Time, space and love
Spring 1984
31 March
We were listening again to the cassette of the story of Rapunzel. When we came to the part where the witch throws the prince out of the window of the tower on to the thorns which blind him, and where the prince wanders through the forest with his stick looking for Rapunzel, Thomas asked, ‘Why was he blind?’
‘Because his eyes were poorly’, I said, adding, ‘My eyes are poorly’.
In a very serious and probing tone, he asked me, ‘Are you blind?’
‘Yes, I am’, I answered.
He turned towards me, and I sensed that he was examining me closely. ‘Your eyes are closed.’
I realised that this was true. Sometimes my eyes get very itchy and watery, and I tend then to keep them closed. I opened my eyes wide, and said, ‘Yes, but even when I open my eyes, I still can’t see, because my eyes are poorly.’
‘Can’t you see the pictures?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘But I can see the pictures.’
‘Your eyes aren’t poorly’, I said.
I gently put my hand over his eyes, closing the lids and keeping them firmly closed. ‘Now can you see?’ I said.
‘No.’
I took my hand away. ‘Now?’
‘Yes, I can see now.’
‘Your eyes aren’t poorly’, I said. I repeated this some half-dozen times, and he seemed to enjoy it, but accepted it very quietly and thoughtfully. Again and again he repeated, ‘Yes my eyes aren’t poorly. Yes. I can see’, each time I took my hand away.
We continued to listen to the story of Rapunzel, but a few moments later he interrupted again. ‘When did you get blind?’ he asked abruptly.
‘It happened just a few days before you were born’, I said.
‘What made your eyes go poorly?’
‘They were sick’, I said, ‘and the doctors couldn’t make them better.’ We continued with the story.
This was a very serious and important exchange. For the first time having poorly eyes, being blind, not being able to see, not being able to see pictures were all associated. It is realised now that this constitutes a difference between me and Thomas, and that it is part of my own personal life-history.
The Rapunzel story is quite important in children’s understanding of blindness, or their misunderstanding of it. I remember being in Wales on a summer holiday in 1981. Imogen, then aged eight, asked me, ‘Daddy, if I cried and the tears fell on your eyes, would you be able to see again?’ I am sure that she had picked this idea up from Rapunzel, for this is how the story ends.
17 April
Michael tells me that he thinks my perception of time has undergone a change since I lost my sight. He thinks that of all the people in the Faculty I am the only one who always seems to have plenty of time. Everyone else is rushing around, chasing their tails, trying to cram every minute with necessary tasks and to squeeze the last drop out of time. I alone seem to have all the time in the world. Michael remarked that in my work I don’t cut corners; I just go on, doing what has to be done, until it is finished. It does not matter how much time it takes. In his own work, he has to cut corners all day long, in order to get his work finished.
Michael suggests that this different attitude to time, or position within time, may be partly due to the fact that I am not under pressure from another life. I do not have to leave the office at 5 p.m. in order to catch the garage so that I can get the car home so my wife can use it tonight. I do not have to get to the supermarket before it closes. There is a sense in which other people are not dependent upon my time.
Michael also wonders whether the fact that I cannot see the change in the day as the evening draws on is a factor. I press my clock. It says that the time is 5.45 p.m. This is an abstract measure of time. It is a fact, spoken by a synthetic voice. I do not perceive the rise and decline of the day.
I think there is much truth in all this. Sighted people can bend time. For sighted people, time is sometimes slow and sometimes rapid. They can make up for being lazy by rushing later on. Things can be gathered up quickly in a few minutes. It is a bit like the change in your sense of time when you buy a car. Journeys that previously took two hours now take twenty minutes. You are amazed at how much more you can squeeze in. In this way, you force time to your will. Time, for sighted people, is that against which they fight.
