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But most remarkable of all was Lusseyran's claim that, despite his total blindness, he learned to see.

   Not at once, I admit.  Not in the days immediately after the operation.    For at that time I still wanted to use my eyes.  I followed their usual    path.  I looked in the direction where I was in the habit of seeing    before the accident, and there was anguish, a lack, something like a    void which filled me with what grown-ups call despair.

   Finally, one day, and it was not long in coming, I realized that I was    looking in the wrong way.  It was as simple as that.  I was making    something very like the mistake people make who change their glasses    without adjusting themselves.  I was looking too far off, and too much    on the surface of things.

And so he changed course, looking "not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within, instead of clinging to the movement of sight towards the world outside."

   Immediately, the substance of the universe drew together, redefined and    peopled itself anew.  I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place    I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me    as within.  But radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely,    light.  It was a fact, for light was there.

Not only light, but also color.

   My father and mother, the people I met or ran into in the street, all    had their characteristic color which I had never seen before I went    blind.  Yet now this special attribute impressed itself on me as part    of them as definitely as any impression created by a face.  Still, the    colors were only a game, while light was my whole reason for being.  I    let it rise in me like water in a well, and I rejoiced.

But this inner light sometimes departed.  Fear, anger, and impatience were enough to make Jacques blind again.  When he lost his confidence and began to fear the obstacles in his way, he could no longer move easily among them.  Everything hurt him.  "What the loss of my eyes had not accomplished was brought about by fear".

Perhaps an even greater danger than his own fear lay in the reactions of others.  In his book Lusseyran gives great credit to his parents for not imagining that their own way of knowing the world was the only one.  He advises parents of a blind child never to say "You can't know that because you can't see" -- and to say as little as possible, "Don't do that; it's dangerous".  The adult's pity, fear, and embarrassment are the worst disaster for someone who has been blinded, as one of Lusseyran's encounters makes clear:

   When I was fifteen I spent long afternoons with a blind boy my own age,    one who went blind, I should add, in circumstances very like my own.    Today I have few memories as painful.  This boy terrified me.  He was    the living image of everything that might have happened to me if I had    not been fortunate, more fortunate than he.  For he was really blind.    He had seen nothing since his accident.  His faculties were normal, he    could have seen as well as I.  But they had kept him from doing so.  To    protect him, as they put it, they had cut him off from everything, and    made fun of all his attempts to explain what he felt.  In grief and    revenge, he had thrown himself into a brutal solitude.  Even his body    lay prostrate in the depths of an armchair.  To my horror I saw that he    did not like me.

When we devise technical aids for the disabled, we need to ask ourselves to what degree our thinking aligns itself with Lusseyran's upbringing or with that of his unhappy acquaintance.  Our attitude in this respect, after all, is probably much more significant for the person we would help than is the technical wizardry we put at his disposal.

Attending to the World with New Eyes
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Lusseyran's story presents a mystery for us sighted people, who speak so naturally of the "night" of blindness.  It's not easy to understand what he means by "seeing".  Throughout his book he tells how his freedom of movement was restricted by his blindness, and how he spent much of his time guided by friends as he walked -- or ran -- through city and countryside.  But at the same time these friends quickly learned to take it for granted that, in some ways, he saw more of this passage than they did, so that he was often at least as quick as they to warn of danger or to announce what lay over the next rise.

He tells how objects in his environment would come to life on his "inner canvas", how his senses of hearing, smell, and touch gained revelatory qualities that departed in wildly unexpected ways from the "normal" performance of these senses, and how all objects exert a kind of "pressure" even from a distance -- a pressure one can respond to in an intimate sensory dance that blurs the visually enforced boundaries commonly felt between object and perceiver.

As to his "seeing" in particular, here is one of his attempts to describe it:

   As I walked along a country road bordered by trees, I could point to    each one of the trees by the road, even if they were not spaced at    regular intervals.  I knew whether the trees were straight and tall,    carrying their brances as a body carries its head, or gathered into    thickets and partly covering the ground around them.

   This kind of exercise soon tired me out, I must admit, but it    succeeded.  And the fatigue did not come from the trees, from their    number or shape, but from myself.  To see them like this I had to hold    myself in a state so far removed from old habits that I could not keep    it up for very long.  I had to let the trees come towards me, and not    allow the slightest inclination to move towards them, the smallest wish    to know them, to come between them and me.  I could not afford to be    curious or impatient or proud of my accomplishment.

   After all, such a state is only what one commonly calls "attention",    but I can testify that when carried to this point it is not easy.

All this may remind some readers of the ancient doctrine that we actually see by virtue of two lights, one of which, more subtle, streams out from us, and the other of which streams from without into our eyes.  It may remind others of the findings of twentieth-century studies in perception.

In his book, The Organism, neurologist Kurt Goldstein demonstrated that the senses (like all other part of the organism) never deliver isolated and local performances.  For example, every visual sense impression corresponds to a different muscle tension:

   If one asks a patient, preferably a cerebellar patient (who exhibits    these phenomena, often exceptionally clearly), to raise his arms    forward so that they are in a somewhat unstable position, and if one    exposes him to various colors (e.g., large sheets of colored paper), we    notice that green and blue stimulation lead to a change of the position    of the arms in the opposite direction as that induced by yellow or red    stimulation.

