Round the bend
Autumn 1984
19 August
I have now spent about four years grappling with the problem of how to speak in public without notes. As a sighted lecturer, I never had to read from a text, except when trying to present a particularly closely argued section. Usually all I needed was a list of headings, divided into sections with subheadings. Of course, if I was giving the sort of lecture which involved a lot of historical facts or statistics, then I would refer to a printed text.
After loss of sight, I tried various ways of dealing with this problem. I experimented in making a summary on micro-cassette which I would use as a prompt. The problem was that, if I happened not to need the reminder until later in the lecture, I would have to run the cassette through all the material until arriving at the point, and this would take a few seconds. Locating the exact point was very difficult, and it was an embarrassing disclosure to an audience that one had lost the way.
Sometimes I would record a brief summary of what I proposed to say, divided into sections. I would actually play this short summary to my audience, and would simply talk around it. This was only a partial success. Sometimes my listeners found it difficult to hear what was coming out of the tape recorder and I would have to repeat it, which was time-wasting. It was also inflexible, in that it committed me to an invariable sequence and to a great deal of laborious preparation, and these factors impaired my informal style and my capacity to respond to the needs of the moment.
I tried dictating to myself by making a recording of the whole speech, or a summary, and using an earplug. For a while I actually tried to listen and speak at the same time, but after one or two disastrous experiences I gave this up. I tried using braille headings. This not only involved laborious preparation, but my braille was just not good enough. I could not scan quickly enough to get myself out of the difficulty which arose when I forgot what to say next.
In the end, I developed the habit of making a precison cassette and of listening and re-listening to this right up to the moment when I had to deliver the lecture. I would take the tape recorder to the lecture, since it gave me a sense of security, although I seldom needed to refer to it.
During a teachers’ course in Canterbury in the spring of 1982, I was sitting in my room feverishly listening to this summary when I was called to the lecture theatre by an old friend. When she realised what I was doing, she told me off. ‘Just forget all that rubbish’, she said. ‘You won’t forget it. Just come and talk to us.’ I did, and it was a great success.
I now seem to have developed a way of scanning ahead in my mind, to work out what I am going to say. Everybody does this in ordinary speech, otherwise we couldn’t complete a sentence. Somehow or other, and without effort, I have developed a longer perspective, and now when I am speaking I can see paragraphs coming up from the recesses of my mind. It is a bit like reading them off a scanner. While I am speaking, another part of my mind is sorting out into paragraphs what I am going to be saying in the next few minutes, and a yet more remote part is selecting alternative lines of argument from a sort of bank of material. This seems to give my lecturing style a greater sense of order than I had before, and people seem to be able to follow me more easily.
I can often cross-reference what I have said, that is, I can remind my audience of a point I made under subheading 2(a) fifteen minutes ago. People find this surprising, but it actually isn’t. If I did not have the material in sections like that, I would not be able to maintain the argument at all. That particular little habit has come, I think, from hearing students’ essays read to me. Often one of my readers will be slightly surprised when I say, ‘Go back to what was said on page 3 under section 4(f)’. I have not put any particular effort into learning how to do this; it is just that it is so inconvenient if you have to have the whole essay read again. You tend to make unconscious mental notes of the structure so that you can go back to it again if necessary. Of course, often it doesn’t work, either because I am not concentrating sufficiently or because the structure in what is being read to me is too vague. It is, however, a kind of mental skill which studying from cassettes has, I suppose, forced upon me.
A sighted author tends to paragraph his or her work retrospectively. You see the stuff unrolling on the typewriter or screen, and you think that it is about time you started a new paragraph. A person listening to books on cassettes, where the actual paragraphs in the printed page are not normally indicated, does his own paragraphing, and when composing tends to project this into the future of the composition. I think that this also helps me to organise my material in advance when I am speaking in public. A sighted lecturer reading from a typescript concentrates mainly upon what he has said, that is, the paragraphs slip away behind him as he ‘swims’ forward through his speech. A blind speaker has to concentrate entirely upon what he is about to say, or what he will be saying fifteen minutes from now, because otherwise he will lose direction. It is rather fallible, but it does seem to be turning into a method which will often work.
21 August
Last night I had a vivid dream in colour. I dreamt that I had got out of bed, and was kneeling or sitting beside the bed, perhaps looking for my slippers or something. This little toddler came padding into the room. I could see her quite clearly in the dim light. In the dream, I knew that I had been blind, and that this was the first time I had been able to see her. I stared at her, full of wonder, taking in every detail of her face as she stood there wreathed in smiles, stretching out her hands to me. It was like a revelation. I thought, ‘So this is her. This is the smile they all talk about. These are those luminous, brown eyes.’ I had a wonderful sense of a renewal of contact, as I felt that she was amazed as she realised, in some way, that there was something different about me, that I was responding to her in a new sort of way. We stood there in complete silence, or, at least, I sat there and she stood beside me. We gazed at one another in this moment of mutual delight. Then the dream faded.
