John M. Hull
In reading this book, you probably want to understand blindness better. You want to know what it is like to go blind, and to be blind. A couple of years after losing my own sight, I became interested in blindness and read more than twenty autobiographies of people who had gone blind. These stories amazed me: they were often full of humour, courage and ingenuity. Some told of how they became golf champions, ski experts, medical practitioners and successful business people. Some were written to proclaim a faith, others in the spirit of stoic acceptance. Most of them were inspiring stories of triumph and reconciliation. But I did not find what I was looking for: an account of blindness as I knew it. Maybe I did not look hard enough, or read sufficiently widely. All I can say is that the books I did read did not describe the aspects of blindness which were more significant to me. Many of them were literary accounts: they had a beginning, a middle and an end. They were like novels, with an interesting style, a climax or a resolution. This book is not like that.
In June of 1983, about two and a half years after I had been registered as a blind person, I began to record on cassette my daily experiences. This was when the truth of being blind began to hit me. You may wonder why it took so long, but the first couple of years were full of exciting problems to be solved. It was only afterwards that I began to make the transition from being a sighted person who could not see to being a blind person. Sometimes I added something to my cassette every day, day after day, but sometimes weeks would go past. I recorded things that I felt strongly about; when they puzzled me, or delighted me, I said what I had to say in order to help me to grapple with what was going on. I kept this up for three years, and gradually the need to make further recordings grew less. I spoke about my children, my work, my relations with women and men, and I recorded my dreams.
This book is the result. It has no particular ending, because blindness has no ending. It would be nice to be able to say that there was a happy ending, that a miracle happened, but it didn’t. I was interested in how my children would gradually discover what it meant to have a blind father. I was interested in what would happen to my dreams. I recorded my dreams, mostly on the day after the dream took place, sometimes within a few minutes of waking. The dream narratives form a sort of subplot, if it can be called a plot, since the conscious material shows how the unconscious mind struggled with the problem. The relationship between dreaming and waking and the nature of consciousness itself is one of the persistent themes of the book. Other themes are the changing perception of nature, the transformation in my understanding of what a person is, and the problem of making sense of such terrible loss.
The book is not tightly organised. There are bits and pieces all over the place. There are times when solutions seem to be in sight, so to speak, but there are continual relapses, when nothing seems to have been gained or learned. If there is repetition, it is because the same problems and the same experiences went round and round, interpreted from many aspects.
Blind people differ from each other as much as sighted people do. I do not claim to speak for you, but only for myself. You do not need to know what blindness is like, because you are blind. Perhaps you are reading this book in order to discover companionship with someone else who has passed your way. I hope you find it here.