Waking up blind
Summer 1985
17 June
A few nights ago I attended the annual meeting of an association for the blind. This was the first time that I had been into a meeting attended by other blind people. Indeed, apart from occasional conversations with John Lorimer, the distinguished blind braillist who is on the staff of our Faculty, I have had almost no contact with other blind people, although it is now about five years since I lost my own sight.
It was curious and in a strange way rather comforting to find myself in a situation where the little habits which characterise the response of blind people to the world were accepted by a social group. The meeting began, for example, by everybody announcing who was present. This sometimes takes place in sighted groups when there is about to be a discussion, but I have never known it at the start of a business meeting. In the social exchange after the business meeting, there was a tremendous hubbub. People were simply shouting out the names of those they wanted to speak with, and in reply, you simply forced your way through the crowd towards whoever was shouting out your name.
I was told by two or three older blind men that the time of adjustment towards loss of sight grew longer in direct proportion to your age. For somebody of my age, I should consider five years quite a short time, and was assured that it would probably take me ten or fifteen years to make a full adjustment.
21 June
Marilyn happened to ask me if I had seen a certain colleague during the day. I knew that I had spoken with him, but had the curious sensation of not knowing whether I had been in his presence or not at the time. Was it face to face or was it on the telephone?
If I use the desk set and not the head set for a telephone call, the voice of my caller comes through so clearly in the room, while I am just sitting in my chair, that it is really quite similar to having the person with me. My colleague and I have a telephone link between our rooms, and often chat for a few minutes about a problem each day. I do not remember, however, that as a sighted person I ever had this strange hesitancy about whether I had been in their presence or not. This must be because a sighted person’s memories of what was said are always associated with what was being seen at the time, so the words are either associated with the expression and posture of the speaker or with gazing at the traffic through the window as you made the telephone call. If this background information is stripped off, then the difference between the face-to-face situation and the telephone conversation is less. Of course, even for the blind considerable differences remain, but the fact that I could experience this uncertainty shows that the difference has become rather fragile. If a slightly absentminded person, at the end of a busy day, might wonder for a moment about the context in which he had met someone briefly, it is easy to see that the blind person will more often find himself in that uncertainty. But the most absentminded sighted person would not confuse speaking on the phone with being in their presence. He would only wonder whether it happened yesterday or today – ‘it’ would always be a meeting, or a telephone call.
This little moment of uncertainty tells us a great deal about blindness. As I paused, explaining to Marilyn that I was trying to work out whether we had been together or not, she sighed, and said, ‘Oh dear! How strange! Even after all these years I still find it extremely difficult to realise what your experience of the world must be like.’
23 June
You can see lots of things at once. Indeed, your visual field is made up of many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny segments which are assembled into a totality. Your attention may be focused upon some particular item but the individual parts of what you see are not in direct competition. They are laid out alongside each other in space. In sound, however, one part of the acoustic field may actually obliterate the rest. The nearest visual parallel would be the experience of being dazzled. A bright shaft of light obliterates everything else. With sound, however, this happens much more readily. It is a characteristic of ordinary sounds, not just of exceptional sounds, although exceptional sounds certainly do wipe out other sounds.
When somebody turns the juke-box on in the coffee bar, the sound literally obliterates the voices of my friends. It is as if I was alone. They disappear. Only the juke-box exists. Its noise washes out all the rest of reality. It is as if you were painting, and you kept brushing over the water-colours with more and more colours, until all the distinctions vanished, and you were left with an even, grey smudge.
This must be why I find noisy parties, especially discos, so lonely. People have to tap me on the shoulder to attract my attention. It is like having headphones on and not being able to take them off.
Marilyn asked me what I had done during the day, but for a moment I could not remember where I had been in the morning. I had been speaking with two colleagues, but where? It suddenly flashed upon me that I had spent the morning at Newman College.
This was not like the experience of a sighted but slightly absentminded person who momentarily forgets what has been done during the day. I knew I had been somewhere, and had done particular things with certain people, but where? I could not put the conversations I had had into a context. There was no background, no features against which to identify the place. Normally, the memories of people you have spoken to during the day are stored in frames which include the background. You remember talking to the person and you remember that he was sitting in an armchair in front of a bookcase, or leaning against the windowsill through which the garden could be seen and so on. I knew that I had spoken with these people in some unusual context, because I could not associate my conversations with the usual sensations of my office chair and the feel of my elbows on the desk.
It was this strange sense of blankness which was so disconcerting. It reminds me of the incident the other day when I could not, for a moment, remember whether I had been in the presence of Michael when I had a conversation with him. What someone says is normally associated with the look on her face as she says it, and with her posture and what she is wearing. The body in turn is situated against its own background.
