[School for the Young Blind, 1829]
I have heard of The Death of Marat. Marat was, they say, dotted with ugly holes in his skin that oozed and gave pain. He only found relief in the bath, so that is where he stayed. With his writing table hovering above the surface of the water, he took the names of traitors and wrote them on his Guillotine list. He was stabbed by mademoiselle Corday, a girl who hoped to stop the madness. David, ever the sycophantic whore of the revolution, bathed the scene in a holy light, forever casting the mastermind of the REIGN OF TERROR a martyr in the gullible eye of the viewer. Once again, the eye deceives the mind!
Now my professors paint me a rebel because I dare to teach a writing system that works better than that of poor old father Haüy. So much for progress. These petty pedants wouldn’t recognize progress if it bumped them on the back of their heads. Ha, bumps, that’s what we’re talking about! You would have laughed to see me point at them in my tribunal and say, “You are all no better than a lot of Oedipuses and I, like Tiresias, warn you to reconsider your folly!” They did not like that at all. Not at all. Sighted people have very fragile egos!
How can they not see that nothing man creates is perfect? Fine-tuning—even the most magnificent instrument—is always possible. Consider the organ. With each new great one built, the air pumps more efficiently, the levers glide more smoothly and the stops are placed ever more precisely. There is something divine in progress. Perhaps even God is a tinkerer? One could wish for some improvements. Hear me Lord, my suggestion for the next version of Man: please make the eyeball a little less delicate. It seems a very important organ to be so vulnerable. Or else make us humans less clumsy…
My father was a saddler,
A sad saddler was he,
For I, his little boy,
Would be a saddler too.
Sitting at my father’s bench,
I took the awl in hand,
The awl missed its mark
And found my eye!
The infection spread from the poked out eyeball to the other and made me blind. Happily, my sad parents did not let me fall into helplessness. They encouraged me to study with my sisters. Then we learned of this place. I was so excited—they said there would be books for me! And, to be fair, there were books…three books! Each of them: a grammar book, a prayer book and a history of France, weighed more than I did!
They were made before the revolution when the aristocracy was feeling panicky and philanthropic. Ever since the fight for liberté and égalité seized the soul of France, there’s been no money for making blind people books. Not only are these embossed books enormous and expensive to produce, but they are really hard to read. The raised letters are so big and take so long to feel that by the time you get to the end of a sentence, you’ve forgotten the beginning! Nonetheless, I read them. I reread them. The whole time thinking, there must be a better way.
Then, when I was twelve, Captain Barbier brought us his Night Writing, a sonography he had invented for Napoleon. The dots and dashes he poked out on thick paper represented sounds, military intelligence that could be read in the dark, without a torch, without alerting the enemy. It was a revelation!! The raised dots were so much easier to feel than raised lines. Not only could we read the dotted signs but, with a small pointed tool, we could poke out dots of our own. Still, there was room for improvement: the captain’s system, while more compact than embossed Latin characters, was still too bulky and the symbols corresponded to sounds rather than letters. In order to read like sighted people, we would need an alphabet.
For eight years I’ve worked on my system. Making it readable. Making it easy to learn. Making it into something that is truly useful and life changing. And what do I get? Greif from Barbier and obstinacy from my professors! Imagine, ten men arguing the fate of my invention with more gusto than they would the fate of my head! They act as if my dotted letters threatened the very existence of writing. As if the Latin script had been handed down to Moses with the Ten Commandments!
I would not trade my blindness for theirs. I accept the burden of my prophetic vision as have so many of my blind brothers before me. I see bump, no bump, bump, no bump, bump, no bump, bump, as a binary code that will someday link blind technology to that of the sighted in a language so precise as to reveal their Latin characters as chicken scratch!
So be it. My bumpy little system does not need their support. That is, dare I say, the genius of it. We can poke out our letters without books…but some books would be nice! And yes, I have noticed that the instrument I use to poke my alphabet looks a lot like a little awl. The irony is not lost on me. It is a very clever awl that pokes holes in whatever it is asked: saddles, harnesses, belts, boots, corsets, hearts, eyes, minds, time!
Thus, my blind eyes are the ultimate awl that burst through time to look to you, spectators of the future, to see that I, Braille, invented.
*First published as “The Awl” at FLAPPERHOUSE*