Poetic Vision Loss

Recently RantWoman was reading of a poet trying to write about vision loss. The poet talked about various kinds of metaphors, but something about the writing has prompted RantWoman to start with some physical descriptions of her experiences and to see whether starting from there will be helpful in stitching / knitting / glueing metaphors together.

Of course the first problem with this line of thinking is that everyone's vision loss experience is different, with a different vocabulary of effects, defects, interactions, intersections, interpretations, and imprecations; it thus becomes the writer's job to provide enough of a description to make whatever metaphor one is aiming for work.

Materials science:
RantWoman remembers RantMom exclaiming once about a young RantWoman equating street lights with pearls or diamonds / rhinestones on velvet. Nowadays, once in awhile if RantWoman closes one eye, pearls or smooth buttons are still there. More often then effect is at best rough like crumbled cheese, or blobby and stringy like melted cheese, finger paints or Play-Doh smeared on a table.

RantWoman actually has double vision. Most of a time at visual infinity, RantWoman gets only one of these effects, but every once in awhile, RantWoman gets to live the equivalent of the wave / particle duality from physics class and enjoy both of these effects at once. RantWoman does not recommend adding mind-altering substances to the experience.

Physically, objects are as hard as ever but visually everything might as well be wrapped in fuzz. RantWoman lately has been living with two choices. RantWoman can wear her glasses, which at least causes objects to have fewer edges. but RantWoman's double vision and different corrections in her two lenses make objects move at different speeds in each eye. Or else, RantWoman can go without glasses and live life with everything stuck permanently in mid beamup / beamdown off Star Trek.

The texture of landscapes:
RantWoman has done a lot of sewing and worked with lots of different fabrics. RantWoman also has lived in a lot of places with really varied landscapes and actually considers herself lucky still to have what seem like comparatively clear sense of landscapes much of the time around her. Interestingly RantWoman's experience with fabrics and her profound appreciation for the different expanses of landscapes and ebbs and flows of bodies of water sometimes tempt RantWoman to try to render her experience of landscapes in fabric in two or so dimensions. RantWoman is tempted in this direction but so far has not made any physical attempts and might still be more likely just to fuss with metaphors in this direction.

The sound environment:
There have been no large-scale changes in RantWoman's hearing and the level of things like traffic noise at key intersections has not changed but RantWoman is still auditorily overwhelmed much more often than she used to be, much more challenged to pull the sounds she most needs out of the sonic fuzz and clatter around her.

While RantWoman gets overloaded out in the world, RantWoman sorely laments something else about her sonic reality at home: RantWoman grew up in a musical household and used to really, really like sitting and reading with some kind of classical music playing in the background. Now RantWoman spends a lot of time having things read aloud to her by various devices. Lamentably, RantWoman finds the shift from visual inspection and reinspection to sequential sonic breadcrumb trails such a tough leap that she very seldom tries to have music going on at the same time.

RantWoman remembers in elementary school getting exhorted to read along if someone was reading aloud. The fact that RantWoman can no longer do this means RantWoman needs to keep working at making mental markers in the sound stream. That is not as easy as it sounds, and RantWoman has whole new ways to get disoriented.

RantWoman probably needs to pen a whole blog post about her newly acquired difficulties absorbing information out of tables through her screen reader!