My blog was a casualty of some updating, caused -no doubt - by my clumsiness in dealing with midphase’s cPanel. Fortunately I make export files on a weekly basis, so not much was lost, but the loss of search engine rankings and connectivity is a major pain, also because on wordpress.com none of my SEO enhancing pug-ins can be used. Otherwise, it was good to catch up on my favorite rss feeds and finally do some reading. So much over the last few days has been devoted to digesting “paris”, but that’s almost finished now, and I don’t have the opportunity, at the moment, to add more work (although a friend asked me to post a shot “of my room”). 

It’s ascension day here, and that means a sunday in the middle of the working week. The Netherlands is on vacation, and a skeleton staff takes care of business here, so it’s a boring affair, all in all. I now need to attend to the even more boring business of removing all the “404s” from the scanr domain.

My blog was a casualty of some updating, caused -no doubt - by my clumsiness in dealing with midphase’s cPanel. Fortunately I make export files on a weekly basis, so not much was lost, but the loss of search engine rankings and connectivity is a major pain, also because on wordpress.com none of my SEO enhancing pug-ins can be used. Otherwise, it was good to catch up on my favorite rss feeds and finally do some reading. So much over the last few days has been devoted to digesting “paris”, but that’s almost finished now, and I don’t have the opportunity, at the moment, to add more work (although a friend asked me to post a shot “of my room”). 

It’s ascension day here, and that means a sunday in the middle of the working week. The Netherlands is on vacation, and a skeleton staff takes care of business here, so it’s a boring affair, all in all. I now need to attend to the even more boring business of removing all the “404s” from the scanr domain.

My dreaming is already different and it turns out that memories are not “pictures” but instead are other-sensory visions. Obviously, now that the modality in which they were generated and the modality in which they are remembered are different. A flickr contact’s comment about the Olaffur Eliasson show in the NY MoMA brought this to light. There was an Eliasson show in Rotterdam, two years ago, and I remember the sensory totality of it. It was also a momentous occasion because, after a series of photos, the Leica D2 broke (probably because of the moisture in the air) and had to be repaired. Now that S. writes about the experience of the MoMA show, I remember what I experienced in Rotterdam, but the visual has given way to the other-sensory: the creak of the wooden floors that let you manipulate water, what the rippling water sounded like. Also how the temperature dropped from one room to the next, the air laden with moisture, wet against my face. These memories are now flooding me. The visual memory I retain is the general idea of what it looked like, while the other-sensory memories are vibrant, almost too much to bear. And so it is with remembering people’s faces, or familiar surroundings. As my brain adapts to the reception of other-sensory input, how I think and what I remember are changing. I wouldn’t say there is no vision there, because there is. But it is the vision that was meant before the term was restricted in its meaning to “ocular perception”. What is there is very much like the vision of the deity in visualisation practice. There too, the shift is there. In my imagination is the rush of silk, or the scent of flowers decorating the deity’s implements; likewise, the sound of the bone ornaments she wears and the sound of blood dripping from her garland of freshly severed heads. Yes, blindness is a cognitive condition. So much in the practice speaks of vision, but actually means: to forego seeing, because we have the habit of thinking that what we see is real because it is instantaneous. Once the focus is on the temporal senses, we’re in the shimmering world of impermanence that is forever creating itself in every moment.

The staff is the staff of the herald and of the augur. The keryx, the aggello, the messenger, someone who comes before us to announce what follows. It is the staff of the forerunner. Tireisias’ staff is made of “crow’s wood”, his name already indicates his affinity with the flight and the sound of birds: “the birds who are so near the signs of heaven must know more than man”. Sophocles has Tireisias telling of himself that he would sit in his “observatory”, in his augur’s seat: “I heard a strange bird cry, as they screamed in dire rage and raised a barbarous din. And I knew that they were tearing one another with murderous claws. The whir of wings was all too clear.” The whir of wings. The wings of doves, suddenly stirring into flight at my approach, birds flying by, so close i can feel the air move as they pass. Birds reveal space to me, their wings make it audible. The staff is a hand, as A. taught me: not a windshield wiper, but a steering wheel. While on the street, people do and do not notice. The idea is that the staff alerts others to what I am so that they can take appropriate action and avoid me. Yet, with D. next to me, people seem to rely on her to steer me and so don’t move aside but bump into me if I don’t change direction. And I don’t because I’m guiding D., who has next to no sense of direction. All she has to do is press the alert buttons on the traffic lights and an announcement will sound as to which street we are crossing. Predictions; where will we be next? Place des Vosges announces itself by doves flying around the colonnades, the rush of their wings echoing against the buildings. Then an open space like a theatre and there it is. Under the arches my staff’s tap evokes the space I’m in: vaulted, open to one side, with pillars at regular intervals. To the instantaneous nature of space, the birds introduce something temporal, their passage across the sky, the direction of their flight as announced by their cries and the sound of their wings. The staff bridges the gap between time and space. It converts space into measure with each tap.

