The Blind Girl Sees

"I see men; but they look like trees, walking." (Mk 8:24, RSV)

     Such were the words of a blind man in the process of regaining his sight. Those who have lost their sight, I presume, remember to some extent what the world used to look like. But what about those born blind? Initially, in fact, they would not even know they were blind.
    Thus, Sheila Hocken came from a whole family of visually impaired individuals. Her mother had lost most of her sight as a child due to a rubella infection, while her father suffered from congenital cataracts - a defect he bequeathed to Sheila and her brother. Surprisingly enough, despite his disability, Dad was able to make a living selling drapery, and when that became too much for him, he reinvented himself as a musician. But the adults operated a conspiracy of silence with respect to their children, never letting them know that they were different. The result was that Sheila grew up assuming everyone saw the world as through a heavy gauze. She wondered why other children didn't run into brick walls, or fall over objects as often as she, but perhaps she was just clumsy. It was not until she was about seven that she found out that she was blind and, of course, she did not know what sight really was.
    By the time she reached her late teens, her eyesight had further deteriorated to the extent that she could do no more than distinguish light from darkness. Nevertheless, she managed to obtain employment, and she was provided with a seeing eye dog, which became the centre of her life.
     One amusing incident occurred when her flatmate had gone away for the weekend, leaving her white mice in a cage on the table to be cared for. Sheila came out on Sunday morning to make herself a cup of tea when, suddenly, she heard the scratching of tiny claws on the table top. One of the mice had escaped! Carefully, Sheila took hold of an empty tin, brought it to the edge of the table, and waited with bated breath. Eventually, she heard a movement, and felt the mouse on the tin. Quickly, she got the animal inside, clapped a hand over the top, and put it back inside the cage. That evening, when her flatmate arrived home, she demanded to know what a grey mouse was doing in the cage with her two white ones. Sheila had caught a wild mouse! (Although she claimed this happened in the morning, I presume it was still dark. A wild mouse would be unlikely to venture forth in the daylight and, of course, a blind person wouldn't bother with light switches.)
     However, her life changed at the age of 29, when a surgeon removed her cataracts and replaced them with intraocular lenses. Even then, the possibility of failure was present. Without the stimulation of light for so long, her retinas - the light sensitive cells at the back of the eyes - might have shriveled up and died, leaving her doubly blind. But it wasn't so. Here is her description of the moment when the bandages were removed and, apprehensively, she opened her eyes:

     What happened then - the only way I can describe the sensation - is that I was suddenly hit, physically struck by brilliance, like an immense electric shock into my brain, and through my entire body. It flooded my whole being with a shock-wave, this utterly unimaginable, incandescent brightness: there was white in front of me, a dazzling white that I could hardly bear to take in, and a vivid blue that I had never thought possible. It was fantastic, marvellous, incredible. It was like the beginning of the world.

      She looked around, and there was lots of different shades of green. She looked at the blue again, and said, "Oh it's blue, it's so beautiful." The nurse explained that it was her uniform. And there's the interesting thing: we all cite, as an example of subjectivity, the impossibility of describing colour to someone born blind. But, in fact, although her memory of colours was blurred, she could still recognize them, at least in their strongest shades.
     Next thing, everything started to blur over, and she was afraid she was losing her eyesight again. However, all that had happened was that her eyes had filled with tears. Of course, the bandages had to be applied again; the eyes could not be subjected to too much stimulus all of a sudden, but she now knew there was a bright world outside.
     People would come around, standing silently, and she would not have a clue who they were until they spoke. She looked down at her own hands, and was horrified at how ugly they were - all the veins standing out, as well as the bones of the knuckles. Then her friends showed her their hands, and they were all the same. (Take a look at your own hands - especially if you are white like Sheila, because white skin shows up all the blemishes.) When she first looked in the mirror, she was shocked at the big lump protruding from the middle of her face. Touching it with her fingers, she realised it was her nose, but she hadn't known it was so prominent. Perhaps, she thought, people have been kind and hidden the truth from her. Only later did it become obvious that everyone had one. (Well, every white person. Blacks and Orientals think that our schnozzles are pretty awful.)
     Some things she recognized right away, such as trees; she just wasn't aware how many they were. Once she called her husband to tell him that a bird had just landed in a tree, only to have him explain that this sort of thing happened all the time. Life became a constant field of discovery. She would see something, say a teapot, and she wouldn't have the foggiest idea what it was until she was able to handle it. And what was that great expanse of green? Grass! She had to kneel down and feel it to be sure, and she found it marvellous that it existed in so many different shades of green. Even the separate blades seemed to be different in colour.
     There were other skills which the rest of us learn very early in life, and take for granted. To go to the shops, she harnessed up her seeing eye dog because, after all, she didn't know the route by sight. But suddenly it appeared that the pavement was rushing by under her, a fence was approaching at breakneck speed, and even the shadows of the lamp posts were like black bars blocking her way. She fell over when walking through the park because her brain couldn't recognize the gentle slope which her eyes were seeing. Then there were the pictures on the wall. She could understand the copy of Rembrandt's Man in the Golden Helmet, but she could not make head or tail of the seascape. Apart from the fact that she had never seen the sea, her brain had yet to gain the skill of interpreting a two dimensional picture as three dimensional. Also, it appeared that, while still possessing some residual sight at school, she had learned the numerals and alphabet. Once her sight had been restored, while still at hospital, she had phoned everybody she knew, without needing help. But when she saw the letters, "SALT" on a packet, she had to put the four letters together one by one to interpret the word. You see, once you have learned to read, you recognize every word the way you recognize faces. You have picked up the "gestalt" of the word. And that, incidentally, is why you often do not notice typographic errors; you see what you expect to see. But the blind girl had to learn this skill from scratch.
     So what can we learn from all this? Be thankful you have all your senses. And the world is a wonderful place, but we take it for granted. So turn off your computer, tablet, or phone, and get off your butt. Take time to smell the flowers. And look at the grass. Every blade is a different shade of green.
Reference: Sheila Hocken (1977), Emma and I (Emma was her seeing eye dog.) Also, an interview she gave for TV a few years later.