Reflections of a Lifetime Reader "Second Sight: Reflections of a Once-Blind Professor" An Address Delivered by Robert V. Hine to the Conference of Librarians Serving Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals Denver, Colorado May 2, 1994 _Foreword_ Blind and physically handicapped individuals are entitled to a high quality, free public library service with access to all information, books, and materials perceived as useful. This is the charge under which the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped and the network of cooperating agencies function. To review and focus our mission, we invited a distinguished user of braille and audio materials to meet with librarians and others assembled in conference to present views from a lifetime of reading. Robert V. Hine was that person. This pamphlet is the third in a series of individual views that will be offered in the years ahead. Frank Kurt Cylke Director National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped Library of Congress Washington, D.C. September 1994 I was particularly pleased when Frank Cylke and Michael Moodie asked me to talk to you. I have had a long and rich friendship with Talking Books stretching back to the time of J. Robert Atkinson at the Los Angeles Braille Institute. Those were the days, before cassettes, when I remember so vividly flipping hundreds of discs as Alexander Scourby read _War and Peace_ and the _Iliad_ and the _Old Testament_. How that memory came about may be clearer if I read to you the opening paragraph of _Second Sight_: "At the age of twenty who believes a crotchety old doctor telling him that he would be blind? The man sat there with his round-mirrored reflector tilted on his forehead like a cartoon Cyclops and intoned that my blindness would come eventually, probably sooner than later, and I should start preparing--learn braille, arrange for mobility training, all those jolly pastimes for a recent teenager. The place was a doctor's cold office in Denver, where I had not been before and have never been since (either the doctor's office or the city). I don't think I said much. Being dutiful, I thanked him, I guess. I had seen a lot of doctors, but none had ever told me that." So here I am again, Denver. Welcome me back. What I say today is a salute to the time between. From Denver to Denver, a kind of sandwich, a living sandwich, like a mile-high Mac, full of challenge. Assuming that not many of you have read this book, perhaps I should tell you more of that challenge. After the Denver prophecy, there followed about twenty years during which my vision slowly deteriorated. Then I was blind for fifteen years, and I mean really blind--white cane, braille, only the barest perception of bright light. My medical problem was uveitis, which treated with cortisone gradually produces cataracts. They cannot be operated upon because of the uveitis, and so they grow, slowly at first; in the end, rapidly like well-watered weeds. Eventually they are what Americans seldom experiences any more--dense, mature cataracts that produce complete blindness. As so many of your patrons know, one of the most traumatic events for those with failing sight is giving up driving. Again let me read you a bit from _Second Sight_. "It was hard to give up driving. For urban, southern Californians, it marks the end of spontaneity. From then on, my schedule had to be carefully meshed with someone else's. I was, as Robert Murphy described the paraplegic, a passive recipient, `waiting for the world to come to me in its own time, if at all.' I stopped driving at a point just before James Thurber did. He described some of his last times at the wheel. 'A peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me often like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front end of barges, and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring.'" "Oh, how I appreciate Thurber's penultimate feelings. `I have a curious desire to cry while driving at night, but so far have conquered that, save for a slight consistent whimpering that I keep up.' Not long after that, one bids farewell to spontaneity and quits." Thus it is that challenge leads to adaptation. Braille was my basic salvation. Oh, Louis Braille, clever man! Like rashes of delight your crowded pages brought in worlds of ideas and allowed me to let them out again. . . . Standard Grade 2 braille came fairly easily, though no one should think the transition from visual to tactile reading comes without trauma. There are months in which it seems those fingers will never transmit. I abandoned playing the guitar since the calluses were an impediment. Reading prevailed over `The Foggy, Foggy Dew.' I went on to Grade 3, that wonderful short-hand version, and I have praised that system every since. When writing this book, I wanted to emphasize my indebtedness to braille, so I convinced the publishers to photograph braille for the end papers; braille became indeed the beginning and the end. It has occurred to me, however, that the blind can't read these passages because they're not embossed. And very few sighted people can read braille. I may be the only one here who can tell you what these end papers say. As my sight deteriorated into