[stylist] Blind Faith

[Chris Kuell]

Below is one of the best essays I've ever read about those who still have a little bit of sight. While reading, pay attention to how she arranges and sets up the piece. It's excellent writing.
 
chris
 
Blind Faith

 

By Georgina Kleege

 

My eyes always deceive me, but my blindness never lets me down. Here's an example of what I mean. One late winter afternoon I caught a glimpse of the setting sun through the bedroom window. It had been a lowering, overcast day, but the clouds had lifted enough at the horizon to reveal the sun as an intense orange disk, set off by the general grayness of the darkening sky. I thought-Aha, a sunset, and obedient to the writers imperative to pay attention to such things, I sat down on the bed to watch. 

 

Time passed, but the sun did not seem to have progressed much. It remained in the same place that I had first noted it, and appeared to be the same size and shape. Also, the sky was growing steadily darker even though the sun's light stayed at the same level of intensity. Still I continued to watch, thinking that if this seemed strange to me, it was only because I had not been paying enough attention to sunsets lately, and had grown unfamiliar with the natural course of the phenomena. 

 

More time passed, and at last I recognized my mistake. The orange light I had taken for the sun was in fact only a sodium vapor street lamp. 

 

I have been legally blind since the age of eleven. Like most legally blind people, I retain some residual vision. In my case, I can perceive light, color and motion with some degree of accuracy. I cannot perceive fine detail, such as print on a page or features on a face. Forms appear amorphous, mutable and with unstable outlines, threatening always to dissolve into their surroundings. I cannot tell for sure how lines and curves in a visual array come together, and I have next to no depth perception. What I was responding to on this occasion was mainly color, specifically the juxtaposition of two colors, the orange and the grey. This, plus the fact that it was the correct hour for sunset, led me astray. I would not have jumped to the sunset conclusion at another hour of the day. It seems possible that a person with average vision might have made the same mistake, but a second glance would have spotted the structure of the street light and the other relevant details that I cannot make out.

 

This incident, however, did not make me feel sad. No pang of grief for my lost vision. I have been blind too long to mourn about it. If anything, I felt a little silly about my desire to conform to some stereotypically romantic ideal pairing of writers and sunsets.    

 

Though I try to be alert to the world around me, I am actually not that sort of writer. Beyond occasioning some mild self-mockery, the incident was just another example of what is a commonplace for me. Despite more than four decades of experience with severely impaired vision, when I rely on my vision alone I am likely to be tricked. When I rely on my other senses and more general knowledge about the laws of nature, I do better. In other words, my eyes always deceive me, but my blindness never lets me down.

 

Here's another example. In the basement of the house mentioned above, there were glass blocks in the windows. When the light was right, usually early on a sunny morning, the prismatic effect of the blocks made flecks of iridescent light appear on the gray, cement floor. Without fail, I took these flecks of light for scraps of     Mylar gift wrap or confetti. I would reach down to grasp one in wonder and have my error confirmed through touch. No matter how often this occurred, I never failed to be duped. When it happened a couple of days in a row, I forced myself to look before reaching down. But even when I made a deliberate effort to look carefully, the intensity of the light and colors made it impossible for me to believe I was not seeing something substantial. It can be annoying to be tricked in the same manner day after day, but I suppose I was perpetually enchanted by the idea that someone-was it the cats-might be having a party in my basement festive enough to require iridescent confetti. 

 

To use the technical term, I am 'legally blind with some useable sight'. The need for a legal definition of blindness arose in the 1930s to determine eligibility for newly established, federally funded, educational and rehabilitation programs. In America, as in most of the industrialized world, a person is legally or certifiably blind if her or his acuity measures 20/200 or less; or if her or his field of vision is twenty degrees or less in the better eye, with corrective lenses. 

 

The prepositional phrase, with some useable sight, begs several questions. How much is some? What kind of sight is useable and what is useless? For that matter, what exactly is sight? These questions have increasing urgency. Demographers predict that as     the baby-boom generation ages and becomes prone to the leading causes of vision loss that occur later in life, the number of blind people, with and without residual vision, will increase dramatically.  by the year 2020, the National Institute of Health projects, with uncharacteristic wit, that there will be 5.5 million blind and visually impaired persons forty years of age or older. This is between five and ten times the number of the current population. For those of us who are already blind and visually impaired, this promises     a proliferation of goods and services designed to aid us. Talking computers, talking ATMs and other vending machines, new currency with large print and/or tactile markings, global positioning devices, audible traffic signals. In the future, blind people adapting to vision loss will have more resources to draw upon as they determine how much vision they retain and what use they might make of it.   

