Hello Everyone,
I was in Union Station in Washington DC a few weeks ago, when I saw something that has stayed with me ever since. A group of about five blind men were navigating the crowded hall, partly with the help of their canes. But they were also holding onto each other with their free arms. Chatting back and forth jovially, they had both the graceful ease and the remarkable efficiency of migrating geese or a first-rate basketball team.
When I was little, my mom told me about a conversation she’d had while teaching Sunday School. The class was learning about Jesus restoring sight to a blind man, and she wanted the four- or five-year-olds in her class to understand what it felt like to be blind. So she blindfolded them and had them move around the classroom a bit. She asked what it was like to not be able to see. When they concluded that they didn’t like it, she asked, “What would you do if you were blind? How would you get around? How would you do all of the things that you like to do?” One boy had the solution: “I would just take off the blindfold!” Simple!
If only it were. Even at my early age, I understood the naiveté of that response. I understood that losing my vision would be devastating for me in so many ways, both practical and aesthetic. And though I blame the Laura Ingalls Wilder books—in which Mary wakes up one morning unable to see—for some of my childhood fear of blindness, it continues to terrify me because observing the world is one of my very favorite activities.
And yet, a few years after my mom told me about her Sunday School lesson, I began to understand that there are many different kinds of blindness. I was in fifth grade, and I had been trying to impress a boy I had a crush on. I told him that I had been doing some thinking in the middle of the night (classic Sarah Jackson pick-up line) and something had reminded me of him. He responded by singing the chorus from Billy Joel’s classic song, “The River of Dreams.” I was embarrassed because I hadn’t heard it before and he didn’t seem to appreciate my late-night musings. But when I finally heard the whole song, the line, “I know I’m searching for something, something so undefined, that it can only be seen by the eyes of the blind” sent shivers of profundity up my fifth grade spine. “Blindness can actually be a strength?” I thought. I suspect it was somewhere around this time that I stopped scowling at paradoxes and started delighting in them; I was beginning to understand that the vision our eyes give us is only part of the picture.
None of the synonyms for “blind” in my computer’s thesaurus are at all flattering: visionless, unperceptive, obtuse, unrestrained, careless of, stupid, irrational, and so on. Both literal and figurative blindness are things we want to avoid. But as Mr. Joel articulated, sometimes a lack of physical sight can allow people to see something beyond the tangible world around us.
I have just finished up another (and alas, my final) summer as a student at Hollins, the University where I am earning my Masters in Children’s Literature.
And as I reflect on my experience there and on my attempts at creative writing and scholarship, it occurs to me that the image of the blind men in Union Station might be a rather fitting way of describing my time at Hollins.
I’m beginning to think that being a writer involves a certain kind of blindness, that none of us really sees what we’re doing. If we did, we’d quit, in either despair, awe, or some mixture of the two. It might seem a bit worrisome after four summers and more than four dollars in tuition to conclude that I don’t know what I’m doing. After all, our classes have given us many tools to help us navigate our way through the murkier parts of the writing process. And sure, our professors have given us much advice and many assignments that have provided essential experience as we leave grad school. We are as well equipped as we could ask to be, no doubt about it. But writing is a creative act, and so, in a sense, we are blind to every as-yet-unwritten word. It can be scary and frustrating and lonely. It can feel like trying to make your way through a crowded and overwhelming train station without being able to rely on your eyes.
The beauty of the Hollins campus will sustain me for the rest of my life.
But the best part of Hollins is that it isn’t over when it’s over, that as I stumble blindly forward, I know I am joining a whole community of other blind people holding confidently onto each other. They are fantastic writers and even more fantastic human beings.
So keep your eyes open, folks. There is a whole crowd of very talented writers heading to academic journals and bookstores near you!
My friend-peers will make you think and ask good questions. They will make you laugh and cry. They will spellbind you with creatures and stories and lands that you’ve never dreamed of, except that maybe you have been dreaming of them your whole life without knowing it.
And on occasion, like all good writers, they will show you something else, something undefined. They will show you what it means to take off the blindfold.
Have a great week,
Sarah/Mouse
(Thanks to the folks whose photos I swiped!)
