The wind and the sea
Summer 1984
19 June
If the blind live in time, the deaf live in space. The deaf measure time by seeing movement. If, however, the deaf gaze out upon a world in which there is no movement, such as the stars, a deserted street, or some mountain scenery, then there is a quality of permanence, of static consistency. In losing this kind of awareness of space, blind people have less awareness of unchangeability. The world of the blind is more ephemeral, since sounds come and go.
Consider the importance of body-time to the blind. A deaf person walking home has no problems in timing the point at which he leaves the public footpath and enters his own house. His body is placed within a number of pictures of his environment which are fairly consistent from day to day. When a picture of a certain kind, the shape of his house, or the colour of his front gate appears before him, he knows which way to go. With the blind, this sense of being in a place is less pronounced.
Let us take an example of internal body timing. For several days recently, I have been overshooting my front gate by about fifteen yards, which would be about the length occupied by a single house. I could not work out why I was doing this, but I did it several times in a week. My house is about a hundred and fifty yards from the corner of the block. As I begin that final part of my walk home, I seem to know more or less how far I have to walk. I do not count the paces, I just know how much work I have to do in order to arrive. I am usually tapping the line of fences, and this gives me all sorts of clues about my exact position, but even if I am being guided by somebody else and have no contact with the fences, I seem to know how far it is.
At present, the second house up from the corner is having a new roof, and the footpath is blocked with piles of roofing materials. It is clear that my body clock had been resetting itself again after that interruption, and then allowing me to go the expected distance. I was overshooting by about the same distance as that which was occupied by the tiles on the footpath. For the blind person, the house is only there because of past experience. Space is reduced to one’s own body, and the position of the body is known not by what objects have been passed but by how long it has been in motion. Position is thus measured by time.
Let us take another example. A page on a printed book is an area of space. When you are reading with your eyes you traverse this space until it is all covered, and then turning the page you encounter another space and so on. The same is true of braille. Books recorded on tape are, however, like speech itself, always moving, and measured by time. We may say that the problem for the blind author not using braille is to find an equivalent in time for everything which the sighted author does in space.
This brings us to the difference in the blind perception of people. For the deaf person, people have an abiding presence. They are there, all the time, every day. For the blind, people are not there unless they speak. Many times I have continued a conversation with a sighted friend, only to discover that he is not there. He may have walked away without telling me. He may have nodded or smiled, thinking the conversation was over. From my point of view, he has suddenly vanished.
When you are blind, a hand suddenly grabs you. A voice suddenly addresses you. There is no anticipation or preparation. There is no hiding around the corner. There is no lying low. I am grasped. I am greeted. I am passive in the presence of that which accosts me. I cannot escape it. The sighted person can choose whom he wants to speak to, as he wanders around the streets or the market-place. People are already there for him; they have a presence prior to his greeting them, and he can choose whether or not to turn that presence into a relationship by addressing his acquaintance. For the blind person, people are in motion, they are temporal, they come and they go. They come out of nothing; they disappear. St Augustine has a parable about the human soul. He says it is like a bird which bursts into a large building, flutters for a while, and then finds an escape and disappears. This idea of being visited, of being blessed by receiving a visitation, seems to me to be quite important in the blind experience of other people.
3 July
I have just returned from a conference in Ontario. I made a big effort in getting to know all of the eighty or so people there. If I heard someone speaking in one of the public sessions, and could not recognise the voice, I would whisper to the person next to me, asking who it was. I was surprised by the number of times my neighbours were unable to reply. They recognised the speaker; they knew it was the person with whom they had had such and such a conversation, but they did not know the name. Even late in the conference, when I would have thought that most people had got to know each other, I found that if I asked an acquaintance to take me over to anyone in the room whose name he knew, there might be no more than two or three in a room with twenty people in it whose names were familiar. I discussed this with a colleague, pointing out that it was relatively easy for a sighted person to get to know a group of seventy or eighty people, whereas a blind person had to work hard at it. My colleague replied that my assumptions about how sighted people got to know each other were mistaken. They do not, on the whole, get to know each other by name. That is part of it, of course, but it is more a requirement of courtesy. Sighted people get to know each other by recognising each other’s appearance, and all the things the new acquaintance has said and done are associated with that image of what he or she looks like. The appearance, the look of the person, is that around which all of the other items cluster. The name of the person is one additional item of information, but the appearance is that central core around which everything gathers.
For me, knowing someone hangs upon knowing the name. It is the same with streets. Sighted people often do not know the names of the streets they use every day. For the blind person the name of the street is essential, so that he can ask where he is.
The name of a person, however, does not tell you much about what to expect. You can tell the sex, and often the nationality, and sometimes you might be able to make a rough guess at the age of the person. From the appearance of somebody, on the other hand, you can learn much more.
In Ontario, I worked by getting to know people’s names. I had the list of names read to me again and again, and I could simply ask to be taken to somebody by name, and could keep on asking, until I met somebody who could do this. I kept on working down the list, name by name. Not until I heard the voice and felt the hand clasp which would, from now on, be associated with that name, did I form much of an expectation. Around the name I would build up the story of that person. The name is the verbal cue around which that particular story hangs.
