+++I hope I do too. I'll let you know, of course, but I suspect that my own description of feeling hopeful might actually appall any number of others. That's the way things are though. People feeling hopeful about things that others are actually fearful of.+++
And vice versa.
+++Controversial I suppose because, as with many other conflicting moral conflagrations that beset us, those on both sides of the issue are able to make reasonable arguments simply by starting out with their own set of assumptions about the human condition itself. No one, however, is able to pin down the most rational or ethical prescriptions other than by insisting they are their own. And the rest, as they say, is history. Then the part where God and religion sometimes enter into it.+++
Perhaps there are some issues that will never be resolved.
+++The melody is beautiful. But few things are more subjective than our reactions to music.
In the "Hello" video [at least the one I saw] Lionel Ritchie is an acting instructor and the song is just his way of telling us about this relationship. Laura is depicted as a talented actor, a musician, a dancer and a sculptress. The camera follows her though the day as the teacher hovers in the background singing the song. At this point, though, I assumed that he was just infatuated with one of his students. That's why the ending puzzled me. It seemed to indicate an intimate relationship had already begun.
As the video comes to an end, the instructor is with Laura in the art studio. She tells him that the clay bust she has been working on is finished and shows it to him.
"This is how I see you", she says and then follows the contours of his face with her fingers. On the other hand, if they were already lovers, wouldn't that make it appropriate. Lovers caress each other's faces all the time. I'm sure there were times when you have had your own face lovingly caressed. So, it would seem, it's not about blindness so much as the embodiment of love and affection and tenderness. And, sure, arousal.
Anyway, the melody itself often gives me goosebumps. Not unlike other pop songs...Mandy by Barry Manilo or Superstar by the Carpenters.+++
Aren't teacher-student relationships frowned on? Depends on the ages of those involved, I suppose. I know the song primarily because of its reputation in the blind community, members of which have been known, on occasion, to break out into deeply un-heartfelt renditions of "Hello, is it me you're looking for?" at the most inopportune of moments.
I do, indeed, like Mandy by Barry Manilow, and definitely Superstar by the Carpenters. Karen Carpenter's voice is beautiful.
+++Any creative passion is better than none at all. And echolocation is something that most of us are familiar with in regard to bats and dolphins.
This from web.md:
Surprisingly, echolocation can be learned as a skill. Experts have found that the human brain has areas that are dedicated to processing echoes. They also estimate that about 20 to 30 percent of blind people learn how to echolocate at some point in their lives.
Here's a video of a man using it:
https://youtu.be/A8lztr1tu4o?si=M1ogoDuzPRg-BUCx
He and the narrator attempt to explain it.+++
A very interesting video, and I can certainly relate to the guy talking in it. Having no eyes, blind since birth (though it wasn't cancer in my case), doing echolocation completely automatically without ever being taught it, without even thinking about it. It's not a skill that can easily be learnt by an adult, though. Perhaps to a limited extent, in some cases. To me, it's really easy. I just click my tongue.
My brother used to call me Batty, when I was little, as a nickname. As in, blind as a bat. Also because bats do echolocation, and "batty" means a bit loopy or mad. No matter how many times I pointed out to him that bats aren't actually blind, he still did it.
+++All you can do is to make that attempt yourself. Write about something that genuinely moves you, send it out to publishers, and see what happens. I did that myself twice. A whole bunch of rejections slips later I had to accept that I would never be on any best sellers list. But you can't know that until you try to write something you want to convey to others because you are passionaite about it. And maybe they should be too.+++
I have lots of different ideas, but I always think that my writing comes across as a bit dry, lacking in feeling. The beauty of the book I recently read, Caedmon's Song, is that it was able to transport the reader to a different time and place, and to get inside the mind of the protagonist, Kirsten, and her truly heart-breaking story. I would very much recommend it, in fact, if you're looking for something new and different, and maybe we can share our thoughts, afterwards. But reading it brought home to me just how much my own writing skills pale in comparison. One idea I've been thinking about quite seriously is a young adult fantasy about some teenagers who meet an elf girl lost in the woods one day. The elves live underground, and for them, times goes much slower than for us on the surface, and although she says she's 17, she's actually thousands of years old. The teenagers have to help her find her way home, while being chased by the bad guys who want to capture her for scientific research, and in the process one of the teenagers falls in love with her. I have all the plot elements mapped out, but I'm not sure my writing skills are up to a novel-length story, or even a novella. I'm also a bit unsure how to handle visual description, whether to ignore it completely, which would detract quite considerably from the novel, or fake it. Certainly, when I read novels, I love all the visual descriptions in them.