For me, as a blind person, time is simply the medium of my activities. It is that inexorable context within which I do what must be done. For example, the reason why I do not seem to be in a hurry as I go around the building is not that I have less to do than my colleagues, but I am simply unable to hurry. It takes me almost exactly twenty-two minutes to walk from my front door to my office. I cannot do it in fifteen minutes, and if I tried to take thirty minutes over it, I would probably get lost, because knowledge of the route depends, to some extent, upon maintaining the same speed. The measured pace, the calm concentration, the continual recollection of exactly how far one has come and how far is still to go, the pause at each marked spot to make sure that one is orientated, all this must be conducted at the same controlled pace. Whether it rains or shines, I just go on.
It is also a matter of what one expects to be able to wrench out of time. When I had sight, I would have worked with feverish haste, correcting forty footnotes in a single morning. Now, I am happy if, with the help of a sighted reader, by the end of the morning I have corrected ten. I do not think to myself, ‘Oh damn. I’ve only done ten’. I think, ‘Good. That’s ten done. Only another three mornings like this and the job will be finished.’ I am so glad that I am able to do it at all. The simplicity, the careful planning, the long-term preparation, the deliberateness with which the blind person must live, all this means that he cannot take advantage of time by suddenly harvesting a whole lot of it.
Perhaps all severe disabilities lead to a decrease in space and an increase in time. I think of my friend Chris, with his multiple sclerosis. Without his mobility machine, his range is about twenty yards. With the machine, which travels at about four miles an hour, his space is extended. He can rove for eight or twelve miles and come home again. Nevertheless, his space has shrunk relatively to what it was when he was in normal health. Time, on the other hand, has strangely expanded. It takes him 45 minutes to tie up his shoelaces in the morning. It doesn’t matter. He does not get impatient. He just does it. That is how long it takes to tie shoelaces. I think of Clive Inman, my medical friend, who has recently been recovering from a serious road accident, with his back injuries, lying in the Stoke Mandeville bed in the spinal unit at the Hexham Hospital. Space to him is diminished to the size of his bed. On the other hand, for those twelve long weeks, he has all the time in the world. He can lie there all day, spend hours talking to friends, listening to the radio, thinking. It no longer matters if it takes five minutes careful concentration to pick something up.
When you have a lot of time, you experience time-inflation. The price of each hour goes up, because of the cost involved in the performance of each tiny task, but because the tasks are long and take so many hours the distinct value of each hour seems to deteriorate. The increasing cost is associated with a decreasing value. The hours become cheap in contrast to the necessary tasks which must be accommodated within them. You are no longer fighting against the clock but against the task. You no longer think of the time it takes. You only think of what you have to do. It cannot be done any faster. Time, against which you previously fought, becomes simply the stream of consciousness within which you act. For the deaf-blind person, space is confined to his body, but he has lots of time.
Modern technology seeks to expand human space and compress human time. The disabled person, on the other hand, finds that space is contracted and time is expanded. It is because of the space–time co-ordinates within which the blind person lives that his life becomes gradually different from the lives of sighted people, particularly in a time of high technology.
27 April
What is the world of sound? I have been spending some time out of doors trying to respond to the special nature of the acoustic world. I am impressed by the many different aspects of reality, the range and depth of the contact points between myself and something created by sound.
The tangible world sets up only as many points of reality as can be touched by my body, and this seems to be restricted to one problem at a time. I can explore the splinters on the park bench with the tip of my finger but I cannot, at the same time, concentrate upon exploring the pebbles with my big toe. I can use all ten fingers when I am exploring the shape of something but it is quite difficult to explore two objects simultaneously, one with each hand. It is true that, if many people were poking me, I would feel all the prods with various parts of my body but this would not tell me very much about the world, only about my body.
The world revealed by sound is so different. It is true that I cannot listen to two different tape-recorded books at the same time, but that has to do with speech. I am thinking of the way in which sound places one within a world.