So I was at Newman College. But what does it mean to me? What does the concrete, physical presence of the College buildings mean? I have taught with these people in what they told me was ‘Newman College’. It could have been anywhere else. We walked up and down stairs and along corridors. We sat down in what was described as the Principal’s office. All this, however, could have been anywhere. The blind person’s experience of institutions is rather abstract.
4 July
It is now many months since I began to appreciate the illumination and sense of real knowledge which comes through touch. In more recent weeks, I am beginning to experience not only this real knowledge through touch but also the pleasure of it. The other day I was at the home of a friend whose wife collects model owls. He put into my hand a little stone owl about five inches high. It was squat and beautifully rough. The weight of it in my hand was satisfying. There was a carved, wooden owl from Africa. I admired the simplicity of the details, the warmth and smoothness of the wood, the way that the whole object could be contained within the hand.
I am developing the art of gazing with my hands. I like to hold and rehold and go on holding a beautiful object, absorbing every aspect of it. In a multi-cultural exhibition the other day, I was allowed to handle a string of beads, smooth and polished, and a South American water jar made from earthenware. There was a lovely, scraping sound when one rotated the lid of the jar, and thousands of tiny, tinkling, hollow echoes were made when the full, round belly of the jar was touched with the fingernails.
I am beginning to enjoy the different textures of materials. One of my teacher friends is using a heavy, velvet bag to conceal an object from her children. They have to feel it through the bag. I love the way the fibres wiggle as your hands pass over the bag, this way and that. There is a delightful contrast with the smooth clean sharpness of the metal bracelet in the bag.
I am surprised that it should have taken approximately five years to begin to appreciate experiences of this kind. Weight, texture and shape, temperature and the sounds things make, these are what I look for now.
During breakfast the other day I called out to Marilyn, who was struggling with a million other things, ‘Have you made the tea yet, darling?’
‘Yes’, she called back from the kitchen. ‘It’s on the table in front of you.’
Lizzie interjected, ‘Why did you ask Mummy for the tea?’
Thomas said, ‘It’s because he had to ask Mummy.’
Lizzie added, ‘It’s because you can’t see and I can see.’
I thought this was a good example of Lizzie’s increasing ability to interpret my otherwise extraordinary behaviour.
As I was standing in the front porch with Thomas, looking down the steps towards the car which was parked in the road, Thomas asked, ‘Why don’t we park the car in the house?’
‘We’d have a job getting up the steps’, I replied.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Have you ever tried to lift it?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s pretty heavy’, I said. ‘Anyway’, I continued, ‘We might try it. You could take one end and I could take the other.’ ‘Well’, he said in a serious but rather doubtful tone, ‘it would be difficult. You’re blind and I’m not very strong.’
‘We could get Lizzie’, I suggested.
‘She’s not very strong either’, he mused.
‘What about Mummy?’ I asked.
‘Well …’ he sounded most uncertain.
‘Let’s face it’, I said briskly, ‘the whole family’s not very strong.’
He did not seem inclined to pursue this any further, and changed the subject.
On Friday I went to New Street station to meet a friend. As I moved across the concourse, I was approached by a chatty Irishman who escorted me to a suitable position where I would be seen by my guest as she came through the barriers. Having put me into position, he asked if I would mind some personal questions. I told him to go ahead, and he asked me if it was true that I was blind. I confirmed this, and without further ado, he declared, ‘Jesus will heal you’. I responded to this in vigorous religious terms, assuring him that he need have no anxiety, Jesus had already healed me, had given me his presence and his guidance and that although my outward sight was decayed I hoped that my inward vision was getting stronger every day. Moving the discussion to his life, I found out that he was a Pentecostalist, and we talked about this for some time.
The arrival of my train was announced, and my friend told me that he had a young daughter, injured in a hit-and-run road accident. She was in hospital, he had to go and see her, but he had no money to give her a gift. Would I be kind enough to help him to buy a bunch of grapes for her? I gave him the required sum and we parted with mutual praising of the Lord.
16 July
Marilyn told me that a sensitive friend had asked her whether it was my blindness which, through helping me to concentrate more, had been responsible for the creativity which she thinks I have shown during the last six months or so.
There may be something in this. Blindness is like a huge vacuum cleaner which comes down upon your life, sucking almost everything away. Your past memories, your interests, your perception of time and how you will spend it, of place itself, even the world, everything is sucked out. Your consciousness is evacuated, and you are left to reconstruct it, including a new sense of time, a new realisation of the body in space and so on. In that situation, there is likely to be a drastic revision of priorities. As for my own so-called creativity during these months, for what it is worth, it must be remembered that from 1968 until about 1983 I was completely occupied by my teaching and supervising duties with students, and my university committee work. No less important than the onset of my blindness is the fact that since about 1983, through the natural process of not seeking re-election, I have given up most of my university committees including Court, Council, Senate, Academic Executive, Faculty Board, Education General Purposes Committee and lots of lesser committees. It is quite possible that, had I been relieved of those duties and retained my sight, I would have been just as creative in research and publications as perhaps I have been these last few months.
