An Essay on Embroidered Birds and Blindness

 

1.

 

When I was a boy I lived alone on many days. I’ve written about this elsewhere. I leaned into the water and opened my damaged eyes and watched a turtle move in and out of the boat house. The turtle was building a nest. The turtle’s life was fervent but steady. In my poor eyes she looked like a Rorschach.

 

2.

 

When I became quasi-known for writing a memoir about blindness a group called the National Federation of the Blind accused me of demeaning blind people. In the memoir I describe trying to ride a bicycle when I couldn’t see. I did the bicycle thing for several years, largely because my mother insisted that I should. She didn’t want me to be blind. “Don’t be blind,” she said. “You’ll never get anywhere.” My poor mother! Blind people are enormously successful! The problem for the blind and visually impaired is that there are lots of old fashioned social attitudes about blindness. There’s a Victorian quality to the public’s incomprehension about “the blind”–we’re thought to be helpless and virtually unemployable, for indeed how can a blind man find his mouth to eat or locate the bus stop? It is still the case that some 70 per cent of the blind remain unemployed.

 

3.

I don’t know when I first understood this–I was very young, I know that much. I saw that one can learn by means of reversible luck. (Remember the old days when you could buy a reversible suit?) 

In general terms people think they understand luck. Most think its a visitation, like the appearance of magic in a fairy tale. I can’t say this isn’t true. Certainly I’m not presumptuous enough to speak on behalf of the angels. But with reversible luck I don’t have to. Reversible luck says you’re open to the potential for goodness. And “open” means open: you are aware that the structure you imagined for the day will impede you now; you see that a minor set back is really an advantage.

Reversible luck is what we call “thinking on the run” or “outside the box” –pick your cliche. But its also a sort of mental jujitsu: we instantly change the terms of our problem and in turn achieve an advantage. Being lost works this way. The American poet James Wright once got lost while he was in graduate school and entered the wrong classroom and heard, quite by chance a professor reciting the poems of Georg Trakl. Trakl was one of the great 20th century German language expressionist poets, a poet largely unknown in the U.S. –at least in those days. What James Wright heard changed his life.

 

4.

The important thing is to remain all your life both able and willing to learn something different. Reversible luck won’t work without this rich, strange, extra-absorptive intelligence. The poet Robert Bly writes: “The beauty that six or seven words can bring/Together makes the whole brain sing.” Do you see that learning something different can derive from a small thing?

 

5.

Suppose you’re the kind of blind person who believes that the only way to read is by knowing Braille. Let’s be clear. Braille is a good thing. A reader of Braille can access information at his or her fingertips. Braille is the closest thing to the immediacy of sight reading. Yet today, with advancements in ophthalmology, there are more blind people (legally blind) who have usable vision than ever before. They don’t necessarily need Braille to have a literate and successful life.

 

Or let’s suppose the Braille reader gets carpal tunnel syndrome or has tennis elbow. Isn’t having a talking computer that can read books aloud a good thing? Of course it is. And isn’t having someone read to you–someone who loves poetry–can’t that be a beautiful thing?

My point is that one needs intense flexibility all one’s life, both “with” and “without” a disability–but especially “with” a disability.

The more one can live a life without adhering to static behavior the better. Routine will kill reversible luck. My feeling is that a lot of blind people ruin their chances for serendipity because they’re weighted down by the dark mud of rehabilitation strategies. The white cane people don’t like the guide dog people; the advocates for tactile warning strips on a railway platform are demeaned by those who say that the blind don’t need this kind of help. On and on it goes. The static condition of disability in the U.S. is ingrown, confused and unlucky. In this way blind people give away their power. Did you know the average computer package of assistive technology for the blind pc user costs over $1,000? This is a scandal since every computer should be blind-usable right out of the box. But the blind sign up for this burden, a burden that I believe is a testament to the antipathy of blindness advocacy organizations to work with other groups.

 

6.

There is no right way to read. A person with autism may use facilitated communication and a special typing device. An elderly blind person may use Braille exclusively. A younger blind person born without hands may use a talking computer. Rules are not persuasive in the world of reversible luck.

 

There is no right way to read, there is only good reading. If literacy has a value this is it. Those who read well read adventurously. Reading adventurously is like the picture of Jesus standing in his boat, his back to the far shore. He knows he will get there. He doesn’t have to see.

 

7.

 

There is no right way to be disabled or to be blind. Even the day itself can lay claims on disability. A person with low vision begins her day reading with large print. By the afternoon she might need JAWS for Windows or a Braille display. 

 

8.

I suppose I’m writing about reversible luck today for several reasons. Recently I was uninvited to be the keynote speaker at an Iowa organization for rehab specialists serving the blind and visually impaired. These specialists had invited me and I’d agreed to speak for free. Then after months of planning the word came back that I wasn’t needed. I know for a fact that this had everything to do with my public outcry against the Iowa Department of the Blind’s discrimination against a woman with a guide dog. And so you see, we’re back to the issue of reversible luck, or by turn, how to create the conditions that will make such luck possible. The Iowa Department of the Blind didn’t want a woman with a guide dog in a computer class. Imagine. And imagine the group of sub-rosa people who would dis-invite a visually impaired American writer from speaking on their own behalf? Silly! To imagine that my years of research both in Disability Studies and in the history of literacy and the arts might have some bearing on the lives of the blind in Iowa.

 

9.

There is no right way to read. There is only good reading. And the latter leads to reversible luck. As Robert Bly writes:

 

“This man  went up to monsters and asked to be

Adopted. I’ve done that often. Reader, are you

Fond of the Jonah story? Say to a monster,

“I may have something for you, but I can’t promise.”

 

10.

 

What about the embroidered birds in the title?  Did you know there are people who still believe that embroidery is all the blind can do?

 

S.K.