one hears (the ears) and the organs by means of which one makes oneself heard (the larynx and the mouth) are not identical. The organ with which one sees and the organ with which one is seen are, however, identical. Sight is reciprocal but hearing is sequential.
The eye is thus related both actively and passively to other eyes, which is not the case with the ear, which is an organ of receptivity only.
Touch is reciprocal under normal conditions. If I can feel you, you can normally feel me feeling you. If I cannot feel you, it is probable that you cannot feel me. The difference between touch and sight is that the reciprocity of sight can be turned off so easily. There are ways of turning off the reciprocity of mutual touch. I could feel you while you were asleep, or I could hold a lock of your hair without you becoming aware of it. You might have had a dab of anaesthetic and your skin might be dulled. In the case of sight, however, you only have to close your eyes. The closing of the eyes is a normal, indeed, a moment by moment action, whereas the shutting off of the sense of touch is not so simple.
The implications of this reciprocity of sight for the relationships between the blind and the sighted are extensive. Because I cannot see, I cannot be seen. I can be ignored, treated as if I did not exist, spoken about in the third person. ‘Will you look after him? Will you put him by the lift? Where would you like to sit him? Will you walk him back to his office?’ When in a hurry, one can rush past a blind friend without the inconvenience of having to greet him. He does not see you, therefore he does not know. Therefore you can pretend that you cannot see him either.
The other day, with my colleague, Michael Grimmitt, I was interviewing a student. Michael told me afterwards that she did not look at me once during the entire interview. All of her questions, her smiles, her whole body were pointed towards Michael. Even when I was directly questioning her, she barely inclined her head in my direction.
Was it that she could not bear to look at me? Did she think that Michael would think she was stupid if she smiled at me and looked at me because she would know that Michael would know that I could not know if she smiled at me or not? Whatever the reason, the effect was that she was unable to see me, because I was unable to see her.
This feeling of having become invisible must be related to the loss of the body image. Just as one has lost the faces of others, so it would not matter if one’s own face were to be lost. On cold, wintry mornings, I suffer from a strange, almost inhuman feeling, that I could go around not merely with the lower part of my face muffled against the wind, but with my entire head shrouded. It would make no difference if my whole face disappeared. Being invisible to others, I become invisible to myself. This means that I lack self-knowledge, I become unconscious. This is what the archetype of blindness indicates, the loss of consciousness, the descent into sleep, the sense of nothingness, of becoming nothing. To be seen is to exist.
This gives insight into the longing of the beloved sighted to be seen by the beloved blind. It is the longing to exist in the lover’s sight, the desire to be perceived by him. This is surely what lies behind the thought which my elder daughter, aged ten and a half, expressed the other day, ‘Oh Daddy, I wish you could see me.’ This is not merely the desire to be seen performing some feat, such as a younger child might feel, it is the desire to have been in the presence of someone who did, as a parent, confer being, but now is blind.
11 February
The other day Thomas and I were listening to the story of Rapunzel on cassette. When we came to the part where the young prince falls from the tower, scratches his eyes on the thorns and becomes blind, Thomas interrupted, in some agitation, turning to me and crying out, ‘Why was he blind?’
‘Because the thorns hurt his eyes’, I replied.
‘Why did the thorns hurt his eyes?’
‘It was when he fell out of the tower. He fell on to the thorn bushes.’
There was a pause while he digested this. I decided to take the initiative. ‘What’s blindness, Thomas?’
After a short pause, he replied thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know.’
There was again a short pause. The illustration in the book apparently showed the young prince wandering through the forest with a white cane or a stick of some kind, because Thomas next asked, ‘Is the prince blind?’
‘Yes’, I replied.
Thomas added, ‘He’s carrying a stick.’
‘Is it a white stick?’ I asked him.
‘No.’
‘Why is he carrying a stick?’ I inquired.
Again there was a pause, and he said, ‘I don’t know.’
