To See or Not to See. Inez De Florio-Hansen
moving/touching of the body—is the total embodied awareness of a body in an environment. Knowledge is made corporeal with the sense of touch replacing that of sight as the primary mode of data gathering.
Neil Lewis
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“Cecilia! Cecilia!”15 Someone shouted my name from the opposite platform. I immediately recognized David by his voice even though we had not been in touch for many years. Just in this moment my train arrived. I had not even the time to call out to him my email address.
Among my schoolmates, I preferred David for many reasons. Two years older than me, he was preparing for the Abitur, the university-entrance diploma at the end of secondary school. Whenever possible, he accompanied me to school. He usually was waiting for me in front of his parents’ house. In order to facilitate my orientation, he talked to me from a distance. But he never picked me up at my home. Later on, I understood that he did not want to limit my independence where it was not necessary. Where I could arrive on my own, he let me do so. At the beginning, he pointed out to me the greatest obstacles on our more than two kilometers long way to school. “You have to be careful here! They have not yet mended the pavement!” As time went by, he limited his hints more and more. Above all, he never made me feel helpless. On the contrary, he invited me to try out some little experiments. How proud I was, when I could take two stair steps at once, first upwards and then even downwards!
I considered it another merit of David that he never touched me as most others did. Under the pretext of helping me, they took me by my hand, touched my arm or grabbed me by the hips. They did not notice my reluctance. Perhaps I did not show my discomfort clearly enough because all in all I had to be grateful for any kind of help. Probably, I myself was the cause of the unwanted physical contact. I always felt the need to explore everyone and everything by touch as most blind and visually impaired persons do. Furthermore, you cannot suppress touch which makes you feel things and persons around you, but also your own body.
Although I knew David quite well, I only had a vague idea of his appearance. Of course, I asked my male and female friends about it. I always invited them to describe the persons in my environment, above all the boys. “You know, he looks really great, tall and slim, with dark curls and a fitting face,” Alina told me about her cousin. Somehow, I was able to make sense of this description.
From the past years a memorable afternoon in David’s apartment came often to my mind. It was the beginning of the hype around Elvis Presley. As with most of us, I liked his songs. But I did not manage to imitate the swing of his hips because the descriptions of my classmates and friends remained too vague. I had already difficulties with the hula-hoops that came into fashion at that time. Finally, I managed to move it around my hips. But there was the hoop. When it fell down, I had to keep on trying.
I told David about my wish to imitate Elvis’ hip swing: “You know, they don’t describe it exactly enough. What does that mean: one hip up, meanwhile the other one goes down and you lift the respective knee simultaneously and move it inwards?” Impossible to imagine if you had not seen it. One of Elvis’ managers—and he was able to see—is reported to have said: “I don’t know how you do it, but continue to do so!”
On our way home, David said to me one day: “If you want, you can come upstairs with me. I’ll show you how to do it.” That was an offer! David’s parents were both at work. We were alone in the apartment and could turn up the record player as loud as we wanted. Above all, I was sure that David never would have done anything against my will. But even today I don’t know if I would not have enjoyed it. At the time, I was almost seventeen years old. And, above all, body contact was much more important for me than for people in possession of their eyesight.
So, we went upstairs to David’s apartment. As soon as he opened the door, I heard the chirping of birds.
“Robins in a cage, how awful! Why did you never tell me about it?”
“How do you know that they’re robins?”
“My grandfather taught me during our walks. As I could not see the birds, I should at least recognize them by their chirping.”
“That’s fantastic! Yes, they’re robins, but they are not ours. We only have to care about them. A friend of my mother is on vacation.”
We drank a Coke. Then David put the first record on the player. I immediately recognized the sounds of Love me tender.
“Why not Jailhouse Rock?” I wanted to know.
“It is much too fast! We have to practice first. We’ll improve bit by bit.”
David was following a plan and that was a good thing!
After a few beats David took my hands and put them on his hips. With care, he moved them slowly up and down. Then he put my hands on his knees.
“When you move your right hip up, you bend your left leg inwards.”
“What does that mean: bend inwards?”
“You move it to the middle and bend it slightly. You have to put your foot on top. Did anybody ever tell you that Elvis always wears white socks to emphasize the position?”
No one had ever told me that before, why should they? I tried to imagine the movement. After a while it worked somehow. But it wasn’t easy to adapt the whole process to the rhythm of the music. David never got tired of making the same movements over and over again. Finally, I was ready.
“I think I can try it now.”
Love Me Tender sounded for the fifth time. David put his hands on my hips. Up and down, turning his knees alternately inwards.
When I could do it to David’s satisfaction, we increased the speed with Don’t Be Cruel. Then Teddy Bear followed. The others would be amazed when they saw how well I was able to do it now.
“So, when’s Jailhouse Rock coming?”
“First we have to perfect the whole thing. But soon we will.”
In my eyes David was the perfect teacher. I had told him that before. But he fended me off.
“If you mean to say that I’m quite capable of relating to others, then perhaps you’re right. … but I never want to be a teacher.”
“Why not? The students would learn a lot from you. You know what’s important.”
“That may be. But in a classroom, you can’t respond to each individual student in the way you need to. Besides, there are the curricula. Or do you learn what you really want to learn from Mrs. Siebert and Mr. Dahlmann? And do they teach it the way that suits you best?”
I hadn’t really thought about it. All in all, I was very satisfied with my teachers. They had never tried to send me to a school for disabled. Special schools for visually impaired or blind students like today did not exist at that time.16 Moreover, blindness was not as much of a problem in the post-war years as it is today, because many soldiers had returned home blind from the battles.
I still clearly remember Mrs. Melzer, my very first teacher in primary school. She had been reactivated for teaching at the age of 70, because there were hardly any teachers immediately after the war. Of course, she had heard about my visual impairment, but she never said a word about it. She always found time to spell the new words with her index finger in my hand, so that I gradually got an idea of the writing. When she came along and took my wrist, I knew that I had to open my hand. Then she wrote the respective letter with her finger or a tiny stick in the palm of my hand. And she urged Renate, a neighbor’s child, to spell and read out all the new words to me several times. In return, I helped Renate with the arithmetic problems. Like most visually impaired people, I could imagine abstract things quite well.
Mrs. Melzer—by the way, she insisted that we addressed her as ‘Fräulein’—was quite modern from the point of view of