Over time, I started to develop a revulsion against certain kinds of photographic gesture and against the photograph as such. The finished product, the print, even the digital file displayed on the web page. There was a time when I could make out the general tonality and perhaps, if I got really close to the screen, some form. That’s all gone now, and I don’t look at my photographs anymore. This is perhaps the hardest of all. A similar disgust made itself felt when I started shooting randomly into space. Space is a cognitive impossibility for me. When looking forward, we have no concept of the area behind us, outside our field of vision: it is simply not there. That’s how space surrounds me. There is light there, and some vague impressions of shapes, and sometimes a little movement. It’s how my vision changed, from the detailed to the general. Consequently, I explain much of my disgust with the photograph by means of the changes in how I relate to my environment. Photography is all environment; what I know about that environment is what I know “by prediction”, not by how it presents itself to me “now”. That’s the cognitive divide between me and others. Others know more than I do, what I lack is information. In the simultaneous, there is harmony; the procedural carries discord. Wait, that’s not true. Kyudo used to be steps, a sequence, a procedure for setting up the shot, making it aim true mentally, if not physically. I use the walking I learned in archery in everyday life, because it warns you of obstructions in the terrain, if you cannot look down. And there are more parallels. When using the Leica, there is a procedure of feeling for the motif, measuring focal distance, setting up the shot by kneeling, placing the camera on my shoe, balancing it, then holding still while I press the shutter. Not unlike the moment the arrow is released, effortlessly. Shooting without aiming. 

Odd how disembodiment was the most immediate effect of losing vision. The bodies of others and my own body as well. It would be easy to say the body sees to exist since notions of how it relates to the space around it, how it moves through that space, the pleasure of an ever-changing, coherent point of view, no longer exist. That’s true may be for others, who make themselves known to me by their voice, their scent, footsteps, a presence I perceive, somehow. As for me, hearing is far more generalized than sight, touching is far less spatial than hearing, and scent is the most powerful of all. The cane has stopped being a tool, but is, in my hand, an extension of it, reaching farther, touching more, sounding out walls, a tunnel, cobblestones or tarmac. Likewise the clicker that I use becomes a function of my body, that seeks to locate itself in space through sound, through touch. I could say that this construction of myself is an alternative, not necessarily inferior to how sighted people construct themselves. But this is not true. My body is not a container for the mind, using the eyes in the head as a focus for the perception of its reality. Rather it has become a general instrument of perception, the visual experience being non-existent, and it has been assigned a new role, that of medium. In this way I have become embodied in my disembodiment.

I’m in the Anywhere. Space is mainly time, but not quite. Simultaneous occurrences exist there, but without the conventions of perspective and distance. I walk across Pont d’Iena and I say to D.: “those poles are very loud.” Yet I hear a kind of absence as I’m passing them and this, in itself, is something pleasurable, instantly recognizable. The desire to experience myself in relation to the space around me. The two central tasks: getting a spatial image of my environment and integrating changes into that image. I love maps, but I have almost no access to them. The relief map at the Arsenal gave me a wealth of information, but usually I map my environment by walking it. I start out with a few routes that I can connect, and then connect other routes to the set I already have, until I have a pattern of paths. D.’s presence was a boon, because I was able to pay more attention to mapping: usually, almost all of my attention is needed to stay alive in traffic. Although I think I have carried over most of my spatial skills intact, they are of next to no use in practice. Early on I noticed how useless it was to infer an image of “space” from auditory or sensory clues. My maps are not maps, experiential rather than representational. The Arsenal map was a gift precisely because it wasn’t an ordinary map. It gave the Arsenal area in great detail, but fewer details for the area surrounding it. Upon touching it, the routes I had already walked sprang to life in relation to the central area of interest on the map. Very early on, I was taught a valuable lesson in mapping and from that many of my present habits formed. I have become more cunning in getting the information I need to get around, asking for more information, allowing myself to make mistakes more. There’s fear to overcome. 