On Holy Saturday I sat in Cannon Hill Park while the children were playing. I heard the footsteps of passers-by, many different kinds of footsteps. There was the flip-flop of sandals and the sharper, more delicate sound of high-heeled shoes. There were groups of people walking together with different strides creating a sort of patter, being overtaken now by one, firm, long stride, or by the rapid pad of a jogger. There were children, running along in little bursts, and stopping to get on and off squeaky tricycles or scooters. The footsteps came from both sides. They met, mingled, separated again. From the next bench, there was the rustle of a newspaper and the murmur of conversation. Further out, to the right and behind me, there was the car park. Cars were stopping and starting, arriving and departing, doors were being slammed. Far over to the left, there was the main road. I heard the steady, deep roar of the through traffic, the buses and the trucks. In front of me was the lake. It was full of wild fowl. The ducks were quacking, the geese honking, and other birds, which I could not identify, were calling and cranking. There was continual flapping of wings, splashing and squabbling, as birds took off and landed on the surface, or fought over scraps of bread. There was the splash of the paddle boats, the cries of the children, and the bump as two boats collided. Parents on shore called out encouragement or warning. Further away, from the larger expanse of the lake, there was the different sound of the rowing boats as they swished past, and beyond that was the park. People were playing football. I heard the shouting, running feet, the impact of leather upon leather as the ball was kicked. There seemed to be several groups playing different games. Here there were boys; further over in that direction there seemed to be a group of young children playing. Over this whole scene, there was the wind. The trees behind me were murmuring, the shrubs and bushes along the side of the paths rustled, leaves and scraps of paper were blown along the path. I leant back and drank it all in. It was an astonishingly varied and rich panorama of movement, music and information. It was absorbing and fascinating.
The strange thing about it, however, is that it was a world of nothing but action. Every sound was a point of activity. Where nothing was happening, there was silence. That little part of the world then died, disappeared. The ducks were silent. Had they gone or was something holding their rapt attention? The boat came to rest. Were people leaning on the oars, or had they tied it to the edge and gone away? Nobody was walking past me just now. This meant that the footpath itself had disappeared. I could only remind myself of its direction by considering that it ran parallel to the bench upon which I sat. Even the traffic on the main road had paused. Were the lights red? When there is rest, everything else passes out of existence. To rest is not to be. To do is to be. Mine is not a world of being; it is a world of becoming. The world of being, the silent, still world where things simply are, that does not exist. The rockery, the pavilion, the skyline of high-rise flats, the flagpoles over the cricket ground, none of this is really there. The world of happenings, of movement and conflict, that is there.
The acoustic world is one in which things pass in and out of existence. This happens with such surprising rapidity. There seems to be no intermediate zone of approach. There is a sudden cry from the lake, ‘Hello, Daddy!’; my children are there in their paddle boat. Previously, a moment ago, they were not there. Not until they greeted me with a cry could I distinguish them from the rest of the background sounds. There was no gradual approach. While the world which greets me in this way is active, I am passive. I cannot stop these stimulations flooding me. I just sit here. The creatures emitting the noise have to engage in some activity. They have to scrape, bang, hit, club, strike surface upon surface, impact, make their vocal chords vibrate. They must take the initiative in announcing their presence to me. For my part, I have no power to explore them. I cannot penetrate them or discover them without their active co-operation. They must utter their voice, their sound. It is thus a world which comes to me, which springs into life for me, which has no existence apart from its life towards me.
The intermittent nature of the acoustic world is one of its most striking features. In contrast, the perceived world is stable and continuous. The seen world cannot escape from your eyes. Even in the darkness, you can use a torch and force things into visibility, but I have only very limited power over the acoustic world.
Here is another feature of the acoustic world: it stays the same whichever way I turn my head. This is not true of the perceptible world. It changes as I turn my head. New things come into view. The view looking that way is quite different from the view looking this way. It is not like that with sound. New noises do not come to my attention as I turn my head around. I may allow my head to hang limply down upon my chest; I may lean right back and face the sky. It makes little difference. Perhaps there is some slight shading of quality, but the acoustic world is mainly independent of my movement. This heightens the sense of passivity. Instead of me having to search things out and uncover fresh portions of my world by my own effort as I fix my gaze first here then there, in the acoustic world there is something which is rather indifferent to my attempts to penetrate it. This is a world which I cannot shut out, which goes on all around me, and which gets on with its own life. I can, of course, train myself to pay attention to it; I can learn to distinguish this from that sound, become more practised in judging distance and so on. Nevertheless, my ears remain fixed in a stationary head, while my eyes, if I could see, would be darting here and there with innumerable movements in a head which itself was moving.