 

Making this determination is trickier than it sounds. Descriptions in ophthalmology and perception texts are not necessarily helpful. These descriptions are written from the perspective of someone looking at the impaired eyes from the outside and extrapolating what the visible imperfections there would do to an undamaged eye would see. In other words, authors of those texts take an image and erase the parts they imagine would be affected by the visual impairment. They rarely consult with anyone looking at the world through those impaired eyes. At best, they compile a list of symptoms that an eye-care specialist should expect to hear from a patient experiencing some new vision loss. More significant, these medical descriptions rarely take into account how the experience of lost vision might change over time. One may lose faith in vision that has failed to be faithful to reality.

 

Assigning words to my fragmentary visual experience, the orange disk in the sky, the iridescent flecks on the floor, makes them sound more definite than they were. If I can come up with words to describe my visual experiences, it is because I have a lot of practice at it. In reality, vision isn't naturally at the forefront of my attention. 

 

Some years ago I was washing potatoes for dinner one evening. At the time I was writing a book about living with impaired sight and was in the habit of putting my visual experiences into words. Every activity, however mundane, provided additional practice. On this occasion I was trying to find words to express the look of the running water. A tricky visual phenomenon involving transparence in motion. I was having trouble separating what I was seeing from what I was feeling. The slightly fizzy stream of warm, and what I was hearing, the shush of water over the faint gurgle of the drain. I could tell that the    sounds were influencing the image. The vibration that is always at the center of my visual field was somehow in sync with the sound. Further complicating matters was the bright, white sheen off the chrome faucet, perpendicular to the softer, white tube of flowing water. 

 

And then I told myself to turn it off. I already had enough examples. This one was at once too complex and too silly. Instantly, everything changed. The image did not go blank or black, it simply receded from the taught center of my attention. I allowed myself to go back to being blind. I relaxed into the sensation coming from my hand as my fingers rubbed the skin of the potato with a few last remnants of dirt off and dissolved in the running water. Does anyone actually need to look at the potato while washing it? Isn't touch the more useful sense in this situation?        

 

To say that my blindness never lets me down will be jarring to many readers. Blindness is usually understood to be a lack, an absence, a void. Since seeing and knowing are so often conflated in people's thinking, blindness is defined as the opposite of knowing, a state of non-knowing. People speak of losing sight, never of gaining blindness. For this reason, blind people are thought to be cut off from reality. Cut loose, adrift. While we may use our other senses to get around and identify objects we encounter, our knowledge of the world is assumed to be incomplete, flimsy and make-shift. A poor imitation of true knowledge. In my definition, blindness is something to be trusted and relied upon rather than something to work around and overcome. I am speaking of blindness as an array of non-visual perception and other forms of acquired knowledge, that when used in combination, provide me with more reliable and useful information than my eyes   ever do.

 

According to this definition then, many sighted people make use of blindness in their daily lives. Here I am not speaking of simulation exercises, where a sighted person dons a blindfold to promote empathy. Rather, I'm thinking of occasions when non-visual techniques might be better suited to the task. Cooks test the doneness of food through touch, smell and even hearing. Physicians and auto mechanics often make preliminary diagnoses through touch and sound. 

 

Place an unfamiliar object before me and no amount of looking will tell me what it is. The longer I fixate on it, the more     its form, size, even color will appear to change as my brain attempts to make educated guesses to interpret the fragmentary information my eyes supply. These guesses are guided by expectation. If I am in a china shop, I expect that the object might be a tea cup. If I am in a pet shop, it might be a turtle, but only touching it will let me know for sure. Contrary to popular belief, touch does not replace sight for blind people. The details I observe through the tactile examination of an object do not produce an image in my mind's eye. Similarly, the information that comes to my hand through my white cane does not create a mental map of my surroundings. In fact, using a white cane is as much a matter of hearing as of touch. Or more accurately, I use hearing, touch, and sometimes even olfactory perception in combination to get me where I want to go. The cane's tip sweeps the ground before my feet to alert me to obstacles and curbs and to announce details about     the texture of the surface underfoot. On regular routes, changes in the pavement's texture signal that I am approaching a destination or turning point. But while I attend to this tactile information I am still conscious of sounds -both the echoes the cane makes which can sometimes tell me about my surroundings, and the sound of traffic, children at play in a schoolyard, footsteps behind or coming toward me, music playing at a corner bar, and so forth. Restaurants, bakeries, flower stands, drug stores and bookshops all exhale their particular scents.

