POSTCARD FROM CHICAGO: Scratching The Surface

CHICAGO—I stood waiting while the man behind the desk talked on the phone, typing furiously. The emerging pages seemed blank, however, and his eyes were aimed at the wall in front of him. I wondered if he knew I was there, not wanting to interrupt.

I looked around the small, fluorescent-lit room, stacked full with tapes, headphones and large-buttoned tape players, that had been so difficult to find in the massive Chicago Public Library. Finally a woman emerged from a back room and asked who I was. I told her my name and the title of the book I was looking for. “You called about it, right?” she asked. I had called the main library number least a week earlier to find out if they had that book, and hadn’t realized after being transferred several times that by giving my name, I was essentially making an appointment.

“But you’re sighted?” the woman said, only half asking.

“Yes.”

She picked up a large plastic binder of sorts that was sitting on the desk. “Are you a student?” she asked, searching for a reason why anyone who could see would be requesting such a volume. Frankly, I hadn’t realized that the “book” I had to read for my internship with Art Education for the Blind would consist of a series of audio tapes and a spiral bound notebook of tactile drawings. Somehow, I had assumed that “Art History Through Touch and Sound” would be a practical guide to finding resources, not the resource itself. After two years of dealing with Harvard’s system of advising, that assumption seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

I requested a tape player and read the table of contents, printed in large block letters and underscored with Braille. Looking at the series of tapes before me, I quickly understood that it would take a very long time to listen to the book in its entirety. I would have to content myself with concentrating in detail on sections of it, a method that, as an English major, I have learned works quite well with verbose 19th-century novels. I scanned the table of contents and noted the page numbers and tape volumes of the Picasso section. I pressed play, closed my eyes, and began listening to the introduction.

Just as I was settling into a dark reverie with my padded earphones, I heard a voice directly behind me. I started, and the light stung my eyes as I turned my head to see the man from the counter behind me. He asked how I was doing, and like the woman, he prodded to find out why I was using this book.

I returned to my tapes, and began trying to follow along to the audio instructions. I had already looked at the first pages of the notebook, and knew that there was a page identifying the various raised patterns--cross-hatch, dots, vertical lines. There were symbols to identify the top of the page and the doors in an architectural drawing. The tape directed me to a tactile drawing of one of Picasso’s paintings, and my fingers falteringly followed the audio prompts.

But as I listened to the narrator talk about the raised flat section that was the woman’s hair, I couldn’t find the area being described. I scanned my fingers over the whole drawing, trying to piece together where one woman ended and another began, trying to understand their shapes and positions.

I failed utterly.

I sat in my self-imposed darkness, both hands lightly grazing the drawing, eyebrows drawn in frustration. My fingers weren’t sensitive enough, and my brain wasn’t putting together the jumbled pieces of the image. Finally I rewound the tape and opened my eyes, exhausted, disappointed, and disturbed.

• • •

My visit to the library was merely an introduction to my internship; I spent the rest of the summer interviewing people who were blind and writing about their experiences. But as much as I learned from those people, nothing jarred me quite as much as my library visit did. I’m a Harvard student, I don’t like to admit that I cannot understand something. It was during those three hours that I began to understand that blindness is not trying to reconstruct the visual world, but of learning non-visual ways to experience the world. One man told me in an interview that his definition of “pretty” was largely based upon an appealing texture, something very smooth. I thought of the zit on my forehead and realized how ugly I would be to him, and justly so on his criteria.

I realized that I often overlooked the subtleties of touch, the nuances of sound and voice, and felt incapable of picking them up when I finally tried. All of a sudden I notice all of the signs that say, “Do not touch!” in museums, in stores, all the taboos. I notice how often this realm is prohibited, and I understand a little more why I was responded to so guardedly in the library.

I felt very much a visitor there; I knew I could leave when I wanted to. And perhaps I could not have understood my book any better had I sat there for several more hours, for days, still knowing that, when I chose, I could open my eyes.

Kristin L. Rakowski ’03, a Crimson editor, is an English and American liteartures and languages concentrator in Kirkland House. This summer, she interned for Art Education for the Blind and worked for the Circuit Court of Illinois. Somewhere in between, she rediscovered the foreign concepts of sleep and having time to herself.