[stylist] essay of interest

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Dear List,
 
I'm posting this not because it was written by a blind writer, but
because many have expressed concern before about engaging readers with
descriptions.  I have always maintained that if you do not have first
hand experience of visual descriptions, your writing will not be
lacking, but will have a unique perspective.  It is amazing how much we
learn and in return can relay without using sight.
 
I recently read this essay and thought I would share it with the list as
an example of how we can write in great detail, providing a sensory
experience, without sight.  Enjoy.
 
Bridgit P.
 
Stephen kuusisto
NIGHT SONG
 
My earliest memory of hearing comes from 1958.  I'm standing on a dock
in Helsinki, Finland.  My father holds my hand.  Its march and the
harbor is dotted with ice.  My blindness allows me to see colors and
torn geometries.  Shards of ice drift before us and my father tells me
they look like continents.  "There's Australia," he says.  "There's
Hawaii."  I see no distinction between sky and ice.  I see only endless
plains of gray Baltic light.  When a person appears before me he or she
resembles nothing more than a blank trunk of a tree.
A troupe of women emerges from the mist. They are the walking trees of
Dunsinane, black and green.  These are the old women of the neighborhood
unfurling their carpets on the shore of the frozen sea. 
Lordy! Lordy! Then they sing!
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The tree women sing and beat carpets in the Baltic wind.
My father tells me to listen.
"These are the old songs," he says.
The women croak, chant, breathe and weep.
These women are forest people. Arctic people. They have survived
starvation, civil war and then another war, the "Win-ter War" with the
Russians.
They hang their carpets on tall racks that stand along the seashore and
beat them with wooden bats.
They sing over and over a song of night. The song unwinds from a spool.
I remember its terrible darkness. They were together singing a song that
rose from a place deeper than dreams. Even a boy knows what this is.
This is not only my earliest memory of sound-it's also my earliest
memory. As I near fifty I realize that sound has been exceptionally
important in my blind life. I have also come to realize that I've
largely ignored this fact. Although I have lived by listening, I've been
inattentive about the role of chance sound in my life.
My parents and I lived in the south harbor of Helsinki, just a short
walk from the open-air market where fish peddlers and butchers had their
stalls. We walked across the cobbled square and I'd tilt my head in the
harbor light and listen to the gulls and ravens. The gulls sounded like
mewing cats and the ravens sounded like hinges in need of oil. I walked
about lis-tening to the polyphony of hungry birds.
The Russian Orthodox Church had mysterious bells.
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And winter wouldn't give up. We traveled into the country and I heard
the reindeer bells. Old farm. Runners of a sleigh crossing ice . . .
What else?
The woman who sold flowers, singing just for me . . . And her little
daughter who played a wooden recorder . . .
Wind poured into the city through the masts of sailboats.
There's an old man who sells potatoes from a dory in the har-bor. His
voice is like sand. He talks to me every day.
Potatoes from the earth, potatoes from the cellar! You can still taste
the summer! You can still taste the summer!
Later I would think of his voice when reading of trolls under bridges.
What else?
Sound of knife blades in the tinsmith's stall . . . The rumble of
streetcars . . .
The clacking of a loom . . . My mother weaving a rug . . .
The sound of my father's typing late in the night.
Sound of a wooden top that whistles like a teakettle as it spins . . .
my first toy . . .
A winter tree tapping at the window . . .
My father is a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki and he
has time to walk with me and introduce me to the chance music of the
city.
One day he takes me to the house of a glassblower. This is my first
experience of synesthesia: the strange suffusion of one sense with
another . . . The glassblower takes his long-stemmed pipe out of the
flames. I can barely make out the red
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halo of the fire. The glassblower explains how he pushes breath into the
molten glass and then I hear him inhale. As he leans into his art there
comes a spirited cry from a cuckoo clock on the far wall. Delicacy and
irreverence have been for-ever linked in my mind from that very moment.
On the way home we ride the tram and I listen to the win-try talk of the
passengers. I love the sound of Finnish, espe-cially the oddly whispered
Finnish of strangers sitting side by side on the tram. The Finns inhale
as they speak, a lovely sotto voce confirmation that two minds are in
solemn agree-ment. Whispers and inhalations as twilight covers the city.
I talk to the empty seat beside me and speak Finnish to an imag-inary
