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In Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, the observer is drawn into a simple domestic scene: the titular woman stands illuminated in the light of, we presume, an unseen window. The expression on her face as she reads is perhaps one of surprise, certainly one of concentration. In this vivid, static painting, she seems even more still and more rooted, unmoving though clearly moved by what she is reading. And the observer is similarly absorbed by this intimate moment.
This interpretation, such as it is, is arrived at first through the eyes: the light and color, the posture of the woman and her expression, the singularity of the room. Vermeer’s painting is a touchstone of sorts in Naomi Cohn’s compelling memoir, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight. To her, with her very limited ability to see, the story is not in the painting; it is the painting. “Who cares what is on the letter?” she writes. “Look at how Vermeer makes folds with paint. Look at the intensity of his looking, how he chose what to see.”
Choosing what to see is at the heart of Cohn’s book. It is what she must do due to a condition known, by one of many names, as “bilateral degenerative progressive high myopia,” which significantly limits her ability to see. As Cohn explains: “Each blind eye, each blind mind, is different. Each of my eyes bears its own unique shape of retinal scar…. Dead center in my field of vision. Dead center, blotting out the letters of a text or street sign or pill bottle. Blocking faces and expressions.”
Cohn’s condition did not come on suddenly. As a child, she was very near-sighted and wore glasses by age four. At 15, her vision had diminished so much that “without prescription, instead of being clear and focused at twenty feet, [it] was focused around three inches.” This “disease process,” in which the eye “becomes so elongated that it tears itself apart,” may have been genetic or, she wonders, perhaps the result of being born to parents who were academicians, “an inheritance expressed in close focus, head bent over book or paper, rarely breaking away to the long view.” By age 30, she had lost enough of her sight to be considered legally blind.
For Cohn, who describes herself as “made of words,” turns to language to make sense of it all, if there is any sense is to be made. The result is The Braille Encyclopedia, which, like the light she can see at the periphery of her vision, presents a world experienced in flickers and glances, brief glimpses into her life and arranged so that the picture created is not fully realized until the last page is turned.
Cohn never intended “to write an encyclopedia, imaginary or otherwise,” she tells us in an author’s note. Originally gathered as a collection of linked prose poems, it became apparent as she worked on revising the book for publication that it needed a different form, one she saw first as a temporary scaffold, but what started “as a form of support has become the form itself: the armature has become the sculpture.”
This encyclopedic structure the strength of Cohn’s book: alphabetized entries help to order her thoughts, not just about her own history and experiences, but art, love, medicine, white canes, and Louis Braille, among many other topics. Some of these ideas and images are revisited and, to reference another type of framework, provide thematic buttresses for the abecedarian architecture of the book.
Using the Vermeer painting as an example, Cohn first mentions it in the entry “Blue,” in which she discusses a color she can still see and loves. Though “the world of the painting weights toward earth tones,” she observes, at the center “there is the woman’s blue jacket: layers of transparent pigment that read like layers of light. Blue.” Later, in “Unforgettable,” Cohn sees her neighbor walking his dog in “Dutch cloud light. What might have streamed into Vermeer’s window if we ever had a chance to stand where he stood.” The final time the reader encounters Vermeer and his painting is the entry mentioned earlier, called “The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” about the intensity of his looking.
Cohn’s most frequently recurring subject is, unsurprisingly, Louis Braille and his eponymous tactile code. In considering Braille’s life, Cohn begins with his accidentally blinding himself with an awl in his father’s saddle-making shop—“Perhaps the last thing he saw, a shine of metal galloping toward his eye”—and then revisits him as a boy sent off to the National Institute for the Blind in Paris when he was 10, imagining him at the Jardin des Plantes with boys just like himself, or in the Institute’s library which consisted of 14 books with huge embossed letters read by “feeling each character with both hands.” When she presents him the last time, in “Obituary,” we learn that when he died at age 43, “[n]o one published a death notice. No one mentioned his childhood accident, nor how his father hammered nails in the shapes of the letters of the alphabet into a wooden board, so his blind son could learn by feel. No one eulogized his writing system.”
Cohn recounts the difficulty of learning braille in midlife in much the same way that any new skill or language is more difficult the older the learner. Her guide through this education is Cindy, a woman “who can teach two students at once, reading two texts, one with her left hand, one with her right.” It is Cindy’s kind encouragement that keeps Cohn going, keeps her motivated to learn how to read with her fingers, how to write by punching a pattern of raised dots—“millet-sized and delicate”—and to persevere in acquiring a means of communication shared by only 10% of blind people. The payoff is having a form of expression she ultimately came to love: “Braille is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, those almost touching fingers of God and Adam. When my finger touches braille bumps, something moves in me.”
Throughout The Braille Encyclopedia, Cohn—neither resentful of her situation nor resigned to it—finds ways to translate the world she has with the one she remembers. Such is the case in “Synesthesia,” a meditation about how foolish it feels “to tease apart the threads of different senses” and how she feels she has “seen the orange of an oriole when I hear its jazzy call,” or how the smell of wet acorns makes her feel she can “see their clever shape, their little shaggy berets atop glossy nuts. How ice smells blue.”
Perhaps the best illustration of Cohn’s resolute acceptance of her reality, and one of the most memorable entries in her encyclopedia, is the story of another encyclopedia, The International Wildlife Encyclopedia: An Illustrated Library of All the Animals, Birds, Fish, Insects and Reptiles of the World. The 20-volume set was a gift from her parents when she was a child, and she was smitten with all the creatures in its many pages. One of the strangest was a cliff-dwelling worm. In its life story, she found, as an adult, an echo of her own:
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.
Because The Braille Encyclopedia itself moves “forward into the future,” rather than dwelling on the past, there is not a wisp of pathos to be found in the book. Instead, Cohn’s sharp and beautifully rendered vignettes ask to be read again and again, perhaps in a different or random order, each time yielding new insights into the intensity of her looking, at how she chooses what to see.
