[stylist] Blind Faith

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Chris,

Thanks for sharing this. I find it speaks to blindness in general and
not just to those with some residual vision. I love some of her
descriptions and points. Very well done, and something more people
should read. Thanks.

Bridgit

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Chris
Kuell
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 10:54 AM
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
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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