Thomas does not know what the word ‘blind’ means, although he realises that it is something to do with one’s eyes. He knows that it is not natural, and is, indeed, the result of some misfortune, and he knows that blindness is associated with the carrying of a stick, although it is not clear quite what the association is. He made no reference to my own blindness, nor to the conversation we had last week which so startled him, when he heard Marilyn say that her husband was blind. Is it possible that my foolish refusal to answer his question directly, about whether I was indeed blind, has now confused him? Perhaps he now is not quite sure whether I am blind or not. He does, however, realise that the word ‘blind’ is a significant word for us all.
24 February
Occasionally I feel depressed, and this is worst when I am frustrated in playing with the children. I feel as if I have become nothing, unable to act as a father, impotent, unable to survey, to admire, or to exercise jurisdiction or discrimination. I have a strange feeling of being dead.
My response is to go even further inwards, into a deeper deadness. I sink into quietness and passivity. I might sit in a chair alone, without moving, reducing my breathing to the barest minimum, simmering down until I am aware of less and less. I try to think of nothing, and often drift in and out of sleep. I might cover myself with a blanket, cutting out any faint sounds, and by emptying myself completely, I become the cipher that my blindness tells me I am. In this state, I can continue for hours.
This technique for fighting depression is effective up to a point. It does provide a certain refuge, a kind of solace, a place to go to. I certainly find that, if the joyful games of the children throw me into one of these depressed states, and if I am unable to go into my nothingness refuge, possibly because I am responsible for the children and have to remain alert, or because of some social obligation to visitors or friends, then I seem to go to pieces. I build up inner tension. There is a tightness in my forehead, a feeling that I will not be able to go on much longer. The image of the quiet little bed in the corner of my study keeps flooding into my mind and I feel that the demands of the outside world which prevent me from retiring are rapidly becoming less and less acceptable. Each voice comes, as it were, from an increasingly remote distance, and is heard with increasing reluctance. The sounds of the outside world now strike me with a certain pain, as if they are preventing me from obtaining relief, and I will, at this stage, find it impossible to remain awake.
I must find another way of tackling this problem. I need to understand it more. It has been suggested that blindness is one of the great symbols or archetypes. In the art and mythology of many peoples, blindness is associated with ignorance, confusion and unconsciousness. Perhaps my imagination has come under the power of these associations. Perhaps my actual blindness has activated the archetype of blindness within me.
This could be why in these states of depression I feel as if I am on the borders of conscious life, not just in the literal sense that I am slipping in and out of sleep, but in a deeper and more alarming sense. I feel as if I want to stop thinking, stop experiencing. The lack of a body image makes this worse: the fact that one can’t glance down and see the reassuring continuity of one’s own consciousness in the outlines of one’s own body, moving a distant foot which, so to speak, waves back, saying, ‘Yes, I hear you. I am here’. There is no extension of awareness into space. So I am nothing but a pure consciousness, and if so, I could be anywhere. I am becoming ubiquitous; it no longer matters where I am. I am dissolving. I am no longer concentrated in a particular location, which would be symbolised by the integrity of the body.
The archetype of blindness represents the power to obliterate the distinction between that which is known and that which is not known, that which is here and that which is not here, the inside and the outside, the specific and the general. It represents dissolution, the borderland between being and not-being.
The techniques which I have described for fighting panic and depression are only partly successful. In the case of the withdrawing technique, it is too similar to the object of its fear. This is why it cannot be an effective response, urgent and perhaps inevitable though it may be in the short term. As for blindness being an archetype, what do I do about it? I need to find an antidote. Could there be an opposing archetype? Could this be the idea of light? Light is certainly one of the perennial symbols. Light gives detail, drives away uncertainty, allows discrimination, dissolves ambiguity, and gives a particular place and context.
Thomas had asked me if he could have the light on in the room where we were playing. It had not occurred to me that it had become dark. He had explained, ‘Thomas needs the light. Daddy doesn’t need the light’.
I thought of the passage in Psalm 139.12: ‘Darkness and light are both alike to thee’. There is a strange sense in which I have become like God. I may have discovered not so much the opposing archetype as the alternative one, the one which transcends and unifies at a higher level.
