Touching the rock
Summer 1986
14 May
During breakfast yesterday morning Lizzie asked abruptly, ‘You’ve got eyes, so why can’t you see?’
‘My eyes don’t work.’
‘You’ll have to pray to God then.’
‘Well’, I replied rather hesitantly, ‘perhaps God has ideas of his own about all this. He’s not just there to look after us, you know. God’s got his own problems.’
‘Yes’, Thomas echoed. ‘God’s got his own problems.’
I added, ‘We’re here to help him, he’s not there just to help us.’
In bed this morning she cuddled up very close to me and whispered softly, ‘Can you see just a little bit?’
‘No’, I said, ‘not even a tiny bit.’
‘Oh’, she said.
17 June
I realise now that you do not have to have sight to teach a child to read, although this problem caused me much distress in the early years of blindness, when Thomas was little.
About a week ago I began to take Lizzie into my study before breakfast. She has several sets of flash cards which she is learning to recognise, and a number of books, which she will be able to read when she can recognise all of the cards. She sits on my knee, while I pass each card to her, one by one. If she can tell me what it is, I lay it down on the table. If she is not sure, I ask her to spell it to me. Often she can do this, and she can at least tell me how many letters the word has. Usually, she can tell me enough to enable me to recognise the word. If there is any remaining doubt, or if we get stuck, I can get out the set of letters of the alphabet carved in wood and go through them until she recognises the initial letter of the word. Often it is easier for her to run out and ask an older member of the family what the word is. We arrange the words in various patterns forming silly sentences. She loves this and we laugh a lot. I ask her to take my finger and point to each word laid out on the table, and then read them to me again as I replace them in the box. Each day, I narrow down in a special pile the words with which she has difficulty. Each day the number of times we have to ask somebody else gets less. Finally, out comes a book, and with great excitement, off we go. One of the good things about this procedure is that the child has to do all the thinking, all the recognition. She has to help me, and my role as a knowledgeable adult is reduced to a minimum. Instead, I become the friendly, encouraging companion, the one with whom to play.
22 June
I had two separate dreams. Each involved a recovery of sight, and each a daughter.
I dreamed that I was actually in my office. Imogen was helping me. She was typing at a far table. Gradually, I became aware of the fact that I was seeing light. The light increased, turned into a sort of glowing mist, into blurred and then into sharper outlines. Colours gradually emerged. I could see. I could see Imogen’s face, on the other side of the large office, as she worked at the typewriter. I was stunned and sat there for some time, without saying anything or moving. Then I got up, and told her what had happened. She was not surprised, but continued to work, saying how nice it was. I went into an adjacent room, opened up some filing cabinets, and got out some magazines, looking at the pictures to make sure that I really could see. It was amazing. I really could. So the dream ended.
The second dream followed immediately. I was playing with Lizzie on my knee. Suddenly, with amazement, I realised that I could glimpse the outlines of her head, and then her face, and then I had perfect vision of her. The first thing I noticed was her eyes. They were brown and enormous. She was not looking at me, but her eyes were darting around, here and there. I noted with wonder the many tiny movements made constantly by the eyes. It seemed incredible to me. Then I noticed that this was only happening in one of her eyes. The other eye was immobile. At that moment, I caught her attention. I saw her good eye widen with surprise as she realised that I was looking at her. We clung to each other. Then I said to her, ‘What happened to your other eye, Lizzie?’
‘I can’t see in that eye, Daddy’, she replied.
‘I didn’t know. How long? When did that happen? I’ve never heard that. Why didn’t you tell me?’
She said, ‘Mummy knew. Mummy knows. Mummy will tell you.’
I went over to Marilyn. ‘What happened to Lizzie’s other eye?’ I asked.
‘Oh’, she said, ‘that happened a long time ago.’
In the dream, I was overcome by a feeling of intense anxiety about Lizzie’s other eye. So I awoke.
I woke up very slowly, groping with the realisation that it had been a dream, and then remembering, further back, that I had had an earlier dream, the one about Imogen.