Was this a little dream or a big dream? Was it mere wish-fulfilment or was this an example of what Jung calls the archetype of the divine child, a kind of dream which he reports from his patients when a new self was at the point of birth? The child who visited me in the night was radiant with grace.
*
This morning as I was drying him after his bath, Thomas asked me which towel I had used to dry Lizzie. I replied that I did not know, and he asked me, ‘Was it the white one?’ Again, I said that I did not know, and he asked, ‘Would Mummy know?’
When I said ‘Yes’, he asked why Mummy would know.
‘Because Mummy can see colours.’
‘Can’t you see colours?’
‘No.’
‘Why can’t you see colours?’
‘Because I can’t see anything. I’m blind.’
‘Oh.’
The concept of being unable to see has so many fragments. The child does not put these together into one global idea, any more than the adult does. Many adults do not immediately grasp the fact that it is no use saying to a blind person that something is over there. The words ‘here’ and ‘there’ have to be used in a different way with the blind. We may say that such an adult has not realised the linguistic implication of blindness. The child may not realise the colour implication of blindness. An adult might be surprised at the thought that a child would not realise that a blind person could not see colours, but then a blind person might be surprised that a sighted person did not realise the verbal implication of blindness.
This was the first discussion I have had with Thomas about colour, although about a week ago an incident occurred which brought home to him the mobility problems of the blind. It took a long time for me to learn the layout of our Melbourne home. As I was getting out of the car, I tried to go towards the front door of the house alone. I turned along the left hand side of the house instead of the right and one of the other adults called me back. ‘This way, John.’ Laughing, Thomas said, ‘He was going the wrong way. He would have gone towards the gate.’ He kept repeating this, surprised and amused, as we walked along the path. I am not sure if he connected my mistake with blindness, or whether he merely thought I had done something funny.
Last Friday I really enjoyed travelling on the London Underground. The surfaces are smoother to walk on than the street-level footpaths. I learned a better way of getting on and off the escalators, which pleased me, and I found the winds in the tunnels rather interesting. As the trains come in and out, currents of air are pushed along the platforms, up the stairways and along the tunnels. These are full of the fragrance of newspaper, metals and oils, together with traces of cigar smoke, food and people’s clothes.
Most interesting was the train itself. Between stations, there is nothing to be seen through the windows, so I did not feel frustrated about missing the view. I found I could easily distinguish the metallic click of the wheels on the rails, the electronic hum of the engines as the train gathered power, the swish of the automatic doors opening and closing, and the rushing noise of the air in the tunnel itself. The sound of the wind when you are approaching a platform is quite different from when you are leaving it. As well as all this, there are the human noises, the conversation in the compartment, the rustle of clothes and the footsteps as people get in and out, and the whole background noise of the station which comes flooding into the compartment each time the doors are opened. The whole panorama is repeated every two or three minutes, this being the time it takes to travel from one station to the next. There is the rapid acceleration, faster and faster until we reach our maximum speed. The brakes are applied and the deceleration commences. We roar into a new station, stop with a jerk, and the whole process begins again. Moreover, the sounds entirely envelop me. I am in the middle of them.
I have realised that the intensity of my feeling of blindness is in proportion to my presence with people whose lives I long to share. I am, for example, not particularly conscious of being blind when I am at work. Most of what I do in the University is done on my terms. People have to fit in with my diary, come to my room, get used to my things, and my way of working. Our sharing is more a sharing of ideas than of our lives as such.
With family, it is otherwise. Over this weekend, I have become sharply aware of how much sighted children live in a visual world. Their play, their humour, their dressing-up and their tumbling around, everything is in the context of sight. It is by way of contrast with this that I developed a sense that I am not in the presence of these sighted children.
I am, of course, an object in their visual field, but the world of common experience, the world which we know together, the world before which we stand in a sort of mutuality of presence, that is so fragmented by blindness.
21 September
At five o’clock this morning I woke up to the sound of rain. I went into my study and pressed my forehead against the window pane. The house was completely still, and the streets outside seemed to be deserted. I stood there motionless, hardly breathing, concentrating everything upon the sound of the rain.
