The gift
Winter 1985/Spring 1986
28 December
Last Friday night, as I was putting him to bed, Thomas launched into a long and detailed discussion about my blindness. ‘Will you always be blind?’ was his opening thought.
‘Yes, always.’
‘When did it happen? Was it when I was a little boy or a baby?’
‘No. It was before you were born, just before you were born.’
‘What was it like? Did you have one good eye that you could see with and one bad eye that you couldn’t see with and then your good eye got worse? Or did you have two good eyes or what?’
‘I had one good eye that I could see with but it gradually got worse.’
‘Couldn’t the doctors stop it?’
‘The doctors tried.’
‘What was wrong with it? Why did it get worse?’
I then explained to him about detached retina. I told him about the retina of the eye, what it is and a little bit about how it works. I described how the retina may become elevated from the back of the eye or torn and what effect this has.
‘Why does it tear? What makes it come off? Can’t they put it back on?’
I described the many operations I had had, and told him something of the techniques used in trying to replace the retina and prevent further elevations. I described how gradually it had got worse and worse, and how other complications had set in.
‘Couldn’t they do any more in the end? What did they say?’
‘Well’, I told him, ‘they just said, “We’re very sorry, Mr Hull, we are afraid that there isn’t much more we can do now.”’
‘That was bad luck’, he said.
I agreed.
‘Why doesn’t God help you?’
‘God does help me, in lots of ways.’
‘How?’
‘Well, he makes me strong. He gives me courage.’
‘But he doesn’t help you to get your eyes back.’
‘No, but he does help me with lots of other things, and he has helped me with lots of other things.’
At this point I felt that he had enough to think about, and so did I; I went off to have my supper and he went to sleep. This discussion must be put into the context of Thomas’s current theology, which is a theology of divine power, based upon what He-man and Superman can do. God is seen as the perfection of He-man and Superman, rolled into one but stronger than them both. The film Superman had been on the television only the previous day and the children had watched it with great interest. Superman is a deliverer, a saviour and a liberator who shows amazing strength and resourcefulness on behalf of his friends and fellow-countrymen. By contrast, the outcome of having God as one’s ally seems disappointing.
I was, however, impressed by the nature of his questioning, the interest and the details of the surgery and the ophthalmology, and what I had felt about it. I was struck by his strangely adult comment that it was bad luck.
29 December
Christmas is difficult because it is a time of loved objects. It is not easy for the blind person to take part in this unwrapping, this unveiling of loved objects. It also takes the blind person longer to learn to love that object.
What are the loved objects in my life? I used to love books. I used to love handling my small collection of eighteenth-century books, noting the antique lettering, glancing at the woodcuts or the engravings, and musing over the old handwriting which is often found inside the covers. When I have a new book these days, I certainly like to feel it. I get a certain amount of information from this and I will probably be able to identify that particular book the next time I touch it on my shelves. I always enjoy the smell of a new book, as I thumb the pages. I do not think, however, that I can honestly say that the book becomes a loved object.
Has the love of books transferred to the love of tapes? Hardly! Nobody loves cassettes the way people love books. Cassettes lack individuality and immediacy. The cassette has little or no personality until you put it on the deck. Then it speaks to you, but a new book speaks to you the moment you pick it up. The love for the book requires no mediation from a machine.
I used to love gramophone record covers. I used to admire the artwork, the way in which the atmosphere of the music was often so cleverly suggested through the illustration on the sleeve. Today, the sleeve is merely a casing, merely a protection for the disc and something upon which to put the braille label. Apart from this, the record covers are indistinguishable one from the other.
And what about people? Are not even people becoming indistinguishable? Did I not wonder if it was Lizzie on my knee? Did I not fail to recognise even Marilyn when she called out in the street the other day? What is the status now of a person as a loved object in my life? Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the boredom of the blind, or at least of this blind person. Should I be taking more active steps to fill my life with objects that I can love, objects the loving of which lies in the feeling of them?
In many ways, the blind person lives in a world which is strangely devoid of objects. A sighted person walking through a city centre comes away with impressions of many hundreds of objects, arranged in shop windows, so as to arouse desire. The blind person walks this route with little or no conception of any of these attractive objects. Not many things draw him out of himself, into life.
3 March
This morning I woke up feeling most refreshed, because I had had a beautiful night of dreaming. There was a long series of most exciting adventure stories, all in full technicolour, and I woke feeling strangely purged. My mind had been renewed, had been on holiday, had been in open spaces, knowing the freedom and excitement of living in a visual world.
The most memorable dream took the form of a serial. It was one of those unusual experiences where one wakes up several times, while the dream seems to continue in a series of episodes, in a number of snatches of sleep. It was a sea dream, and the central part, the only section I can remember vividly, showed our party navigating a ship through a wild ocean. We were on the bridge, which was glassed over. Heavy seas were breaking upon this glass roof. The waters were crashing down upon a sort of skylight. We were afraid that the ship would be swamped should this skylight window break. It was shivering and shaking with the great masses of water pounding down upon it. Several of us were stretching up our arms to hold the frame steady in case it should collapse inwards with the force of the water. It did not break and we came successfully through the storm and into port. I awoke with an exhilarating sense of recreation, happy at having had all these wonderful experiences.
Sighted people live in the world. The blind person lives in consciousness. From this consciousness there is no escape, or escape is permitted only occasionally as in dreams. Such escape is blissful.
21 March
Yesterday morning I was kneeling on the floor, helping Lizzie to get dressed. When she was finished, I stood her up in front of me and said, ‘Now! Let’s have a look at you.’ I held her face lightly between my hands while she stood there, and gave her a big smile.