 

From when my vision first started changing, I remember the feeling of combined dread and excitement. The fear produced in me by the strange colors I was perceiving, by objects abruptly appearing and disappearing, by the way everything acquired a painful luminosity. Yet, all this was exciting too, in a way, because of the visual spectacle, because it demonstrated so excellently how the visual world we take for granted is a mirage, an illusion. Now, the dust has settled, at least some of it, and my new way of seeing has become as common-place as the old. Along with the shifts, my understanding of the visual world has changed. The change is mainly a cognitive one. There is a story about how it may be easy to declare the world an illusion, “but why would you want to forego the sight of the ships, their sails being coloured radiantly red by the setting sun” That radiance is all I see. Blindness is clear light, useless vision, total luminosity.

What is the camera to me. Perhaps a bit what a musical instrument is to musicians; the bond between D. and her clarinet, an instrument of expression and an object that has to be coaxed into performing for her. My cameras do not have to be adjusted while I’m using them, but neither are they accessible without help: they’re primarily instruments of the seeing. Interestingly, I’m not the only one who seems to think so: while working, I’ll be approached at least 3 times by people demanding to know what I’m using a camera for, or by people demanding to know why I am faking blindness. So the use of a camera in itself already signifies: “I can see.” Which is odd, because it is the camera that is doing the seeing, the recording of a visual spectacle, for me. Well, not the seeing, because I, and the camera, don’t see. Formerly I would defend myself against the “a camera is a machine for the seeing” approach by saying, I was only recording something visual by means of an apparatus. Like I use a digital recorder to capture ambient sound, snapshots. Yet there is a central problem there, because, while I can record sights, I cannot see the output myself: I have to leave that to others, which includes making some editing and post processing decisions. And I wonder what meaning my shooting choices have once the image is accessible to others. Clearly, the showing of image, and writing about them is a kind of dispatch writing. Meant to clarify something, meant to give insight into what exactly is seeing. And this informs me. It enlightens my loss, it delineates in exact terms what it is that has disappeared. Might I have developed into a photographer if I had been born blind? I might have. The activity of seeing is a combination of seeing moments and of blind moments: the blind moments aren’t registered when seeing is predominant, but they are still there, just like there are stars in the sky even during the day. 

Procedure is following pre-determined steps in time to arrive at a result. The steps all concern converting spatial information to a format I can perceive. I consider sighted help much the same way: converting visual cues into aural ones. I felt entirely self-conscious while out shooting, because D. was there. I remember from earlier, when I had more vision, that I would go off on my own to do my shooting. Now however, for navigational purposes things move faster and more smoothly (how to get from point A to point B) if there’s someone present who can guide me. I wondered what might be the cause of the lack of ease. Part of it was sharing my haphazard way of working with someone who had not really witnessed me at work before. Well, unconsciously perhaps: “he’s photographing”, but not specifically the struggle I have with getting a grip on the photograph. Still the revulsion against shooting randomly “into space”, something I have to conquer. I notice that something audible has to be there to anchor the photograph, or anchor me in relation to the photograph. It may be the insecurity about a resultant image that is perhaps totally unlike my perception of the environment I’m in. We walked along the Seine, from Bastille towards Ile St Louis. The river, traffic crossing the bridge behind, traffic across from where we were walking on the left bank, and the quais and park areas below. These were all there, but not the way the façades face the river, not the pleasing sight of the benches along the bank, not the way shopkeeper lay out their etalages. Instead, a flower shop suddenly springing to life and presence as we pass it, the scent of coffee beckoning us, the sound of children playing behind the high walls of their school, their voices erupting like a geyser, upwards towards the sky. Unimaginable, no. Un-photographable, yes.