Overdoing the Senses

If the author L. P. Hartley lives on, it is for the opening sentence of his 1953 novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” A parallel line for disabled people might be: Disability is an alien land: the people there are different.

What brings this gloomy thought to mind is Andy Isaacson’s “Sites Unseen,” his absorbing New York Times article about escorting a group of blind tourists in India. I first read it with the interest of one who shares their disability. Here is a company, TravelEyes, whose mission is to organize tours for disabled people. But on finishing reading, I was left with misgivings that took time for me to put into words.

Let me be clear at the outset that I hope TravelEyes prospers both for its sake and its clients’. I also believe Isaacson is a sensitive writer with integrity.

At first, I thought my reservation was that the blind tourists aren’t given voices of their own. However, a re-reading revealed that some are quoted. Okay. But aren’t they shown as incapable of acting for themselves? On reading the article yet again, I was reminded of this passage:

Sighted guides sometimes forget that their V.I. [visually impaired] companions are independent adults. ‘I’m another human being,’ Susan, a V.I. from San Francisco, told me. ‘I’ll say what I need. When someone sees themselves as a helper, the whole relationship gets skewed.’

Once again, I’d done Isaacson an injustice. He understands the predicament when one person is the guide and the other the guided.

Then I turned to Isaacson’s focus on the difference in sense reliance that absence of sight creates. He tells of a blind tourist touching one of the Taj Mahal’s stone columns and how another says he senses “a grand, open space around us.” Another describes her experience of touching an elephant’s trunk, while still another explains her reaction to instinctively taking an offered hand that turned out to belong to a beggar.

For insight, Isaacson turns to Amar Latif, TravelEyes’ founder, himself visually impaired:

Sighted people tend to rely on immediate visual cues — architecture, color, landscape — forming quick, vivid impressions, like a movie that lays everything out on the screen. For blind travelers, Mr. Latif explained, the world reveals itself more slowly, through layers of sound, touch, scent and spatial awareness. It’s a more immersive, interpretive process — like reading a novel, where the story unfolds through detail and imagination.

Ironically, this emphasis on different ways of perceiving leads me to my difficulty with the article.

Isaacson alludes to the parable of the blind men and the elephant in which one blind man says the elephant is like a cow, based on his touching a leg, while another, touching its trunk, says it is like a snake, and so on. The moral of the story is that “no single viewpoint captures the full picture.” However, in retelling this version of the parable, Isaacson reinforces the idea that differences between blind and sighted people cannot be reconciled. All the people in this story are blind, and they remain ignorant of the “fuller truth.”

Other versions of the parable, to which Isaacson makes no reference, go on to say that the men who checked out the elephant were all young and that later a wise old blind man examines the entire elephant and concludes their judgments had been too hasty. From this vantage point, blind and sighted people are alike: some content to rely on their individual experiences; others patient for that “fuller truth.”

For most of every day, we aren’t thinking about our senses. We may see daylight coming through the window, but without thinking, “Sight!” We dash to stop a boiling kettle from shrieking, but don’t think, “Hearing.”

Consciousness is, in many ways, a mystery. For a thought-provoking discussion, see Ezra Klein’s New York Times interview with Michael Pollan. The mind constantly notices and appears not to notice. It produces ideas and images without any exercise of willpower on our part. As I’m typing this paragraph, a song has come into my head along with a disconnected memory of the back garden in one of my childhood homes. Relevant to this essay? Hardly. But in a similar way, as one who once had vision, my mind automatically forms images when people talk about what they’re looking at or I encounter descriptions in books.

Isaacson writes that after past trips, a friend would ask him what it smelled like and that he’d fumble for a meaningful answer: “What layers of experience — what deeper kind of vision — had I been missing?” In an essay posted six years ago, I look back over a journey my wife and I took to Italy. As if anticipating Isaacson, its title is “Layers.” Reading it now, I notice I make no reference to smells. Instead, I describe how the trip deepened my understanding not only of Italy, but also of myself; how Italy’s millennia of history, revealed level by level at archeological sites, became a metaphor for the layers of my own past. My own senses and the visual information Laura and others gave me during the trip were essential to that essay, but not overtly stated. It’s the same with sighted people, who don’t say to themselves, I’m using vision as I look around me any more than blind people say to themselves, I’m using touch, hearing or sense of smell. Blind people may not literally “see” the Taj Mahal, but I’m confident that being in its presence will have an impact on every blind visitor.

Identifying how blind people perceive can be a useful starting point for understanding, but when we stop there, we reinforce their separation from mainstream society. I’d urge Isaacson to consider a follow-up article in which he gives these blind tourists more of their own voices. To the extent language differences permitted, did they meet and talk to local people? Beyond sensory perceptions, how do they reflect on their trip to India?

My reaction to Isaacson’s article may well be unduly pessimistic. The age-old question of how well can we be known applies across all humanity. Can any of us, wise or old, find a true “fuller truth” about each other?

Still, the article left me feeling deflated. The tour ends. The guides go their way with their eyes on the horizon, and the guided go theirs with their noses in the air. Alienation resumes.

Separate Note

In the comments to Isaacson’s article, several readers complained that the Times failed to supply an audio version, saying their blind husbands or fathers were denied access. I read the article with my speech software on a regular Dell PC. Do they not know about this technology? We have so far to go in bringing disabled people and those who become disabled into the mainstream.