Tossing a football around with a blind guy

Way back when, in our days of youth and glory back in Iowa, Steve Kuusisto would sometimes come find me where I was holed up in my apartment and drag me outside to toss a football around.

If you're a visitor to Steve and his wife Connie's blog, or if you've read his poems, or his memoir, or his book of essays, you know that Steve is blind.  Has been since he was an infant when, the survivor of a pair of premature twins, he was put into an incubator that saved his life and ruined his eyes for life.  He's been blind since birth.  Legally blind, as Steve is often careful to emphasize.  Being legally blind isn't in many cases, like Steve's, much more than a tautology.  Steve is blind.  But he can see.  Most blind people can see.  Their eyes work.  They feed their brains information.  But the information is either so scanty or so abstracted or so incomplete that the blind cannot trust it or rely on it to navigate.  They can however make sense of it.  They can use it to help them figure out what's going on around them.  This is what Steve does, what he used to be able to do better---his "sight" has deteriorated over the years to the point that now a lot of what he sees is memories of what he used to see, but then memory is an important part of everybody's sense of sight.  Steve stresses that he is legally blind as a way of beginning to educate sighted people about what it really means to be blind.  It's the beginning of a lesson in what it is like to see what a blind person sees.  The first thing to know is that a blind guy like Steve can see...something.

Steve sees colors and fogs.  He describes being in the world as he sees it as living inside a Jackson Pollock painting.

It's important to keep in mind that in this painting there is movement.  The colors and the fog dance and swirl.  And movement is information.

Back in Iowa, I would grab my football, we'd go out to a park, Steve would run downfield twenty or thirty yards, and then tell me to throw the ball right at his face.  I'd let it fly.  Steve would stand still.  The ball would shoot towards his head.  And a second before it would have broken his nose and smashed his glasses he'd throw up his hands and catch the ball.

No matter how many times I watched him do this I would be horrified each time.

Don't get the idea that he was catching it at the last second because it was only when it was that close that he could see it.  He was showing off.  A little.  As he described it to me he could see the ball as it left my hand.  Which of course meant he could see me---he could pick out a familiar arrangement of blocks and blots and blobs of color disturbing the fog at about the spot where he guessed I ought to be and he could see those blots and blobs move a certain way.   He could follow the ball as it flew towards him.  The reason he waited for it to tickle his nose before snatching it out of the air was that if he'd moved towards it or turned to catch it over his shoulder its movement would have appeared to change.  Steve wasn't watching the ball, he was watching where it had been, where it was, where it was going.  He was seeing movement, which made about as much sense to me as seeing sound.

But in the world as Steve sees it movement has a distinct form.  (As I understand it, this is pretty much true of the worlds all of us see.  We don't see things themselves.  We see fluctuations in light.  The light changes as things pass through it and our brains arrange those fluctuations into forms we recognize as things.)  The form movement takes inside his Jackson Pollock is possibly unique to him.  This is the second item in the lesson.  Blind people see, but they all don't see the same.

As impressed as I was by Steve's ability to catch a football, I was more impressed by another "trick" of his.

It took me a while, but I eventually learned to see what Steve saw...or what he didn't.  A reporter for NPR recently asked Steve how he knew he was living inside a Jackson Pollock if he couldn't see what a Jackson Pollock looked like.  Steve didn't feel he had time to go into the history of the degradation of his own eyesight.  Steve used to be able to watch television and read books, although it was exhausting for him.  He did it by putting his nose right to the screen and to the pages.  He's been to museums.  He still goes to museums.  He has seen Jackson Pollock's paintings.  But he gave the reporter the short answer.

"I have descriptive friends who tell me these things."

I am one of those friends.  But I had to learn how to be.  Steve had to teach me what he needed me to describe.  This meant he had to describe his vision to me.  I got pretty good at seeing what he was seeing when we were together.  (This has meant that Steve has taught me to see a whole lot more than I would normally have taken in.  "You see, Watson, but you do not observe," Holmes used to scold his old friend.  Steve taught me to observe.)  I began to understand how he could get around on his own in those days before his eyes worsened to the point that he needed a guide dog.  I understood how he could see and still be blind, how he could be blind and still see.  But one thing I never figured out was how, when we were walking across a crowded campus, he could look far down the sidewalk and pick out a student or a friend or a colleague from the crowd and call out a greeting before that person spotted him.

He was especially good at this, I noticed, when that person was a pretty girl.

"How do you do that?" I'd always ask.

And he could never, and still can't, tell me.