First, I noticed differences of place. Some sounds come from the left of the window, some from the right, and I can trace these as far as the corner of the house and around it. Now I pay attention to the higher sounds, as the rain splatters on the wall above the window and on the roof of the house itself. Below me, the rain falls on to a fence, the shrubbery and on to the ground itself.
Next, there are differences of speed. There is a slow, steady drip, drip, drip, and a more rapid cascade, against the background of the pitter-patter of the individual drops on the window pane. These vary in speed as the rainstorm itself ebbs and flows, and some patterns of sounds overtake others, a bit like the music of the American minimalist composer Steve Reich.
I notice now that there are differences in intensity. Here a surface is meeting the full force of the rain but here is a sheltered place. Over there is a heavy splashing, not the sound of rain at all, but of collected water overflowing from a blocked pipe or something like that.
Differences of pitch emerge. There is the high-pitched drumming staccato as the drops fall on metal, the deeper, duller impact on brick or concrete, and I notice that the note being struck differs slightly even from one window pane to another. There are differences in the speed with which the water is travelling: it swishes, gurgles, pelts along in a fury, comes and goes. There are differences in the volume. On the window pane, it is very loud. The panes of glass vibrate on my forehead. The sounds diminish, layer upon layer, receding into the faint distance as the rain falls on nearby trees. I wonder how far away I can hear it falling. Can I make it out on the houses over the road? I can certainly hear it on the house next door.
This built up into a complex pattern. The more intensely I listened, the more I found I could discriminate, building block upon block of sound, noticing regularities and irregularities, filling dimension upon dimension. Complete silence was necessary. Even the slight sound of my breathing was enough to obscure some of the faintest details. It reminded me of the noise of the London Underground, which was similarly patterned into many textures, layers and shapes, so many positions and levels.
Is it true that the blind live in their bodies rather than in the world? I am aware of my body just as I am aware of the rain. My body is similarly made up of many patterns, many different regularities and irregularities, extended in space from down there to up here. These dimensions and details reveal themselves more and more as I concentrate my attention upon them. Nothing corresponds visually to this realisation. Instead of having an image of my body, as being in what we call the ‘human form’, I apprehend it now as these arrangements of sensitivities, a conscious space comparable to the patterns of the falling rain. The patterns of water envelop me in myriads of spots of awareness, and my own body is presented to me in the same way. There is a central area, of which I am barely conscious, and which seems to come and go. At the extremities, sensations fade into unconsciousness. My body and the rain intermingle, and become one audio-tactile, three-dimensional universe, within which and throughout the whole of which lies my awareness. This is in sharp contrast to the single-track line of consecutive speech which makes up my thoughts. This line of thought expressed in speech is not extended in space at all, but comes towards me like carriages in a goods train, one after the other, coming out of the darkness, passing under the floodlight of knowledge, and receding into memory. That line of consecutive thoughts is situated within the three-dimensional reality of the patterns of consciousness made up by the rain and my body, a bit like the axis of a spinning-top. It could be otherwise, however. If the rain were to stop, and I remain motionless here, there would be silence. My awareness of the world would again shrink to the extremities of my skin. If I were paralysed from the neck down, the area would again be curtailed. How far could this process go? At what point do I become only a line of thought-speech, without an environment of sensation and perception? What happens to the tracks when there is no longer ground to support the line? What happens to the spinning-top when only the axis is left? Where do thoughts come from? Upon what do they depend? Into how many worlds am I inserted? What is blindness?
A lot of Thomas’s behaviour at present with me consists of checking the various meanings which blindness has for our relationship. He understands most of these, but needs to check on various angles.
Today he was sitting on my knee at the table, colouring a dinosaur painting book. He asked if I would like to do some colouring. I said that I couldn’t really do this because I couldn’t see the edges. He commented, ‘But I can colour because I can see the edges, because I’m not blind.’
I agreed. He went on colouring for a few moments and then looked up at me. I could feel his head turn around. ‘Can you only talk?’
I laughed at this and said, ‘I can talk and I can listen.’
‘Yes!’ he said brightly.
‘And I can tickle.’
He agreed.
‘And I can shout, listen.’ I then gave an enormous bellow.
He was delighted with this and wanted me to shout again and again which I did. He joined in. I summed up the meeting by saying, ‘So, I can’t see but I can talk and listen and tickle and shout.’
There was a pause while he seemed to consider the situation. He then made a suggestion, ‘Look, Daddy. You can colour like this.’ He put a crayon into my fingers, holding me by the hand and moving my hand backwards and forwards over the paper. I suggested that if he held my wrist he could move me around. I made rapid circular movements with the crayon and quickly shaded in most of the dinosaur. This pleased him very much, as it did me, and we repeated it several times.