It is also true that I spent the first three or four years after my loss of sight in getting my university teaching work together. It was not really until the beginning of the 1984/5 academic year that I began to feel confident. The time which I had spent on making notes on cassette so I could resource my teaching work could now be diverted into more original writing.
Taking all of these factors into account, I still think there is something purging about blindness. One must re-create one’s life or be destroyed. I was fortunate in that I had such a strong central core to my life. I had a job, a secure family life, an institution which accepted me and helped me, and multitudes of friends.
19 July
I can tell when other things are moving by the sounds they make. Cars swish past, feet patter along, leaves rustle, but a silent nature is immobile. So it is that, for me, the clouds do not move, the world outside the car window or the window of the train is not moving. The countryside makes no noise as the train passes through it. The hills and fields are silent.
If the movements of other bodies are revealed by sound, the movements of my own body are revealed by the fact that it is being made to vibrate, or I feel the sway of the carriage as we round the bend at high speed. I am held back in my seat as we accelerate, and thrust forward as we slow down.
This means, however, that the knowledge I have of my own body’s movements and of the movements of other things is not symmetrical. The cues are provided by external sound and internal sensation. This is not the case for the sighted person, who can tell whether other things are moving and whether he himself is moving by the same faculty of sight. You know when the train starts by looking out of the window. You tell it, as a sighted person, by seeing a changing relationship between your body and the world. The different ways in which the blind person experiences motion indicate that the normal relationship between the body and the world has been severed.
21 July
When she is out walking, the sighted person sees a world within potential reach. She knows that by performing a certain amount of work (i.e. walking) she will turn that potential into an actual reach. A measured, predictable quantity of walking will bring the anticipated object closer. The walking of the sighted person thus has purpose. Her purpose is to get to a certain point which she already envisages. This is illustrated by the fact that sighted people tend to become discouraged when objects towards which they are walking, like a distant line of hills, do not seem to be any nearer after putting in a lot of work.
The problem of walking for the blind person is that he has no world of potential reach, but only a zone of actual reach, made up by the feeling of his feet on the ground. He does not know if a bend in the road is in sight, or if there is a range of hills ahead. The blind person thus lacks an incentive to form a purposeful action which would turn something grasped potentially into something realised actually.
The result is that the blind person, when walking, becomes mainly conscious of his own body. There are movements up and down, steps one after the other. There is, of course, a pleasure in feeling the wind in one’s face, the sound of the birds, and the smells, but all this could be experienced stationary. If the blind person is walking along a familiar route, then it is better. Through memory, he knows that a certain amount of work will bring him to a particular point, for example where we sat on the fallen log, where there is a bridge we’ll be able to lean on and listen to the river. Because the route is familiar, the blind walker can estimate how much work it will take to get to that point. A new route, without information, can easily become rather meaningless.
When I am walking along the city streets, along a strange route, escorted by a friend, I tend to ask frequently such questions as, ‘Can you see it yet? Is it a long block? How far do you think it will be now?’ I seem to need to set my body to reach certain goals in a walk which otherwise will become a weary plod. There is so little progress; the things now passing were not far off a moment ago. It is easy for a blind person to have the feeling that a lot of work is being done but little progress is being made.
Only if the route is punctuated by various textures of the pavement, the smell of a bakery or the sounds of a street musician, is there a feeling of having crossed an area, drawn near to things and gone past them.
8 August
A few minutes ago I drifted off to sleep in my armchair on this Saturday afternoon in the office. I dreamed that my colleague Michael knocked on my door to tell me that he was finishing work and going home. He closed the door and left. Then an unbelievable thing happened. My room was flooded with light. With incredulity, I gazed at the walls and saw the rows of books, filing cases and labelled boxes, all in bright colours and standing out clearly and neatly with an amazing simplicity of line, form and colour. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The whole room was aglow with objects. I daren’t blink in case it should disappear. I got to my feet, terrified lest the change of position should suddenly make me realise this was a dream. I staggered to the door, thinking as I stretched out my hand to grasp the door handle how remarkable it was to be able to do that. Reaching the door, I looked back into the room, seeing it now from a different perspective. There was the desk with all the things on it, as fresh and bright and distinct as if it was the very day of creation. Out into the corridor I stumbled, crying out, ‘Mike! Mike!’ My voice couldn’t get out. It was choked. I realised that, although I was struggling to scream, what was coming out was no more than a whisper. In the corridor it was gloomy, but I could still see. As I hurried towards the lift, I was moving my hands side to side as if I was waving my stick. I don’t think I had actually taken the stick off its hook beside the door. The thought crossed my mind, ‘There’s no need for me to do that now. Now that I can see. But how hard it will be to throw off that habit of moving my hand from side to side.’ I was wondering what on earth could have happened to my eyes to have brought this thing about.
