BY JESSE BERING
ONE NIGHT MANY YEARS AGO I TOOK A LOVELY BLIND girl out to the movies on a date. (Yes, a girl—this was before I’d come out!) Let’s call her Charlotte. Now, seeing a movie is something that most of us take for granted. But for the visually impaired, going to the movie theatre is an altogether different phenomenological event. Back then, naïve and egocentric as I was, it didn’t even occur to me that my literally blind date might have trouble following the details of the film in the absence of onscreen visual cues. And to make matters worse, the film was Face/Off, the plot of which revolves around one character literally having the face of the other. As such, there are a number of scenes where being able to see what’s happening up there on the screen seems like it might come in handy. This fact suddenly dawned on me, and I felt the urge to explain. That, as it turns out, was a big, ableist faux pas. “That’s actually the other guy,” I whispered to Charlotte. “The brother thinks he’s about to talk to the Nick Cage guy when it’s really John Travolta’s character.” “Yeah, I know that.” (Add “you stupid sighted schmuck” and you’ll get the gist of her tone.)
In hindsight (sorry) I don’t know why I should have found Charlotte’s auditory deciphering of some meagre John Woo wizardry especially surprising. She was brilliant. In our psychology graduate stats class, it was Charlotte who—merely listening to the lecturer conjuring up complex hypothetical problems— was the first to raise her hand with the correct answers, not any of us actually seeing him writing down the very problems on the chalkboard and trying to work them out on paper. I still find it astonishing, and perplexing, how the symbols and formulas inherent to such challenging mathematical concepts are represented in the mind of a congenitally blind person. But whatever nonvisual faculties Charlotte employed to process this abstract information, she was using them at lightning speed.