October 7 Disability Awareness Item

Dear Friends

Today’s Disabilities Awareness item starts with blog roll: Johan Maurer is a Friend from Portland, Northwest Yearly Meeting who teaches English in Electrostal Russia. He writes weekly blog posts. This week’s is typical: a Biblical reference, riffing on some specific news item, in this case the Nobel prize in physics, and reference in passing to other current events, for instance the occupy Wall Street protests. http://johanpdx.blogspot.com/2011/10/light.html

The Biblical reference is about blindness and Light. One of these days for the pure obsessive excess of it, I will look up all the Biblical references to blindness, but this one is one of the more bearable. It’s also fun to be served up pictures of the supernovae connected with this year’s Nobel prize in physics because I otherwise probably would wait to stumble upon them rather than go look.

Literary Digression: two works called Blindness in English, Nobel prize winner Jose Saramago’s novel and a wonderful literary reminiscence by Jorge Luis Borges. I have not read Saramago’s novel though I have read a lot of blind people ranting about who is Saramago, a sighted person, to write about blindness? The blurb on Amazon refers to a plague of white blindness and “the authorities” shipping all the blind people off to an abandoned mental hospital. I think I should read the novel before unleashing the rant starting to form just from reading the blurb. When the novel came up in email discussions, I asked, rhetorically whether anyone on the list had ever felt like the only person in a crowd who sees something. The list members were more metaphor-challenged than usual.

I do not know whether Borges’ essay is available in English. I read it in Spanish and read fast without looking up a lot of vocabulary. Borges went blind toward the end of his life; I do not remember from what cause. The piece is a very tender reflection about many things: his life of letters, some of the people he worked with, being the head of the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico. The overwhelming sense is of gratitude though at one point, writing specifically of his blindness, he writes that what he misses most is the color yellow. I think of this sometimes when I drop a lemon onto my white floor and get to try to chase the wayward fruit all over my kitchen.

But back to Johan’s blog and to vast adventures available in activities other people take for granted, in this case reading. Johan’s blog always takes a long time to load and does all kinds of weird things with the cursor and what my screen reader can find. I assume it’s entirely rational, somehow, to blame the Russians and that the culprit is one or another of the gizmos, widgets, and gadgets somewhere on the page.

Johan’s blog tends to have reading lists as long and interesting to me as this one every week. I find myself wondering how one person, even one person with a lot more vision than I have can interact with all of this reading in a week. I try not to think too much about this question lest I find another reason to become cranky. Most of the books on the reading list come with live links to Amazon. If I need a reason to become grumpy, I can usually complain if the content is not available on Kindle or if a hardcover edition costs, say, $3 while a Kindle version costs $9.99.
But I will close with the reflection that there are people for whom it’s a great liberation not to have to think about print but just to rely on audio or whatever. That would be why an organization I knew of in college called Recording for the Blind is now called recording for the Blind and Dyslexic.

In the Light

(rantWoman)