Lizzie, eighteen months younger, is still almost entirely unaware of the significance of blindness. This morning I asked her to throw a tissue into the waste-paper basket. She ran across the room with it and called back to me, ‘This one? Shall I throw it in here?’ Thomas has reached the stage when he knows that he would have to come and get me, and make my hand touch the edge of the waste-paper basket.
28 September
Looking back on the past few months, when I have been travelling to Canada and Australia, I do not have a very clear sense of having visited either place. It is true that here the people with whom I spoke had Canadian accents and there Australian, but that might happen in my own office in Birmingham. In my memory, I have a file of photographs of the Melbourne skyline, but I have not returned with this file updated. I did a tour by car of the eastern part of Lake Ontario, where the St Lawrence river begins, the area called ‘One Thousand Islands’. I remember the various comments made by my fellow-travellers inside the car. There was the time we stopped for an ice-cream and I walked over the gravelly car park. In what sense, however, can I say that these visits have added to my experience?
As the sighted traveller without a camera is to the sighted traveller with a camera, so am I to any sighted traveller. The sighted traveller with the camera is storing up visual memories, so that his or her present experiences can be prolonged, recalled and re-lived, shared with others and enjoyed again. As I, the blind traveller, sitting in the car, consider my sighted fellow-traveller, he is like someone who has a camera. He is continually filing away the memorable things he sees – skylines, waterfalls, sunsets, islands and bridges – so that he will be able to live in them, talk about them, compare them with other places he has visited, cross-reference them and come back to them again and again. He will talk about where he has been, what his impressions were. The sighted traveller with the camera says to his friend, ‘Oh, but you’ll have nothing to remember it by!’ So the sighted person would say to the blind person (if it occurred to him to wonder what the experience was like), ‘You’ll have nothing to remember it by.’ So it is that when I look back on the places I have visited in the past four years, my experience has not been enriched in any way commensurate with the effort involved in getting there. I have learned a great deal about those places, most of which I could have learned here but would not have bothered. Having talked to people in their own homes in Houston about security problems in the American cities, I have stored up in my mind various impressions about life in America, but this hardly amounts to a visit to Houston. There is a certain immediacy about talking with people in their own city, in that the anecdotes are fresher, and you overhear their current conversations. But what to me are Houston, Ottawa, Melbourne?
Just as the blind get to know people by storing memories around the name of the person, so it is with cities. Around the cue-word ‘Ottawa’, I associate my memories of all the people I spoke with, the food I ate, the beds I slept in, and the hands I shook in Ottawa. That is what Ottawa means to me: that collection of memories of human contacts, so different from what is conjured up in the minds of sighted people by the names of cities. To the sighted, ‘Sydney’ conjures up a vision of the Harbour Bridge, ‘Paris’ the Eiffel Tower, and ‘New York’ the Empire State Building. In less dramatic and symbolic terms, the name of any town conjures up for a sighted person the images of what that town looks like. The blind person either has no such images at all, or he projects in imagination images of what he thinks those cities would be like. We do not, however, learn from our own images, nor from our own memories, but only from our perceptions.
The result of all this in the experience of an adult recently blinded is a strange feeling that one has stopped accumulating experiences. Previously, one seemed always to be standing upon the edge of a line of experience which had been steadily expanding. It was like laying down a mosaic pavement. It was always possible to pause on the edge and look back at the pattern. As I look back now, I feel that the laying down of the mosaic ended in the summer of 1980. Since then I have been wandering over a trackless waste with very few co-ordinated and understood experiences to fill in the area between where I now am and the last line of the mosaic which I see far behind me. When you are travelling along a road punctuated by lots of houses or trees, you have a definite sense of speed and the passage of distance and time. When you start to travel through the trackless waste, through space or through the desert, through a featureless world, you lose that sense. Vast spaces seem small; sometimes small spaces seem vast. This is aggravated by the lack of any succession of day or night, and the absence of any vivid realisation of the passage of the seasons. The days grow colder but not shorter, there is no question of the autumn leaves this year being more beautiful, more memorable, than the lovely autumn of several years ago. Experience has lost its punctuation marks.
The way a blind adult recollects experience is rather like the way any adult recollects his or her experience from infancy. Many adults, when trying to remember their childhood, search for visual images of the sort that they would now be able to collect if they were in those places, for example, the appearance of furniture or of the interior of rooms, the layout of the backyard or the line of shops near the house. The point is, however, that to the young child things did not look like that, and thus could not be stored in a form which the adult can recollect or can recognise as being similar to more recently stored images. Now and again, back and beyond the occasional visual inspiration, lies something deeper which can be called body memory. This is not so much memory of what things looked like, but recollection of how things felt. The most vivid of these are usually not of a specific event but of some regular happening. They are difficult to distinguish from the moments of empathy which an adult has with a child experiencing the same thing.
