I happily admit that I have a vivid imagination that often takes me into the realm of fantasy. Reality is rich, but fantasy makes life richer and often fosters creativity. I love imagining different scenarios for my own life, and this in turn has made me try to see things from other people’s perspectives.
Saint-Exupéry observed, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” And, in Helen Keller’s words, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” I am told by an old expert on Japan that there is an appreciation in that country for places and things that are off limits to the public, including great national treasures within certain temple precincts. I take that to be a tribute to the special role played by imagination: how much richer those places and objects may become to us when we know of them, yet cannot confront them and “check them off.”
For sighted people, the consciousness is normally dominated by the constant stream of visual perceptions. Sounds run a distant second to the role of visual distraction. The visual stream is like having the television on all day; the eye is drawn constantly toward the screen. Since I don’t have that, you might think that I would be locked within my mind. But that’s not the case. My imagination allows for rich engagement, not just in an imaginary world but in the real one.
I’m not sure this counts as an unblemished asset, but an odd side effect of being sightless has to do with confidences. My local community, Washington, is a town full of secrets, or supposed secrets. People tell me their secrets the way you might tell a bartender something that is on your mind. Sometimes very personal secrets, as at a confessional—so perhaps in this way I am like the priest who is unable to see the penitent but is there to grant absolution.
Often, the secrets I hear are silly or trivial. Sometimes, however, they are not. Indeed, you would probably find it hard to believe what I hear in confidence. (Of course, I can’t tell you.) Cabinet members, senators, heads of federal agencies, heads of educational institutions, old Hollywood icons, Supreme Court justices, captains of industry and finance—leaning close to me, out of the sides of their mouths, they confess all sorts of things. Mistakes. Transgressions. Bypasses that should not have been taken. Things overlooked that should not have been overlooked. Evidence uncovered that should not have been uncovered. Sometimes they want to get it off their chests, and they know I am discreet. I could have ruined lives. My word, or my ear, it seems, is good—and all the better because I have no eyes. As they say, go figure.
Powerful people have told me secrets about their lives, but sometimes that is nearly all I know about them. The rest of their lives is a mystery, and so there would be no point in revealing the little I know. Sometimes I wonder what is the correct amount of my own life to disclose to people and whether everything would be better if I disclosed a little more. Or would it be better if I disclosed less?
Something special about us blind people—and this, I have come to realize is an unqualified asset—is that we do not see horizons. It is a subtle thing, but not insignificant. I can testify that there are no longer any horizons in my own life. Since I left the hospital in Detroit, I have not perceived any of the everyday horizons that sighted people experience. My not seeing topological horizons might seem like something Delphic or metaphorical. It is not. Horizons are essentially a function of spatial perceptions, and only tangentially (pun intended) an aspect of experience.
We blind people cannot go toward a horizon, nor can we feel the limitation of space suggested by a horizon. We do not wonder what is beyond the horizon because we do not have horizons. For us, horizons just do not exist. No such thing. Walls and the like do exist for us, for example, when we physically encounter them. But except for echoes when the walls are very near, I do not establish a mental environment hemmed in by walls, either. I have developed a way to approximate the layout of a room, but with a diminished sense of enclosure. It’s subtle.
Schopenhauer wrote, “Every man takes the limit of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” With no horizons and no visual sensations to compete with and anchor my thoughts, I don’t have the same sense of boundaries shared by people impaired with sight. Sometimes this has to do with the physical world in front of me; sometimes I experience it as a vague border between the dream state and the waking state.
I also lack perspective. Not the sort that is supposed to inform judgment and decision making, I hope, but the kind that concerns visual artists. The sort of perspective that Professor Schnorrenberg once brought up at the university in discussing the innovations of the Renaissance painters: the concept of the vanishing point. Aside from visual memories from before I lost my eyesight—a blessing the magnitude of which I cannot express—I know no vanishing points. My image of the topographical world can cram in distant things without their having to be all squeezed together, as they would in perspective. I am a functional surrealist.
The duality of boundaries for me as a blind person is another element of my bent mentality. As I sit in a room, for instance, my maximum boundary of safety and freedom from fear of movement is…zero. The zone of pure safety