blindness, I remained a college professor, and one of my jobs was lecturing. A good lecture requires quotations to flesh it out and bring it to life. As my sight got fuzzier and fuzzier, milkier and milkier, I could not read the passages I wished, and my braille was not yet fast enough to be effective. So I had a friend--not an Alexander Scourby or a Bob Askey, but still a fine, dramatic reader--record passages on tape, and it was easy enough to flip them on when needed. That led to combining the quotations with contemporary slides and music, until I had fifteen-minute presentations to tuck into lectures a dozen or fifteen times a term. Everyone profited. As for the basic notes for the lectures, braille worked well, except that I have to confess to a subterfuge. In Grade 3 I could braille a great deal on 3 x 5 cards, slip them in my jacket pocket, read them without anyone knowing, walk casually around the front of the room, and impress everyone with my erudition. How blindness sharpens memory! I wrote three books while I was blind. One needs readers, of course, for the obscure documents and rarer books. I will always cherish the list of my readers--wonderful students, many of whom became genuine friends. But here again, the road was not without detours. I learned the hard way that subject material is often related to visual capacity. When sighted, I had become excited over artists who had drawn the American West but who had never been there, who had drawn from their imagination to depict a new land. I was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue the subject in England, and Shirley and I pursued every painting about the American West in every gallery, country estate, or museum in the land. At that time, however, my sight was failing fast, and gradually it dawned on me that Delacroix and Bonheur and Miller called out for eyes, not ears. I was on the wrong track. I was Beethoven trying to be a music critic; Franklin Roosevelt aspiring to be a sprinter. Some years into my complete blindness, I made another false start. I got interested in the life of Big Bill Haywood, the anarchist Wobbly labor organizer of Western miners, particularly in this state of Colorado. For about a year my readers and I delved into the biographies and the secondary material. Slowly I realized that Haywood was not a good subject for a blind author. He had been dragged constantly into the courts and there were shelves of transactions in countless cities. The federal government had him on its list of dangerous individuals, and Washington housed records that detailed his every move for years at a time. Going through those heaps of material without skimming and jumping from one heading to another would have been a horrendous task. A sighted scholar can do that. A reader cannot do it for you. I abandoned Haywood and turned instead to another man who interested me, Josiah Royce. He proved an ideal subject for a blind scholar, because at the time of his death the Royce family had destroyed mountains of his personal papers. My wife is a good birder, and she knew birds by sight. I thought, wouldn't it be nice while she identified birds by sight if I did the same by their call. Together we'd make a remarkable team. I started listening to records, like the supplement to the _Peterson Guide_, and I listened and listened. Alas. I never was any good at distinguishing a thrush from a finch or whatever I was supposed to distinguish. And I gave it up. In _Second Sight_ I came to see the birding episode as symptomatic of the way I reacted to blindness: "If that was the way it was to be, then that was the way it was to be. My profession not only was good economically, but it also became a kind of retreat. The office was so familiar, untouched by anyone but myself. There, I could ignore my blindness. There, my innate desire to work and do well was rewarded. It satisfied what Arnold Beisser, the disabled psychiatrist, calls the need to live intensely. I could even fantasize that students really cared what I was saying, that someone might actually want to read the books I was writing. Teaching evaluations were good, promotions came on schedule, and book reviews were mildly complimentary. Did I cease wanting my old sight back? Well, at least I stopped thinking much about it. I was perfectly prepared to live out my life, and Shirley was prepared to live it out with me, blind. This personal history of challenge and adaptation proved, however, to be far from over. The mature, dense cataracts began to leak, the leakage caused the system to clog, and glaucoma set in. An emergency operation was called, but with no expectations, since the retinas were assumed to be badly damaged by the years of inflammation. But when the bandages were removed, I saw again. There was Shirley in a striped blouse. I could point to the colors and say yellow and blue and red. And the whole doctor's office was an incredible experience--the shining instruments, the nurse in her white-pants uniform--it made me think of landings on the moon. Sight restored after long disuse does not come immediately. Though the lens and retina are functioning perfectly, one doesn't see well at first. Vision is composed of many elements, not just light