27 February
I am often surprised that my sighted friends know something when it is still so far off. The blind have to remember that it is just as if the sighted were touching their faces all the time. Sighted people gain knowledge of what blind people are thinking just through watching their faces. Sighted people often call out, telling me that there is a car parked on the footpath. Friends often tell me that they saw me (from their cars) crossing the road. They honked me, but there was no way I could recognise them before the traffic moved on. I was surprised the other day to find out how far down the road I was when my children, knowing I was coming, had time to prepare something for me.
In some ways, God’s knowledge of the world is rather like the knowledge which the sighted have of the blind, but it also goes further. ‘Open your eyes!’ one of my sighted friends said to her husband. ‘I can’t tell what you’re thinking when you sit there with your eyes closed.’ The eyes of the blind are inscrutable. It is true that the sighted can catch the transient emotions upon the face of the blind, but all too often I find that my friends think I am asleep, when in fact I am paying very close attention to them. I must speak if they are to know my inner thoughts. Speech becomes all important to the blind. God, however, does not depend upon my speech to know me, even though I am blind. It is at this point that we realise that we are entering into the presence of something which transcends the distinction between blindness and sight, darkness and light.
As a sighted person, you are acknowledged by your friends with a smile, a nod, a wink or even the most fleeting exchange of glances. To be acknowledged by my friends, I must soon be spoken to or touched. I find that I have developed a little habit, which I feel sure is due to my blindness, of shaking hands with people by using both of my hands. I somehow feel the need to extend an acknowledgement of their presence which will make up for my inability to receive their smiles. When I am speaking at a meeting, it is important to go around as many people as I can beforehand, shaking hands and literally making contact.
*
I drop a teaspoon on to the floor. I lower my twelve-month old baby, holding her by the waist. I wait a moment, moving her up and down a little like a vacuum cleaner. I lift her up again. The teaspoon is in her hand. I am full of wonder. She picked it up, so smoothly, so easily, with no need to scrape the carpet with her hand. She went straight for it. How did she know? This child has some strange sense which I can but remember. God’s knowledge fills me with even greater wonder. ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me! It is high, I cannot attain it’ (Psalm 139, v.6). What does ‘high’ mean to a blind person? How high are the buildings? How high are the clouds? I only know that things are up there; they are beyond my reach.
The knowledge which God has is inescapable. It surrounds me; it fills me. It makes every place alike, for all places are known to God. ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?’ (v.7). There are no degrees of the divine presence because there are no degrees of divine knowledge. ‘If I ascend to heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in Sheol thou art there’ (v.8). God is Lord of all worlds. The world of heaven, of light is his. The world of Sheol, of darkness and of the depths is also his. It makes no difference to him where I am, or in what world I find myself. He is not enclosed within the world of heavenly light nor is he defeated by the world of impenetrable night.
Now I imagine I am flying. I imagine I am free, once again, to go where I will, and that the morning and the ocean will once again be accessible to me. ‘If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea …’ (v.9). I may, perhaps, live beneath the sea, in that world of the unconscious depths. Even there, the One who is the Lord of all worlds will make himself known to me in the manner which suits my condition. He will not show himself to me: he will not appear to me. He will not offer me a vision or be transformed in glory. He will remember my blindness. ‘… even there thy hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall hold me’ (v.10).
I feel certain that the author of this psalm was blind. Nobody else could have described so powerfully the religious experience of the blind person, or could have interpreted so perfectly the presence of a blind person before God.
*
The physical closeness of two people making love is a problem to the pornographic film-maker, for at the point of most intimate touching where sight becomes irrelevant, the pornographer must introduce distance in order to retain visual excitement. It is amusing for a blind man to think that there is still one thing he can do, and people often remark that you don’t need speech and you don’t need sight to do it. No matter how exciting and profound may be the mutual knowledge which lovers exchange, none can ever be said to know or experience the moment when the sperm joins the ovum and a new life is born. I was made in secret and I am still being made in the secrets of blindness, but all secrets are open to God. I no longer know the passage of my days by means of the alternation of day and night, light and darkness, and in this sense also, my knowledge of my days is rather like God’s. The important thing about waking up is not the morning but the presence. I am restored by wakefulness to the presence of the ones I love. So although I experience the paradoxes of redis-covering sight in the unconscious life of dreams and of losing my sight once again every time I wake up, the paradoxes are transcended in communion with the One who knows me, whether I wake or sleep, for I am still with him.
