The Braille Encyclopedia, page 7
Sitting in my window seat, I’d flick my eyes from that view, back to the open page, and join the world of the book in my hands.
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
I come to look at Vermeer’s painting multiple times in 2015, when it is on loan from the Rijksmuseum at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The woman in blue gets a room all to herself on the main floor. She has her own guard. The first surprise is how many people walk by without even looking. The second surprise is how quickly the ones who do stop to look move on.
The painting measures eighteen by fifteen inches, under glass in a wide gilt frame. Soon the glass and frame recede, and I see a woman with a blue jacket, a map on the wall behind her. Sunlight traveling in from an unseen window. Tall-backed chairs, a table with a sparse scatter of objects.
With my glasses off, the woman becomes a squat blue obelisk. The folds of the letter disappear.
Those massive black chairs, their empty seats and imposing backs, stand guard around her. With my glasses off, the chairs disappear and a black geometry, a play of rectangles, comes forward.
I look with my glasses on and with glasses off. I go home and look at reproductions in books and online, my eye close to screen and page. I come back and look again.
The woman’s light brown hair merges with the soft deltas of the map on the wall behind her. The map shows seas beyond seas; she is painted with a pigment that means from beyond the sea. People wonder if she is pregnant, wonder if the letter is from—or about—a merchant husband, overseas, perhaps not returning.
I wonder how my loss of visual detail makes colors and shapes speak more clearly to me. Ray, with his clear eyes, sees tiny dabs of paint that mark shiny metal bosses on the chairs’ upholstery. I see the black shapes trapping her. I see a painter’s joy at the abstract composition of shape and dark and light. Who cares what is on the letter? Look at how Vermeer makes folds with paint. Look at the intensity of his looking, how he chose what to see.
Work
These days, on a good morning, I sit in my improvised window seat. A couple years ago, I bought three reasonably sturdy storage ottomans and pushed them together in front of a southeast-facing window. Tossed a yoga bolster and a few pillows on them. Gained a slanting view of trees and houses facing a pocket park, bordered by the arrow of street pointing to a distant high rise. In winter, up before dawn, I settle on this seat, nestle into the pillows, drape a throw over my legs against the seeping chill. I stare out at the moving glare of car lights. I pull out my braille journal, punch a few lines with my stylus onto a piece of card stock held tight in the jaws of the slate. On good days, life’s a braille sandwich: at night, lights out, glasses off, I read a few pages of a braille magazine, the texture under my fingers lulling me to sleep. I rarely read whole books and when I do, it often takes me months. But these bits of braille reclaim my sensory pleasure in reading and writing. And this pleasure, it turns out, is my real work.
Xerophthalmia
Fancy-pants word for dry eyes. An old friend on my list of eye conditions, I’ve lived with it almost as long as my retinal degeneration. These days, in my sixties, I seem to make a new friend every time I go to the doctor. Meet your cataracts. Meet your friend glaucoma suspect.
X-height
A property of a font or typeface. In print typography, the height of lowercase letters, benchmarked by the letter x. X-height measures the body, or torso, of the letters on a line, setting aside ascenders and descenders. Descenders include the dangling legs of y or g or q. Ascenders are the arms, reaching up from an h or l. For visual readers, x-height in a font matters. Whether in print or on screen, larger x-height generally means greater readability.
It charms me that the height of a typeface is measured by one of its rarest letters. And many languages, like Italian, don’t have an x. So does it have instead a quagga-height? A dodo-height?
For me, in braille, the height of letters does not vary. Three dots deep. Braille has no general equivalent to the splendid, diverse array of print typefaces. Braille gains readability from sameness, each cell the same dimension as the first letters and words Cindy slid under my fingers more than a decade ago. Page after glorious page.
Yahrzeit
A candle lit on the anniversary of a death. Tonight it’s my mother’s yahrzeit. Dead fifteen years. I can’t read the prayer book, so I rattle off a string of remembered syllables, all run together like a screen reader. Ray, wearing a kippah stitched by his tailor grandfather, shushes me because it makes him stumble as he reads the Hebrew text from the book.
