#jumping about

He’s so expressive tonight i love this side so much

Serendipity somehow reaching me across inconceivable transmissions. Reading Berger further, on the point of seeing - indeed, his most famous work is Ways of Seeing - suddenly it strikes me, just as he is saying it - so is it a coincidal event, or does my realisation follow his saying? - that we are so dependent on the visible; and how ableistic this is. Coming off the heels of reading Sacks' deliveries of patients who have lost their sight, partial, returned, suddenly-restored or otherwise, I wonder - what is the experience like for the blind? Berger conceives that the visible is how reality appears to us - note the term 'appear, which is so frequently in hand with the visible - is how we realise space and orientate ourselves in it, within it - yet Sacks writes of the blind as existing in time; whose worlds make sense in time more so than ours - who know the approaching of a step in rhyme and number of their steps. Indeed, this is how we orientate ourselves when we cannot see - we count the number of steps around a room - five steps forward, there is a stool. The beginning of this book states: Part one is about Time. Part two is about Space. Sacks says that for the blind, who cannot see a person who is before them but who only realises their presence when their voice comes to them - perhaps this is more regarding the newly-blind; if Matt Murdock's portrayal is anything true, and to be conscious not to impose too ableist a view on the blind, surely they develop senses sharp otherwise to realise the presence of an object occupying the space before them, though it may not be visibly seen - people only appear when their voices are heard. To us, the abled and sighted, who imagine blindness as being a complete and utter darkness, a voice appearing - the word appearing - in the vast emptiness of a full void, which is often conflated with darkness. Berger notes that even in religion, everything came after light. Light is the thing that allows us to see. First God created the light, then the world... he says. I want to know how the unsighted experience spatial dimension(s). Even internally, space is construed by some form of sight. We translate so much of perception into terms of 'seeing'. We say bats and other animals who are diminished in the sense of sight 'see' by way of echolocation. (That's still space.) We do not simply say 'perceive', which includes all senses, but specifically, 'seeing'. This belies how much we rely on seeing, the visible, sight. Yet space exists for all of us, whether or not we are sighted. If Sacks is to be believed, then the unsighted live in a vastness of space, for whom space is in some way detached, disorientated from the populated visage of the things that we are not touching, not hearing, inanimate objects that exist though we are not interacting; other people who are across the road and whom we cannot hear nor feel, only see. Yet people breathe even as they stand still; there is some form of audial information being given out, no less than to the sighted the presence of their being standing still, unmoving; perceivable if they are close enough. Wait, but how did I come to this? Berger says that, for us, what is real extends only so far as our vision. It allows us far sight - into the distance - but stops at what we cannot see - i.e. the way that if we do not know what is going on in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or other such places, then it is not 'real' for us. Serendipitous because: 'Pics or it didn't happen', or my questioning of a tree in a forest falling without 'witness'. Even the word martyr is a word based on the Greek, 'to witness'. Joan of Arc burned in public, and many saw it. How if it is not visible to us - physical pain, that can be seen, but not mental pain, which is not tangible to the naked eye - it is questioned, interrogated as unreal. Doctors treat only symptoms, a disease is found and noticed only when symptoms appear. This, to me, seems wholly inadequate - to rely on only what we can visibly 'confirm' - which in itself does not subscribe to such - our - views of convenience or conformity - illnesses whose symptoms do not appear cheerfully and helpfully specifically when we are sat before the doctor; perhaps by then they are subsided, become minimal; who do not go along with our notions of appointed time but act on their own whim(s). Or how, 'empirically' - the word itself belying the emphasis on 'viewing' further - what can be 'confirmed' is only what can be made visible... (Consider criticism of Freudian theory of the unconsciousness, whose subject is inherently 'unsee-able', being that it cannot be 'seen'.) Yet even as all our reliance on the sight of what can be perceived, in science much is realised of its existence in the form of what cannot be seen - such as the initial discovery of the presence of black holes - but discovered only by way of its effects, on what is see-able... (Again, a 'symptomatic' discovery or 'confirmation'.) What am I coming to? That perhaps what is important is the sharpening of all senses of perception, not only the over-reliance on the single sense of seeing. In all senses including not only that of the physically-given, but also of perceiving meanings, behind words, the abstract, behaviour...