We remained like that for a moment and then she said, ‘Daddy, how can you smile between you and me when I smile and when you smile because you’re blind?’
I laughed, and said, ‘What do you mean, darling? How can I what?’
With great hesitation, and faltering over every word, she said, ‘How can you smile – no – how can I smile between you and me – no – between you and me, a smile, when you’re blind?’
‘You mean, how do I know when to smile at you?’
‘Yes’, she said, ‘when you’re blind.’
‘It’s true, darling’, I said, ‘that blind people often don’t know when to smile at people, and I often don’t know when to smile at you, do I?’
She agreed.
‘But today I knew you were smiling, darling, because you were standing there, and I was smiling at you, and I thought you were probably smiling at me. Were you?’
So this little child, having just had her fourth birthday, is able to articulate the breakdown which blindness causes in the language of smiles. I noticed the fine distinction she made by implication between smiling at someone and the smiling which takes place between people. I cannot describe my emotions as I reflected upon the fact that she had had so many experiences of smiling at me, but that the in-between smile was, for her and me, not only a great rarity, but a puzzle. I had endured a terrible loss and been granted a wonderful gain simultaneously.
20 April
Thomas and Lizzie were sitting on my knee. I was telling them a story. Thomas began to poke my right eye with his finger. He asked, ‘If I do that and that, will your sight come back?’
‘No’, I said, ‘nothing will make my sight come back.’
‘Not ever?’ he said. ‘When you die, will it come back? Will God make it come back then?’
‘Well’, I speculated, ‘I suppose that, in a way, when I am entirely in God I will know everything, won’t I?’
Lizzie then joined in with an exclamation. ‘It’s not very nice, is it?’ She repeated this again quite emphatically. ‘It’s not very nice, is it?’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Being blind’, she cried, ‘always!’
I said that it was not very nice, but that there were worse things.
‘But it’s not very nice!’ she insisted passionately.
Again I repeated the thought that there were worse things, but she seemed not to hear me.
She burst out, ‘It’s like going down and down and down and down and down and down and down to the bottom of a very, very, very, very, very, very, very deep well where you can never get out, like in the castle.’ She was referring to a trip we had made recently to the ruins of Ludlow Castle where she had been impressed by the dark depths of the well. We had dropped stones down it and listened. Lizzie shrank away from the edge. Now, with a shudder, she said, ‘I didn’t like that castle. I don’t like that place. I don’t like those dungeons, and that going down and down and down and down that well. I don’t ever want to go back to a castle like that again.’
I think that by now she had more or less forgotten what it was that had made her think of the castle but I was most impressed by her insight into the blind condition, and her instinctive awareness of the horror of the receding light, of the experience of going deeper and deeper down, of the revulsion and rejection one feels in the presence of an irretrievable loss and at the sense of being trapped in there for ever.
21 April
In recent weeks the thought has been in my mind that blindness could be a gift. I cannot quite remember where I got this idea. It may have been through hearing a programme about meditation in which the expression used was ‘the gift of silence’.
I resist this thought, for if blindness is a gift, I would have to accept it. I have said to myself that I would learn to live with blindness but I would never accept it.
Yet I find the thought keeps coming back to me, and arouses my curiosity. Could there be a strange way in which blindness is a dark, paradoxical gift? Does it offer a way of life, a purification, an economy? Is it really like a kind of painful purging through a death? Am I to expect that I shall enter into a new, more concentrated phase of life because of this gift?
The philosopher Feliz Brentano did a lot of his creative work after he lost his sight, and attributed this to his blindness. Should I begin to think of myself not as a person disabled by a defect but empowered by a capacity?
If blindness is a gift, it is not one that I would wish on anybody. It is not a gift I want to receive. It is something which I would rather like to give back, but one which I find I cannot help accepting. A gift you cannot help receiving is rather a strange kind of gift. I suppose that I need feel under no bond of gratitude if I am given something which I cannot help but accept.
3 May
On Saturday night, Michael and I saw a performance of the musical Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein, given by the older pupils in an independent Catholic High School in Edmonton, Alberta. During the interval, Michael read to me a poster which was displayed on one of the noticeboards. It went something like this: ‘Perhaps the thing which we have to learn from Christianity is this: that in return for this gift we have nothing to offer.’
I found this a strange thought. The motto was directed to people who thought that they would have to repay something in return for having received the gift. It was intended to tell them that this would not be necessary. Just because it is a gift, there can be no question of a repayment.
In my case, the effect was the opposite. It had never occurred to me that in accepting the gift I should give something back. I had been taking it for granted that no gift in return was expected. The poster made me wonder whether this assumption was justified. Of course, a gift does not require a payment, but reception of a gift places one in a relationship with the giver in which an exchange of gifts is courteous and appropriate.
But what gift could be an appropriate exchange for the gift of blindness? What could I give, what would I want to give, which could match the numinous darkness and the brilliantly destructive qualities of blindness?
In thinking that the gift is blindness, perhaps I am not being quite accurate. Blindness is the wrapping, or the medium. The gift lies deeper, on the other side of blindness.
10 May
If blindness is a gift, then death is a gift. What shall we give in return for our death? Whatever we are able to give, it must be in anticipation, for when we receive that final gift, we will have nothing left to give.
But if blindness is a gift and death is a gift what have we to fear? If life is death, then death is life. If darkness is light then light is darkness. The conscious and the unconscious lives are one. We have nothing, yet we have everything.