I didn’t inherit my mother’s Zionism, nor her almost lifelong belief in a deity. (She said watching what my father went through in his last dementia decade turned her atheist at the end.) What I did inherit was a head full of words: the glorious spendthrift excess of English. We didn’t just have a dog, but a hound, a cur, a canine companion. Even today, things my parents gave me fly from my mouth. Funny how many are unprintable. Mother had rules: you could use any of George Carlin’s seven banned words, so long as you could define and spell without error. But never, ever, tell someone to Shut up. That was rude. My parents also gave me shards of Yiddish—schmuck and putz, shiksa, treyf, and goy. This mother tongue curves more to insult than to praise.
As a family therapist, I learned to hand children a language of feelings: mad and sad and glad and scared. How useful it would have been, when a child myself, to be able to label that strange non- digestive twist in my gut, that pattering heart, that sudden gout of tears triggered without an ounce of chopped onion in sight.
But tonight, watching a quivering flame mirrored on a black window—how does it cast this flicker of presence?—I’m without words.
Yearning
If my mother’s been dead fifteen years, that means my father’s been dead twenty. So we can never get back that last pastrami sandwich. The one my brother and I smuggled from Manny’s after he picked me up at O’Hare on one of our mutual visits back to Chicago. Maybe 1999, 2000. We’d both moved away years before, but sometimes managed to time our visits to our ailing parents to also see each other.
We can’t ever feel again that exact heartburn after standing in the Manny’s lunch crowd line, after shouting Pastrami at the corned beef guy, making him turn his bulk and knives to carve from the peppery slab, after eating both halves and the pickle and the entirely excessive latke, watching the grease from that extra sandwich we ordered speak with a spreading mark on the white deli bag. We can get pastrami. There will be pepper, salt, and fat; meat cured to the color of an heirloom rose. But we can’t sit on a lakefront park bench with our father in the August heat as he eats that sandwich, the one we hid from our mother because she wouldn’t have approved of all that cholesterol. We can’t get back my father eating without dropping one cracked peppercorn, one single caraway seed, though his brain no longer told him where his feet were or his cousin’s name. He still knew how to hold that gargantuan sandwich with as much feeling as a blues harp player just before letting loose the most wailing riff. He still knew my brother, who clambered onto the riprap after a swim in Lake Michigan. He offered his dripping-wet child that leftover pickle, glowing in the afternoon light.
Yellow
Light with a wavelength of around 570 nanometers. Yellow pigments come from so many things you shouldn’t eat, like cadmium and uranium, one form of which is called yellowcake. When I was little, one physics building at the University of Chicago had a basement corridor with lovely yellow ceramic tiles. According to the technicians who worked there—one of whom was married to my childhood pottery teacher, Dorothy—they were made with a uranium-based glaze that still emitted radiation.
Genuine Naples Yellow pigment was made of lead. Chrome yellow. Yellows from tin and rutile and benzodiazepines. Other than the honest dirt of a natural yellow ocher, all a pretty poisonous lot.
Even if you could find a brilliant yet edible yellow pigment, nothing could beat the yellow of the eggs Ray made me a few days after my abdominal surgery in 2021. Propped up in my tattered robe, I was grateful my decayed vision spared me details of the six-inch incision, covered with its grin of Steri-Strips. Still wobbly from the useful poison of general anesthetic, I wanted none of my usual Sriracha, kimchi, or salsa verde. I declined even black pepper, just wanted salt and scrambled eggs, a fluffy buttery mass on dark pumpernickel. I’m not even embarrassed to repeat the animal grunts of delight over being alive to eat that yellow cloud, to live with a man who knows how to scramble an egg, to still see enough to see the visible yellowness of wavelength reflected back into my eyes.
