[stylist] Blind Faith

[Atty Rose]

Thanks for sharing this.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Kuell" <ckuell at comcast.net>
To: <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 10:54 AM
Subject: [stylist] Blind Faith


>
> 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)
>
>
>
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