friend who I name Matti. I hold my breath and listen to the rocking of
the tram. I exhale and speak in a flurry to my little doppelganger. My
father is lost in his newspaper. I'm lost on the heart's road of
whispered confidences.
The entire world is green or white. Blindness is veil after veil of
forest colors. But what a thrill it is to be a sightless child in a city
of sounds.
Our apartment is in the south harbor. My mother is weav-ing a carpet and
listening to the radio. She tells us that the Russian navy is coming,
that it's just been announced. And then we hear the booming of the guns
from the archipelago of islands that stretches out into the Baltic. The
Soviet navy is conducting war games and we stand on our balcony and
lis-ten to the guns of the destroyers. A neighbor woman leaning from her
balcony tells us this is the sound that made her hair turn white. I
worry for days that we will all have white hair. I ask my parents all
kinds of questions about growing old. Why
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do the Russians want to make people old? I put such great faith in
sound: sound is this tree and that grass; this man; this dimension of
light and shade. Meanwhile the evening wind arrives and the Russian navy
goes away.
April turns to May and the park spins itself into green smoke; leaves in
the trees again; and an old man plays his accordion in a grove of
birches. A little girl whose name I can no longer recall teaches me to
waltz. I'm sure that her parents have told her I'm blind. She must have
been around eight years old. She sways me back and forth in the light of
the birches. The old man plays slowly and I feel something of the
Zen-body: wherever I am I am there. By the age of four I've found the
intricacies of listening are inexhaustible.
In late 1959 we fly home to the United States. I love the groan and
rumble of the plane's propellers. What a fabulous sound they make! I
rest my head against the cabin wall and feel the vibration rattle
through my bones. I breathe and hum and let the engines push my own
little song. I imitate the Kale-vala cadences and sorrows of the Finnish
carpet ladies and groan in unison with the straining metal of the
airplane.
A blind kid rarely sleeps. Small blind people hear a hundred sounds and
learn early to make analogies.
I hear the trees that surround our New Hampshire house. A spruce sways
in the wind and so I think a door is opening, a door with rusted hinges
and locks.
At sunup while my parents sleep I dress quickly and slip from the house.
I walk through a meadow, blindly following
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patterns of light and shade until I reach the university's horse barn.
Somewhere in all this cool emptiness a horse is breath-ing. He sounds
like water going down a drain.
I take one step forward into a pyramid of fragrances.
What a thing! To be a young boy smelling hay and leather and turds!
What a thing!
And the horse gurgles like water in the back of a boat. Mice scurry like
beaded curtains disturbed by a hand. I stand in this magical nowhere and
listen to the full range of sounds in a barn.
I am a blind child approaching a horse! Behind me a cat mews.
Who would guess that horses sometimes hold their breath?
The horse must be eyeing me from his corner.
Now two cats are talking.
Wind pushes forcefully at the high roof.
Somewhere up high a timber creaks.
My horse is still holding his breath.
When will he breathe again?
Come on, boy!
Breathe for me!
Where are you?
I hear him rubbing his flank against a wall. And now he breathes again
with a great deflation! He sounds like a fat balloon venting in swift
circles. And now I imitate him with my arm pressed to my lips. I make
great flatulent noises by pressing my lips to my forearm.
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How do you like that, horse? He snorts.
I notice the ringing of silence. An insect travels between our bursts of
forced air.
Sunlight heats my face because I'm standing in a long sun-beam.
I am in the luminous whereabouts of horse! I am a very small boy and I
have wandered about a mile from home. Although I can see colors and
shapes in sunlight, in the barn I am completely blind.
But I have made up my mind to touch this horse.
Judging by his breathing, his slow release of air, that sound of a
concertina, judging by this, I am nearly beside him. And so I reach out
and there is the great wet fruit of his nose, the velvet bone of his
enormous face. And we stand there together for a little while, all alive
and all alone.
And so at night when I can't sleep I think of this horse. I think of his
glory-his fat sound. I think of how he pinches the air around him with
his breathing. The house and the trees move in the night wind. The horse
is dry wood talking. He's all nerves and nostrils. He tightens and then
unwinds like a clock. He groans like the Finnish women who stand beside
the ocean waving their sticks. Strophe and antistrophe. Early. I've
crossed a threshold. Hearing. Insomnia. Walking the uncer-tain space
that opens before me. Step. Rhythm. Pulse beat. Night songs. Precision.