When a blind person and a sighted person are making friends, it is a bit like the difference between the parables about the merchant who, having discovered a pearl of great price, sold everything he had to buy that pearl, and the one about the farmer, ploughing in the field, who accidentally discovered a hidden treasure. The sighted person, having formed an image of the pearl he is seeking, takes steps to deepen that friendship. The blind person suddenly strikes treasure in the field. Without anticipation, without previous images, he encounters someone, enters into dialogue, and meets a surprising new story.
The people in the group around him are not present to him as if stretched out in space, as so many patches of colour, but they do have depths. They are like voices suspended upon stilts – a present emerging out of a past, in time rather than in space. Sight enables one to take a cross-section through somebody’s life at the present moment. The blind person, however, takes a longitudinal section, back through time. This is not only a longer view of a person’s life, but it takes longer to acquire.
4 July
One of the most difficult aspects of blindness is the way it tends to make you passive in getting to know people. Not to be able to choose freely whom you want to speak with, not to be able to get to know somebody better by making a special point of greeting him or her, this problem has always worried me since I lost my sight.
I have been developing techniques to deal with this. I hope that these will restore to me some of the initiative in making and keeping human friendships.
Suppose I am talking with somebody after a meeting. How do I change partners? The sighted person has many little devices available. She can say, ‘Oh, excuse me a minute, I just want to have a word with so and so.’ The blind person cannot do this, because he has no easy way of knowing that so and so is over there. The sighted person can say, ‘I’ll be back in a minute. I’m just going to get another drink.’ Not only have I found it very difficult to break away from a conversation, but my sighted friend finds it difficult to get away from me. He feels responsible for me. He cannot just go off and leave me standing there. It is an impasse. How can we get away from each other?
When I have decided that the time has come to stop talking to someone, I simply ask him or her to have a look around the room and to take me to someone else. Knowing the names of the people I want to speak to is, of course, all important. I may say, ‘Well, I’m going to go and talk to somebody else now. Can you see if so and so is around?’ This is not too good. It takes my friend ages to look around for a particular person. If my friend does not know this person, or if the person turns out not to be around, I am stuck. I find it better to ask, ‘Can you see anybody at all you know?’ Usually, my friend will say, ‘Well, there’s old so and so over there.’ I say, ‘Will you please take me to him and introduce me?’ I repeat this process again and again.
In this way I may manage to speak to a dozen people during the course of a fifteen-minute coffee break. I am also meeting new people, because my friends are introducing me to the people they know.
This technique works best in a situation where it is a meeting of a fairly regular group of people, for example a society or a church. It works well in a confined social situation such as at a conference where people are wearing name badges, or where everybody in the building is taking part in the same event, but the technique does have various problems. It makes it rather difficult for somebody who wants to talk to me to get a word in. Since I always appear to be in conversation, there are never the natural, social spaces during which it is normally possible to intervene. Many people do not find it easy to adopt the direct approach: ‘Excuse me, I’ll just have a word with John now, if you don’t mind.’
One of the interesting features of this technique is the enormous differences I find in the skill with which people seem to realise what it is I want, and are able to carry it out smoothly. Sometimes my conversational partner will embarrass me by shouting out, ‘Excuse me, Bill! John Hull would like to have a word with you.’
Bill then breaks away from whoever he is with, comes over to me and says, ‘Yes, John, what is it?’ The truth is that I have nothing in particular to say to Bill. I merely wanted to shake hands with him and ask him how he is. The fact that the technique itself is so deliberate makes people think that I am deliberate in wanting to speak to the named individual. Other people seem to have a natural instinct for helping. They can not only rattle off half a dozen names in quick succession, but can slide me into the new conversation in an unobtrusive way. I seem to have discovered a sort of litmus paper test, a kind of social examination, which enables me to find out certain things about my new acquaintances quite quickly and, often, quite reliably.
It’s awful, having to make such demands upon people all the time. The alternative, however, seems to be almost complete social marginalisation and passivity.
6 July
When I am walking into work, it is not unusual for people to ask if I need any help. Now, the truth is that on this route I do not need help. Usually, I say, ‘Thank you very much. I’m quite okay. I come along here every day. Thanks just the same for your offer.’
I am always grateful for these offers, since I am conscious of the fact that on an unfamiliar route I would probably be quite glad of some help. The sighted pedestrian, meeting me, may not know whether I am on one of my familiar routes or not.
Sometimes, the person who offers to help me is known to me already. It may be a neighbour, somebody who works in some other part of the University, or somebody who walked in with me on some earlier occasion. Usually I respond by saying, ‘I don’t need any help because this is one of my routes, but I am glad of your company and would like to walk along with you.’
Now, with me, a curious thing takes place. I lose my independence as soon as I accept my friend’s company. This is because I must put a finger under the elbow of my companion, in order to locate him, to keep abreast of him, so as not to keep walking into him. I am like a hitch-hiker. I am being towed, moving more rapidly than would normally be possible.