We've batted it around and the best we can come up with is that individuals have their own unique ways of moving.  Steve recognized people by the way they walked.  Which is again something sighted people do all the time, but take for granted.  Somehow a person's peculiar gait, the way he or she tilts her head, the special swing of shoulders---or hips---alerts us to who that is way off in the distance when they are still too far off for us to recognize faces.  Reduced---translated, Steve?---to blobs and blocks and blots of color swirling through the fog, our movement still has a form that is distinctly us.

Now, this ability to recognize friends by the way they walk is only available to someone who is paying attention, who is observing not just seeing.  Most sighted people don't pay this close attention.  They don't observe.  Blind people like Steve can't afford not to pay attention.

It's a cliche that blind people develop acute senses of hearing or tourch or taste or smell to compensate.  But there is no compensation for not being able to see.  You are not compensated by having to work harder.  And that's what this paying extra attention is, hard work.  Blind people do not develop super-hearing or super-feeling or super-smell.  Their ears and skin and noses and tongues work no better than sighted people's.  They just have to pay far more attention to the information coming to them through those organs.

Sighted people have the luxury of being able to ignore most of that information.  We all have to re-create the world in our heads as we go.  Human beings have less than optimum senses of sight and sound.  We have better senses of smell than we normally realize but we can't compete with dogs, not by a long shot.  We have very finely tuned senses of taste too but most of us have dulled ours by bland and repetitive diets.  So we take in a fraction of all the information reality is passing along to us.  We are all pretty much "legally" blind.  We miss a lot.  And therefore we have to make sense out of incomplete information.  We do this with help from our memories and our imaginations.  We don't actually see some things we think we see.  We remember that those things must me there because they were there the last time and what we don't remember we imagine because we know those things must be there.

All of what I'm writing here about how we perceive the world is based on what I've learned, probably incompletely and innacurately, from Jonah Leher's Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by the way.

We invent the world we think we see out of combination of sensual data, memory, and illusion.

Sighted people get most of their data through their eyes, because this is how human beings evolved to work.  Sounds, smells, textures, tastes contribute to the invention, but they are after-thoughts, in a way.  For blind people they are vital.  But blind people's brains don't "know" their eyes aren't working.  Their brains expect to receive most data through the eyes.  Blind people have to keep reminding their brains to pay just as close attention to what's coming in through the ears and the skin and the nose and the mouth as to what the brain thinks ought to be coming in through the eyes.

Like I said, it's hard work and it's tiring and it causes confusion.  Blind people invent their world differently than sighted people do so different things wind up being important and, therefore, noticed or not noticed.

As Steve explains in an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times last week:

One of my students recently observed that I ask people in my classes to explain the things that they customarily overlook. “You ask things like ‘What was the first thing you said to yourself this morning?’” she pointed out. “You challenge us to recall the forgotten things.” I can’t afford forgotten things. Blind folks must constantly keep track of what we learn and memorize our surroundings. For us, an unfamiliar setting that a sighted person could map out in a glance is a puzzle that requires agile problem-solving.

The reason for the op-ed was that New York State was about to get a new governor, David Paterson, who is blind.

Steve was taking advantage of the occasion to teach Times readers a few things about being blind and about how blind people see.

He was also expressing the hope that Paterson's blindness might have helped make him a smarter, even wiser, politician.

Blind people are invariably creative and resourceful. Obviously we’re good listeners. But what people may not know is that learning to have a keen sense for what others are talking about requires developing an equally sharp curiosity about human beings. When people talk to me, I can’t just listen; I am also compelled to take stock of the person behind the words...

New Yorkers will no doubt discover that Mr. Paterson will take great interest in the details of governance and that this will require him to take sincere interest in people. He’ll ask more questions than your average politician. And those who work in his administration will find that they are important not simply for knowing things but because they can describe how they learned those things in the first place. That’s perhaps the most important thing for the public to understand about professionals who are blind — we are by nature tireless in acquiring information, and we remember virtually every detail of what we read or hear.

Let's hope.

But Steve's real point, I think, is the same one he's been making to me since we met, which is not how blind people see the world but how to see the world.

From the start, Steve's been telling me the same things over and over again.  Don't just look, observe.  Listen.  Ask questions.   Notice everything.  Notice people.  Take note of how they move, how they sound, what they say.  Pay attention to them.

Pay attention to everything.

 

Comments

[actor212]

I used to volunteer to read to the blind, before it became too big a drain on my time (I recorded books).