So it is with the memories of the blind adult. They focus upon what his body experienced, or underwent. This is quite different from visual memory, because your body does not feel what your eye sees.
So my memories of Melbourne consist of the innumerable car journeys from place to place, and the different textures of this seat belt and that car upholstery. From such and such a city I remember the discomfort of standing in the cold wind, from another the stiffness of sitting for hours in the same chair, from another the comfort of the smooth cool tiles in the bathroom. My memory is like the memory of a snail. My body can recollect the narrow little strip of ground over which I have passed, and it consists of tiny details, so tiny as to be irrelevant from the point of view of the cat and the dog. Here the footpath goes up slightly, there is a nick in the kerb, this telephone pole has a metal plate screwed to it but this other one is smooth.
This route, like the path of a snail, is what I know about my walk from home to the office. It is not exactly going from one place to another place through some intermediate places. When I try to visualise my route, what I do is to anticipate the sensations which my body will have at various times (i.e. places) along that route. Here I will be guided by something which I will pass on my left, later on it will be something on my right. What lies more than two or three feet away on either side of that trail means nothing to me. It is not part of my experience, except when it comes home to me in traffic noise or birdsong. My place is known to me by the soles of my feet and by the tip of my cane.
I can now reflect upon the meaning of the whole Australian experience. I have turned a corner in the tunnel. So far, there has been light at the end. True, I have been travelling away from that light, deeper and deeper from it; nevertheless, the light has been there behind me. It has been an ever-diminishing pinpoint, yet its presence has served to orientate and guide. At least, there was some point of definition in the past from which I was receding. It has been like a bright star from which my spacecraft has been moving further and further away, but I only know this because of the star, which fixes a point from which my position becomes more and more remote.
Going back to the image of the tunnel, I have turned a corner. The pinpoint of light seems to have vanished.
The light at the end of the tunnel consisted of my memories of my forty-five years of sighted life. This seems to fall into two sections. There are twenty-four years (1935–59) spent in Australia. Then there are twenty-one years (1959–80) spent in England, fourteen of them in Birmingham. The part of the light represented by my years in Birmingham has gradually had superimposed upon it memories from my years of blindness. There are now many journeys which I can make by car through the streets of Birmingham, along familiar routes, and I can tell where I am by the turns and twists of the car. I am like a dog, asleep on the back seat, that wakes up a block or two from home. He knows in his body those familiar, final twists and turns of the car. These memories have, to some extent, taken the place of the visual memories of the streets. Of course, it is true that I am still much better off in Birmingham than I would be in any other city, because there is still so much of my blind experience which is enriched by my sighted memories. So, for example, I still see the University clock tower, Big Joe, in my imagination. This helps to fill out my environment and to know where I am. The first twenty-four years are, however, entirely light. There had been no opportunity, apart from the visit to Melbourne in 1980 when I was partially sighted, to superimpose upon that visual layer a gradual readjustment of blind memories. Between me and that sighted past there has now built up a sort of protective wall. When I think of Australia now, it not only conjures up visions of dazzling, golden beaches, swaying eucalyptus forests, and the dry hillsides with their rocky outcrops, but also the bumpiness of the car rides, the wheezing from room to room, the feel of the handrails at Melbourne Zoo, and the fragrance of the bush.
There are parts of my twenty-one years of sighted English experience which are still brightly lit. The light seems to fall on all the places which I have not revisited as a blind person. Every time I do revisit one of these places, it comes home to me with a sense of loss that now, instead of accumulating further visual images, bringing up to date the memories I have, making a mental note of changes, and finding out what lay beyond the corner I had not had time to visit previously, I have to start again, helped to some extent by the visual memories, but knowing the city now as part of a different world. So my entire visual stock of knowledge is receding into the past, becoming less useful, less relevant to me, less accurate. It is the dramatic realisation of the remoteness of that visual past brought on by the Melbourne visit which I am referring to as turning the corner in a tunnel. Just as the disappearance of the final speck of light means that I have to find new ways of orientating myself in space, so it also means that I must find new ways of orientating myself within my life span. I am now in blind time, not sighted time.
What is the meaning of blindness? It is strange that after four years of being registered, and two years of total blindness, I am still seeking to understand this question.