Instead of waving my stick from side to side in front of me, I am either holding it steadily in front, just as a protection in case my friend forgets to tell me there is a lamppost, or I may have folded it up under my arm. Moreover, we have to have conversation. If you are walking along with somebody for company, you talk. This means that I cannot devote to my route the concentration which it would normally require.
When I am walking along this, my most familiar route, I have in my mind a screen with a sort of map of the area, and my own presence, like a pinpoint of light, moving along it. I continually refer to this to check up on my position. Here I am, coming along this portion of my route, having crossed the road, being about to cross that road, knowing that around the next corner there will be the traffic lights. I must never forget my position. That would be as if the light went out. I am continually verifying my position on this map by taking into account all sorts of little, familiar features. On this corner, the kerb is slightly higher. The curvature of the footpath is slightly more pronounced at this point. The road surface here is not quite the same as it was there. Here comes that little smooth patch. There are certain points along my route where I actually have to count the steps in order to avoid the lampposts. All of this requires constant attention. If I allow my concentration to lapse for a moment, I may get slightly out of position, I might walk into something, I might stray on to a busy road. I cannot do any of this and have a conversation at the same time.
This means that a sighted person cannot simply accept my company. Through no fault of his own, he has by walking with me deprived me of my independence.
Through no fault of my own, I have sacrificed my independence for the sake of his company. He then becomes responsible for me. He becomes like a car towing a caravan. It is his responsibility to make sure that the vehicle he is towing is still there – that I do not become detached from him at some crucial point of the route. He has to make sure that there is room, when passing between those two parked vehicles, not just for him, but for both of us. If he walks around the lamppost, but does not make sure that I also walk round the lamppost, my collision with the lamppost will be his responsibility. All of this can be very unnerving for the inexperienced guide.
It is easy, in this situation, for the sighted person to assume that the dependency which he now finds himself committed to is my ordinary or typical state. He realises that I am now depending on him for some warning of where the kerbs and the lampposts are; he finds it a little more difficult to imagine that, when I am alone, I can work these details out quite well for myself. He is thus always ready to rush up and give me his help, rather than merely to offer me his company, because his experience is always of my helplessness. Blindness creates a strange variation upon familiar human patterns of dependence and independence.
7 July
Once he is on it, a stairway is one of the safest places for a blind person. You never find a chair left on a stairway, or a bucket or a brick. There is never a stair missing from a stairway, and all the stairs are the same height. There is almost always a handrail or at least a wall to touch. There may be some uncertainty about the top step and the bottom step, but with the white cane, that problem is simplified.
This puzzles most sighted people, who tend to assume that stairs will be dangerous for the blind. Sighted people know that they sometimes trip and fall on stairs, and they assume that, if a sighted person is likely to trip, a blind person is bound to.
It is very common when I am going up or down stairs for my sighted guide to count aloud the number of stairs, presumably for my benefit. Oddly enough, this is one of the few situations in which the additional knowledge is of little help or relevance. One can, of course, come upon a downward flight of stairs unexpectedly, and this would be as dangerous for a blind person as for a sighted one, and so the approach to a downward stair is an uncertain moment. The blind person needs to know two things: first, that he is approaching stairs, second, that the stairs go down. Most sighted guides disclose the first fact, very many, possibly a majority, forget about the second fact. The existence and the direction are essential; the number is immaterial. If I am descending a series of stairs interrupted by platforms, it is helpful to know when the last set of stairs has been completed, so that I can now set out confidently with my guide, not having to probe with my cane for the first stair of the next flight. Similarly, when approaching a circular stairway, it is helpful to know whether it will be curving clockwise or anticlockwise. A stairway can take an unexpected turn one way or the other, and it is easier on the outer edge of the curvature, where the steps are wider. Generally speaking, however, a stairway is a predictable structure. The same is true of lifts and escalators.
What the blind find difficult are smooth, open spaces. It is just these areas which are assumed by many sighted people to be best for the blind, because there is no danger of tripping. From the blind point of view, however, a flat, open surface is not negotiable because there are no orientating signals. There is no structure. It is not predictable, because it may end at any moment, and there is no way of telling where you are, once you are on it. The problem for the blind person is not falling over, but knowing where he is. For this reason, it is easier to find my way around a campus which is marked out by steps, little hills and valleys, low walls and lots of changes in texture, because I can mark out my route with sections. The structure becomes a sequence when I am moving through it.
Let us take another example of an unpredictable structure. Sometimes my route over a forecourt is obstructed by cars parked at different angles from each other. The danger is not that I might walk into a car but that I will get lost. Blind people do sometimes walk into the edges of doors or into obstructions sticking out at head height, but it is unusual for a blind person to walk into a wall or a parked car. The white cane gives sufficient warning of the presence of such a large object. The problem is rather that having negotiated around three sides of the vehicle it is difficult to pick up one’s route in exactly the same direction. If, with the next step, a second parked car is discovered, lying at a different angle, and then a third, it is almost impossible to align oneself with the original route. You have to try to maintain in your mind a map showing all these angles and set it against the original direction. This is what I call an unpredictable structure.
