My friend Marguerite up in Limpopo province has a small artwork made by a Venda sculptor, carved from a thick branch of the Dombeya or wild pear tree. The sculpture shows an elderly blind man with his arm stretched up and gesturing towards the skies. A boy stands next to him with his face upturned. The blind man is showing the boy where to look in the June skies for the star constellations that indicate it is time to begin planting maize. The blind elder relies on memory to point out where the first stars will appear at dusk, the sighted boy has no idea where to look.
Some years ago, following a simple procedure to remove a cataract produced by eye trauma, I went blind from posterior capsule pacification. Residual lens epithelial cells left behind after surgery migrated along the back surface of the implant and opacified the posterior capsular bag, as the opthalmic surgeon explained. I stayed officially blind for two-and-a-half weeks while I waited for a YAG lasar capusulotomy to blast a tiny aperture in the hardened shell so that I could see again. I had already lost the sight of one eye and dreaded the operation on my remaining eye, although I knew the YAG lasar surgery is a quick and largely successful procedure. A dark grey blur like a deep fog surrounded me day and night. I missed the blackness of night as much as the brightness of day.
While sightless, I listened more intently than I have done before or since, and in the greyness around me could detect little shivers of energy as sound entered or left the room. Within a few days I could tell my dogs apart by smell rather than touch. There were the same ghosts tugging at my sleeve, mumbling in my ear: now, though, I heard them magnified through featureless static, buzzing and drumming away like melancholy bluebottles. Marooned, they had all my attention.
My visual memories fell apart — instead I wondered what had this smelled like, what rough music had I missed hearing?
In the second week, waves and prickles of energy could be detected around me. Time slowed or raced past in a blur. Often I was not sure if I had been dreaming or daydreaming as I sat on my sofa listening and placing sounds and odours. Distinctions between here and there fell away as if I had entered trance. My dreams filled up with voices and smells I could not identify.
Slight flickering or rippling in the fog would alert me that my cell phone was about to ring, so I would reach across, pick up the phone and wait for the clamour of sound. Predictive electronic impulses, so ordinary! The voice on the other end would be louder than expected. I could not as yet dial out, but if I kept the phone the right way up, I could press to answer or end a call.
This isn’t about blindness so much as memory and imagination, how we privilege the imagined over the real and what we lose in doing so. Since my first eye surgery in my early 20s I had tried to imagine what blindness would be like, rehearsed in my mind the dangers of falling, knocking things over, the fear and helplessness, and pitch blackness engulfing me. Now that I was technically blind it was all different, as I might one day say about the process of dying.
Of course, the crucial fact is that I believed firmly that I would regain my eye sight. If my condition had been declared permanent, would it all have been so very different?
Odours, aromas, fragrances, stenches were everything: tuberoses, magnolia, aromatic cumin, freshly ground black pepper, lemon zest, sweaty socks, wet dog, cat shit, garbage… If I raised my hand, the air would sough around the movement, the bare gesture replete with the floral wilderness of supposedly unscented hypoallergenic soap and a metallic trace of cuticle.
Anyone who entered the room offered up odours like an imprint, unmistakeable
[The sudden restoration of visual stimuli was unsettling and unpleasant. 'Don't worry about it, ' said the surgeon 'Think about hostages kept blindfolded or shut in a darkened room for a fortnight. It's all too much to be able to see again, the rush of sights to absorb. Aftershock, it will take time before you can take sight for granted.'
The analogy was too extreme. I blinked unhappily in the neon glare of his surgery and as I looked around, disoriented and missing something, the odours and sounds began to fade or ebb away, drifting from my consciousness, I could no longer find my way around by a brief surge of fragrance or a whispering of air currents.
Sight was tyranny, overriding other senses. How did we become creatures who look rather than touch, smell, hear?]
Blindness. At times, my waking hours were nothing more than a prolonged vipassana meditation, assaulted by my newfound other senses. The birds at dawn crying out in a language patterned with urgency and lust. Only the human voice tired me.
