Back from Cone-y Eye-land!

CONES at Goddard College
Photo by Brenda Bowyer

After a one-year break from this blog about vision, I think I'm back. Why the pause? Not because I had nothing to write about—rather, there several vision-related instances that occur around me every day.

I started this blog as dramaturgy for my solo show, CONES, about losing my vision to cone-rod dystrophy. In the past year the show was a keynote performance at both Cabrini University and Episcopal Academy, just outside of Philadelphia, and we brought up to Vermont for audiences at Camp Common Ground and Goddard College. I did a lengthy interview about the show on WGDR (below), and held a matinee for employees and clients of the New Jersey Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Next up: Temple University's Institute on Dis/abilities hosts CONES for a Monday morning event on April 24th. If you are in Philly and free, please come! Till then, read this blog—I've got lots to say every day.

Why I Stopped Studying Mandarin(Elephant's Game, Part 1)

My best friend in middle school was from Taiwan. I spent most afternoons at his house where he taught me to play a game that he called Chinese Chess. 

My own Xiangqi board showing the
traditional characters on the red side
and universal glyphs on the black side.

In Mandarin the game is called Xiangqi, meaning "Elephant's Game." It evolved from an Indian board game that's also the ancestor of the chess played more widely in the rest of the world. My friend always won, in part because he'd grown up with this game and better grasped its strategy. But his advantage also came from the pieces being flat discs marked with Chinese characters, and one needs to discern each character to know which piece is which. 

My middle school friend was pretty good at teaching me: "You can remember that ⾺ is the Horse because of these four little brush strokes and a horse has four legs. And the bottom of 象 looks like an elephant's trunk." But the characters in Xiangqi are different for each side, and no matter how many times he went over which was what, I kept confusing them.

In high school I took a course in Mandarin. The first semester was easy: I'm adept at imitating accents and thrived off of Mandarin's nuanced consonants and tonal vowels, so learning spoken vocabulary and building that into sentences was fun and I found opportunities to speak my bits of Mandarin with people around the city. But when the second semester brought in Chinese's characters, I still had trouble discerning them because I just couldn't see them well enough to tell the more complicated characters apart. So I struggled, and at the end of that first year, I stopped studying Mandarin.

I still play Xiangqi, but made stickers for the pieces' non-Chinese symbols. And now I wonder: Do people who have low vision who grow up with Chinese struggle the same way I do in telling these characters apart? Or is my impediment more linguistic than visual?

The Teacher's Pet's Pet

Every Wednesday I go to my yoga teacher's home where she runs an advanced practice for fellow yoga teachers. I set up my mat right next to hers, and I think that always practicing at her side makes me something of a teacher's pet. But I wonder if that's true and why. Do I practice close to my teacher because I want to be a teacher's pet, or because I'm visually impaired and just need to see what's going on? Does having this dis/ability make me more likely to play the part of teachers pet, to be perceived as a teacher's pet, and/or to be treated like a teacher's pet? And what about the actual teacher's pet? You know, the cat who always comes in toward the end of class and gets in the way of everyone trying to hop up into forearm stands? Does the fact that I'm the one who always picks him up and puts him in the other room make me more of a teacher's pet? Or am I just the teacher's pet's pet?

Dumb Waiter

This might be a little gruesome. Read at your own risk.

I grew up in a tough neighborhood. I was a bookish, bespectacled kid in a school full of jocks. Walking home without torment from bullies was rare. And gym class was like an hour-long hazing ritual for a club that I'd never be admitted to.

There was one bully in particular who did more than just call me a "four-eyed goon" like so many other kids. This guy actually targeted me for being nearsighted. He got so much delight in walking right up to me at the cafeteria, in hallways, out on the sports field and around our neighborhood, and then he'd shout in my face, "MORGAN! CAN YOU SEE ME?!?" There was usually some spittle involved.

This persisted past grade school and well into high school. And then the really gruesome thing that I warned you about happened. You can stop reading now, if you want to.

He had a job working in this yuppie market in our hometown. At the end of the day, they'd transport prepared foods to a basement fridge from the main floor via a dumbwaiter. One day this kid who'd bullied me for years was high at work (on marijuana, in case you're curious) and he'd called for the dumbwaiter.

Maybe it seemed to be taking a long time to arrive, maybe he was just goofing with his friends, and for kicks he stuck his head into the dumbwaiter shaft and looked up to see what was holding it up.

That's when the dumbwaiter came down and crushed his head.