Acoustic space is a world of revelation.
1 May
Last night I dreamt that I was in a pub. Marilyn and I were making love. The scene changed to the crowded bar. An announcement was heard over the public address system: ‘Will the blind man at the bar please report immediately because his wife and daughter have been involved in an accident.’ The notice was repeated. In the dream I now had an image of myself, holding the white cane, hearing the notice, stupefied with anxiety. A second time the notice was twice repeated. Then I was at the back door of the pub. At the end of the drive there was a car. Marilyn and Imogen were in it. I couldn’t get to them fast enough. A scream broke from my lips. ‘Meg! Immy!’ Then, whether with assistance or not I cannot tell, I was at the car. Everything was all right. It had been a false alarm. Imogen was fine. Marilyn was fine. I told them about the announcement in the bar, but everything was okay.
In this dream I hear myself described as a blind man, I see myself holding a stick, I once again sense the panic of not being able to get quickly enough to loved ones in distress. In the dream, however, it is not clear whether I am led or conducted. I seem to be able to get there by myself.
The main subject of the dream is fear of losing Marilyn through blindness. This seems to be corrected by the later realisation that, after all, this will not happen. So my dream says.
This is a dream about blindness as well as a blind person’s dream.
8 May
Last Thursday one of my friends was driving me home from a meeting. I asked her if she would mind if I collected a meal from an Indian takeaway. We parked on the double yellow lines outside one of the restaurants in Bristol Street. My friend helped me as far as the door of the restaurant where we were met by an affable man who seemed to be a person of authority in the place. My friend returned to her parked car and I was escorted to a table. My escort introduced himself to me as an entertainer who worked every evening in the restaurant. His name was, he said, Benito Luigi, not an Indian, but a Sicilian. He explained that, although in his capacity as an entertainer, a magician and a conjuror, he worked in the restaurant, his essential work was as a hypnotherapist.
He asked me if my companion would like to come inside and have a cup of coffee, and offered me coffee too. He would keep an eye out for the police, and would explain the situation should the need arise. He called my friend from her car and we were both served with coffee. He entertained her by describing his business and his specialities.
Turning to me he asked if I would mind answering some personal questions. I knew now what was coming, and was ready for it. He asked if I was completely blind, how long I had been blind, the cause of my blindness and whether I was completely satisfied that nothing more could be done. He told me candidly that there was only one thing I could now have hope in, and that was my own willpower. My sight depended upon my will, and he, through hypnotherapy, could restore and strengthen my will.
I asked Luigi whether he could restore a limb which had been lost during a road accident. He said ‘No’. I pointed out that my eyes were a bit like that. This seemed to give him pause for thought.
He hesitated. ‘You got no eyes? They gone?’ I took my glasses off and showed him my left eye, which is completely white. I told him that that was not really a normal eye. Significant components had been removed or destroyed. I told him that the lenses from my eyes were gone and that the retina in both eyes had long since perished. Willpower could not restore these physical structures any more than willpower could make a new arm grow.
Nothing daunted, Luigi told me about some of the marvellous cures he had performed, including terminal cancer. ‘You’re not a hypnotherapist. You’re a faith healer!’ I told him. He appealed to my companion for her opinion of the case. She was inclined to agree with me. This did not seem like a case of weakened will but a case of structural defect. Perhaps seeing that our food was about to be brought to the table, Luigi made one final attempt. ‘But all you need is willpower! Don’t you have willpower? Don’t you want your sight back?’
‘Of course I want my sight back’, I said, laughing at the joke. ‘But, on the other hand, don’t misunderstand me. I am a contented person’.
He replied, ‘I see that you are contented. Yes, I see that you laugh a lot, you are a happy man. Nevertheless, you must want your sight back.’
I agreed, and at that moment our food arrived. Luigi gave me his business card, and we bid each other friendly farewells.
