Featured Writer #119: Naomi Cohn

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Academia

The world into which I was born. Not my world now. But raised among the faux-Gothic towers and gargoyles of the University of Chicago by a linguist mother and a cultural anthropologist/historian father, I grew up in a nest feathered with words, texts, and books.

I am made of words, the organized chaos of text, ant colonies of characters streaming over paper, each letter coalescing into ever greater meaning with its sisters. I am made of words, of the syllable-song of speech, the badminton of argument batted back and forth over the remains of dinner across that round Formica table of childhood. My very cells built of words, the milk and Cheerios and brown sugar, the peanut butter and jelly, the corned beef, bagels, and sardines, lox and cream cheese, Morbier and Manchego, Gruyère and Gorgonzola, all bought with the dollars my father made from words (something like $12,000 the year I was born). Words—read, said, written, and argued.

The milk of words—ethnography and kinship, semester and sabbatical, primary source, archive and field, research, thesis, dissertation, Festschrift and symposium, caste, colonialism, taboo—all churned into the butter on our bread. We got splinters from the aging maple floors of our Hyde Park apartment while my father paid the mortgage with words.

My mother’s milk was also words—linguistics and semantics, etymology and syntax, grammar and glottal stop. Reading the dictionary for dessert. And inside my mother’s cells, flecks of Yiddish, and potato peelings—scraps of my grandmother’s words—stories of a Lithuanian shtetl, of fleeing pogroms, Bolshevik Revolution, World War I—my mother’s mother’s words, words of a grandmother I never met: We ate potatoes. We slept on sacks of potatoes. We wore potato sacks for clothes when the potatoes were gone. In such a teeming ocean of words how could I know there was anything else to swim in?

Between

From Old English, in the space which separates. As in the space between two lines of braille. The inability to move easily from one line to another separates me from a competent braille reader. To me, the interstices feel vanishingly small. Line often separates poetry from prose, line being a tool that poets often use, that prose writers, mostly, do not. I live lost in the few millimeters between lines of braille, lost between poetry and prose, lost in the zone between total sight and total blindness. A whole country that seems invisible to other people, an unimaginable Narnia, as elusive as the space between two lines of braille.

Cindy

My braille teacher when I was completing Adjustment to Blindness Training, in my late forties. Cindy, my guide from the lowercase letter a, a single dot in the upper left corner of a two-by-three grid of dots, through z and beyond, into reading and writing so-called Grade 2 or contracted braille. Grade 2 braille makes use of close to 200 shortcuts, which—if you can remember them—save space and reading and writing time. Cindy, master of all the arts of teaching a subject few want to learn: long chats about hobbies, frequent breaks, ready access to the candy jar. Cindy, who can teach two students at once, reading two texts, one with her left hand, one with her right. Cindy, who can read a bit of braille upside down, like Django Reinhardt playing guitar upside down or behind his back. Cindy, who has a particular gift for listening to the stories. New vision loss rehab students usually have their story—how they lost their sight, what they did for a living before, the spouse who left after. Cindy, who has a very gentle way of breaking bad news.

Code

In developing his system, Louis Braille was inspired by a military code of raised dots for passing notes. Night writing, they called it. This sounds romantic, occult, like dream work. But it might be no more than something that can be shared in the dark, without revealing location or other information. Something the enemy cannot hear. Writing in the dark, in a code almost no one understands, has freed up my writing in ways I did not expect. Braille conceals. Chances are the bumps that mean symbols and words to me mean nothing to you. Or mean something else—mystery, curiosity? Something opens up in the place of concealment. In the silence of the braille cell, I write what I would never put into print.

Dot

Spot, as in a dab of paint. Speck. Fleck. As in that first fleck of blindness in my field of view, all those years ago. By the time I moved to Minnesota in 1996, I had a blind spot in each retina and my visual acuity could no longer be corrected to 20/20. By the time I met my now-husband, Ray, tandem biking in 1998, those spots had expanded a bit. He can’t see them, but he’s never seen me without them.

Ray refers to braille as dots, as in, Are you off to read some dots now? A braille dot under my index finger walks up my neurons to some arrangement of synapses, moist like damp leaves, and tickles its way back into meaning.

Gadget

Device, invention, or piece of equipment. I make it sound as if braille is always an artisanal affair, fingers on paper or punching by hand, like some monk in his cell. But I learned to write braille on a Perkins Brailler, a monstrous typewriter with only nine keys and a probably unintentional steampunk aesthetic. I don’t own one. When I borrowed and lugged one home to learn on in 2012, it shook the floorboards as I typed. The magazines I read are produced by institutional braille printers, called embossers, that thunder out pages printed on both sides at once. Braille displays, used alone or connected to a computer, tablet, or phone, allow people to read digital braille files and get a braille read-out of what’s on a screen. Reading braille electronically can help an avid reader avoid an avalanche of paper. Even a single braille magazine comes in several eleven-by-eleven inch volumes, each more than an inch thick. I felt lucky to get training to use a forty-cell braille display in 2014. A decade later, on a good day, when I can remember all the commands I learned and get the Bluetooth connection to play nice with my current device, it’s magic. Little pins dance up and down on the refreshable display, forming braille characters under my fingers.

