Linscott Charter School

We have a friend, Edie, about fifteen now, who has been blind from birth. During her early years she went to a special school for the blind in another city, but when it came time to go to middle school she decided to live at home and go to a regular "seeing" school. They warned her that it would probably be very difficult and the adjustment hard, but she had a lot of gumption and wanted to try it. And when she moved home for good, the school for the blind did an interesting thing. They sent along with her enough blindfolds for her entire family.

What they wanted was for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her grandparents, each to experience for a little while Edie's dark world. Blindfolded, the family would quickly realize certain obvious things. Brothers and sisters would find that stuff strewn all over the floor caused bruises, blood, and broken toys. Everyone would recognize how dependent seeing people are on their eyes, and what a handicap the loss of eyesight is. But if they left the blindfolds on long enough they would begin to learn other, less obvious things.

In a book, the Treasure of Green Knowe (called The Chimneys of Green Knowe in the English edition), by Lucy Boston, Tolly meets a blind girl, Susan, and later blindfolds himself to see what blindness is like:

Tolly... spent the next day playing at being blind. He tried first in the house, feeling his way round the walls, surprised to find how difficult it was to tell that all four walls were not in a straight line but had right-angled corners... The stone walls that were so imposing and certain to sight were gentle and curving to touch, almost warm, to be patted like living creatures. They bulged or sloped away and their edges were blurred or broken off. The many recesses for windows or doors were deeper than the length of his arm, so that if he took his hand off the wall, he was quickly in empty space. And in space, even if it extends just beyond one's reach, there is nothing to give a direction. When, after moving cautiously with outstretched hands, he met a piece of furniture, there was pleaure in suddenly recognizing a brass handle or a row of bobbins along the rail of a chair. But they never seemed to be where he had left them. Or sometimes feeling out for the edge for a small table, his hands would meet a vase or candle apparently floating in the air, which was startling, though it only meant that he was holding his hands six inches too high... He soon found he was quite exhausted, so he took off the blindfold and went off into the garden with Orlando. After some crazy romping he felt better, and then he remembered that blind people had dogs to lead them, so he put Orlando on the lead and put his foot on it while he bandaged his eyes again. Off went Orlando straining like a cart horse. There was grass under his feet, then gravel, then grass again and Tolly very soon had an unreasoning terror of walking over the edge of the earth. Although he dragged back on the lead, it seemed to him that they went like the wind. He had no idea which way he was facing— every stumble left him more uncertain. Where was the wall, where the river or the moat? In a panic he let Orlando go and pulled off his blindfold. He was still on the lawn, facing back to where he had started from— the only direction he had not expected. The world whizzed round him into position again. He flopped into his great-grandmother's garden chair that was there in the sun and lay back to recover his self-confidence.

Tolly made a careful note of the distance between himself and the tree. I will walk there without looking, he decided, and set off with his eyes screwed shut. He walked and walked, stretching out his hands to feel the first beech twigs at the extreme end of the banches. But there was only empty air. He walked farther, as far as it could possibly be— but still only emptiness all round him. And there ought to be ivy underfoot, but there wasn't. Why was it all empty? Had everything disappeared? He opened his eyes and found he had hardly moved from where he started. His many steps had been timorous two-inch shuffles instead of paces. It was silly to be so relieved to find the world was permanent.

"It's very tiring not having eyes," he said. "you have to think everything out. But do you know what I have discovered? After my eyes, the most useful things I've got are my feet."
"Not your hands?"
"Well, you can't feel anything unless it's there to feel. There's an awful lot of emptiness. But there's always something under your feet. And they're quite intelligent."

Tolly remained blind long enough to make some subtle discoveries, including the relative intelligence of parts of his body. He discovered his ears were also intelligent, and his skin. He was relying heavily on messages from all over and inside himself that he usually was unaware of, because he had eyes.

Mary Ingalls made those discoveries, too, in By the Shores of Silver Lake. You probably know the Little House series, where Laura Ingalls Wilder is writing about her childood. This book begins when the whole family has just recovered from scarlet fever, but Mary, the oldest girl, has been left blind from it. They are all on a train, moving farther West:

Mary's dress was gray calico woth sprays of blue flowers. Her wide-brimmed straw hat had a blue ribbon on it. And under that hat, her poor short hiar was held back from her face by a blue ribbon tied around her head. Her lovely blue eyes did not see anything. But she said, "Don't fidget, Carrie, you'll muss your dress." Laura craned to look at Carrie, sitting beyond Mary. Carrie was small and thin in pink calico, with pink ribbons on her brown braids and her hat. She flushed miserably because Mary found fault with her, and Laura was going to say, "You come over by me, Carrie, and fidget all you want to!" Just then Mary's face lighted up with joy and she said, "Ma, Laura's fidgeting, too! I can tell she is, without seeing!" "So she is, Mary," Ma said, and Mary smiled in satisfaction.
Laura was ashamed that in her thoughts she had been cross with Mary. She did not say anything.

If you put yourself in Mary's place, how did she tell that Laura and Carrie were fidgeting? As I sit there, blind in my imagination, waiting for the train to start, the plush-covered seat is jiggling a little, and shifting. This is from the restlessness of my sisters. And they're probably heaving an occasional sigh, or giving little noises of boredom, maybe tapping their teeth, cracking thier knuckles, making wriggling sounds. There is a tone of impatience or irritation in their voices. Maybe they jostle me a little. And Mary puts all these things together and realizes to her delight that being in a blind world doesn't mean that she is shut out forever from perception. She can tell that Laura and Carrie are fidgeting! And Laura— Laura also makes a discovery about herself.

