ON BLINDNESS
You may remember how in a recent talk I referred to babies who nave been adopted by animals and brought up by them. I told you explained how in these circumstances they developed no human characteristics. It is always fascinating to think of all the different conditions in which human beings may grow up and the different effects these will have. We far too much take it for granted that we are what we are and that we couldn’t have been different, that we think the way we do because we couldn’t being what we are we couldn’t think any differently.
I believe Brian told you last week in my absence, about the great importance of the imagination. I don’t know exactly what he said and perhaps I shall be repeating some of it when I say how important and how interesting it is to use our imagination to get below the surface of our own experience – to see how different each one of us might have been. This is not at all easy but perhaps it helps to take an extreme example of someone whose experience is different from our own – essentially different. I am not thinking of people who have a diff[erent] sort of education or of a different sort of job, or people who have a different experience of a material sort – poverty, riches, power, for instance.
No I’m thinking of someone who has unavoidably to learn about life in a different way from all the rest of us. Can you think of such a person? What am I thinking of? I’m thinking of a person blind from birth.
Usually when we are asked to think about the blind we are expected to pity them. We are expected to think of all the beauty they cannot see, the variety of form and colour all around us. The faces of our family and friends[1]. The seasons, the snow in winter and the green of the spring. A tumbling sea stretching away to the horizon, or a great range of mountain peaks with the hazy blueness that distance gives them.
It seems that they miss so much that we value, and to us the loss of our sight – if it is threatened – seems almost the worst of all the tragedies that might happen to the body. Nevertheless many blind people would who vigorously repudiate our pity. They have so developed their other senses and a curious and a most unusual sort of awareness, that their experience of life is.in a way, as rich as our own and their sensitive enjoyment of certain things perhaps greater than ours. Their hearing becomes more acute than ours and their feelings – the sense of touch very delicate and discriminating.
During a year or two of my boyhood I went for music lessons to a blind piano teacher - a woman. It was my first experience of the uncanny way in which blind people find their way about. I waited in the room alongside the piano; she would walk in without any hesitation and come up to me knowing exactly where I was turning her face to me in precisely the right direction. She would sit down at the piano and strike a note - exactly the note she wanted. She didn’t have to find out just where she was sitting before she did that. You might expect that she would first have to find out where middle C was and then she would be all right; but she never had to do that. She knew exactly where the piano was without having to touch it once.
I have watched a blind boy – a boy who once had his sight but who had lost it – learning to move about the world. I’ve seen how he used the method of the bat – a little like the principle of radar – to find an opening in a wall. He judged how the sound of his footsteps was reflected from the wall and could work out from this whether he had to move to the right or left in order to come opposite the opening. Now this boy was still depending on his sense of sight. He once had eyes so he could have a picture in his mind of himself here and then walk there. He was blind but still living in his imagination, in the world of sight.
But my music teacher had been blind from birth. She had never seen anything. It was utterly impossible for her to have a picture in her minds eye of what a keyboard was looked like, or what the room looked like. How on earth then could she walk into a room, go straight up to middle C and put her finger on it.
How she told me to look at notes. What did she mean? She had been told, imagine creatures on another planet “Yanning”.
No – we are in a quite different world – but a very fascinating one.
In terms of movement:
Things exist because you can contact them
Distances exist because you can move from one place to another.
Sight makes it possible for Wetherby and Wennington to exist simulataneously (sic). But to a blind person one always after the other?
In a sense there is more reality in the blind person’s vision feeling. It is ridiculous to say for both you and me to say that Wetherby is the same distance away when I go there by car and you go on your feet.
Sense of perspective. We can see near and far simultaneously.
Here’s another interesting point. We all started like blind people and learnt our first lessons about the world in the way that blind people learn. Baby’s eyes unfocused, undiscriminating. They are taught to see.
All those ridiculous things we do to babies.
This supported by instances of people who are born blind, but get their sight in adult life as the result of an operation.
I’ve told you all this
To exercise your imagination
To see that there are different ways of experiencing the world.
But also to ask for humility
Blind people often humble.
If there were more [of] them than us. We might be humble towards them.
Another thing – what if there are ways of knowing that we are very poor at. Suppose it is possible to gain something?
Alex Comfort
No evidence for the supernatural. Bad word – not what relig.[ion] is about.
Two people who love each other, something grows. A group meets humbly to get help. It comes. Some people can be more aware than others. (Radio).
Slaves to the idea of space and distances.
Up in the sky - everywhere?
Got him!
God – only in experience.
We think we know our way about.
- But a glorious mysterious universe – think learn
- Plenty of work for artists etc.
Archive Reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 15