 

To take advantage of all this information direct my attention outward in all directions, creating a sort of sphere of perception around me as I move. And for me to absorb all this, it is necessary for me to ignore the information coming to me through my eyes. When I am at a large party and want to find someone to talk to, I listen for familiar voices. It can take a minute or two to adjust to the general sounds in the room and to sort out voices of different pitches. The process has a tactile element to it. I feel myself sorting out different layers of sounds, with     higher voices up around my head and lower voices somewhere around my chest. Once I have orally located a familiar voice I begin to move in that general direction, hoping the person will stay put and stop me when I draw near. 

 

These habits have evolved gradually during the course of my life, and I cannot recall employing a conscious effort to figure out how to do things non-visually. I recognize, however, someone who has recently acquired a visual impairment will find it hard to abandon sighted habits. I was standing at a bus stop the other day when a woman, aged around 70 judging by her voice, approached me and said, "You don't see very well, do you?" 

 

I knew what she meant. People assume using the word 'blind' will be insulting. I waved my white cane back and forth and said that, yes, I did not see very well, and in fact I was blind. She went on to ask, "How do you get the bus drivers to do that?"

 

She had noticed that the drivers call out the number of their bus line to me, as they are trained to do whenever they see someone with a white cane or service dog. I was not surprised to learn that the woman also 'did not see well', and was intimidated by the surly responses of drivers who did not feel compelled to strain their voices for someone who did not display a sign of blindness.  After a few more exchanges, the woman admitted that she was in fact legally blind, and even that she had received some training with a white cane, but did not like to use it. She did not explain why.

 

Was it the fear of displaying vulnerability to purse snatchers, or possibly more violent criminals on the street? More likely she did not feel blind enough. Like others, she seemed to subscribe to the myth of the blindness police, the vigilante militia who patrols the streets ready to denounce any hapless cane user who shows signs of residual vision. She argued that she could still find her way, more or less, but simply couldn't read the signs on buses. She said that her husband complained that her posture was getting bad because she was always stooping over to see the pavement or her feet. 

 

I suggested that the cane was a simple solution to these problems. It would signal to bus drivers that they needed to call out to her, and would allow her to scan the pavement before her feet so she could straighten her spine. My point was that if the vision she had was inadequate to perform these tasks, it made sense to put her faith into a simple tool of blindness. 

 

The woman and I ended up boarding the same bus, and she told me she had readily adopted other blind tools and techniques, especially recorded books. In fact, she enjoyed recorded books even before she lost her sight, and admitted that she was delighted to discover the wide range of free sources for electronic books specifically for the blind. Perhaps it was a first step toward thinking of blindness in a new way.

 

On another occasion, I sat next to a blind man on an airplane. He used a white cane but seemed to rely more heavily on a sighted companion, which lead me to believe he was another newcomer to blindness. But it turned out that he had been visually impaired for 20 years. He had no vision in one eye and restricted vision in the other, though he could still read enlarged print and perceive color and form with that eye. We did what blind strangers do when we meet-we compared tools and techniques. My telescoping cane versus his folding model. My Braille watch versus his talking one. My computer's synthesized voice versus his screen enlargement software. We went on to discuss common aspects of our different impairments. He described his problems with depth perception. He demonstrated his difficulty in laying his hand on the latch to release the table from the seat back in front of him. His good eye told him it was nearer to him than it actually was. 

 

I was utterly stupefied. Why would he bother to try to perform such a task visually? "Do it with your eyes closed," I suggested. Sure enough, once he'd squared himself in his seat, he got it on the first try.

 

We discussed the hazards of staircases. He told me that when he found himself at the top of a staircase, it filled him with terror. I knew what he meant. When I look down at a flight of steps, what I see is an undulating ramp rippling with slanty, horizontal lines. Nothing about its appearance would make is seem a safe place to put my foot, so I don't look at it. I keep my eyes straight ahead, sometimes even close them, grasp the banister with one hand, my cane with the other, and take the first step. 

"Isn't that why you have the cane?" I asked.

 

It came out that he had resigned from his job as a hospital administrator when he became visually impaired. I could not guess his age, and he was old enough that his resignation could have been more of an early retirement. Still, as he asked me about the technologies I used to do my job, I sensed some wistfulness on his part. Although the types of technology I use now were barely in their infancy 20 years ago, I sensed he was wondering if he was too hasty in giving up work. It might seem that someone formerly employed in the medical field would have access to more information. Unfortunately, the ophthalmologists who diagnose vision impairment do not always know how blind people live. They refer patients to low vision specialists, optometrists, opticians, and rehabilitation consultants who prescribe a vast array of high and low tech aids for visual tasks. The great virtue of the low vision philosophy is that the specialists realize that what we call vision is in fact a range of discreet visual activities. The parts of the eye and brain required to read print are very different from those needed to move through space. But for many patients, being handed off from the physicians to this collection of techies can feel like abandonment. And as in every other facet of human interaction, some of these specialists do a better job than others. 

