[stylist] essay of interest

Mon Aug 30 03:29:33 UTC 2010

thank you Bridgit,
besides being a wonderful example of descriptions, it was just a fine 
piece to read after a hectic day.
thanks.
jc

At 10:12 PM 8/29/2010, you wrote:
>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!
>29
>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.
>3o
>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
>3i
>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
>32
>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
>33
>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.
>34
>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.
>_______________________________________________
>Writers Division web site:
>http://www.nfb-writers-division.org <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
>
>stylist mailing list
>stylist at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/stylist_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for stylist:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/stylist_nfbnet.org/n6yr%40sunflower.com