Imagination seems a lost art in our age of information technology, so let’s take a few minutes to indulge ourselves. Imagine if the whole world was blind. Just for a second.
Imagine by closing your eyes, lifting your face, and taking a deep breath. What can you see? Nothing at all. After a while, what can you hear? All of a sudden, lots of things. The hummm of the computer, the birds, the quiet whirr of the fridge, the ticking clock, distant traffic/people. What can you smell? The coffee you’re drinking, the slightly bitter odour of garlic from dinner the night before, the grass outside. Your thoughts become so prominent they might echo. The longer you keep your eyes closed, a fear, or mild anxiety may unfold, as, without eyesight, the world is new again.
Now imagine if all of us – friends, family, strangers – they couldn’t see either. There’s a knock at the door – you get up – eyes still unseeing – and feel your way down the stairs to the front door (if such buildings were ever built in a blind world), feeling the smooth surface of the banister for the first time, the length of footfall between stairs, and open the door, fumbling. You hear your friend “Hello!.” and you judge who they are and how far away they are by their voice, perhaps you feel a slight draught from their breath, or from erratic arm movements, as they try to find the open door. You extend your arm until both your hands meet by accident. You embrace in greeting, each of you finding out what the other is wearing from the feel of the clothes. Your friend comments on the weather because they’ve felt the course woven wool of your jumper and expresses agreement on the cold. You, feeling the thin t-shirt on your friend, remark that they must be immune, but neither of you can see whether the jumper or t-shirt is old or new, black or white, clean or dirty, etc etc.
It’s now not hard to imagine the small talk, the conversations, the judgments that are foregone in an unseeing world. There’s no talk about a bed hair, a good/bad hair do, or any hair at all, because you can’t see your own, or another’s hair. There are obviously no mirrors to check or groom oneself in front of. Clothes become purely information signals about the weather (sunny? drizzly?) or where you’ve been (outside in the snow, inside next to the fire, lying on grass), based on their feel, texture and smell. There’s no talk on whether it’s Prada, Addidas or Billabong because nobody can tell from looking, nobody can see the mismatch of colours and nobody can see the brand label sticking out from the collar, giving away its authentic/imitation status. It’s the same with makeup, jewellery, shoes, cars, pets, takeaway coffee cups, or anything else you might visit upon a friend. Nobody can see, and while we’re imagining that the whole world is blind, let’s assume living is community based anyway, so you all live within walking distance of each other, any clothes are handmade locally, and gym memberships are non-existent. Fitness is gained from hunting and gathering for food, and weight is a purely sensory affair. Are your family members/friends cuddly or bony? Are they heavy to carry, or light on embrace? Do they need a lot of material to keep warm, because of their large structure, or smaller cuts of the same cloth? Certainly there are no thoughts about a person’s thinness or fatness, beauty or ugliness, or whether they’re sexy or unsexy, corporate or sporty, athletic or slovenly. Anorexia or obesity may only occur as secondary symptoms of another illness, and even then you would have to ask/pinch another to know they were even suffering from it. There are no thoughts on whether anybody’s subscribing to a culture/sub-culture, whether they belong to a group (the airforce; King’s Beach surfers as opposed to Bondi Beach lifesavers; or the local knitting group) because there’s no point wearing the ‘uniforms’ that denote these things if people can’t see.
There’d be no Westfield shopping malls for people to shop for clothes, jewellery, accessories; no Bunnings to accessorise house and garden. Indeed, in a world where people weren’t able to see, there perhaps wouldn’t be notions of property and possession; money, commodities, financial markets; let alone house, garden, roads, towns, cities, and all the associated paraphernalia. Oil would be a pesky substance one may never encounter – there’d be no cars in a blind world, therefore no need for petrol, gasoline, petrochemicals and thus plastics – besides which, could the chemical science required to develop synthetic materials, or any science for that matter, really occur in an unseeing world?
There’d be no wars based on race, creed or religion; as apart from the fact that a person would be unable to be identified (and perhaps racially discriminated) by their looks, it would be very difficult to start a war with an enemy you could only tangibly sense with your ears, nose, hands and tastebuds. State sovereignty would be rather pointless in a world without maps and therefore borders; and due to the lack of intercontinental travel, the world really would seem flat, and confined to the area safest from the elements/predators. There’d be no race to the moon, espionage networks, Cold War, nuclear arms race, transnational corporations, visual (if any) technology, stars, sun, moon, day, night.
Before we get too carried away with an idea of a blind utopia/dystopia, however, it should be stated that, the human condition being what it is, and evolution having been what it has been, biologists would probably argue that we would have learnt to physically overcome our lack of eyesight anyway and control, possess and exploit our physical environment, rather than adapt to it (as we have done); and sociologists would probably argue that, having done this, we would still seek to form groups, attract one another in non-visual ways, conquer, dominate, find other forms of discrimination to inflict and wars to fight. The High-Pitched Shriekers against the Gravelly-Toned Mumblers, perhaps.
The ego, it seems, affects all the senses. At least we have a choice - we can close our eyes, if not our minds, easily enough – if only to big bums…
(This blog, written ages ago and awaiting its very non-blind author’s editing, is dedicated to Kylie Johnson nee Corlett, a friend who has always turned a blind eye to peoples faults, flaws, and immaterial appearances, and who loves with open arms and heart and eyes closed in joy. Happy 31st birthday KC. Xo)