Brief Essays on Altered Sight: On Braille, Loss, and Blindness’ Many Forms

Diagnosis

There are so many different ways of becoming blind.

When I sat at the lunch table at Vision Loss Resources, on any given day, fellow vocational rehab students might have reported, in turn, something like this: 

Diabetes.
Car crash.
I was a premie and got too much oxygen in the incubator.
Ocular melanoma.
Retinitis Pigmentosa.
Accident.
It’s genetic.
A tractor fell on my head.
Untreated pneumonia.
Diabetes.
Mystery—I had a headache for nine months. It was my optic nerve.
Motorcycle accident.
Diabetes.
Auto-immune disease….really they don’t know.
Got punched in my good eye.

Conditions with labels, but no explanations. Why one eye sees and another does not.

It’s different for each of us. Losing sight drip by drip. Rod by cone, axon by dendrite.

Or losing it all at once.

Most blind folks start life with sight and lose it somewhere along the way. But some are born blind; they might argue with my sense of loss. Others go blind as infants or toddlers. They may lose other things—hearing, the parent who died in the car crash, their ability to remember much.

Everybody wants—and loses—something different.

*

Cobbler

A baked fruit dessert with a thick, pebbled crust. Perhaps it gets its name from its bumpy surface, resembling a street paved with cobblestones. Cobbler, more commonly: a person who makes or mends shoes. My shoes often demand the attentions of a cobbler. The man who repairs my shoes holds up my boots, points to the worn heels and the toes of the sole. He tells me the wear pattern shows I walk too fast. Slow down, he says. Relax. What’s your hurry?

I walk fast because I was the youngest of four children; I had to keep up. I walked to school. I walked to Hebrew school, to pottery class, to 31 Flavors in Harper’s Court. I walked to the grocery store and the pizza place and to my friend Sarah’s in the rain. I grew up places it wasn’t safe to dawdle.

I walk fast because I don’t see well enough to drive. I walk fast for the same reason people drive fast: they have places to get to, too many things to do in too few minutes. I walk fast because I live in a climate where winter is long and subzero temperatures remain common despite climate change. Still cold enough, as my father liked to say, to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

I walk faster with my white cane because it tells me things my eyes do not. In winter it growls over concrete (go fast), hisses over ice (go slow), and gurgles through a puddle (go around).

I’ve worn down the tip of my cane more than the heels of my boots. I notice this quickness with a cane bothers some sighted people. Do they think blind people are supposed to be slow?

*

Impossibility

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen brags to Alice that she sometimes believes as many as “six impossible things before breakfast,” a good practice for learning braille. If you stick it out, through the alphabet and punctuation and getting from one line to the next, Cindy cheerfully hands you the slate, a piece of metal, perhaps two inches down by eight across, heavy and cool in the hand.

The top side is a complicated surface of bumps and rectangular openings, the bottom a regular pattern of indents, in groups of six, two across by three down. On the left, a hinge. On the right, a half-moon dent just the right size for an index finger. Your finger naturally presses against the dent and the slate wings open, reveals itself to be two pieces of metal hinged together.

You can now feel the top plate has four rows of openings. The upper surface of the lower plate feels like rows of wells—like egg cartons for fish eggs in little groups of six. The lower plate also has four sharp bumps at its corners. I run my fingers over the metal until they seem to have the iron-tang smell of red blood cells. But it is more than I—with my born-sighted bias—can figure out or describe.

Cindy, still cheerful, slides what she calls a stylus across the table. Less than three inches long, it’s a plastic knob on the end of what feels like a fat, dull darning needle. A tiny awl.

I cannot figure it out. Cindy demonstrates, clamping a thick piece of braille paper between the jaws of the slate. The four sharp teeth of the lower jaw bite into the paper and with the hinge closed, hold the paper fast. Through the topside openings, she presses dents into the paper.

I hear a quick tapping noise as her expert hand punches. Then she pulls out the paper, flips it, and glides it across the table to me. She has pressed into the paper the letters of the alphabet in braille. It will take me months to get the feel of how to press the correct spot in each cell. But that is not the real challenge, Cindy explains.

You read braille as a bump, a series of convexities. But you make braille as a dent, concave.

So to write braille using a slate and stylus, you must relearn everything back to front. Right to left. Reversed. This is the point when many adult learners of braille leave the room, never to return.

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From The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight by Naomi Cohn, Rose Metal Press, October 2024.