More generally, color influences our volitional movements, so that, depending on whether a light is red or green, "movements are carried out with a different speed" even though the difference is not subjectively experienced.  Likewise,    the estimates of traversed distances vary as to length; seen and felt    distances, time intervals and weights are judged differently under the    influence of different colors.

Goldstein notes that stimulation of the skin by different colors can also lead to different effects.  In sum, "it is probably not a false statement to say that a specific color stimulation is accompanied by a specific response pattern of the entire organism."  This is even true when the stimulation does not involve sense objects in the usual sense of the term, as when infrared or ultraviolet light is experienced.

All this stands to reason.  If the organism is a unity, a whole in the deepest sense, then every effort precisely to define a deficit -- a missing piece or a missing function -- is problematic.  Given a true organism, you can, to one degree or another, without predefined limit, arrive at the whole through any of its parts, because the whole is immanent in each of the parts.  All our senses form a unity that can be gotten at -- with more or less success depending on our inner resources -- through any combination of them.

The Human Being as a Developing Potential
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Today we are strongly inclined to technologize every disability, conceiving it as wholly defined by a specific malfunction of a piece of machinery, and immediately setting about the task of "fixing" the malfunction, as if that were the whole story.

What Lusseyran's experience suggests is that this is only a tiny part of the story -- and perhaps the least important part.  By restricting our notion of "seeing" to the narrowest of mechanisms -- the eyeball understood as a camera -- we close ourselves off to many of life's richest possibilities.

Lusseyran himself had little patience for such attitudes.  Noting that the blind suffer greatly "from the inexperience of those who still have their eyes", he goes on to laud his parents,    whose hearts and intelligence were open to spiritual things, for whom    the world was not composed exclusively of objects that were useful, and    useful always in the same fashion; for whom, above all, it was not    necessarily a curse to be different from other people.  Finally, mine    were parents willing to admit that their way of looking at things, the    usual way, was perhaps not the only possible one, and to like my way    and encourage it.

Indeed, as Lusseyran remarks elsewhere, after his accident his father said to him:  "Always tell us when you discover something."  What extraordinary and liberating advice!  One of my own sons had experience of synaesthesia (perception of sound as color) when he was young, and I have often regretted our not having found a way to make a natural place for such experiences in the home.  In general, I suspect that if the imaginations and perceptions of childhood -- above all, the perceptions of ensouled nature that come so naturally to children -- were not systematically suppressed by adult obtuseness, we would live in a radically different world today.

A new collection of Lusseyran's essays is just now coming out (see below), and in its introduction Christopher Bamford mentions a Dutch girl born deaf.  Remarkably, her parents decided to treat her as if she could hear. So they spoke to her constantly, read stories, sang songs.  The girl grew up to be exceptionally intelligent and happy.  And "she speaks clearly, without the slurring common among the deaf."  Today she counsels the parents of deaf children.  She also enjoys music and goes to concerts.

As Bamford observes, "Evidently we hear with more than our ears".  In fact, "the story of the Dutch girl puts in question whether we `hear' sound in the usual sense at all".  His point, if I take him correctly, is that understanding comes to us along innumerable dimensions, the sum of which is that one person participates with another "in a world of love and meaning".  To reduce the possibilities of that shared world to the bare potentials of an imagined set of one-dimensional mechanisms is to lose sight of nearly everything that counts.

Saving Illnesses
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It is one of the characteristic pathologies of our day that we would like to deny the connection between limitation and suffering, on the one hand, and profound accomplishment on the other.  But the link remains, and one particular episode in Lusseyran's autobiography offers a beautiful illustration of it:

After the Germans invaded France, the young Jacques was struck by what became of Paris.  It was a puzzle he could not solve.  Yes, the Germans were largely invisible, and life went on much as before.  Everything seemed roughly the same.  Yet he sensed in everyone's attitude that the world had somehow shifted catastrophically.  He could not help noticing the tenseness, the withdrawal of his neighbors into their private shells, the studied silence as one person after another -- especially Jews -- were summoned by the authorities, never to return.

All this ate away at the teenage boy terribly, like a great societal illness that could neither be clearly identified nor shaken off.  He had never lived through an Occupation, and did not know what it was "supposed" to be like.  The official story was of the Germans as benefactors.  He could not fit the pieces together.

Then, after the arrest of a friend, Lusseyran fell badly ill with the measles.  At the height of the illness, with fever raging, the situation suddenly became crystal clear to him.  He was gripped by a powerful resolve.  All the while his system was purging itself of poisons -- "but the poison was moral as much as it was physical, of that I am sure".

Thus was born the iron will and the whirlpool of renewed energy that set his Resistance activities in motion:

   What a fortunate case of measles that was!  In me it had catalyzed a    pack of fears and desires, intentions and irritations which had held me    closed in a tight fist for weeks, and which I should never have been    able to break open myself.  On the first day of convalescence I said to    myself aloud in my room:  "The Occupation is my sickness".

If only we allowed ourselves more such personal crises today as we confront the deeply embedded, systemic ills of our society!  But, as our readiness to submit ourselves to mass vaccination campaigns for every minor malady suggests, we can't easily accept that illness might be necessary and beneficial -- that we might end up paying more in bodily and social damage for its absence than for its presence.

Accepting such a link is as hard as conceiving that blindness might be a gift.  But on this we should allow the "victims" to speak for themselves. Lusseyran's own conclusion is direct as can be:  "Since I went blind I have never been unhappy".  How do you gainsay a life that could heartily serve others in the French Resistance and find peace in a concentration camp?

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