+++That is basically all that matters. But for many, I suspect, looks are more important than they will admit. I struggled with it myself for years and years. All one need do here in America is go to the movies or watch TV for a while. While there are exceptions, of course, the preponderance of actors are, if not drop dead gorgorous, then really, really easy on the eyes. You can even turn on the local news. Most of the female anchors and almost all of the female reporters are exceptionally attractive. Though, again, genes more or less than memes?
And then of course the "beauty industrial complex". Billions and billions of dollars are at stake convincing both men and women that they can always be considerably more attractive. But again, this is something that is either more or less a part of your own perspective. It would seem to depend on what is communicated to you about "looks" from the sighted community.+++
I suppose it's the same when I say that physical attraction, touch, smell and so on, is important to me, and risk being accused of being shallow.
+++That's basically what we all do here. We describe ourselves out in the particular world around us and note how in some ways others describe themselves the same way and others do not. Then the part where one way or another in any given community rewards or punishments are meted out for particular kinds of behaviors depending on who is in power.+++
That is, indeed, all we can really do.
+++That's always been a tricky thing for me. On the one hand, there is all of the beauty, and all of the bounty we receive from nature. But then in any number of devastating ways, nature can take that bounty away. It can reconfigure our very existence into a Hell on Earth. So, as one might suspect, I am no less fractured and fragmented here as well.+++
The awesome power of nature is truly humbling.
+++So, the dream was...prophetic in some ways? As though in anticiapation of something you had no way of knowing about? Does a vivid dream amount to something akin to an avalanche of sounds and smells and things you touch and taste? And its "reality" then embedded in how you interpret them given the context of the dream?
Much like me, only I have visual cues as well.+++
Yes, it seems like it was prophetic. Or just a very strange coincidence. The vividness mainly consisted of the emotional intensity, which imbued it with meaning, though the sensations in it were very strong too, in this case, touch, as I was crawling over the rubble of ruined buildings, bricks, broken glass, bits of wood sticking up, and so on, on the bare skin of my hands and knees.
+++Same with me. Not only do I rarely have nightmares, I almost never have surreal dreams either...dreams that are not immediately understood by me. Those "themes" that I suspect we all have.+++
I quite often have surreal dreams. The ones involving tunnels, for example.
+++Maybe between the two of us we can get closer to grasping whatever those like Freud and Jung were suggesting about dreams.
Or, perhaps, even rebut them?+++
I'm not even sure, except perhaps in the very broadest sense, what Freud and Jung said about dreams. Though I suspect a bit of psychobabble might have been involved.
+++Again, maybe I am just someone who dreams in reality instead. Almost all of my dreams are rooted in actual experiences that I have had. A couple of nights ago, for example, I was back in Miners Mills. I was with Sharon, my first love, and we were at Harvey's Lake. The dream was not really all that different from the reality all those years ago. And how wonderful to "be" with her again. I still recall vividly walking out of the water together and going over to a photo booth. A picture for her, a picture for me. Almost exacly as it did unfold all those years ago!+++
Some of my dreams are like that, that is, relating to actual incidents, but only a small minority, I think, and even those don't follow the events exactly. It's more the feeling about them that ties them to the actual event.
+++Do you mean those times when you are in a new room or in a new space...a place you have never had any expereince with?+++
Yes, echolocation works in new places, just as much as in familiar ones. Indeed, I rely on it in exactly those situations.
