Communication is not just a product of experiencing it the world, but it also has the potential to be means of experiencing the world. This is something Helen Keller just taught me.
This has nothing to do with an Apples to Apples game, I'm totally serious. I just read the the first four chapter of Helen Keller's The Story of my Life and it blew my mind a little bit. Aside from the anecdotes she tells (which are entertaining even before the uniqueness of her perspective is taken into account) there are two main aspects of Helen's autobiography which grabbed my attention.
The first is the way the author's story depicts communication as an innate human need, something that is crucial not merely expressing, but for for seeing and interpreting and living. The need for communication is obviously apparent to most of us. However, I for one have rarely ever truly pondered what not being able to see or hear would be like from a perspective as unique as Helen's. Most of us can only imagine what it would be like to lose our sight and hearing after we already have substantial knowledge of what things look and sound like. In this kind of situation we would obviously miss the ability to express and communicate with ease because it was something we had already known.
However, Helen recognized the lack of something without even knowing exactly what that something was. She identifies this lack as the missing link not only between herself and others, but herself and everything. Her attempt, even from early childhood, to create a bridge between the outside world and dark, silent island that made up her own world is amazing to me.
Helen describes her frustration at this experience as feeling like "invisible hands" were holding her (another incredible statement- how do you conceptualize "invisible" if you have no solid memories of things that are visible?). She acts out her frustration through numerous fits of crying and kicking and acting out. Once Helen, through the help of Miss. Sullivan, begins to develop her own system of communication she begins to understand much of what it is to be human. The sense of connectedness this gave her allowed her to build relationships with things and people which aided her understanding of both love and regret. It's an amazing look at the significance of communicating.
Another thing which really sparked my interest in reading these chapters was the frequency with which Helen describes her feelings and memories through the use of images. Even from the very first line of work, she describes the (hypothetical) golden veil surrounding her childhood. I have to wonder what "golden" meant to her? Was it simply an idea? What was she able to see in her own mind when she read or wrote the word? How is it that "golden" translates so appropriately to readers who have seen things that we would describe as golden? I was reading a book recently where the author described being on an alien planet and seeing colors that he had never seen before, saying that it hurt his brain when he tried to put the colors into some kind of category. It seems like such a fascinating and awesome process- seeing something that you have no framework to even imagine and describing that thing.