The engineers were blind, and one day, I walked in and the entire board was brand new. I mean, we're talking vaccum tubes-to-microchip new.

The engineer on duty, Ralph, was working, hands flying over the board, adjusting levels, doing mic checks from three studios, and monitoring all three. I was stunned. It was as if he had worked that new board for years.

I asked him about it during a lull, and he kinda smiled and said to me "when you're blind, you become a fast learner or you sink." He went on to explain that not only had he memorized the old board, but he made a point of studying at other boards in recording studios and radio stations around the city, whenever he could.

Then, when they told him he'd be getting a new board, he ran his Rolodex down in his head, and called the studio that he remembered had a similar model to get a few hours sitting at a dead board, going over the controls.

In fact, when he went back to his job the next day, he asked if he could make some recommendations so that it would be an easier transition for the other two engineers...one of whom had 20/20 peeps!

Resourceful, creative, and one more thing: he understood the needs of his readers and his listeners and he felt that if he hadn't taken these extra steps, the process would get bogged down. He got that he had an unique perspective on what listeners would be going thru and that to deprive them unnecessarily of even this small accomodation was to really throw their day into a tizzy.

Yea, he could see, a little bit, much like your friend Steve. But he never felt like he *had* to see at work because he made sure he didn't have to.

I regretted having to give that up, but I was glad to hear he had retired a few years ago after nearly a half century on the job.

[Karen]

I totally understand Steve's point about recognizing people by how they move. My cubicle is near our office's door, and outside that door is a tiled hallway. I can't see the door or the hallway from my desk, but I always know who of my colleagues has just entered, because I recognize the sound of the way they walk. It's never even occurred to me that this required any special powers of observation. It's no different from learning to read: this shape equals that sound. In this case, that sound equals this person.

[judith]

Lance - great post - am going to go read the op=ed tonight
actor212 - amazing story -
Karen - I am a noisy clickity click myself. Sigh.

[Linkmeister]

Remembering people by their movement reminds me of one of my favorite Sinatra songs:

The way you wear your hat
The way you sip your tea
The memory of all that
No they can't take that away from me

[Karen]

Ah, generation gaps! You see, Linkmeister, that will always and forever be Fred Astaire to me.

(Although, of course, it's the Gershwins.)

[Linkmeister]

Karen, I have the Astaire version on CD, but I like the arrangement Sinatra did better. Somehow I doubt that you're older than I. Why, my beard brushes my knees! ;)

[judith]

loved the opt ed - and if steve is the guy in the red tee shirt - he's cute!

[Karen]

Linkmeister, you've definitely got me beat on the beard front!

[actor212]

Somehow I doubt that you're older than I. Why, my beard brushes my knees! ;)

Mine would, if arthritis hadn't claimed them already, and HEY! YOU KIDS! Get off my lawn!

[velvet goldmine]

I've always felt that some people are more attuned to the sixth sense than others. The theory that different people have distinct energy fields is not bunk, even though words like "aura" and "vibes" do make one cringe a bit.

Some people are more sensitive to that energy than others, and I'm sure blind -- and deaf -- people are at the top of that list.

[Steve]

Dear Lance:

I wish to point out for your readers that you have a great arm, or at least you did back in those days. It’s not everyone can throw a football to a blind guy. Oh Lance, if you’d just been two inches taller and a little meaner around the edges you could have been a contender!

As for my uncanny ability to tell when a pretty woman was walking by, I think it’s only fair that I share with your readers the fact that you always hold your breath when lovely girls hove into view. We’d be sitting there in some Iowa City eatery and talking about the Pickwick Papers and then suddenly you weren’t talking or breathing. “Christ,” I’d think to myself, “Is Lance overdosing on the Victorians?” But no, it was a vision of fancy; a Jimmy Carter “lusting in the heart” and just so your readers understand, the application of old fashioned smelling salts always brought you back around. I should also add for your readers that your voice is with me always.

Much love, amigo!

Steve

[Connie]

Readers, in case you're wondering, I can assure you these two have aged well...

Love the photo, Lance. You don't mind if I borrow it do you?

[Moggy]

I might be able to shed some light on the ability to recognize people from distances... :) Check out Prosopagnosia.com -- it's a very well-done personal site (not mine) about a processing disability that forces people to rely on different input to recognize others. It might look like a "supernatural" kind of thing, because the person (whether faceblind or legally blind) can't rely on the kind of data that others do, but as you'll see, it's basically what you suspected: we're simply relying on different input.