On the way home in the car, my friend and I discussed this amusing incident. She was delighted by this new acquaintance, and amused by his vivacity and his charm. She was rather intrigued at the thought of being hypnotised by him, and wondered what it would be like. When we stopped outside the house, she asked in a hesitant but curious tone, ‘But, John, what about yourself? Why did you not accept? What harm could it do? Do you think you have got to the point where you really don’t want your sight back?’
I was taken aback at this, and replied, ‘How can you say that? Of course I want my sight back! I will never accept the loss of my sight!’
‘But, John’, she asked, ‘you do seem so well adjusted to it. You always seem to be so poised, so happy, you seem to function so well.’
‘You don’t know half the truth’, I said warmly. ‘I will never accept the human losses involved in blindness, and I will never accept futile help from that sort of quarter either. Don’t you see that I would find it even more degrading, more humiliating, that it would only be to betray any courage and dignity which I may have left? There are some situations in life when you have to carry out a protracted but dignified warfare against despair and not allow yourself to be made the emotional slave of those who offer false hopes.’
This line of argument had little impact. My loyal and affectionate friend was still inclined to think that it must be a combination of pride and complacency which held me back from accepting such a harmless offer. For my part, to persist with the military metaphor, if blindness is going to vanquish me, I would rather be found dead with the wounds on my chest and not in my back.
At church last Sunday, we again met our faith-healing friend, Mr Cresswell. Perhaps my attitude had hardened somewhat in the meantime, partly because of the encounter with the hypnotherapist in the Indian restaurant and partly because Marilyn had made me have a couple of spoonfuls of cod liver oil mixed with honey, and had been mildly disapproving when I refused any more.
Mr Cresswell came up in a breezy manner, shook me by the hand, and asked me how things were. It was apparent that he was not very interested in how things were, since I suppose the white cane I was holding told its own story, but he apologised for not having visited us again, and then announced that he had a word from the Lord for me. The message was that the Lord was instructing me to get hold of a small Bible and carry it always in my pocket. From now on, I must always have the word of God with me, it must go with me, this is what God had said, ‘Let the word go with you’.
‘I’m sorry Mr Cresswell’, I said, ‘but I am not prepared to do that. I have a lot of things to put in my pockets and I am not prepared to clutter them up with one more thing. I carry the word of God always in my head and in my heart, and I see no point in carrying it in my pocket as well.’
Mr Cresswell waxed rather eloquent at this, and told me roundly that God was telling me the simple thing that I should now do in order to have my sight back and if I were not prepared to obey him then I should not be surprised if my sight were not restored. Sin was the cause of blindness, as of all illness, and sin lay in the resistance and pride of humankind in refusing to obey the word of God, and to do the simple things God said.
‘Mr Cresswell’, I said, ‘I see that we have very different ideas about God, and about sin and about sight. I do not accept any of your ideas about these things. Whether we live or die, we are always the Lord’s and I am not prepared to be put under emotional pressure to do all these strange things week by week. You are advising me to accept magical, superstitious practices.’
‘No, no’, he expostulated, ‘these are the words of the Lord!’
He pursued me down the aisle, as Marilyn and I began to make our way to the door, warning me that I was treading a very dangerous path, and that I would not find healing that way.
As we got into the car, I felt slightly regretful that I had, perhaps, alienated a kindly and well-meaning man through speaking the truth too directly, but on the other hand, as I remarked to Marilyn, I cannot allow myself to be blackmailed into doing all sorts of nonsensical things through weakly capitulating to futile hopes.
11 May
I was walking home after an evening class. It was a little after eight o’clock. There was not much movement around the campus. I heard running feet approaching, stopping perhaps twenty yards away. A fierce, harsh, male voice, distorted with anger and malice, shouted, ‘Are you blind, mate? You’re not blind! How did you get blind? You’re not blind!’
I was so surprised, both by the abruptness and the manner of this address, that I stood perfectly still. I waited for a moment, in silence, wondering whether to reply. Again my accuser spat out his question, ‘Are you blind?’
Quietly, but hoping that my voice sounded firm and clear, I replied, ‘Yes, I am blind.’
I sensed that he was coming closer to me. He swore at me. ‘You dirty fucking bastard! You’re not blind! How did you get blind? You’re not blind!’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘you are wrong. I am blind.’