Friends sat down and talked in louder-than-usual voices (surely not?) while I sniffed up fruity shampoo, stale coffee breath, garlicky after-breath, nail polish remover, sweaty groins, menstrual blood like rusted iron. Nothing to do but pay attention. The cascading inflections of speech, a creak of loft timber, breathlessness after laughter, shaken car keys a tinny orchestra. Somewhere, streets away, a power drill slicing the air.
Everything that is important happens on the periphery, wrote Natalie Sarraute. Until those two-and-a-half weeks without sight, I had not known that I had disregarded and pushed aside my other senses, that they had so much to share with me. So much experience and so little of it experienced, comprehended, marvelled at. Five senses and I had not drawn on most of them, in fact had sought out what I blithely termed the ‘extra-sensory’ before appreciating what was there lurking on the edges and accessible to me.
Hush, I said. Listen. Breathe in the world.
This is such a stunning post. The now Australian writer – she was born in England but now lives in Sydney – Drusilla Modjeska went through a period of temporary blindness, too. She writes about it in her book, The Orchard. The thing I remember most about hearing her speak about this experience which she did in a talk at a writing event before the book came out was the degree to which she stopped thinking of herself as an object that men might want to look at. She could no longer see them and therefore it mattered far less to her that they might see her. She was still a relatively young woman when this blindness struck.
I also think of a book on blindness … now what was it called? Google will help … Ah, yes, John Hull’s Touching the rock: an experience of blindness, but his condition which began in 1980 was permanent and, as you say, there must be a difference between a permanet state and a temporary one. and finally there’s Milton’s on his blindness which I determined to learn off by heart as an adolescent, out of fear perhaps that one day I too might go blind. There’s a history of macular degeneration in my family on my mother’s side, and I mean that both literally and metaphorically: my mother the great denier. Her father went blind in his seventies till he died at 86 and one of her brothers is also now blind and has been for some twenty or more years.
I am grateful for your insight into how much we neglect our other senses. How much we use sight over and above all else.
Thanks.
Hi Elisabeth, I have read Poppy but not The Orchard, will try to get a copy. I have read some harrowing extracts from John Hull in which he writes about going into deeper and deeper blackness as the memory of sights and colours fade.
My own eyesight is worsening but nobody is sure how long it will take for me to lose significant sight in the remaining eye. In order to keep going I live in a certain denial of what might well happen, but encouraged by the memory of how different that reality was from anything anticipated. These days I listen to music much more and memorise scents of herbs and spaces, quite consciously.
Wow.
I am trying to find words for it, but I think Elisabeth is right, this is a stunning post. Your writing is so powerful, lucid, and direct. I was deeply moved, transfixed really, by your voice. You really give us the sense of being embodied in a strangely new landscape.
Thank you for this utterly astounding bit of writing. Bravo!
yrs-
Scott
Thanks Scott — I sometimes feel I am writing from a long, long way off but that there are others finding their footing in equally strange places, writing from the margins and the periphery.
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This was riveting. It opened up so many doors and thoughts for me, the mother of a severely disabled child. I look forward to reading more of your writing –
Elizabeth, I read your blog with awe — the reality of certain situations is so different from what we imagine them to be.
wow is right. wow. wow.
Thank you so much.
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Hello Louisey! Great post! I’ve given you the candle lighter award! Congrats!
Ah, thank you my friend Erzulie, I will check that out
This is one of the most moving things I’ve ever read… I had a friend who withing the last year has had corrective surgery on both eyes and is able to drive again…. I am surprised at how much more defined your experience was, but then she was not unable to see, her sight was severely limited….
My grandfather was legally blind and my father was rapidly loosing his sight before he died. I have often been afraid when thinking of being blind, but your story has made me realize I have no need to be fearful… first of all because, I have good vision, and secondly, because I am going to try to cultivate my other senses… I want to experience the world more fully.
Thanks for sharing!!