8 July
Studying from cassettes means that the difference between the spoken word and the printed page is broken down. Reading a book has become like listening to a lecture. It is not quite the same, because by pressing the rewind button briefly I can get my lecturer to repeat again and again what she has been saying. Moreover, the recording means that there is no ambiguity about the actual words which were spoken, and I can listen to it again and again, from various points of view.
It remains true, however, that the task of summarising a lecture or a speech as I am listening to it is very much the same whether the speaker is personally present on the platform or whether it is a recording. If you have the printed text in front of you as someone is speaking, you tend to follow the printed text, but if you have nothing but the speech, you have to concentrate entirely upon what is being said.
If I am getting any better at summarising and evaluating immediate speech in the form of lectures and addresses, I am sure it is because of the practice I get in doing this very thing as I listen to books.
9 July
I was walking along Navigation Street in the city centre. Someone offered me a packet of mints. ‘Thank you’, I said brightly, accepting the sweets with a cheerful smile.
‘That’s all right’, replied my benefactor. ‘I had decided to give them to the next child I met anyway.’
At a formal dinner, the main course was chicken on the bone. I asked the person next to me to wave to the waitress, to ask the kitchen staff to take the chicken off the bone for me; this is the least embarrassing thing to do on these occasions. The guest next to me said this would be quite unnecessary; she would cut up the chicken for me herself. This she did, very happily and skilfully, passing the plate back to me with the comment, ‘I cut up a meal for a handicapped child only the other day.’
I was staying with a friend in an unfamiliar house, where there had been an overflow from the toilet during the night. The bathroom carpet was soaked with the overflow. My first knowledge of this was in the early morning, when I got up to go to the bathroom. My friend woke up immediately and called out, ‘John, don’t go into the bathroom. There’s been an accident.’
I came back, and he explained the problem. As I sat thought-fully on the edge of the bed, I said to him, ‘Tell me, had you been lying there half awake all night, waiting for me to get up and go to the bathroom so you could intercept me in time? You didn’t like to wake me up earlier to tell me? You knew it would be messy if I went in there without knowing?’
My very good, old friend gave me a laugh. ‘Well’, he said, ‘that’s more or less right. I didn’t stay awake. I went off to sleep, having set my head to wake up the moment I heard you get out of bed.’ He added thoughtfully but with a chuckle, ‘It’s like having a child again.’
Travelling with my eleven-year-old daughter on British Rail, we could never work out whose ticket was whose. Her ticket, purchased on a Family Concession, had printed on it ‘Flat Rate Fare’. Mine, purchased under a Disabled Person’s Concession, had printed on it ‘Child’.
I had a discussion the other day with Clive Inman, who is confined to a wheelchair. He tells me that, when people see him in his wheelchair, they tend to speak to him in a gentle, slow and compassionate sort of voice. It is a kindly, condescending voice, the way some people speak to children. It is also the voice of uncertainty, people not knowing quite how to react in meeting an adult who has been ‘cut down to size’.
A disabled adult man loses part of his manhood, part of his adulthood, and part of his humanity. I don’t like having my adulthood wrenched from me like this.
10 July
While, on the one hand, it is so easy to be marginalised, it is also very easy to dominate. Sometimes a blind person may not be aware of his dominance. He may not realise that he is the centre of a concern, that all around him there is an elaborate fuss which involves getting out of his way; preparations are being made for him, agreements are being reached about him, conversations are taking place in readiness for his arrival. Sometimes a blind person will realise that he is the centre of an attention which he does not want. He is an object of curiosity. All eyes are focused on him as he enters the room.
It is so hard to find an intermediate way, that is, somewhere between being ignored, and being the centre of attention. It is so hard to be a normal person when one is not a normal person. It is also hard to avoid the situation which arises when, because of one’s very powerlessness, one does have a kind of power over people. The disabled person tends to render other people powerless. One flusters them, reduces them to confusion, covers them with uncertainty and embarrassment, makes them feel gauche and insensitive, awkward and intrusive, makes them realise that they do not know what to do, or that they are not handling this very well. The disabled person can inflict all of these feelings upon the normal.
To judge the right use of this power is an important part of learning to be a disabled person.
11 July
There is a certain point along my route which catches the wind. This morning, as I came up the steps from the underpass and around the corner, it hit me. It was a beautiful, warm, scented breeze, not hot like the Australian Northerly, but full of a perfumed richness; a moving, fragrant wind. It was an unsettled wind, suggesting the break-up of rather a sultry day. I stood there for some time, allowing it to play over my face and through my clothes. I turned my head this way and that to catch its different currents. I leaned into it and away from it and breathed it in. It was delightful.
Can the wind mean as much to sighted people? It is invisible, so they gain nothing over the blind. Of course, the blind lose the sight of the world being blown along by the wind, the hurrying clouds and the trees swaying. On the other hand, the wind has a special beauty for the blind. For the sighted, to whom the world is mainly visual, an invisible phenomenon like the wind is only observed incidentally; it is one of many things which one notices in passing. It is mainly visual cues such as the sight of the washing blowing about on the line that give rise to the thought that it is a windy day. The wind itself, as felt by the body, is only one of the ways in which sighted people experience a windy day.