I never wished this to happen to anyone who has ever bullied me before of since. Yet I felt guilty, as if I had wished it and then it actually happened. Fact is, I never really thought about this particular kid until he was up in my face, yelling at me to ridicule my nearsightedness, and now I felt guilty for not thinking about him. And then he was gone. And then I did think about him. I can still hear his loud voice, smell his adolescent breath, and feel his saliva spattering against my face.

And yes, I could see him.

What Would Owen Meany Do?

As anyone who's read A Prayer for Owen Meany knows, absorbing lots of text in all capital letters can be intense. John Irving was clearly aware of this when he wrote that novel in 1989. Irving used all caps to augment everything spoken or written by Owen Meany, a precocious adolescent whose voice and stature set him apart from everyone else in the book. Could Irving have known that, just a few years later, writing in ALL CAPS would become a major faux pas on this newfangled thing called The Internet? That ALL CAPS would signify the text equivalent of shouting and even brand its purveyors as wingnutty wackos whose very words and ideas were to be ignored altogether? Reading Owen Meany pre- and post-Internet are two very different experiences to be sure, and if you, dear reader, are seeing these words online, I regret to inform you, that it's too late to undergo the former: you've already been corrupted.

Etiquette aside, there are also design considerations that make a case against using all caps. The user experience blog UX Movement explains how contrast is an important factor in presenting blocks of text, not just in size, font and color, but also in s h a p e. Take the word, "shape" and the word "style" each printed in three formats here:

shape          style

Shape          Style

  SHAPE          STYLE

Notice how the word in ALL CAPS stand out from those in lowercase or Title Case, but not from each other. UX Movement's article points out that words consisting of mostly lowercase letters have greater variance in terms of shape because some of the letters possess ascenders (b, d, f, h, i, k, l and t), descenders (g, p, q, and y) or bother (j) that make whole words of similar length more identifiable from each other, whereas words in ALL CAPS tend to form a more uniform, rectangular shape, as in the words SHAPE and STYLE.

But what about readers who have low vision? As a person with low vision, I type in standard English sentence case, but my handwriting is rarely contains any lowercase letters. Instead, I print in all caps as I was taught in drafting and cartooning classes I attended in 8th and 9th grade. My handwriting, at its best, looks like something you'd see in a high-caliber comic book or on an architectural blueprint. I do this because, for me, it's easier to see. Online and in printed publications I would never type in all caps, and I find reading sentences in all caps to be as stressful as when someone is physically shouting at me.

So, what would Owen Meany do had he lived in the Information Age instead of the Cold War Era in which Irving set his book? Would Meany have relented, toned down his voice and conformed to the conventions of etiquette and design dictated by Internet 101? And what does that say about those of us who must occasionally defy these conventions for the sake of accessibility? I'll touch on that in a future post about all caps—STAY TUNED.

Stand Clear of the (Closing) Doors, Please

Today in Manhattan, the Uptown ① Train announced all of its stops. The Downtown Ⓐ said none. I tell you, riding the MTA without missing your stop can be a gamble when you're visually impaired.

Another gamble was getting into the PS163 where my friend was teaching dance. All doors are exits, but only one is an entrance, and nowadays a grown man walking around school grounds trying door after door looks sketchy as hell. Had I done the glasses-and-cane act, no problem—everybody wants to help the blind man. But even those who don't show up that way might still have trouble finding the sign that might be there saying, "ENTER HERE" so instead I just stand snowblind outside, waiting till 2:45 when all the kids are gone and safe from weird men fumbling around in the snow.

Awkward Encounters in Academia

School is a hotbed for low vision mishaps. For me, ages 4-18 were full of socio-academic failure that dissuaded me from entering college altogether. Now that I'm suddenly in grad school with an adult grasp of navigating all sorts of social red tape, these mishaps take on a more situation-comedic (or even slapstick) quality. Here are few examples from a weeklong residency at Goddard College:

