Green Jade Plum Trees

            Because I am blind and cannot see faces I must imagine them. I am helped in this daily round by the fact that I can see colors. Many blind people can see something of the world and my own small portion is essentially a kind of abstract impressionism: I live inside Jackson Pollock’s famous painting “Blue Poles” and   I live there while walking the ordinary streets. This brand of walking and seeing is both maddening and lovely. I see faces like shining leaves of the jade trees and I wonder what you look like. “You” are all friends and strangers alike—wind tossed and set against black boughs and I know you differently than your hand mirrors or photographs. Sometimes I think I do not know you at all. OccasionallyI allow myself to imagine that I see the inestimable and charged faces that we all suspect lie just below the surface. But in any event it’s certain that I don’t know what you look like. I don’t even see colors correctly. For your face I might see a parchment colored moon or the flash of falling water.   
            Contrary to what the movies might tell you, blind people do not generally go about touching the faces of people as a means of “seeing”. I think it’s safe to say that the visually impaired  are willing and even happy to know you by means of imagination and some good old fashioned common sense. For me this means seeing the wrong hues and strange light while listening with my best attention. 
            I recently traveled to London with 9 women students from Ohio State University. We were  on a ten day tour of British historical sites and museums. The students had taken a course with me back in Columbus on the Victorians and the  development of 19th century institutions designed to house people with disabilities. We read texts on cultural history and we viewed David Lynch’s classic film about Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”. We read Dickens. And then we flew to the UK to see Queen Victoria’s old hospitals and to ponder together the history of medicine andits relationship to what we now call disability. And together we saw thousands of strange things. Even so, I did not see a single face. Even now I do not know what my students look like. And then again, in an odd way, I do know a thing or two. I taught them how to guide me with their outstretched elbows; how to help me locate the steps of the underground; how to find curbs. We traveled together as a group and worked our way through the rush hour throngs of Trafalgar Square and each student had a chance to guide her blind professor in the unfamiliar city. They also had the opportunity to describe what they were seeing whether we were on the street or deep inside the Victoria and Albert museum. And together we saw an astonishing array of things, everything  from Charles Dickens cigar cutter to the Rosetta stone. Yet despite the shared intimacy that comes with being guided around a city I mean it when I say I can’t tell you what any of my students looks like. I wouldn’t be able to describe them to the wax sculptors at Madame Tussaud’s.
Not seeing faces is nothing new for me. What was new during this college trip with nine young women was the omnipressant ghost of Queen Victoria: not Victoria the dowager but the queen as “flaneur”—the monarch who presided over the first modern wave of leisure class staring and whose great city of empire was built around the emergent middle class obsession with appearances.  As I walked with my students and held tight to  each elbow I knew that we were walking together through Victoria’s funhouse where the perfect body and the idea of proper fashion first became economic necessities. Many people today do not know that the concept of disability was essentially invented by the Victorians who celebrated a new kind of body—one that could work in the factories and one that looked good wearing the trappings of new wealth. The term “disability” was first used by Karl Marx to designate those who couldn’t be functional workers or consumers in a new machine age. Almost overnight people with disabilities were transferred from the village square to newly constructed hospitals, asylums, and work houses.
And so there we were: a 51 year old blind man with a white cane and his students, all of whom were 20 and 21 years old, all of them doing their best to help their professor make his way through some of the world’s busiest traffic. By means of my damaged retinas I saw flashes of gold, spirals of periwinkle blues, sudden specters that might be people. I clung tenaciously to my college girls. They in turn learned the art of being “sighted guides”. They counted off the final steps as we descended into the tube. They eased me around iron lamp posts and perambulators.
My students discovered that they were being stared at in a new way. The staring is filled with appraisal and assumptions. It’s nearly continuous. It has sentimentality about it. A cab driver called out to the woman who was guiding me across an intersection in front of the British museum: “Good job, Luv!” The woman who was guiding me knew she was being sized up for her loveliness of limb along with her charitable act of forbearance.
I was guided for ten days by Luv after Luv. I couldn’t see their faces. I saw only a painter’s palette of hues and vague shapes. They in turn could see how old habits of Victorian staring were fixed their ways when they walked with me. I in turn could discern that they saw this. Such staring is antagonistic to what the Greeks called “Eros”—the young in this view should not be seen with the old; those who are beautiful and stylish should not be paired with disfigurement. The Greeks would not have understood this.
I in turn saw my students without  living in the tyranny of fashionable staring.
When you are being guided through the underground with all its pools of alternating light and darkness you tend to see your escort in a posturalway, rather than through the aggression of the libidinous eye.
Here is how I saw my students:
They were upright, confident, green as the jade plum trees  in spring.