+++Now, if I were to describe being in a pitch black tunnel where even sighted people could not see their hand in front of their face, all I would have at my disposal are the interpretations of the sounds I hear and the things I smell and the things I touch. But all the while, I could turn on a flashlight and see things too. I just find it hard to fathom how a blind person forms a description of a tunnel without actually seeing it.+++
As with all spaces I'm in, by echolocation. It's probably hard to convey just how much I use it, how vital it is in forming my mental map of the world around me. And why, for example, having a cold, which thankfully I very rarely do, can really mess me up, since it prevents me echolocating properly, being all bunged up.
+++Actually, the more confined the spaces are the better for me. Why? Damned if I know. It's just how I have come to react to them. Perhaps for the same or similar reasons that Temple Grandin invented her "hug machine". It's wide open spaces that most perturb me.+++
I love wide open spaces, the great outdoors and all.
+++In some respects -- many respects? most respects? -- others might read these accounts and never really know that you were blind. When they find out they may have entirely different reactions. And, I suspect, particular sighted people no doubt would be grappling to imagine themselves taking a camping trip alone. Then the part where you shared these experience with sighted people and the discussions you had. They perhaps describing what they saw, you perhaps augmenting their undersanding of the sounds and the smells and the textures. But what might be going through the mind of someone at Stonehenge given the fact that they were born blind and could see none of it.
In other words, as difficult as this is for me to convey, how do blind from birth men and women translate their own experiences into descriptions that are understood by others without any visual components.+++
I'm glad, at least, that they didn't come across as incoherent. I've had a number of camping trips alone, the one I described being the first. I thought they'd probably get a bit repetitive after that. It's important to me to be able to do things like that, to be independent, in other words. As for Stonehenge, it's a truly amazing place, marred only by the fact that it was crawling with people at the time.
+++So, intimacy between lovers who are both blind and intimacy between lovers in which one is born blind and the other is sighted. Some things the same, other things different. Then attempts to close any communication gaps by talking about it openly and honestly.+++
I've only ever had such experiences with sighted partners, so can't really comment on anything else.
+++Well, I actually like to think of myself as...an aberration? On the other hand, I do lots and lots of things that others do. I'm completely normal in regard to many, many things. I have just come to think about moral and political conflicts differently from most others. From my frame of mind, normal can be a blessing for some and a curse for others. What's always most important to me here is that in our interactions with others we come up with ways to take into account the fact that for different folks there really are what can be very different strokes.+++
I spent a long time trying to be as normal as possible, to fit in, but I'm far less bothered about it these days.
+++Alas, however, and as often as not, I bump into those here [and there] who are truly perturbed by my own philosophical conclusions. In fact, I'm no less perturbed by them myself. So, all I really can do is hear others out and respect the differences between us as long as neither one of us set out to "preach the 'my way or the highway' gospel."+++
Yes, that's the key. Not preaching, but rather, listening and communicating.
+++Then it's just a matter of sustaining that all the way to the grave.+++
It's just a question of attitude, I think.
+++I like being around people too...virtually. In fact, all my life I've been surrounded by people...a big family, tons of relatives, friends, fellow workers and school mates, fellow political activists, lovers, Army buddies. Now, however, I am most content being alone. If for no other reason that, when you are alone, the things you choose to do you do without having to take into account the things that others want to do instead. Giving you many more options. Though, of course, there's the downside of living like that.+++
I really like having my own space, my own flat, living on my own, and being free do do my own thing. I wasn't sure if I would, at first, but I soon found that it was exactly what I wanted. And I also really like having guests, cooking for them, for example, and enjoying their company. I think this is very much the best of both worlds.
+++Ar least until "our own" starts in on challenging others who insist that, on the contrary, it's "their own" that others must accept.
The part where some are said to be blind not because they can't see but because they refuse to think about something like everyone else does. The are blind to The truth.+++
When the blind are leading the blind, the one-eyed man is king, or something...