The blind person enters into the windiness of the day at first hand. For the blind, the wind does not have the enigmatic quality that it has for the sighted. There is a passage in the Fourth Gospel which says of the wind, ‘You do not know where it goes or where it comes from’. I think that that is a sighted person’s reaction, because sighted people are used to seeing where things go and where things come from. Sighted people work at long range. The sighted person tends to look at the pennants above the pavilion to see which way the wind is blowing.
Blind people are accustomed to not knowing where things come from and where they are going to. Things rush past: one is in the midst of a mêlée of action, one does not expect to see origins and destinations. The invisibility of the wind does not make it mysterious to the blind, for whom there is no such thing as invisibility. The blind person experiences the impact of the wind upon his body and the sound of it in the trees. He knows perfectly well where it is coming from: it is coming from that direction, he is facing into it. The wind is coming from the direction I am facing when I face into it.
Sometimes a blind person experiences a wind which is all the more exciting because it is known at long range. I hear the distant tossing of trees across the park; it comes like a wave rolling across a beach. Now it breaks upon my body in a squall, a gust, like a fist. This is very exciting because of the anticipation, and the wonderful feeling of having the knowledge in your body of what is going on.
If I have to carry a cup of tea from this room into the next, I can do it. If you put a full glass into my other hand, then I cannot do it. Giving me a full glass in my second hand is like blindfolding me. A blind person with a full glass in each hand is equivalent to a sighted person blindfolded with a full glass in each hand. A blind person with a full glass in one hand only is roughly equivalent (he may be a bit slower and a bit more clumsy) to a sighted person with no blindfold and full glasses in each hand. It is the loss of the use of the second hand through having to hold a full glass which is equivalent to blindfolding. It might be objected that a blind person surely has the experience of being blindfolded, as it were, all the time. This, however, would be a mistake. As long as the blind person has one free hand, he sees with that hand. He does not experience not knowing where to go or where he is so long as he can guide himself with his free hand. He does not feel blind, but with a full glass in each hand, it is almost impossible to avoid knocking against something and spilling a few drops. The only way to do it is to walk backwards, rubbing your back or elbows along the walls and so protecting the full glasses. To sighted people, this looks ridiculous.
It is difficult for a blind person to carry cups and plates on a tray from one room to another, or to carry a chair or anything which requires the use of both hands. If a blinded person begins to forget what it was like to see, or if you want to explain to a blind person what it would be like for a sighted person to go blind, there would be no point in blindfolding the already blind person. What you do is put full tumblers of water into both of his hands and tell him to take them into the dining room. He will then bump into things, knock one or both glasses against corners and spill stuff, and will know exactly what it is like for a sighted person to be blindfolded.
Working the other way, a sighted person can always gain some understanding of what blindness is like by being blindfolded. This may be rather superficial unless one adds the additional blindfold, that is, puts two glasses of water into the hands of the blindfolded sighted person, thus depriving him of guidance through the sense of touch. In other words, to obtain insight into the manoeuvrability problems of another mode of cognition it is not enough to delete the faculty most immediately affected (in our case, sight). One must allow the ramifications of this mode to be experienced by deleting a second sense (touch) showing how the nature of the second sense, and its usefulness within the mode as a whole, undergoes a change. Touch is not the same for the sighted person as it is for the blind person. Deleting sight but leaving touch untouched gives a false impression, because touch is affected when sight is deleted. In other words, the blind person sees with his fingers.
13 July
Many of the people I mix with have never met a blind person. They have little idea of what to do or how to relate to me. I try to create situations in which sighted people will feel at home, but this is not always easy, and I often fail. I think that one reason for this failure is the fact that the relationship between the blind person and the sighted person is not often one of equality. Suppose I am standing, talking to people in a lounge bar. Suppose I have changed partners many times, using the ‘litmus paper’ technique. Suppose now that I want to sit. I have several problems. Are there any unoccupied chairs in the room? How do I locate one?
I was talking to someone in a bar. It was during a residential conference. She pointed out that we had no drinks. I suggested that she should go to the bar and get drinks for both of us. I added that I would sit down and wait for her return. ‘Okay’, she said. ‘Where would you like to sit?’ I said, ‘Why don’t you take me to a chair, and put my hand on the back of it?’ She took my hand and put it on the back of a chair, and off she went to the bar. I found that I was standing behind a lounge chair, but, on running my hand across the back of the chair, and down its sides in order to discover if the chair had arms or not, I found I was running my fingers across a woman’s neck. There was someone sitting in the chair already. She got quite a surprise, for a strange man was feeling her neck and shoulders. There was general consternation, much laughter and apologies. Why, I wonder, didn’t my first friend put my hand on the back of an empty chair? Had I somehow failed to make it clear that I wanted to sit down? Maybe my friend thought it was my intention merely to stand up with my hand on the back of a chair waiting for her.
When my friend came back from the bar with the drinks, she was apologetic, having seen the incident. We laughed and made our way towards some seats. I said, ‘Let me put a finger under your left elbow if I may.’ She would not let me do this. Instead, she stretched across with her own right hand, grasped my right hand firmly, pulled my forearm under her left arm, and closed her left arm tightly, continuing to hold my hand. This was someone who was determined not to make a second mistake. This time, there would be no ambiguity.