Yellow, hallelujah. Yellow butter in the pan. Yellow sun clearing my neighbors’ houses on a winter morning. Sometimes I stare straight at it, what do I have to lose?
Zoom
My digital camera boasts a 30X optical zoom. With practice and luck, I use it to pull a dark fleck moving through blue sky into a hawk, crow, eagle, heron. But the greater the power, or magnification, of a lens, the smaller the field of view. That bird on the wing passes out of the camera’s eye in an instant. It’s similar on a computer. On my new laptop, with its built-in accessibility features, I can, with a few keystrokes and finger gestures on the touchpad, zoom in until a single word, zoom, fills my screen. But I can’t read much this way, even the slightest gesture jerks the powerfully magnified view off-screen. And reading via magnification means constantly zooming in, zooming out—zooming in to decipher some text, zooming out to find some vanishingly tiny icon of three dots that hides all the useful operations I might need to perform. Or having managed to zoom in and fill out all the text fields on a screen—to buy a plane ticket, make a medical appointment, search for a testing or vaccination site I can walk to (answer, there is not one), renew my legal business name, buy a birthday gift for a friend, fill out an application for services, use a financial calculator—I have to zoom out. I have to hunt for the elegantly microscopic submit button. More than a few minutes of this and I have to go hunt for the Dramamine.
And as to that video meeting software that took over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, human contact beyond my spouse became one endless headache.
Zorro
Spanish for fox. A rather unprepossessing South American canine. The last alphabetical entry in The International Wildlife Encyclopedia, that twenty-volume set with all the pictures that my parents bought me as a kid. The one I lugged around for so many years before finally letting it go. The one in which I remembered reading about that ever-tunneling coastal worm.
I never forgot that worm. I couldn’t remember the creature’s name and, with all my decades of research skill and digging on the internet, I couldn’t unearth a likely candidate. Time and again I looked. Nothing.
It kept gnawing. One day in 2021, unbidden, the worm showed up in a piece of my writing. Wanting to flesh out the worm memory with some facts, I shifted my hunt to acquiring a replacement set of the books. I found one advertised for over $2,000, another, on Amazon, for $9. Reader, I bought the one for $9.
A big box arrived, with a creak of our screen door, and a thunk on our porch.
I sat down with the volumes. Got out my phone to magnify the list of entries. I flipped through looking for familiar pictures. Nothing. Front to back, back to front. Aardvark to Zorro. Zorro to Aardvark. I never found the worm.
Zutz
A poke or a punch, like the action of making a dot with my braille stylus. From Yiddish, at least as it was used in my family. When I look it up today, I find it’s spelled, and pronounced, zetz. I guess that’s fitting, since my father was never much of a speller. And I hear the word in his voice, his Brooklyn accent still fresh, Give it a zutz, encouraging me to shove a little harder on a sticky door.
Braille will not restore my sight. It will not help me grok a pie chart or find the bright red tips on the feathers of a cedar waxwing. It will not confirm my memories: not how individual droplets make up the roar of a waterfall nor how Ray’s eyes glow a warm hazel, flecked with darker brown. But learning braille, using braille, even in tiny doses, thaws out something I had to put on ice over the years. Something I lost contact with as my old print-bound ways of loving language slipped from my grasp.
So when Ray wanders upstairs, finds me sitting in that cobbled-together window seat, asks what I’m up to—my right hand hovering with stylus mid-air, my left hand holding my place on the braille slate, but my attention out the window, caught by some shape winging by—I say, Just zutzing some dots.
Author’s Note
I didn’t set out to write an encyclopedia, imaginary or otherwise. Inspiration for the form came from Rebecca Solnit’s The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness. Solnit’s book is an expansive manifestation of what nonfiction can be and do, but my initial scheme was specifically inspired by the book’s opening essay, “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition,” an alphabetical exploration of a trip to Svalbard; I loved how the form, rather than restricting, freed her to move easily from lyric natural history and travel journaling to reflections on human history and climate change.
