Here is my ignorant first-sense impression, which I'm hoping you can turn into useful thoughts I can carry like wise words...or sommat ;)
Great diary!
So, here is my thought:
That our senses are there to aid us on the planet. Five senses:
Taste Touch Sight Hearing Smell
Western civilisation downplays smell, taste, and touch, and overplays sight and hearing--sight more than hearing, so here we can communicate through vision--not good for the blind, though we can build software that "reads" the page, machines blind people can talk into which translates into diaries, comments, ratings etc... But they are disadvantaged compared to us because we can do all this by using our eyes.
Would it make sense for a blind couple to be glad that their child was born blind?
For each sense, society comes up with solutions, ameliorations, systems. I think back to a pre-civilised situation...human childbirth is a difficult business since we stood upright...hence civilisation...humans cannae survive without society, no human being can survive on their own...there is no such thing...
But the thought that is still in my head (I think you typed the expression "hearing loss" in one of your comments, In Wales) is that not being able to smell because of industrial strength car fumes (or cigarette fumes!), or having my sense of touch atrophied by even something as simple as not having wide variety of materials to touch and the time to learn the subtleties...these are losses. To my possibilities of experience.
Loss being part of the human condition, and not linked to happiness... No, that makes no sense.
But...I can't experience all the pleasures potentially available to me, this is my loss, but there are only so many pleasures one can cram into a life...
There's some connection there. This is why I'm asking for your help, In Wales. If I lost my legs in, say, a road accident, I'd feel I'd lost my legs. I would have lost a skill. But I might be a happier person afterwards because I could find a new me devloping, and my relationships might develop in positive ways they wouldn't have, and relying more on society would teach me more about it, both good and bad.
But what if I was born without legs? And without arms? And without a sense of smell? And blind, and deaf?
The senses are communication devices...if we use them badly or use them to communicate idiocies (that would be me ;) or pernicious nonsense, or use it to inflict pain or suffering on others...
You must have heard people banging on like this so many times, in Wales. So I'm appealing to your patience and good will, a chance to lay it down so I can see it a bit clearer.
See...touch...taste...smell...hear...
(I mean, perhaps, that we all need to develop as many senses as possible--microscopes and telescopes expand site; acoustic devices expand hearing; bio-sensors expand taste; nano machines expand touch--testing surfaces too subtle for our fingers etc...)
Hey, that's me yack yacking! A great diary; I hope I haven't said the wrong thing(s), but if I have, well, now I have the chance to lose some more prejudices!
Have a great weekend. Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
The first thing that comes to mind though is that if you are born without something, such as hearing or limbs, you don't know what you don't have - although you can see other people experiencing things that you never will.
And I guess in many ways it comes down to the individual. Each barrier I reach I will push at until it falls down or I figure out some way around it and in doing so I experience and learn new and different things that shape me as a person. When life is easy, nothing challenges you and you don't develop unless you choose to find challenges for yourself.
Maybe through not having something I actually have more because I quite conciously look at the world in a different way and look for new things to absorb from it. But that's my way.
Other people see a barrier and give up and then, yes, there is a true loss because they no longer try to reach out to the world around them and the world certainly isn't go to go to them and they've lost a wealth of experience through that. I will continue to think on your comments and reply tomorrow. Ad astra per aspera
My sense of smell is duller without my hearing aid in. Although I don't get much useful sound from it I still need sound around me otherwise I feel dissociated from the world, like I'm not functioning properly until I've been switched on. I think my brain needs to process some information from sound as well as everything coming in from the other senses and if sound is missing, my brain can't process the rest.
When I am driving I have to have my MP3 player on, not specifically for listening to music but to stop me trying to listen to the sounds the car makes. My brain ends up desperately trying to process all the noise and it can't and I just end up worrying whether or not that noise is normal, is the engine about to blow up, am I over-revving, what's going on???! So if I take the sound of the car away, I feel the car through my feet instead and my driving is much better as a result.
Information is around us in so many forms and there are different ways of de-coding it all.
When I'm in a club, I feel the beat of the music through my feet (or just force of the air vibrating) and use that for dancing. When I'm in gym classes, I'm moving too much to feel the beat and rely entirely on sight to move at the right time to keep up.
When people talk to me I have to lipread to understand but interestingly enough, if I can't see their eyes (sunglasses for example), I understand nothing at all. Body language is hugely important. In meetings I can tell if someone has a hidden agenda, is lying or not giving us all the information we need even if they are appearing to be open and saying all the right things. I don't even know I'm processing these things, I can't articulate my gut feeling but it is there.
So in many ways I see more, I gain more than if I were 'badly' using sound alone to interpret my environment.
If you lose one of those senses, you either find a way to adapt and heighten your use of other methods of extracting information from your surroundings, or you don't- I suspect if you don't it is because you are still trying to use the sense that you don't have and not allowing your brain to process the rest of the scene.
When you've grown up without, you automatically tap into the other methods available to you. That's why I'm adament that I do things differently as opposed to being lacking in some way because I can't hear. When I play music, I'll 'hear' it differently, I'll gain different things from it but still, I love music.
So perhaps in answer to your post, you use what you have access to and having less of one sense than another just gives you a different experience of something, rather than a loss of experience. Ad astra per aspera
You got me wondering now how the Deaf (political group) relate to the blind? Is there a "capital B" Blind group? I was wondering how sign language would be considered by a Blind person. Could it be seen as a form of discrimination? Thinking about this I wondered if there is a finger-to-palm-touch language. That would be great to learn.
Anyway, thanks again for the diary and your comments. Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
There is a sort of sign language for deafblind people where you use the palm of the hand and fingers to spell and communicate. I've seen it being used, I think it is limited especially because many words have to be spelt out and it takes time to do so.
I don't think sign language would be considered a form of discrimination since the language comes about as a necessity for Deaf people. As with all hearing people who don't know sign, an interpreter would be needed to aid communication.
Glad that diary was useful for you! Ad astra per aspera