As we walked across the crowded lounge, I said to her brightly, ‘You know, I have to train people the way they train guide dogs for the blind. I have a special technique for people to sit me down in an armchair. Would you like me to train you in it?’ Laughing, she agreed. ‘Okay’, I said. ‘This is what we do. When we get to the chair, you take one of my hands, stretch it out, and place it on the back of the chair.’
When we got to the chair, she couldn’t do this. Maybe the lounge chair was in an awkward position or something. I suggested that she should put her own hand on the back of the chair. She did this, by now thoroughly mystified. I simply ran my fingers along her arm and located the back of the chair. Immediately, I was orientated. I needed no further help. I knew exactly where the chair was, and I could now sit down any time I liked, with safety and dignity. My companion, however, refused to let go. ‘Thank you’, I said cheerfully. ‘That was very good. You can let go now and I will sit down.’ She was determined to back me into the chair, holding both my elbows from the front. After a few more appeals I persuaded her to let go and I sat down. I contrast this with a similar incident which took place the following day. I was walking with another friend who said, ‘Let’s sit down.’ In a swift, natural and unobtrusive movement she took my hand, placed it lightly on the back of a nearby armchair, and sat down herself on the adjacent chair without any further comment. I was so impressed by the speed and the gracious ease of this gesture, that I asked her if she was used to working with blind people. ‘I never met a blind person in my life before’, she said, ‘but I get a fast read-out.’ This person, as I got to know her, proved to be someone of exceptional sensitivity and insight.
Yes, I begin to think that I really do have a sort of litmus test. What degree of freedom will this new person be prepared to allow me? Will this sighted person find ways of letting me preserve as much independence and dignity as possible? Will this person want to possess me, to control me, to make me feel even more handicapped by refusing to admit that I can do the slightest thing for myself? For my part, how can I make it easier for sighted people? My policy of giving cheerful, simple directions will work with some, but not with others.
16 July
At church, one of the vergers approached Marilyn as she was standing with me, and said to her, ‘Marilyn, is it John’s wish to go forward to the communion rail?’ Marilyn made no reply, so I turned towards him and said with a smile, ‘Yes, thank you very much, I will be going forward.’ There was a slight sound of surprise, and I gathered that the kindly man was somewhat flustered because I had overheard what he had said. I assured him that I would be quite all right, and would go up accompanied by Marilyn as I normally did. I thanked him for his concern. I think that he was assuming I was deaf. Why not tap me on the elbow, and ask me whether I intended to go forward, and whether I would need any assistance? I would appreciate this thoughtful gesture. To speak about me, in the third person, to someone else, is another matter.
This situation often seems to arise when I am getting in a car with a group of other people. ‘Will you put John in the back with you?’ ‘No, I’ll put him in the front with you.’ ‘All right, you put him in then.’ At this point I interjected, crying out with an exceedingly loud voice, ‘John is not put anywhere, thank you very much. John is asked if he has any preferences about where he sits.’ At this, all my friends laughed uproariously and were covered with apologies and confusions. On a similar occasion recently I shouted out, ‘Hey, you guys, don’t you talk about me as if I’m not here.’
This, again, brought shouts of laughter and a mixture of apologies, agreements and congratulations.
It is, of course, very embarrassing for intelligent and sensitive people when they are caught out like this, in using the ‘does he take sugar?’ approach to a disabled person. These people are all sensitive, and well aware of the humiliation which this approach implies. So the question arises, why do they do it?
It is so easy to marginalise a blind person, indeed, in certain situations it is almost impossible not to.
I had been nervous about several aspects of my visit to Melbourne. I had been afraid of a renewed sense of loss through being in a place which has so many visual memories for me. Flinders Street Station and Princes Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral, and the famous view of the city seen over the river Yarra from the Botanical Gardens, these are all sights which are deeply etched upon my mind. I have always loved the view along Collins Street towards the Victorian parliament buildings, and the vistas along St Kilda Road, with the Shrine of Remembrance standing out so prominently among the lawns and trees.
In the case of Birmingham, I have had time to adjust to the gradual disappearance of well-loved buildings, and to revise my memories bit by bit as people tell me about demolitions here and reconstructions there. To be suddenly plunged back as a blind person into a world so full of remembered visions made me feel most unhappy. I felt particularly dismayed by the thought that I would not be able to enjoy the coastline. I had always loved Port Phillip Bay with its lapping waves and myriads of yachts, but my greatest excitement had always been the south-western Victorian coast. Here the Great Ocean Road, cut out of the cliff, takes you through spectacular scenery, down to the Port Campbell area, where the massive waves have eroded strange shapes in the cliffs, and the wildness and majesty of the scenery had always held a strong fascination for me. Although I had never been a great lover of the outdoor life as such, and could claim almost no real experience of bush walking, I had always been moved by the endless ridges of blue-grey hills and the gaunt beauty of the rocky outcrops of granite. The Grampian mountains had been a favourite holiday spot for us children, since my mother had been brought up as a child in the nearby town of Stawell. When I was there in the spring of 1980, many of the best-remembered places were already inaccessible to me because of my poor vision and the rocky, uneven ground. Wonderland, the Grand Canyon, the Nerve Test, the Whale, the Fallen Giant and the Elephant’s Hide were already fading. Now they would be entirely gone.
