People in my neck of the bush, if asked to choose between being blind or being deaf, most say they could go without sound but recoil from surrendering sight. Barring musicians, of course, almost everyone I questioned considered blindness more debilitating. They would rather not be deprived of independent mobility. A blind person seems helpless and dependent, which is a terrifying vulnerability. That is why nowadays prisoners are hooded - to further intimidate and incapacitate them. Then there’s the beauty of the world that’s lost. I too thought so.
That, however, Is an adult’s perspective. Experiments show that infants are drawn first to sounds before sights. Auditory dominance, some suggest, arises from our hearing sounds while still in the womb, long before we can see. Maybe, but either way it’s fundamentally important for the infant because the sounds that bring us language and music are evanescent.
The eye focuses on the future, that’s how it facilitates movement - anticipating what is going to happen, where you will be in a split second. Hearing, on the other hand, is bound to a fleeting present or the immediate past. It is little use in movement because it rarely anticipates upcoming events. That is why we are more easily startled by a sound. Anything it warns you about has already happened.
It also doesn’t - or very rarely - linger. By the second word of a sentence, the first one is gone. The infant has to catch sounds as they emerge, including unexpected ones, and store them in short-term memory to combine them with what follows. Every word must make sense of what came before and anticipate what’s about to follow.
By privileging sounds the infant explores and recreates language, which is the most important ability he must achieve for normal psychological and cognitive development. If sight draws us to the physical world, hearing immerses us in the social, the ways of thinking, language and music that are the heart of culture, that enfold us within our community. “Blindness separates us from things but deafness separates us from people,” explained Helen Keller, who experienced both.
Lacking language a child’s cognitive functions are limited. A normally functioning person thinks verbally. That’s the risk deaf children face - of becoming permanently “dumb” - if not introduced to a language before adolescence. It could be visual, as is the case with deaf children, or tactile as in Keller’s experience. Without any language the child’s reality is dominated by things here and now, so he has difficulty understanding abstract concepts.
Negatives, and especially double negatives, can be a problem, the principal of the School for the Deaf told me. The driving regulations test had to be rewritten to take that into account, she said. As Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky put it, language isn’t just an expression of thought; it is a means for the construction of thought. They aren’t separate; language and thought intertwine to create our complex mental processes.
That’s why you probably know or know of blind people who have achieved great things or at least lived normal lives, but no deaf ones other than Helen Keller, who was deaf, blind and a genius too; and Beethoven, who became deaf only in his forties by which time he was already a famous and accomplished composer. Writing his ninth symphony was no more difficult for him without hearing it than it is for you to write an essay with your eyes closed.
To learn more about the challenges of being deaf I enrolled in sign language classes at the Cascade School for the Deaf. The principal invited me to publicise the plight of the pupils. I’d just started making films so I proposed encouraging the students to tell their own stories rather than have a hearing person do so, as has always been the case.
Out of that encounter came Learning To Look, a silent, not-very-good, mostly black-and-white documentary that followed the kids as they produced a play about a deaf teen whose parents could not sign. It was an enriching experience for me but also frustrating because I didn’t learn much in the classes I attended and remained unable to communicate more than very rudimentary ideas with those warm, enthusiastic youths. Behind their elaborate and graceful gestures I could just intuit but not grasp a mode of communication that was rich in ways my spoken language couldn’t be. The mobility of their facial expressions, the grace of their bodily movements, their manipulation of space, all seemed to allow them a choreographic eloquence far beyond that of their hearing peers.
The phrase Mother Tongue refers to our first language, but it also conveys an idea that language, any language, gave birth to us. Infants absorb it to become self-consciously human. Before she learned English through touch, Keller had lived without language and consequently lacked a sense of self:
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect... My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith... When I learned the meaning of ‘I’ and ‘me’ and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me.
That’s why infants are predisposed to spontaneously enter language by any means necessary. As hearing children acquire speech effortlessly, so too deaf children commingling with signers easily learn the signs and syntax and even the accents of their community’s signs. If there are no signers present a group of deaf kids invent a new language, complete with rules of grammar – as happened when the first deaf schools were established in revolutionary Nicaragua. Helen Keller invented an English of touch with Anne Sullivan, her teacher and life-long companion.
In a way every child, including those deaf, blind or both, seems to acquire language not so much by osmosis as by reinvention, with a little help from their friends. Adults cannot do that. Deaf children who communicate only with non-signing parents cannot invent a language, although their gestures exhibit linguistic properties, unlike their parents’ gestures. That amazing openness enjoyed by the average child is partly preserved into the adulthood of the most creative people.
Because sign is a visual language and our awareness of physical reality is also visual, there is an easy correspondence between signs and the things they refer to. That’s not found in spoken languages, whose words are mostly arbitrary sounds. You can imagine the sign for walk, with your index and pointer fingers “walking”; or the sign for eat, with your hand carrying something to your mouth. Nothing links the words “walk” or “eat” and the activities they describe.
It’s likely that symbolic language began with signs, gestures accompanied by facial expressions, such as we still use when communicating with people whose language we cannot comprehend. Infants still point before they can talk. Gang members, cricketers, Buddhist monks talk with their hands. Our earliest gestures would have indicated something immediate – Look at that, I want to eat. Chimpanzees communicate more visually than vocally. And our earliest gestures were probably accompanied by sounds: grunts, whimpers, laughs, screams, moans, until those sounds became the words that are our main vehicle for communication, except in our moments of inarticulate intimacy.
I didn’t care. I've long been solitary anyway, more comfortable in the company of books and movies and, in good times, a lover. If deafness would be a disaster for a child or even a young adult, when I made Learning To Look I was in my fifties, and I agreed with those who opted for seeing before hearing. Blindness, I felt, would have confined me to a narrower, more intolerable life than deafness. I would have lost all that was beautiful. Until I met you. If I now lose myself in your bright eyes; if I am entranced by the play of shadows on your soft, luminous curves...
...I would nonetheless surrender it all in a flash to retain the wonderful world our conversation and laughter conjured into existence. Pablo Neruda’s love song declared: deny me bread, air, light, spring, but never your laughter for I would die. Without our words I won’t die, but a whole world would wither away.