Up the steps now I dashed, and around the foyer to the lift. Michael, with his wife and family, were just getting in. No, indeed, they had entered, and the doors were closing. I hurried forward. The doors of the lift closed. I felt now as if I was about to faint. I hammered on the metal doors as I saw, through the little window, the lift going down. Again I cried out, but all that came was a muffled hoarse whisper. The lift disappeared, and as I stood there, the vision began to fade. The distinction between the blue, metal doors and the brown jambs on either side began to blur, it began to melt and disappear. Mists and darkness came flooding in. I was back in consciousness. And there I was, in my chair, and I realised with a shock that it had been a dream.
Within this dream there is a consciousness of being blind, since I am a blind person who, in the dream, regains sight and loses it again. The curious feature is that, although the regaining of sight is part of the dreamed story, the loss of sight is not, so to speak, something I dream about. In the dream, I do not dream that I lose my sight. What happens is simply that I wake up. As I stand beside the closed lift doors, I do not dream that I go blind. All that happens is that the vision is swept away by returning consciousness. The dream stops because I wake up. The fear, in the dream, of moving lest I should lose my sight is the same as the fear that I should move in my chair, and disturb the dream and so wake up too soon.
The simultaneity of the experience of waking up and of going blind impresses me. I stood beside the lift doors. The little lighted panel was going down, with a fleeting glimpse of Michael and his family. Then it began to fade away, as with a moment of panic and despair I realised that I was both waking up and losing my sight. I opened my eyes and my mind grew dark. Every time I return to consciousness I lose my sight again.
I do not remember any dream which has left me with such a sharp sense of reality-shock as this one. This is partly due to the continuity between the dream and the actual circumstances in which I fell asleep. It was all so natural, so plausible, there was such a smooth continuity of events. The reality of it all was completely overwhelming, and the movement back from the dream-reality to the actual reality left my mind numbed, as with a blow. It was not merely the realisation again that I am blind, but the strange sense of passing from one reality to another, as if my mind had become derailed. There had been a sort of reality clock. Everything was swimming around me. The vivid distinctness of perceived objects was now exchanged for the feel of my body and clothes on the armchair, the smooth edge of the desk at which I was sitting, the knowledge that all I knew was confined within the reach of my fingers. Everything else had gone again. I felt deceived, momentarily uncertain as to whether this might also be an interlude in the dream, and if I sat very still it also might fade away.
11 August
In commemoration of the fifth anniversary of my final eye operation, I want to set out the stages through which this journey has passed.
First, there was a period of hope which lasted for a year or eighteen months. It was brought to an end by the deterioration of sight during the summer of 1981, although even as late as the summer of 1982, when I was still seeing a few lights, colours and shapes, I could not resist occasional flickers of hope.
Secondly, there was a period of business in overcoming the problems. This began about the summer of 1981, when visual work became impossible, and lasted until about the summer of 1984. It was not until Easter of 1985 that I began to have a feeling that I did not need any more equipment. A main drive to create a workable office system took place during 1982 and 1983. During this time, blindness was a challenge.
The third stage began some time in 1983, possibly late in the year, and lasted for about a year. This was the time when I passed through despair. These were the years during which my sleep was punctuated by terrible dreams, and my waking life was oppressed by the awareness of being carried irresistibly deeper and deeper into blindness.
The fourth and current period has begun since the autumn of 1984, that is, since the recovery from the visit to Australia, during which time blindness had engulfed me. I began writing my book on adult religious education in October of 1984 and concluded it in March 1985.
For most of the time now my brain no longer hurts with the pain of blindness. There has been a strange change in the state or the kind of activity in my brain. It seems to have turned in upon itself to find inner resources. Being denied the stimulus of much of the outside world, it has had to sort out its own functions and priorities. I now feel clearer, more excited and more adventurous intellectually than ever before in my life. I find myself connecting more, remembering more, making more links in my mind between the various things I have read and had to learn over the years. Sometimes I come home in the evening and feel that my mind is almost bursting with new ideas and new horizons.
I continue to find a deep need for that kind of sustenance. Even a single day without study, away from the possibility of learning something new, can precipitate a new sense of urgency and suffering. I still feel like a person on a kidney machine, but increasingly like a person who has managed to survive.