I was most anxious about the people I was to meet. I knew that it would undoubtedly cause pain to people I knew and loved so much when they met me as a blind person. I felt worried and rather frightened at the thought that I would have to reconstitute my knowledge of them on the basis of sound and touch, just as I was doing with people I was not meeting for the first time in England. All of my visual memories of those loved faces were now at best an irrelevance and at worst an actual obstruction to my entering into a real and contemporary relationship with them.
I also felt disturbed at the thought of being deprived of my routine for so many weeks. I would have to learn my way round so many new houses and buildings, make myself familiar with new household utensils, and learn the names of so many new people. I felt afraid that in this situation I would be even more thoroughly marginalised, even more completely passive than I always am these days.
I have to admit that all of these fears were fulfilled. After three or four days I developed persistent asthma which has not really lifted after ten or twelve days. I have been aware of quite a severe sense of suffering, even of anguish. One of the strands of this is realising that people who love me are trying to communicate with me. They are having to get used to me again, like this. My mother sat close beside me at the nature reservation, while the children fed a tiny wallaby with a bottle of milk. She stroked my hand lightly, saying, ‘I have to touch you because I feel that’s the only way I can get close to you now.’ I longed for a more immediate recognition of loved ones than the rather slow, day-by-day building up of impressions, histories and voices which blindness seems to require.
In the presence of those from whom I have been absent for so long, I want something more than this. I want to be in the immediate presence, to have the same person again. I want to be greeted by the person I love in his or her remembered form. Not being able to experience this is a cause not only of frustration but of grief.
The loss of the sights of the city, the sea and the countryside, I can endure. There is, however, a problem of sharing. It is so difficult to remain always interested and enthusiastic when people are pointing things out and reminding me of the lovely view which one can see from this spot. I sense their own perplexity at how they can help me to share their own enjoyment, how to show things off, how to be proud about the recent developments, how to draw me into this world which they love so much.
I still have difficulty in renouncing my role as father, as the convivial one who always makes others feel at home. How can I any longer count upon being reliable as good company? How can I any longer take the initiative in anecdotes and witticisms? What about my role as leader and guide to my own children? I am sharply conscious of the difficulty of showing the place off to them. As we travel around, I want to say, ‘Look! That is where we did so-and-so. There is the place where it happened. Down that street I once lived. There! You can just catch a glimpse of my old school.’ I cannot even point out the strange animals to the children unless I get a description first of what they look like.
I have been driving myself on with the expectation that I would and should be able to do all these things. During the first ten or twelve days I was fighting to bring my emotions under control, and felt almost continually on the edge of exhaustion and panic. The defences which I have built up were being threatened.
In the middle of all this, I had a strangely impressive dream. I was going to Cambridge to register for a Master of Theology degree. I was to enrol at Gonville and Caius College. Suddenly I was myself required to sit the final paper, with all the other candidates who had, however, been able to pursue the course the whole year. I was struggling with the examination questions, knowing that I was at a considerable disadvantage. After the examination, I was presented with a financial statement of what the year would cost me, if I was successfully enrolled. This was given to me by the Rev. Jack Newport (who had actually been my tutor when I was at Cambridge from 1959 to 1962). The bill amounted to £2,600 and with a shock I realised that I had not yet made any applications to trusts for grants. I would have to take immediate steps to make it clear to the college authorities that the work I had done on the examination paper should not be considered in the same light as the papers done by the other candidates, because there had been a terrible misunderstanding. I should not even have been taking that examination. The rest of the dream consisted in wandering around this beautifully furnished old college, with its lovely displays of antiques, its thronging students everywhere, its strange and interesting doors with the impressive names of members of staff with whom one had to make appointments.
The thing that stuck in my mind was that I was being judged in a context full of associations of a beautiful past which was, however, misunderstanding me, and to which I could probably not now gain access. I am blaming myself for being blind, accusing myself of being on the margin, critical of myself for not doing more for my parents, my wife and my children. I blame myself that I cannot give them a better life, that I cannot make it good for them to be here, in this wonderful country.
One thing which I did not feel, compared with my trip here more than four years ago, was the sense of resentment against the sighted world. I did not feel as if I wanted to withdraw from the world of sighted people and lose myself in the less demanding and more comfortable world of blind people who would understand me.
I have been helped a lot through the present crisis by Marilyn, who keeps telling me that I must not put myself under such demands, that I must not have such expectations. I have also been comforted by applying to myself the words from the famous sermon by Paul Tillich, ‘You are accepted’. I am accepted in my blindness. I am accepted as a blind person.