At a recent conference I was waiting in the foyer to receive the distinguished visiting speaker and his wife. There was a crunch of tyres on the gravel drive as the escorting cars arrived, and a whispered warning told me that the official car was following. Two or three of us lined up to form a welcome party, and a moment later our guest was shaking my hand. The host continued, ‘and this is Mrs …’. I stretched out my hand again, and this time tapped something rather bristly. A round of laughter covered our embarrassment as I was informed that I had knocked our speaker on the chin. He had been stooping down, I gathered, to help his wife. She seemed to be much shorter. Covered with confusion, I tried again. ‘No’, a warm and friendly voice said, ‘I’m down here!’ I made a sort of mid-course correction and there she was, in a wheelchair. The farewells were not much better. I got slightly confused about where everyone was. Believing that I was shaking him by the hand, I thanked our guest for coming, only to find that I was in fact saying goodbye to one of my immediate colleagues, who had taken my hand merely to bring me over to our visitor. We parted as we had met, with mutual amusement and misunderstandings.
26 July
Last night I dreamed that I was speaking at a large conference, in a town hall. For a while, I was on the stage. A number of my colleagues were there. There were vivid, visual impressions of the auditorium. The wide gangways had been furnished with tables for the discussion groups. I spent some of the time sitting in the body of the hall, and some on the platform. I had to be very careful going up and down the steps, and in locating my chair. I was aided from one point in the hall to another by various colleagues, but did not seem to be carrying a white cane.
In considering the extent to which I acknowledge myself as a blind person in these recent dreams, it is necessary to distinguish between the visual quality of the dream itself, and how the dream pictures me. It is the dream that sees me, and what the dream sees (with various degrees of ambiguity) is me as being blind.
The fact that I am seen by the dream and, indeed, that everything in the dream is seen by the dreamer, is no failure to acknowledge that I, who appear as part of the content of the dream, am blind. It is not I who see the auditorium, but the dreamer. I am seen as having difficulty in getting up and down the steps. I don’t see the steps, but the dream sees them, and sees that I don’t see them. The sleeping dreamer, who is sighted, admits that the waking person, who is dreamed about, is blind. This does not mean that my subconscious does not acknowledge my blindness, for one always dreams of what one knows, what one senses, or images. The point of view of the dream is different from that of the conscious person, because the dream expresses its knowledge in symbolic or image-like impressions and snatches of memories. When I stand on the platform in real life, I know that down there are rows of chairs with gangways and people. This knowledge is abstract, in the sense that these thoughts are present in the form of sentences. I do not particularly imagine it, unless someone happens to remark that there are, for example, heavy red curtains hanging around the sides, in which case irresistibly an image flits into the conscious mind. In the dream, however, the sequence of sentences, the running tide of thoughts expressed in language, which more or less fills waking time, is suspended in a series of images, events and emotions in which what is known is directly experienced, not mediated through the abstractions of language. You might be watching a video which showed a conference of blind people, but could you tell, by looking at the film alone, whether the camera person was also blind?
I do not see how the dreamer can cease to see unless the dreamer ceases to know. Perhaps it is significant that I cannot remember having dreamed about people’s faces for a long time.
In the dream about the town hall conference, I was aware of other people, of the colours of their suits and dresses. I had a general impression of them being there, in their bodies, visually but without faces, although I knew who they were. How did the dreamer know who these people were? The dream was not particularly auditory, so recognition was not by means of voice. The dreamer has ways of recognising people without knowing what their faces look like. Will the day come when the dreamer will discover ways of knowing that people are scattered around in space, here and there, without representing them bodily, as blobs of coloured presence?
27 July
Since April I have been working through the idea that blindness should be thought of as a gift, in some strange way. Since then, I have noticed many examples of this idea in legend, folklore and religion.
The Amrit ceremony is the rite of admission into the Sikh Khalsa, the dedicated Sikh brotherhood. The Amrit bowl is full of sweet water. The initiate will drink some of this, and some will be sprinkled on his hair and beard, and used to anoint his face. The ceremony is watched by five members of the Khalsa, each armed with a long, ceremonial sword. This is in memory of the incident in 1699 when the Khalsa was founded. The first five faithful disciples offered themselves up for execution by the Guru Gobind Singh, only passing into the sweetness of the Amrit through that terrible ordeal.