I tried to resist the impulse to lift up my briefcase and hold it in front of me, for I had the impression that he was about to attack me, to punch me, to see whether I was blind or not. Perhaps he would see whether or not I would try to duck. I resisted the temptation, however, and stayed quite still, looking in his direction, since I thought that any sign of nervousness might have encouraged him to attack me. He seemed to move off to the left a little, and when he spoke again it was from further away. Again he shouted in the same tone of malicious anger and hatred, ‘You’re not blind! How did you get blind?’ From even further away, he sent after me one final ‘You’re not blind!’ and then he seemed to disappear.
I was, rather naturally, a little hesitant about proceeding on my route. What if he had come back and was standing only a few feet in front of me? I waited a few more moments to see if he would shout out again. I then realised that there was a car parked on the far side of the road along which I was walking. I got the impression that the driver had got out of his car during this incident, but was not getting back in. I heard him mutter to the person he was with, ‘Silly bugger! What’s he want to talk like that to him for?’
I took it that he was referring to my assailant, rather than to me, and was encouraged to call out, ‘Is he gone?’
The driver asked me which way I was going. I misunderstood him, thinking that he was about to offer me a lift. ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ I said. ‘I can manage, thank you very much. I was just a bit startled, that’s all.’
‘No, which way are you going?’ he asked again.
‘I’m going straight ahead, down to the Bristol Road.’
‘Oh, you’re all right. He’s gone off in the opposite direction.’
‘Who was he?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘What was he like? Was he drunk or something?’
‘Don’t know, couldn’t tell.’
I thanked the driver for his help and went on my way.
Two or three years ago, when I still had a little residual vision, I was walking through the Selly Oak shops one night when, crossing a side street, a chap a few paces behind me shouted, ‘Look out, mate! There’s a car! Stop!’ I stopped rather sharply, startled because I had not heard anything coming. I took a step back towards the pavement from which I had come. A second voice spoke. ‘It’s all right, mate, he’s only kidding. You’re all right to cross.’ I did not look around or make any gesture of acknowledgement or thanks, but resumed my path across the road with what I hoped was a distant dignity. These were simply young fellows having a bit of fun. The man on the campus was rather more strange. A blind friend who makes a living by busking in shopping centres told me that he is often attacked by youths who accuse him of being a fraud. I have never had this particular experience before.
17 June
What gives me this feeling of tension after several days away from work or from my office? It builds up into quite a strong sense of discomfort, anxiety and then depression. This becomes so disquieting that it is almost painful.
To some extent, I think it is the frustration caused by the presence of the children. In that situation, I become most keenly aware of blindness. Perhaps another factor is that any blind person is, to some extent, starved of information. I run short of facts. My brain demands something new to know.
I can be plunged quite suddenly into such feelings of deprivation through some little incident or other. As we were crossing the road from the car park to the entrance of the airport the other day, I called out, ‘Is anybody holding Lizzie’s hand?’ In the rush to get over the road, the family simply ignored my question. This was perfectly sensible of them, since this was the moment to get safely to the footpath, not to start discussing who was holding whom. Nevertheless, I suddenly felt out of things, that my ability to watch over Lizzie had been destroyed, that there was no point in trying to care for her or bothering. What was the point, I found myself wondering, in asking who is with her, what she is doing, and if she is safe? I was a mere lump of fat being carted around.
On the other hand, a few days ago I attended a conference in London where I found many people I knew. All day long I was meeting old friends, being introduced to new colleagues, catching up on bits of news about various events and finding out new developments in my work. I hardly had time to realise that I was blind, and the day passed by quickly.
What affects me is the cumulative experience of the inescapable presence of blindness. Perhaps it is also the lack of control, and this may well be why I find it so exhausting. It is in intellectual work that I find refreshment, partly because I can almost entirely forget that I am blind. The social demands of public life and the personal demands of family life seem to create so many situations in which I become not only aware but painfully aware of blindness. On the whole, however, such experiences are not as common nor as severe as they were six months ago.