I have been helped by two other things. First, the primary school at which my older sister teaches has made an office available for my use. She picks me up in her car every morning on her way to school, and I have my tape recorders in the office there. I work there all the school day, joining the staff for the tea breaks and at lunchtime. After school, I return with my sister and spend the rest of the late afternoon and evening with the family and relatives. This has established a pattern which is giving me a sense of familiarity. Secondly, I have discovered that I can control the attacks of asthma by breathing. I must have seen dozens of doctors over the years about asthma, but none has ever told me that I could reduce my panic and thus diminish the actual attack by a simple technique of breathing. I have discovered it over the past two or three days. By breathing from the stomach, I can stop wheezing. After a dozen or twenty breaths the sense of panic passes, and breathing becomes easier. Instead of being frightened by the thought that I could be dead in three or four minutes, I now know that I am already up to the seventh or eighth breath, and within another ten or twelve the worst will be over. It works. It is like fighting an enemy.
30 July
Maybe my earlier view that one place is like another was exaggerated. Yesterday the whole family went to a park about twenty miles inland from Geelong called Fairy Park. This is a granite outcrop, worn into huge boulders intersected with gulleys and ravines, laid out as a barbecue area with a winding trail through the boulders, into which are set scenes of fairy-tales. These animated models are behind glass like shop windows. The children ran from one to the next with great excitement, pressing the buttons which set the displays in motion, turning on the music and the story.
I came away with quite a vivid impression of this place. I did not feel remote and abstract, perhaps because I was able to take an active part, in lifting the children up to see better, or so they could press the buttons, and because the nursery rhymes and fairy-tales were familiar, so there was plenty to talk about. Having direct acoustic access to the displays was important. I knew what was going on, because of the commentary. I was in demand from the children to answer questions, and to hold buttons pressed down and so on. There was also the walking itself, up and down little slopes, passing through the gaps between boulders, a series of little ravines, feeling the rough stone on either side, going into caves or other covered areas and feeling the difference in the echoes, the changes in temperature as we moved from an exposed place where the breeze was quite cool into a secluded place where the air was still warm and we could feel the sunlight. We came to the highest point, a look-out place, and I could feel the handrail. I could sense the vast, open space, the drop at my feet. The movement of air was so different, and whereas before I could hear the echoing footsteps of the running children, now it was the cries of the wheeling gulls, the noise coming from the distant brick kiln down in the valley, the patterns of the roads beneath me traced out by the passing traffic and the excited comments of the sighted people gathered along the rail next to me. Finally, we came back to the picnic area, where there was the fascinating feel of the rough-hewn wooden benches and the different kinds of tessellated pavements linking the various facilities. The fact that we had gone around the entire area and come back helped me to realise the dimensions of the place and made me feel it was distinctive.
Last Friday I had a very impressive dream. It was set entirely in the depths of the ocean. Nothing was shown above the surface at all. It was a bit like scenes from the film Ice Station Zebra, I think it was called, about a nuclear submarine going under the ice cap, except that in the dream there was no ice cap; it was just deep under the ocean, very murky. The dream was divided between scenes of the outside of the submarine and those of the inside. This huge hulk, rather like a gigantic, elongated, flying saucer equipped with jet engines, was travelling through the depths of the ocean. It was not long and thin, as a submarine might be, but bulky and round. The view of the inside of the submarine showed the crew trying to interpret their instruments. They did not know whether the craft was travelling forwards or backwards. I myself was not in the dream; I was viewing all this, as if at the cinema. The crew were intently watching the screens upon which the water outside the submarine was displayed. They were covered with disappearing, fluctuating, luminous traces, rather like the ones I now see in my right eye. There was a discussion about whether these traces were approaching the vessel or leaving it. Finally, there was a picture, from the outside, of the submarine touching the bottom of the sea. A very perilous situation had been reached. The main impression left by the dream was of a huge, lumbering weight, of vast power advancing steadily, but with those in charge not knowing which way it was going.
There was no trace of blindness in this dream. It was in beautiful, impressive colour. There were the deep blues and greens of the ocean, the lights of the moving submarine, its grey and white hulk, the luminous trails that it left behind as it moved.
It is strange how much I have come to depend upon dreams for entertainment. I am engrossed in dreams like this, rather as I might have been fascinated by watching an epic film. The outside world seldom comes home to me with such vividness.
Although the dream was powerful, and portrayed a situation of great peril, it also conveyed to my waking mind a sort of friendliness, as if the depths are aware of my problem, and are trying to help me, to describe things for me. The submarine is blind, and sees as I do. But the ocean is also blind, and the submarine moves through it, trying to find direction and contact. Now I am the ocean; now I am the submarine. I am also the submarine and the ocean at the same time. The dream is me and yet it is greater than me.
*
I arrived in Melbourne with the family about a month ago. This is the long-awaited visit to my relatives, and the long-feared attempt to get to know my parents again as a blind person. My parents have been marvellous, most understanding and matter of fact. I still find the experience particularly difficult and distressing, to be cut off in this way from the people one loves most, to have to begin again, as it were, without the faces of one’s own mother and father.
Melbourne is where my childhood lies. Here, I always have a strange experience of encounter with that past. I left Australia for study in England at the age of twenty-four. This is the fourth time I have been back. Visiting my parents always makes me aware of the connection between my faith in God and my relationship with them. I have no doubt that my lifelong love affair with God is, at least partly, an expression of my lifelong attempt to know and love my father, and to be known and loved by him.