All I aimed to do was write one essay, maybe a few thousand words, on learning braille as part of adapting to progressive vision loss. In 2015, I’d received a grant to support exploring creative prose after years of focusing on poetry. I quickly gave the piece the working title The Braille Encyclopedia as an homage to Solnit’s work. The structure of encyclopedia entries gave me a series of smaller vessels to contain my writing, which was useful practically in working with text as a blind person. I also found it creatively useful: The scaffold of the alphabet gave the puzzle part of my brain something to noodle on, while simultaneously providing openings for going deeper into my experiences.
The piece soon expanded into something much bigger than a single essay. Over several years of writing and revision, it morphed into a mix of poetry and prose. When Rose Metal Press accepted the manuscript in 2020, I’d presented them with a collection of what I called linked prose poems. But in revision, it became clear that at least some of the pieces were more solidly prose; Rose Metal not only agreed, but they also embraced the shift and the expansion of the breadth of the book. We’ve called the pieces “brief essays,” but the lines between forms feel flexible, and I’d call some prose poems, lyric fragments, flash memoirs, or vignettes.
The alphabetical encyclopedia form, even though I originally thought of it as a temporary scaffold, has endured through all the revisions. What started as a form of support has become the form itself: the armature has become the sculpture.
So form supports. But form also distorts. No memoir or personal essay can (or should) capture the gestalt of a life. But in weird—and to me, unexpected—ways, the form transformed the content. One aspect of this metamorphosis arose from the demands of filling out the sequence of the alphabet. For example, I wasn’t originally planning to revisit the medical journey of my vision loss in this project. I’m more interested in adaptation than diagnosis or, for me, nonexistent treatments. The medical system, doing its best to fix the unfixable, often made me feel like my body and I were a problem. My life got a whole lot better when I focused less on medicine and more on how to adapt, including engaging in vocational rehabilitation, which I experienced as empowering me to live fully in the body I had. But when you’re looking for an X for your imaginary encyclopedia, the lexicon of medicine is hard to pass up.
Another example of form distorting is how much Yiddish has crept into this work. I’ve always identified as Jewish, if nonreligious and non-Zionist. But once again, the ecosystem of the encyclopedia tugged me into exploring my family history and other cultural strands of my life.
But perhaps the most forceful tug of the encyclopedia form is toward a stance of implied expertise. Of facts. Knowledge. Authority. The fiction of being able to be comprehensive about anything. The only authority I fully claim is being expert in my own particular life. I have the greatest fondness for facts and have tried to bolster this imagined encyclopedia with accurate information, but ultimately this is an account—and a fragmentary one at that—of personal experience as I remember it, an inherently fallible source.
A note on altered sight. I’m not—in this book or elsewhere—consistent in how I refer to blindness. I tend to say I’m blind, which can be confusing to many people who associate that term with a total lack of visual perception, because, at least as of this writing, I obviously see a lot and am still visually oriented. But to say I’m blind is briefer than saying I’m legally blind (according to definitions used in the United States). And I’ve always found the U.S. definition of blindness weird: as I understand it, in the eyes of the law, I had so-called normal vision until I was thirty, because as long as I wore intensely powerful corrective lenses, my vision was 20/20, meaning that a person can clearly see an object twenty feet away. In a legally blind person, vision is 20/200 or less, or their field of vision is less than twenty degrees. Roughly 1.1 million Americans fit the definition of legal blindness, stemming from cataracts, glaucoma, age- related macular degeneration, diabetes, and other conditions. In addition, the World Health Organization estimates that 800 million people live with vision impairments that impact their daily functioning simply because they lack access to a pair of glasses. So my being defined, and able to function, as sighted for so many years had a lot to do with geography, luck, and privilege. But that’s usually way more than I want to explain any time somebody asks about my vision. One more observation on altered sight: as much as I like language that centers people rather than conditions, I find referring to myself as a person living with blindness cumbersome.