hitting the retina. There is an interesting book by Arthur Zadonc of Amherst, which describes two kinds of light--that coming from nature and that coming from the mind. The two meet and create vision, but without both, there is no vision. The latter is the light from within, and if you were a Quaker you might call it the inner light. The light from within has to meet the light from without to create vision. From a more scientific standpoint, the brain, like an unused muscle, has to readjust. As Oliver Sacks wrote, "We are not given the world; we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection." It took me about six months to get the vision I have now, about 20/40 corrected. The literature of restored vision was expanded in a May 1993 _New Yorker_ article in which Oliver Sacks described Virgil, a 50-year-old man whose sight was restored after a lifetime of blindness. When the bandages were removed, Virgil saw, true, but in another sense he only began to learn to see. He was mentally still blind. The brain, which acts in this case rather like a muscle, has atrophied from lack of use. Or, using an educational analogy, it needs to be taught or retaught to see. With Virgil, as so often, it was such a frustrating and unhappy experience that he eventually reverted psychologically to his blind self. I likewise can attest to negative feelings in those months after my sight was restored. In my case fifteen years was apparently enough to make me forget the world that I had once _learned_ to see. The blind are paid deference in an effort to make things easier for them. I can remember wondering how much of my accomplishment was based on the fact that I was blind, how much of my credit was unearned. When back in the race on a level with everyone else, could I make it? So on the day the bandages were removed, Shirley drove me home, and I looked at this world again--the white and yellow arrows and broken lines on the streets, the colors of cars, the landscaped freeway intersections--I was Robert DeNiro in the movie _Awakenings_. But I was also Madeline Stowe in _Blink_, with still fuzzy vision and a fundamental ambiguity about the future. I wanted to write down all of these feelings. The historian in me wanted to record it for myself. It was too wonderful to just let go. So every night I sat at my brailler (I wasn't able to read yet) and recalled experiences like opening a kitchen cupboard and seeing the Milk of Magnesia bottle--the most beautiful blue in the world. It made me wonder what beauty is. When you're first getting your sight back, everything is beautiful. That mess of a garage of ours was truly beautiful to me--the colors, the shapes. I was like a child again. But as I began to record these feelings, I kept wondering how my experience compared with others. I began reading in the literature of the blind. And I got terribly excited about the people I met, people like James Thurber and Eleanor Clark and Jacques Lusseyran. Lusseyran, for example, was a Frenchman, blind from the age of eight. During World War II his French Resistance cell required all applicants to be interviewed by him because he was able to judge people through their voices better than any sighted person could ever do. Lusseyran as a boy remembered mothers who would not let their children play with him because he was blind. He felt sorry for them, as he did all blind children who under the guise of being protected were not allowed to find their second world of seeing. The greatest danger to a blind child, Lusseyran said, comes from sighted people who imagine that their way of seeing the world is the only way, not listening to the blind child's way. I thought of that when I read a manuscript not too long ago by an English blind philosopher, who used the word "visionist" in the same way that we use the word "racist." A visionist thinks that sighted vision is the only real way to see, like the mother of Lusseyran's blind childhood friend. In contrast was Lusseyran's own second visual life which he considers a stream of light and joy. "I have found where it flowed and stayed close to it, walking beside its banks. Doors had opened inside me leading into a place of refuge, a cave, and everything that happened to me entered there and was reflected a thousand times over before it was extinguished." Another of my newly found blind writers was Eleanor Clark, the novelist, who lashed back about her growing blindness: "Who says you have to accept it, experience it, still less relish it?" I admired her feistiness. She alternated between fury ("Go away, get under there with the snakes, I'm sick of you") and anguish ("Secretly I yell No, no! and shut my ears or they shut themselves"). Give me, she said, "a good healthy capacity for gloom and despair." That's a very different attitude. It is easy to get mystical about the blind. Embedded in the myths of the race are notions that the blind are superior. This hit me hardest when my friend, Bill Brandon, directed me to Ovid's story of Tiresias. Here is a young Theban walking in the woods and surprising two snakes mating. He had stumbled over the male and female wrestling in coitus over the secret of life. He struck them with his stick and was immediately altered into a