28 February
As a blind person, sitting on the beach, I have poured a fistful of sand upon the palm of my other hand, allowing it to trickle through my fingers. I have rubbed the sand between my finger and thumb, wondering at the various textures. Some of the grains are coarse and sharp, filing the skin in such a way that every little speck stands out. Some are so smooth and silky that it is almost impossible to tell the grains, the sand disappearing like water. If I stretch my hand out a little further, I can still grasp sand, and so on, further and further. I know that with sight I could tell the sweep of this beach for miles around the bay. This beach is but one of thousands of such beaches, and there are probably thousands of people like me just now, doing what I am doing, running the grains between their fingers and wondering. So are the divine thoughts. My body holds them, one by one, while I myself am held like a grain upon the hand of God.
In adoration I welcome the divine knowledge. What matters is not that I am blind, but that I am known and that I am led by the hand, and that my life, whether sighted or blind, is full of praise.
Last night I had the most powerful, frightening and impressive dream. I was on board a huge ship. There were no women on board, it was all men. It appeared to be some kind of naval expedition. Giant waves kept crashing right over the ship. The first of these we saw coming. Everyone ran for shelter. We had time to scuttle inside the bulkheads, to run along to the end, and to clamber up the metal stairways. Up and up we climbed to the very top recesses. Then the wave broke. It came crashing across the deck, into the cabins and holds, swamping the whole of the interior section where we were, and splashing right up, but not quite touching us. We were all grouped on the very top part of this spacious hall, or stateroom, in the ship. This was the first of many such waves. One, in particular, I saw coming. It was a mountainous, threatening wall of dark, green water. They crashed again and again over the ship. The whole place was awash. We ourselves had just managed to escape, although others were being swept away. Now the vessel became a submarine. We went down, under the water. We were on some kind of mission. Three men seemed to be in charge. They were the captain and his helpers, the officers. They were swimming around, beautiful, strong, powerful men. Now I had an external view of this submarine. Still it was descending, very modern, like a space craft. It was covered with bulbs, all sorts of equipment and lamps. It was not particularly large, but was coming down and down, very gently. Now it was resting on the deck of another ship, far beneath the water, where there seemed to be some mission to accomplish. Then we were back inside the large vessel. There seemed to be some kind of disaster, a punishment amongst the crew. There was my colleague, Michael, being wrapped up inside a blanket or a shroud and hung on a rope out of the cabin window. This was to serve as a punishment, or some kind of signal. As he was lowered out of the window, I heard the bell sounding. I was full of distress, and I saw others of my colleagues being punished in the same way. I did not know what for. I was full of fear that somehow or other my colleagues and I had let down the expedition, disgraced the party. We were being punished in this dreadful and incomprehensible manner by these majestic men who were our captains. It was a very vivid, compelling and exciting dream.
Above and below blindness … is there to be a meeting with something down there? What loss! What failure! How incomprehensible it all is and how irresistible!
5 March
On a number of occasions in one of the Birmingham city centre churches Marilyn and I had met a man whom I will call Mr Cresswell. A few Sundays ago Mr Cresswell approached me after the morning service, shook me warmly by the hand, and told me that God had told him that it was his intention to heal me of my blindness. Mr Cresswell would have to wait for the signal from the Lord that the time had come but as soon as the Lord did give him the word he would be along to see me. I congratulated him on having received this message, adding that, as soon as the Lord gave him the word he was to lose no time but to come out and see me straight away.
He called at the house a couple of times during the following weeks but I was out. He then rang and an appointment was made for five o’clock on Friday 2 March. When I arrived home from the office, Mr Cresswell was already there talking with Marilyn. Thomas and Lizzie were frisking around rather noisily and when it became clear that we were about to start Marilyn offered to leave the room and take the children with her. Mr Cresswell was, however, very anxious that she should remain, and so we all stayed.
