Anna Lyndsey isn't blind, but she lives in the dark because of her acute photosensitive seborrhoeic dermatitis, an illness that makes all contact with light feel like a blowtorch on her skin. While most blind folks can walk out into the light, they just can't see much, Lyndsey could see were she able to exist in the light. Have a listen to this chapter, "Metaphor", in which she reviews a handful of audiobooks whose protagonists have something in common with her. She also reviews a couple of new age healers and offers a game:
Games to Play in the Dark 5: Scribe
This is a game to play on your own, when talking books have palled, when you have no visitors in prospect, when boredom eats your brain.
You will need a large bound notebook and a pencil. A bound notebook so that your pages are disciplined and do not become entangled. A pencil, because a pen could run out and in the dark you will not be able to tell.
Pick up your pencil and open your notebook.
Place the thumb of your non-writing hand on the page beneath the start of the first line.
Your thumb will act as a marker, so that there will be space between each line and the next.
Write.
Write what?
Write what you know. Isn't that what they say? What you know is the darkness.
And as you begin to form words on the page, the darkness around you moves. It starts to gather, to circle, to form a vortex round the end of your pencil, and then — down the pencil's black centre it pours.
It is unstoppable. It flows faster and faster, funneling down that slim conductive wand, erupting on to the page, staining its purity with straggling struggling words.
And in your mind, a light goes on.
—Anna Lyndsey, Girl in the Dark
Listen (or read) here.
Are you familiar with Beth Omansky's book Borderlands of Blindness? It's got a lot of personal reflection in it, but it's also about getting critical perspective on the boundary between sightedness and blindness.
ReplyDeleteAdding it to my reading list!
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