1. Arriving on Friday, I got greeted with a warm hug. Thought she was a fellow student that I sort of knew, then realized she's someone I helped hire and work with all the time.
2. Saturday in the cafeteria, a hand directed me toward a pair of professors. I walked over, said hello, then realized they were student friends. It took me 10 seconds to identify one of them, another 20 for the other. I know both people really well.
3. Graduating students left Sunday, but on Monday I kept seeing some of them sitting at dinner, even though I knew they weren't there.
4. There are these three students I visually confuse with each other. I hang out with each, but they are never with each other, so whenever I talk to one it takes me a while to figure out who she is.
5. Tuesday night I sought out a student and saw her walking down the path with a friend. Running up to her, she looked at me, wondering why I'd run up to her. It took several seconds to determine she wasn't the student I sought, but my advisor from last semester.
6. In group on Wednesday everyone sat in a circle of chairs except for one student across the room who knelt on the floor writing on a flip chart. When that student walked in through a different door, I figured out what I saw to be her was actually a hoodie hanging from a doorknob. Throughout the meeting I kept seeing a person over there, knowing full well it was just a hoodie.
7. At the Art Crawl I looked at many pieces that I couldn't really see.
8. I called out to and caught up with a professor I wanted to talk to. As I began conversation, I gradually realized that she wasn't the professor that I thought I'd called out to. I covered this up by awkwardly changing the subject to be relevant to her work.
9. Thursday night I emceed a 2-hour cabaret not knowing how many people were in the audience because I saw no one. This always happens. Everywhere.
10. My eyes are tired from spending time on this computer. Good night!

Outing My Self

I'm starting to talk about this more: this project about vision loss, and about my vision loss in general.

Today somebody said, "Are you alright?" because My face was this close to the screen in the computer lab. "Do you know that I'm legally blind?" I replied, and we had a great conversation.

Someone else asked, "What do you see when you look at me?" and it was interesting to explain how I saw her coat, her pants and her hair, how her bits of her eyeglasses glinted into focus while pieces of her face formed into some sort of expression. Then the rest of the room: the office desk phone and laptop were easy to identify, but the tape dispenser and cafeteria glass wore shrouds of ambiguity until I walked over to see who they were. But that dark thing—the one right under the clock—I still have no idea. 

Sometimes seeing (clearly) means doing some legwork. Get up. Take a walk. Look. See?

Orbital Ouch, Forgotten Binoculars

At grad school in Vermont. So much snow from below and so many fluorescents above make photokeratitus inevitable. That, and too little sleep, makes my orbits sore.

Everyone around me is oblivious to what I'm going through. A few know that I can't see who they are and take steps to fill me in. Otherwise I'm shy to out myself. I packed binoculars, but seem to forget to have them in pocket as I flit from presentation to presentation, unable to see anyone's work. 

Why do I do this? Why don't I? Perhaps the pain of seeing is too great today. So in my seat I shut my eyes and try not to fall into a much needed sleep.

Colorblind Sometimes

Last night I saw interdisciplinary hip hop artist Baba Israel perform. The roots of Baba's beatboxing, storytelling and radical pedagogy run deep within his DNA: From the 50s through the 80s, his parents were members of legendary anarchist performing arts ensemble The Living Theatre, and Baba's own work traces a vibrant through-line from his folks' relationships to New York's jazz revolutionaries, Beat poets, Yippee upstarts, squatter cartoonists and avant gardettes, coupled with brushes with his own generation's most talented MCs and DJs of more recent decades.

I sat close so I could see the man more clearly, and was surprised when, 50 minutes in, Baba mentioned his own "white skin." I thought he was mixed, Black and Ashkenazi Jew, but later learned that presumed African half was actually Anglo. And, "Yeah," he later told me when I told him what my head had done, "I get asked if I'm Latino sometimes."

Being a person who sometimes sees only in shadow, I often cannot determine details such as skin tone. In this specific instance, I thought of Adam Mansbach's 2005 novel, Angry Black White Boy, a modern nod to Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, but about a white cab driver steeped in hip hop culture. When the cabbie starts robbing businessmen at gunpoint, the papers all report that he's black because those robbed don't see their assailant's skin beyond the barrel of a gun and that B-boy affect in his voice. 

I've been told and consoled, "the blind are also colorblind," but Adam Mansbach and Baba Israel show that the sighted can also be blind. Seeing skin tone and ethnicity is a multi-sensory process, and one infused with judgments based on our own experiences—a brown paper bag test that continuously constructs the façade of race. That façade may be a bit more malleable for someone like me who sometimes doesn't see and can't differentiate subtleties in skin pigment, therefore other senses and experiences must play a bigger part: a voice, a narrative, an accent, a gesture, a stance and all other aesthetics coalesce into a picture of personhood, with my mind sussing up said person's culture and then creating some imaginary color that corresponds to it. For Baba Israel, that color was "black"—not the kind in the Crayola 8-pack, but a complex cultural blackness that could also include swaths of "white" (or pink, or beige, or whatever color "Caucasian" is). But at the mention of his own "white skin", the fictitious pigment began to fade and presumed melanin grew thin.

Colorblind? Sometimes. And sometimes just colorblinded by judgments picked up that I can't quite put down, no matter how hard I let go.