 

A friend of mine who had recently been diagnosed as legally blind came home from the low vision clinic with a carload of gadgets and devices. She was showing me a magnifying lens that was to be worn around the neck and propped up against the chest so she could look through it at her hands while doing embroidery. 

 

"I didn't know you did embroidery," I said.

 

After a pause, she admitted that she didn't do embroidery-or any other kind of needlework. In the silence that followed, we both recognized the miscommunication. Because someone somewhere had thought to invent the device, and an expert was showing it to her, she felt an obligation to take it home. It was as if becoming blind meant taking up new hobbies, particularly those of the most demure and sedentary kind. 

 

The man on the plane said he'd not liked to call himself blind. I told him that I preferred the word to any of the alternative terms. I told him that I figure if I'm blind in the eyes of the law, why should I encumber my speech with adverbs and prepositional phrases? I said that although the vision I have is entertaining, and sometimes aesthetically pleasing, it is so unpredictable and unreliable that it would be misleading to claim to use it. I doubt I convinced him, and it's really none of my business what word one wants to use to identify oneself. I just wanted him to think about  whether he resisted using the word 'blind' because it was inaccurate, or if he wanted to distance himself from the connotations of helplessness , ineptitude, ignorance and prejudice such idioms such as blind drunk, blind frenzy, and blind folly. There are many who reserve the word blind to refer to those individuals who have absolutely no visual perception at all. Some purists would even restrict the term to people who have been totally blind since birth, excluding people who have lost their sight as adults either gradually through some disease such as retinitis pigmentosa, or suddenly through a traumatic injury such as a gunshot wound. The adventitiously blind are thought not to be quite as blind as the congenitally blind because they often retain and make use of visual memory. The legal definition of blindness makes no separate division for total or congenital blindness. 

 

The National Federation of the Blind, established in 1940, has long held that making distinctions between the totally, congenitally blind and adventitiously blind, the legally blind with some useable sight, the visually impaired, the partially sighted, and all other cumbersome terms sets up a divisive hierarchy that dilutes the political and social impact of a group with common interests and goals. Because degrees of vision loss can be precisely calibrated, there is a temptation to think of a spectrum of human visual variation, with the totally congenitally blind at one end and the totally, congenitally sighted at the other. But this schema fails to take into account other factors, such as the age of onset and rapidity of sight loss. How is it different to lose sight as a child, and to lose it late in life? How is it different to experience sight loss gradually, over many months or years, and to lose it suddenly-in the blink of an eye? The problem is that these differences are often understood in terms of degrees of tragedy. If blindness is synonymous with tragedy, an emblem of all human loss, then total blindness must be therefore more tragic than partial blindness. Early blindness must be more tragic than later blindness. Or are the born blind   better off for not knowing what they are missing? 

 

If, however, we abandon ideas of individual tragedy and consider instead how changing certain aspects of the culture enlarges opportunities for a wide range of possibilities with all degrees of sight loss, a different image emerges.

 

Public transportation benefits those who have always been totally blind and those who used to drive cars. Ready availability of books in electronic formats increases the educational and employment opportunities for people who can read enlarged print, those who use text to speech technology, and    those who prefer to print the file in Braille. I know why people resist the word. What I want to do is reassign meaning to it, to talk of blindness as

 Something other than a lack, a loss, an absence. Blind people are neither pathetic nor heroic. Blind people are resourceful, innovative, flexible, good problem solvers, good listeners. We know where we are going and what we are doing. The quantity of quality assistive technology and opportunities for the blind and visually impaired has increased exponentially in my lifetime, but understanding of blindness lags behind. I can only hope that as the blind population grows in the coming years, our public image will take on new dimensions. In the meantime, if anyone asks me to offer advice to someone who is newly diagnosed as legally blind, I would recommend that the person consult other blind people-as many as possible. There are growing numbers of blind people employed as rehabilitation counselors and technology consultants, but even the average blind person on the street has valuable expertise.  If reading the words 'blind' and 'expertise' in the same sentence wrangles, it signals that the biggest hurdle to overcome is abandoning previous beliefs about blindness. 

 

So my advice would be this: Forget everything you know about blindness. If vision no longer works there are non-visual alternatives. Learn to trust the blindness. It won't let you down.    

 

Georgina Kleege teaches literature and creative writing in the English department of the University of California at Berkley. Blind Faith first appeared in The Yale Review, Volume 98, number 3, (2010)