In his last letter, Goethe wrote, “The Ancients said that the animals are taught through their organs; let me add to this, so are men, but they have the advantage of teaching their organs in return.”
He wrote this in 1832, a time when phrenology was at its height, and the brain was seen as a mosaic of “little organs” subserving everything from language to drawing ability to shyness. Each individual, it was believed, was given a fixed measure of this faculty or that, according to the luck of his birth. Though we no longer pay attention, as the phrenologists did, to the “bumps” on the head (each of which, supposedly, indicated a brain-mind organ beneath), neurology and neuroscience have stayed close to the idea of brain fixity and localization–the notion, in particular, that the highest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is effectively programmed from birth: this part to vision and visual processing, that part to hearing, that to touch, and so on.
This would seem to allow individuals little power of choice, of self-determination, let alone of adaptation, in the event of a neurological or perceptual mishap.
But to what extent are we–our experiences, our reactions–shaped, predetermined, by our brains, and to what extent do we shape our own brains? Does the mind run the brain or the brain the mind–or, rather, to what extent does one run the other? To what extent are we the authors, the creators, of our own experiences? The effects of a profound perceptual deprivation such as blindness can cast an unexpected light on this. To become blind, especially later in life, presents one with a huge, potentially overwhelming challenge: to find a new way of living, of ordering one’s world, when the old way has been destroyed.
A dozen years ago, I was sent an extraordinary book called “Touching the Rock An Experience of Blindness.” The author, John Hull, was a professor of religious education who had grown up in Australia and then moved to England. Hull had developed cataracts at the age of thirteen, and became completely blind in his left eye four years later. Vision in his right eye remained reasonable until he was thirty-five or so, and then started to deteriorate. There followed a decade of steadily failing vision, in which Hull needed stronger and stronger magnifying glasses, and had to write with thicker and thicker pens, until, in 1983, at the age of forty-eight, he became completely blind.
“Touching the Rock” is the journal he dictated in the three years that followed. It is full of piercing insights relating to Hull’s life as a blind person, but most striking for me is Hull’s description of how, in the years after his loss of sight, he experienced a gradual attenuation of visual imagery and memory, and finally a virtual extinction of them (except in dreams)–a state that he calls “deep blindness.”
By this, Hull meant not only the loss of visual images and memories but a loss of the very idea of seeing, so that concepts like “here,” “there,” and “facing” seemed to lose meaning for him, and even the sense of objects having “appearances,” visible characteristics, vanished. At this point, for example, he could no longer imagine how the numeral 3 looked, unless he traced it in the air with his hand. He could construct a “motor” image of a 3, but not a visual one.
Hull, though at first greatly distressed about the fading of visual memories and images–the fact that he could no longer conjure up the faces of his wife or children, or of familiar and loved landscapes and places–then came to accept it with remarkable equanimity; indeed, to regard it as a natural response to a nonvisual world. He seemed to regard this loss of visual imagery as a prerequisite for the full development, the heightening, of his other senses.
Two years after becoming completely blind, Hull had apparently become so nonvisual as to resemble someone who had been blind from birth. Hull’s loss of visuality also reminded me of the sort of “cortical blindness” that can happen if the primary visual cortex is damaged, through a stroke or traumatic brain damage–although in Hull’s case there was no direct damage to the visual cortex but, rather, a cutting off from any visual stimulation or input.
In a profoundly religious way, and in language sometimes reminiscent of that of St. John of the Cross, Hull enters into this state, surrenders himself, with a sort of acquiescence and joy. And such “deep” blindness he conceives as “an authentic and autonomous world, a place of its own. . . . Being a whole-body seer is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions.”
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