For those of us who aren't blind, there's a real fascination with being blind for a while. Look at all the games. Only a few are Blindman's Bluff, Poor Pussy, Pin the Tail on the Donkey and a good one I don't know the name of, but "it" sits outdoors in the center, blindfolded, and one by one the others try to creep up and tag him before he can point and "freeze" the creeper. Whoever tags him gets to be "it." (This is a fine game for autumn, because the leaves crackle.)

Most of us, when we play blind, stay that way just long enough for the game and then with relief rip off the blindfold— though sometimes with the same sobering thought from the woody poem at the start of this chapter: "A person who is really blind never opens his eyes."

It is an interesting and worthwhile experience, and especially valuable for a writer, to be blind for more than just a few moments. It will give you quite a lot to write about, and it will also reveal some pretty interesting things about yourself and other people, and the world.

You might try shutting your eyes after you read this paragraph. Keep them shut, no peeking, long enough for something else to begin to take place. What do you become aware of? What sounds are going on? Are you conscious of of the floor under your feet? A desk under your fingers? The paper of this book, the binding? Have you ever noticed the feel of a book, the texture of its pages, its smell?

Then carry the experiment still further, for a longer time, in different places. Walk, indoors and out, like Tolly did. Stop and listen. Demi's ninth-grade science teacher took a small roup of students and parents out into a woods at night, and each parent and chilod shared a blanket. We weren't blindfolded for it was pitch-dark, but we lay, in utter silence, for an hour. At first I could hear only one loud insistent insect, a steady sort of chirping, and I listened to it for a long time before I realized that there was a whole background of lesser insect noises that I hadn't heard at all. After turning my attention for a while to these, and trying to differentiate between them, I suddenly realized that the loud insect which had first attracted me had quieted down— not actually, but my ears had tuned him out and were now tuning in the other insects exclusively. This taught me something about my own hearing: while I was concentrating on one sound I would lose another.

The next step in increasing listening awarenenss might be to see if one can hear in total, at least for short times: tune in everything. And then there are the awarenesses of the other senses. The touch of the wind. The smell of pine and earth. Or, of hot exhaust— for the science teacher on another night took our same group downtown and we sat, this time blindfolded, at a bus stop, experiencing the city for contrast. Cars and buses came and went; so did people. A few lingered, loudly curious about this peculiar group, but a policeman had been assigned to take care of us, and didn't let anyone kick us to see if we were alive.

Then, if you can, be blindfolded for a whole day. I read in a magazine about how a teacher taped cotton pads over some students' eyes so that no glimmer of light could get in. Thsoe who volunteered for this experience stayed blind for several days, even a week. What was the teacher hoping to teach them? And what did they learn?

It's the sustained experience that will be most valuable. You'll become increasingly aware, not only of how you perceive things outwardly, but of what your inner self is like. do you feel terror? Panic? Calm? Detachment? What sorts of things to you think about? You're more "with" yourself— you're less distracted by externals. You can't pick up a newspaper and read anything at all to keep yourself from thinking.

And when you finally take off your blindfold, what do you see? What are your feelings? In Chaim Potoks The Chosen, Reuben has an eye injury which may blind him permanently. When the bandages are removed, he does have vision— but because of his experience he sees in a different way than he ever has before: "The hydrangea bush— or snowball bush, as we called it— on our lawn glowed in the sunlight and I stared at it. I had never really paid any attention to it before. Now it seemed suddenly luminous and alive." Will any of the perceptions and ablilites and intelligences you discovered when you were blind linger on with you into a new way of seeing?

A person who is really blind will know a lot of these things already. He will never be able to do certain jobs that require eyes— drive a car, study through a telescope or microscope. But there are many things he can do as well as or better than sighted people. One of these is to write.

Tradition says that one of the greatest poets of all time, Homer, who wrote the story or Troy and the wanderings of Ulysses in the Iliad and the Odyssey, was blind. The British poet John Milton wrote Paradise Lost after he was blind. Helen Keller was both deaf and blind from the age of two, yet she became a very fine writer. You've perhaps read books about her, and seen the play and movie The Miracle Worker; now read her autobiography, The Story of My Life. And James Thurber, who wrote children's and adult books, told some pretty funny and poignant stories about his own near-blind eyesight.

Edie, our blind friend, is a writer, and she brought some of her stories to our house. We sat around the dining room table reading aloud. After a little while, Demi remarked that practically all of Edie's writing was conversation and other things that came to her through her ears. Demi ran and got her own journal, and compared some of her passages with Edie's. Almost all Demi's perceptions came through her eyes. They were excellent observations, but she was largely lacking in the intelligence of the ears. Both girls, we noticed, didn't record much perception through their other senses— their noses, tonges, and skins. After they realized this, they began to include more of these awarenesses in their writings.

I said that these blindness games will be valuable to you as a writer. But their main value to you can be in another way. For writing doesn't depend as much on the images you see with your eyes, or the sounds you hear with your ears, as it does on your "inner eye," your "inner ear," the understandings you have inside you that you glean from all your senses, including your heart. The more you learn about your own inners, the deeper understanding you will have about yourself and about everybody. You'll be seeing with your heart, and then if you write it down, fine. The writing will be the richer. But the writing's not the most important thing in the world. The understanding is.

Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail

Chapter 2: Blind