[blindza] Excerpt from book about blind world traveller

The following is an excerpt from that book, A sense of the world, about the 
blind world traveller, James Holman, by Jason Roberts, and it comes from a 
piece shortly after he turns 100% blind, for no apparent reason - not sure if 
they come up with an explanatory reason later on, but anyway:

"...if you are sighted and wish to experience the limitations of 
sight-centrism, sit down in your most familiar chair, in your most familiar 
room, pick an object across the room, and stare at it as long as you like.Do 
your best to fix it in your memory, then close your eyes, and rise, and walk 
towards it.Chances are your first 2 or 3 steps will be natural and confident, 
but by the 4th or 5th, a certain apprehension will suddenly set in. By the 6th 
or 7th, your focus shifts from progress to protection. Is a forgotten piece of 
furniture lurking at shin height? Your hands splay out at arms length, ready to 
touch a wall or interrupt a fall. Perhaps you can fight the impulse to open 
your eyes long enough to reach the vicinity of your target object. If you 
actually succeed in touching it, your motions arise more out of a tentative 
clambering, than a true sense of location. If you're honest with yourself, you 
may acknowledge at least the slight presence of panic. No matter how intimately 
familiar you are with the room, whether you've occupied it for a month, or a 
lifetime, the results will be the same. That's, because your visual, spatial 
map begins to degrade, with your first step, and in the abscence of new data 
soon becomes useless. It appears to be enduring, but is in fact a repeated 
ephemerality, persistent only because it is continuously updated. Like the 
screen display of a computer, it needs constant refreshing. Pull the plug, and 
it disappears into darkness. That mild panic, by the way, is a common source of 
pity for the blind. The notion is that they spend their lives in that 
uncertain, unsettling state. They do not..."

The term, sight-centrism, seems to be what the author uses to explain that the 
sighted world is sort of subconsciously, permanently focusing on visual input, 
without really understanding/realising that they are really just carrying out a 
form of sense/environment interpretation, and focusing on one specific form of 
a sense.

You can also download the audio clip of the above content here, since it might 
be a bit more of an emotive rendition thereof <smile>:
http://www.blindza.co.za/uploads/book-excerpt.mp3
(it is just over 2 minutes long and is just over 800kb)

Stay well

Jacob Kruger
Blind Biker
Skype: BlindZA
'...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...'



__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature 
database 5366 (20100814) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com

Other related posts:

  • » [blindza] Excerpt from book about blind world traveller - Jacob Kruger