woman. For seven years he lived completely female. Then, walking in the woods, he once more came upon serpents coupling. He battered them again [You'd think he would have learned, wouldn't you?] and was restored to the gender of his birth. Thereafter he lived as one who had known life as both male and female, one who was blessed with the heavenly ability to see the other person's point of view. The scene shifts to Olympus where Zeus and Hera are feuding over the momentous issue of which sex has the greater pleasure in love making (Zeus saying the woman; Hera, the man.) [You'd think the gods had better things to do.] In desperation they summoned Tiresias, graced with the gift to see both sides, to settle their argument. He sided with Zeus. "If the parts of love pleasure be counted as ten, Thrice three go to women, one only to men." Hera, furious with the verdict, struck Tiresias blind. Unable to counter his wife's curse, but pitying the begetter of his victory, Zeus endowed Tiresias with prophecy. So the blind prophet strode through Greek mythology as the wise man to whom heroes, including the great Odysseus, repaired for guidance. Now, it should be clear that, when blind, I never felt superior to anyone, believe me. I certainly did not see me . . . as blessed with any special insights on sex. Yet the story caused me to wonder if I might not be in an unusual position to say something about blindness and sight. Though I never felt prophetic, I am willing to acknowledge that blind men like Lusseyran . . . have used their blindness in ways that suggest modern Tiresiases. And it is sobering to remember that [Lusseyran contends] that all blind people could have these gifts did not society relentlessly teach that the blind cannot see. More often than making them prophets, we say the blind have special keenness in their other senses, remarkable hearing, incredible smell or touch, phenomenal memories. If we can elevate the blind or near-blind, we can also diminish them. Sight seems so crucial to most of us that to lose it is to lose an essential part of our selves. We're then not whole. We're a vehicle minus a wheel, a cart without a horse, a lizard without a tail. But I suggest considerable care when you think that. The blind have their own ways of seeing, rich in imagination, often flooded with inner light. Their selves have not been violated. They are not made saints or prophets by their blindness, but neither have they lost any measure of their whole selves and their potentials. Their challenge is to communicate their abilities; yours is to recognize and reward them. Society's challenge is to give you the resources to do so. When those resources become pinched, the effect sends a shiver along the whole chain, but the challenge can and must be met. I close with the last words in _Second Sight_ because I think they relate to what we're saying about challenge and about adaptation: "Barring the unforeseen, it seems that the overall pattern of my life will be the initial birth out of womb-blindness into sight, the descent into fifteen years of another blindness, and then the rebirth into sight. There will be one final plunge, I know, one last blindness (or one last sight?). When that comes, I stand fortunate, because like Tiresias, I have tasted the two alternatives before." Unlike Tiresias, I will not advise the gods on sex . . . and not even on the delights of darkness and light. If they were to question me on blindness and sight, if one like Hera suggested that I renounce my wicked ways of seeing to understand my former sightlessness, I think I would mumble a few words about the two faces of reality. I might revive the old clich‚ that sighted or blind, we are all disabled. I would beg forgiveness that I had once aspired to become a mini-king in the country of the blind. And I would try to recite a poem I read somewhere about every singing bird concealing within itself "a bat in love with darkness." Thank you very much for having me. Robert V. Hine Denver, Colorado Professor Recalled, University of California, Irvine 1990- University of California, Riverside 1954-1990 Chairman, Department of History 1962-1967 In-residence, University of California, Santa Cruz (Kresge College) 1973 Huntington Library Fellowships 1952, 1954, 1961; Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Book Award 1953; Guggenheim Fellowships 1957, 1968; E. Harris Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching (Danforth Foundation) 1967; Distinguished Teaching Award, Academic Senate, University of California, Riverside 1968; National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellow 1977; California Historical Society Award of Merit 1977 and Henry R. Wagner Memorial Award 1986; Southern California Historical Society Fellow 1990; Western History Association, Honorary Life Membership 1990 B.A., Pomona College; M.A. and PhD., Yale University _California's Utopian Colonies_ (1953); _Edward Kern and American Expansion_ (1962); _The American West: An Interpretive History (1973) (RC 23190); _Community on the American Frontier: Separate but Not Alone (1980) (RC 22805); _Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard_ (1992); _Second Sight_ (1993) (RC 37336) *** 6/14/95 (gft) ***