Film: Phenomenology of deafness

I watched this film on Aeon Magazine, a description of the experience of lip reading by a deaf person. This is excellent for its unusual content of actually trying to explain 'what it is like' to experience the world differently, and how it might be your effort of will which makes it seem achievable, even easy. It reminds me of my recent explanation to people of my 'superpower' eye. I find I can sometimes see things more readily than others, things which are oblique, in some way obscured, at an angle, upside down - and I realised that my one eye's compromised acuity has led me to become very good at finding clues, of reading things in difficult circumstances, obscured or difficult, precisely because I have to work so hard to overcome the limitations of my own ability to see. Therefor when I try to see something in the world which is actually obscured in some way, my brain has new super-powers of deduction. This hasn't just come from practicing reading, but by the difficulties I have with moving forms, people speaking to me (I can't hear them sometimes and I think its because I can't see their lips moving), seeing enough of their eyes to gauge mood, not to mention images which I sometimes have to puzzle over for ages before I understand them (I have to give up sometimes, but I try to do so lightly, with a shrug). 

Karen SmallComment