[humanser] There But for the NFB Go I

[JD Townsend]

That’s my reaction.  What’s yours?



New York Times Sunday Review Desk Section 
2016 11 20




DISABILITY  

Feeling My Way Into Blindness.  

By EDWARD HOAGLAND.  
Edward Hoagland is a nature and travel writer, and the author, most recently, of 'In the Country of the Blind,' a novel




Blindness is enveloping.  It's beyond belief to step outside and 
see so little, just a milky haze.  Indoors, a smothering dark.  
It means that you can't shed a mood of loneliness with a brisk 
walk down the street because you might trip, fall and break 
something.  Nor will you see a passing friend, the sight of whom 
could be as cheery as an actual conversation.  Sights, like 
sounds, randomly evoke a surge of memories ordinarily 
inaccessible that lighten and brighten the day.  'Who are you? I 
may already have asked 10 people who have spoken to me.  Their 
body language as well as their smiles are lost to me.  Human 
nature is striped with ambiguities, and you need to see them, but 
like a prisoner, I am hooded.

I lost my sight once before, to cataracts, a quarter-century ago, 
but it was restored miraculously by surgery.  It then went 
seriously bad again, until, reaching 80, I needed a cane.  Tap, 
tap.  Ambulatory vision is the technical term..

Everything becomes impromptu, hour by hour improvised.  Pouring 
coffee so it doesn't spill, feeling for the john so you won't pee 
on the floor, calling information for a phone number because you 
can't read the computer, or the book.  Eating takes considerable 
time since you can't see your food.  Feeling for the scrambled 
eggs with your fingers, you fret about whether you appear 
disgusting.  Shopping for necessities requires help.  So does 
traveling on a bus.

The kindness of strangers is proverbial -- a woman leads me 
through the bustle of an airport toward the taxi stand, a 
waitress hands me back a $50 bill I mistook for a 20.  Blindness 
is factually a handicap, yet an empathetic one, because other 
people can so easily imagine themselves suffering from it, 
sometimes even experiencing a rehearsal for it when stumbling 
through a darkened house at night.  I remember how in school we 
teased students with Coke-bottle glasses, but didn't laugh at 
blind folk whose black glasses signified that they couldn't see 
at all.

I know about handicaps harder to cotton to, having stuttered 
terribly for decades, my face like a gargoyle's, my mouth 
flabbering uncontrollably.  Blindness is old hat.  In Africa you 
still see sightless souls led about by children gripping the 
other end of a stick.  Blindness in its helplessness reassures 
the rest of us that that oddball is not an eyesore or a loose 
cannon.  Being blind is omission, not commission; and you'd 
better learn how to fall.  Paratrooper or tumbler training would 
be useful.  A tumbler can tip sideways as he lands so his hip and 
shoulder absorb the blow.

The ears need schooling as a locator.  I search for the bathroom 
at night, guided by a ticking clock whose location I recognize.  
As you go blind, exasperating incongruities arise, but also the 
convenience of this new excuse for shedding social obligations 
not desired.  And you can give your car away.

Hearing snatches of conversation from invisible voices, 
everything becomes eavesdropping.  Have I seen my last movie? Is 
the vision gone from television? But I can still see daylight and 
bipedal forms, tree crowns and running water, swirling, seething 
leaves against the sky-blue heavens, which remind me of 80 years 
of previous gazing on several continents.  Eternal instants on 
Telegraph Hill, Beacon Hill, or Venice and Kampala.

Splendiferous mountain vistas of greensward and cliffs scaffold 
my dreams, drawn from memories of sheep pastures in Sicily and 
Greece, rich with textured sedges or tinted canyons, then 
bombastic skyscrapers, or Matisse's Chapel.  So it's 
flabbergastingly impoverishing to wake up in the morning.  Faces 
are no longer seamed, nor are raindrops stippled on the 
windowpane, cats high-tailed in a turf war, postage stamps 
vividly illustrative.  I forget my condition and grope for my 
glasses, wherever they are, as if they could solve the emergency.  
Blindness is an emergency; the window shades are drawn, and one 
deals with it in myriad ways.

Instinctively I reach out to touch everyone I talk with, 
heightening the moment of contact.  Shoulders I go for, as 
gender-neutral, companionable territory, but most folks don't 
want to chat for long with anyone whose deficits are front and 
center.  There's sympathy fatigue, though allowances must be 
made, an elbow gripped, and perhaps the menu read aloud in a 
restaurant.  Poor guy; be considerate; tell him what the 
headlines were in the paper today, but if he's not Helen Keller, 
let the next person take a turn at being nice.

You get somebody to scan your mail for you outside the post 
office, and supervise paying a bill in the return envelope, maybe 
even writing the check for you to sign.  Improvising keeps one 
alive, and at the beach you can hear the surf thump if not exult 
in the spindrift's curl.  The tide tugs your feet.  At 4:30 in 
midsummer you hear the birds' morning chorus, nature primeval and 
ascendant.  You dig when you're blind, fingering for roots, then 
for what the roots are connected to.  Curiosity does tip into 
tediousness, though, when there's no new material.