This combination of sword and sweetness in the one ceremony is a characteristic feature of this idea of the terrible gift. Many religions express this, and in many different ways. I have recently come across the book by Sheldon Vanauken called A Severe Mercy. This is another variation on the same theme.
At first, I found the Iona Abbey buildings very confusing. I was so dispirited by the labyrinths (as they seemed to me) of corridors and stairways, pillars and porches that I could hardly summon up the will to leave the bedroom. I found it impossible to learn the layout of the place, because every time I set foot outside the door of our room, kind-hearted people gave me such a lot of help that I could not take anything in.
After two or three days of this I changed my tactics, venturing out late at night when everyone was asleep, or during a quiet time of the day when everyone had gone out. Then I would explore.
I learned the routes to the dining hall and the library. Each time I went out, I filled in a few places on the map I was forming in my mind. One night I discovered a very large wooden door. Opening it, I immediately realised I was in some vast space. It was too still to be outside, but the coolness and the movement of the air suggested an enormous area. I must not get lost. I was at the head of a stone stairway. Every time I went down a few steps I would retrace the way back to the door, making sure I could get out again. The stairway seemed to be interminable, although in fact I suppose it was not more than twenty or thirty steps. At the bottom, there was a huge area of stone floor. It was enough for one night. I had discovered the Abbey itself.
Every night I returned, to explore a little bit more. From pillar to pillar I would work my way, counting the steps, remembering the angles, always returning to the foot of the stairway.
After several nights, I discovered the main altar. I had been told about this, and I easily recognised it from the description. It was a single block of marble. Finding one corner, I ran my fingers along the edge, only to find that I could not reach the other end. I worked my way along the front and was amazed at its size. The front was carved with hard, cold letters. They stood out boldly, but I could not be bothered reading them. The top was as smooth as silk, but how far back did it go? I stretched my arms out over it but could not reach the back. This was incredible. It must have a back somewhere. Pushing myself up on to it, my feet hanging out over the front, I could reach the back. I did this again and again, measuring it with my body, till at last I began to have some idea of its proportions. It was bigger than me and much older. There were several places on the polished surface which were marked with long, rather irregular indentations, not cracks, but imperfections of some kind. Could it have been dropped? These marks felt like the result of impact. The contrast between the rough depressions and the huge polished areas was extraordinary. Here was the work of people, grinding this thing, smoothing it to an almost greasy, slightly dusty finish which went slippery when I licked it. Here were these abrasions, something more primitive, the naked heart of the rock.
Postscript
I have tried to speak the truth about what must remain a remarkable experience for any human being to undergo. Have I come close to understanding blindness? There is still much I do not know, but the conviction has deepened in me that blindness is a paradoxical world because it is both independent and dependent. It is independent in the sense that it is an authentic and autonomous world, a place of its own. Increasingly, I do not think of myself so much as a blind person, which would define me with reference to sighted people and as lacking something, but simply as a Whole-Body-Seer. A blind person is simply someone in whom the specialist function of sight is now devolved upon the whole body, and no longer specialised in a particular organ. Being a WBS is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions. It is a state, like the state of being young, or of being old, of being male or female, it is one of the orders of human being. It is difficult, because of human tribalism and parochialism, for us to make contact across the boundaries of the states. One human order finds it difficult to understand another. The orders arrange themselves in hierarchies of power and prestige, some are on top, others below, some are inside, others are excluded. This book has tried to describe the experience of someone who has crossed over the border, but who wants to retain communion.
Blindness is also dependent. Somewhere along the line, at the end of the road, there is someone with eyes. Like it or not, the blind are weak. Blindness is a little world, authentic and integrated of itself, and yet surrounded by and held within a greater world, the world of the sighted. How shall the little understand the big, without jealousy, and how shall the big understand the little without pity?