Hinge

A mechanical joint. The hardware on which a door or gate hangs and swings open. As in the hinge on a braille slate, a tool for embossing braille by hand. If you are perverse enough to want to learn more than the rudiments—as a forty-seven-year-old, born-sighted, visually-oriented adult—eventually the hinge of a braille slate wings open.

I never meant to learn braille. It was just part of the package of vocational rehab, or Adjustment to Blindness Training: Technology, Orientation, and Mobility, Woodshop, Keyboarding, Cooking, and Tasks of Daily Living. I’d never even thought about the possibility that people wrote braille by hand, until I started rehab. I never meant to start rehab either. I just wanted State Services for the Blind to help me earn a quick little master’s in therapy so I could shift to what I thought would be a more physically sustainable way of earning a living as the usefulness of my eyesight dwindled. Annie, my vocational counselor at the time, wisely suggested Adjustment to Blindness Training to bolster my chances of getting through grad school as a legally blind student. Sure, okay, whatever, I said. When I learned that braille class was part of the curriculum, I couldn’t imagine it would be more than a passing curiosity. But I said, Sure, okay. And some hinge within me began to unfold.

Motivation

If it’s so hard, why bother? Why write, for example? Because I’m like that cliff-dwelling worm I’m sure I read about as a kid in that encyclopedia I loved: The International Wildlife Encyclopedia: An Illustrated Library of All the Animals, Birds, Fish, Insects and Reptiles of the World. Twenty glorious volumes, from aardvark to zorro, a stumpy mutt-looking canine. All rich with fact and picture. With geographic distribution maps, taxonomic information, and text in three important-looking columns. First published in 1970. The lead author, Maurice Burton (1898–1992), was once the curator of sponges at the British Museum of Natural History. My parents bought me the set in the 1970s, feeding my obsessions with both the animal world and with books. I cooed over koala and kangaroo. I flipped past the slimy hagfish and gruesome botfly with a shudder.

I kept those encyclopedia volumes for decades, the same way I kept the hundreds of pounds of other books I began buying for myself as soon as I had pocket money. Even today, I still have books I bought the year my family lived in England. From 1975 to 1976, when I turned thirteen, we lived in Sydenham, South London. My father, on sabbatical, spent his days tunneling in the records of the India Office Library where he was researching the British colonial enterprise in South Asia. My mother was deep into a yearslong hunt for the origins of the name Samantha. I spent my allowance on Smarties and caramels sold in white paper bags at the sweet shop, Osmiroid fountain pens from the stationers at the end of the High Street, and on books from Kirkdale Bookshop: from Watership Down and The Hunting of the Snark to Northanger Abbey, from more books on animals to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

My mother complained of the cost, but my father shipped a whole trunk full of those English books, both his and mine, back to the States when we returned home to Chicago.

I lugged many of those books, and all those that joined them through high school and college and into my twenties, with me through much of my adult life, even after my sight began to make text unreachable. From apartment to apartment in Chicago, from apartment to house to house in Minnesota. Eventually I did my grieving and let the animal encyclopedias and most of the others go.

But I still carried the memory of that coastal worm within me. How it lived by eating its way into a cliff face. Over the years as it tunneled, it grew, boring a wider hole as it lived deeper into the cliff, eating mud and stone. I carried with me the story of how it could never turn around, the tunnel behind it too narrow for its present larger self. The way a writer just has to keep gnawing, writing forward into the future.

Voice

After a few years of keeping a braille journal, I notice a different voice emerges. Sometimes wild, sometimes catty, but more and more, a voice that does not pull punches. Not wrapping everything in endless modifiers. When it’s so much work to write a single word, it had better be worth saying.

Despite my ready tongue, I have always been afraid to say my mind. But so few people can read what I write in braille. I can leave a screed, a manifesto, or a satisfying string of insults and obscenities face up in the middle of a room.

Window Seat

My favorite place to read or write. As a kid I loved sneaking into the walk-in closet in my father’s study. Part of its magic: it boasted its own small window, an open view to the south. Also, no one else claimed it as their particular space. I’d wander in and reach up to tug the long string hanging from the bare bulb and set my book atop the built-in storage shelves. I’d pull out my mother’s sewing kit, a toolbox with trays, full of bobbins, thimbles, pins and needles, embroidered name tags for each of her four children, waiting to be sewn into the collars of clothes. I’d run my finger over the spools of thread. Trusty cotton and elegant silk, my mother ordered them into a perfect rainbow, like a new set of crayons not yet jumbled by use. Tucking the kit away, I’d open the skate drawer, explore the tangle of laces and blades, wonder which of my siblings’ scuffed cast-offs I’d grow into by winter. Then I’d hoist myself onto the wide shelf, next to my waiting book—Pagoo, Misty of Chincoteague, or one of the Narnia Chronicles. Standing, I could read the titles of paperback mysteries on open shelves overhead—Murder Must Advertise, The Daughter of Time, The Thin Man, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, Flying Finish. Then, like a dog settling into her bed, I’d sit cross-legged and peer out at the tennis courts, the gray limestone of International House, the cars all pointed north on our one-way street. Unseen but felt: the Midway, where every year, come winter, its summer turf was iced into a third-rate rink. My father, his high-school-hockey-star status long abandoned, would take me there to mince and stumble until our cold fingers called out for hot chocolate.

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.

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