Blindness as a metaphor is not flattering.  Blind drunk, a parent 
blind to the misery of her children, a politician blind to the 
needs of his constituents.  When blind you can neither read text 
nor frowns, but if somebody starts talking to you and you can't 
see them, hang loose till you figure it out.  Equilibrium is the 
key.

Eyedrops of several descriptions and optical devices accumulate 
as each is superseded by another.  You used different hand lenses 
for different phases of magnification.  Since a book or film is 
not in the cards, blindly groping for succor in your boredom can 
be a danger.  That comfy stranger on the bench may be Mr.  Ponzi.  
Discipline is required.  In all your parts, do you still enjoy 
being alive? Crossing your legs and twitching an ankle, savoring 
cherry tomatoes, then sweet corn and lobster.

Nights can turn bright if the world mysteriously whitens, as 
though one's optic nerves were rebelling.  It's odd when one part 
of the body dies but the rest does not.  In blindness we don't 
cast off our eyes, but continue to consult them in thwarted ways, 
much as amputees feel their lost parts almost function.

Feeling a chill wind, I'll look at the sky for a forecast, but 
triangulate the slanting breezes for the message I can't see.  I 
smell the rain before it comes, and the sun speaks to my skin 
like a finger stroking.  As, in my view, joy in people may be 
analogous to photosynthesis in plants, this is quite logical.  
But wet days can be delicious also, a cool drink for dry skin, 
restful in its implications; good weather has its pressures.  
Less is expected of a rainy day; you can hole up a bit with 
yourself.

Like Plato's Cave, your brain consists of memories flickering on 
a wall.  The phenomenalities of sight are now memories, but my 
sixth sense has helped.  Call it intuition; and I've never felt 
despair, any more than when I was a kid who couldn't talk.  
Blindness resembles a stretched-out stroke.  Functions wither as 
your walking slows.  Muscles atrophy and sensibilities, too.  You 
can't size up a new visage, yet the grottoes in your head have 
more to plumb if your sight was lost midlife or later.  You can 
go caving.

Where are my eyes, I suddenly think, as if I'd left behind my 
coat.  Landscapes become impressionistic, eliding details.  
Abbreviation is at the core.  Input is so precious -- the 
conversations other people pause to grant you, beyond the barest 
niceties, describing piquant scenery you can't see.  Strong 
sunlight is needed for a newsstand headline but muted 
illumination has subtler uses, and in pitch dark a blind man is 
at an advantage.

The personality of the street, hubbubed with hurry, invites 
strolling.  Slatted fences, orange lilies, SALE signs in a 
window.  'Outta sight! a guy exclaims.  I seek a bench I know 
about, remembering a whole gallery of friends who have died by 
now.  Older than Mozart, younger than Bach, they engulfed my life 
with love and commitment, and on a good day permeate my mind.  My 
sexual fantasies invoke an alloy of wives and friends.  But 
anonymity has swallowed me like Jonah's whale; I grope inside.

Sunlight beams turn the street radiant for a quarter-hour.  Two 
of my mentors ended their lives by suicide, and I remember their 
dilemmas sympathetically.  One jumped into the sea, the other the 
Mississippi, but I wonder in each case whether the sun was 
shining or they'd waited for a rainy day.  Our elements return, 
in any event, to the oceans to re-form as other life.

Nature is our mother, if no longer our home.  We couch-surf in 
rented beach houses, with green belts as habitat for other 
creatures that remain.  How many of us have watched a possum 
'play possum' or a goshawk swoop after a blue jay? We feed 
pigeons and hummingbirds, then have done with it.  Nature has 
become a suburb.  Of course I can't see the cardinal at the 
feeder out the window, though tidal forces still operate.  The 
leaves natter even if you can't see them.  Your ears report their 
bustle, ceaseless until dormant for a span of moments.  The pulse 
in your throat signals that in your torso all is well; it will 
beat till it quits.  That concordance of organs lives within us 
like sea creatures throbbing on a coral reef, strung there as on 
our skeleton as long as conditions allow.

Novelty is the spice of life and salts our daily round even when 
we lose our sight.  Your eyes don't steer you as you saunter, yet 
your lungs, legs, arms feel as fit as ever.  For simple exercise, 
I hoist myself out of each chair, or bicycle in bed, though then 
unfortunately may pick up two completely different shoes and try 
to squeeze them on.  My socks don't match either.  But why am I 
not crankier? a friend asks.  I'm helpless; I can't be cranky.  
Blindness is enforced passivity.  I have become a second-class 
citizen, an object of concern.  Crankiness won't persuade people 
to treat me thoughtfully.  Disabled, that dry term once applied 
to so many others over my lifetime, now applies to me.  As best I 
can, I'll make my peace with it.



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