Mr Cresswell began by telling me that I had had a fall when I was young. He did not deny that what the doctors said about detached retina might well be true, according to their lights, but the other way of looking at it was that I had had a fall and this had caused me to lose my sight. I expressed interest in this in a fairly non-committal way and we passed on to various other subjects. Mr Cresswell told me a little bit about his work, his calling to be a healer, and the extent of his ministry. He had special knowledge. We, for example, had a sick woman teacher friend. Marilyn and I discussed this briefly. We do have dozens of women teacher friends but, to the best of our knowledge, none of them was sick at that time. Mr Cresswell did not pursue that line of inquiry, but told us that we were missing someone very badly. We were, he told us, missing our home. He asked which home we were missing. We told him that this was our home and we were not missing any other place. ‘Aren’t you homesick for your parents’ place?’ We repeated that this was our home, we loved each other very much, we were happy together and although we loved our parents we did not miss their home. Mr Cresswell then introduced the idea that our true home was heaven, and this was the place that we should be missing.
These little attempts at clairvoyance having been somewhat inconclusive, our visitor began another explanation about my lack of sight. He told me that I had ceased to read the Bible. I assured him that I had not ceased to read the Bible and he countered this by insisting that I was not reading it as much as I used to. I informed him that I was only reading the Bible for about half an hour a day, and in braille, whereas in the past I had occasionally read the Bible more each day, and at other times less. Mr Cresswell seemed to think this a clear admission of guilt, commenting that the moment we stop reading the Bible these things come upon us. I pointed out that there are many sighted people who had stopped or who had never read the Bible. They did not lose their sight, so the thing he was describing could hardly be a general rule. Mr Cresswell pointed out that people are different, and then again maybe it was not me but my parents or grandparents because God visits their sins unto the third and fourth generation. Mr Cresswell took a vigorously punitive view of illness and disability.
These preliminaries being concluded, Mr Cresswell called for a Bible. Marilyn offered him a New English Bible, but he was not satisfied with it. We passed him an Authorised Version, which was acceptable. He sat there for some time apparently meditating on what he should read. He gave the impression that he was waiting to receive instructions because he muttered softly, ‘Genesis? Yes? No, not Genesis. All right. Acts? Yes, we’ll have the first chapter of Acts.’
Since I was unable to read the printed version, Marilyn was asked to read. In order to impress upon him that I had not stopped reading the Bible, I broke into the reading about half way through the chapter and quoted from memory the following six or eight verses. Mr Cresswell was delighted with this, and Marilyn then completed the chapter. Our visitor called for a cup of cold water, stood up, asked me to remove my glasses, placed one of his hands over my forehead and eyes, sprinkled my head with the water, and prayed, first a general, healing prayer, then the Lord’s Prayer, followed by the Twenty-third Psalm. He then anointed my eyes with the water, above and below each lid, and asked me to roll up my right sleeve. He was taken aback to discover that my arm was bandaged. He asked me what that was in a tone of surprise and some indignation. I explained that I had been having a little eczema and he told me to remove the bandage, and that I would never, never wear it again. I was not sure if this was an instruction or a prediction, but certainly Mr Cresswell seemed slightly upset by the bandage, possibly because I had not informed him about the full extent of my bodily state, or perhaps because his special knowledge had not revealed it to him. Be that as it may, I was then grasped by the upper arm, and Mr Cresswell made firm, stroking movements right down the arm to the tip of the fingers, stroking each finger or pulling each finger one by one to the very tip. This was repeated on my left arm and then over my head, although I cannot quite remember if the movements on the head were up or down. The evil influences having been removed from me in this way, I was then told to take cod liver oil mixed with an equal quantity of honey. Nothing was said about whether the dosage should be repeated, or how often, and I did not inquire.
This entire ritual was repeated again on Marilyn who was then commanded to drink a little bit of the remaining water and in a forceful voice I was commanded to finish it off. That was the end of the matter, and Marilyn left the room to put the two babies in the bath. Mr Cresswell remained for a few moments, and we had a very friendly and lively conversation about his work and the Lord’s work. I thanked him for coming and thanked him for his prayers and readings. He told me that the Lord had seen fit to afflict me with this pain but that probably he would now see fit to remove it. He was cautious, and emphasised the probability only. So, with renewed greetings and warm embraces, together with a promise to return to offer further treatment if the Lord so instructed him, Mr Cresswell took his leave.