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Stricken blind by a stroke at the age of 32,
commercial photographer John Dugdale
was able to transform what seemed like
an insurmountable liability
into a successful career as an art photographer.
So, what does he see?
An aurora borealis,
or as he calls it, "a whole constellation in my eye."
This meeting is particularly touching,
as we witness a tender solidarity grow up
between John Dugdale and Dr. Oliver Sacks
as they compare their compromised visions.
And to hear Dr. Sacks describe his monoscopically viewed foot
as a "protoplasmic effulgence" is worth waiting for.
DR. SACKS: We were asked to imagine
that we had just met in a café,
and you are entering into a conversation
about things of shared interest
and that you just happened to be in the same café.
[ Laughter ]
DUGDALE: I hope everyone got their coffee.
[ Laughter ]
DR. SACKS: We both have to deal
with visual problems and phenomena
of one sort or another.
How did yours start, John?
DUGDALE: In 1993, I had an age-related stroke
that knocked my retinas to pieces.
And then, when they tried to repair them,
I lost the one eye.
The other eye was poorly repaired.
It´s been diminishing.
It was stable for about 10 years,
and then it´s been diminishing gradually
and, actually, just the last few months, very rapidly.
So I´m just about without sight,
which always sounds silly when I say that,
´cause I never feel like that at all, you know?
Not even in the slightest.
So, you know, just if you had just met me
and I would try to think of the most important thing
that I wanted to tell you over our coffee,
I would tell you that the great surprise of my life
was when I got home from a year in the hospital.
I had learned how to walk again
and sort of dealt as best as I could
with the amount of sight that I had,
that I got home and I could not fall asleep
after having started taking pictures when I was 11.
I thought, how was I to continue with my career?
And I realized that I could see fine even without my sight --
which we all can --
but I felt like the Cheshire Cat when I went to bed
´cause everyone thought it was so tragic and I had a secret --
that actually things were going to be even more beautiful
than they were before.
It really turned out that way.
I had done commercial work
for everyone from Bergdorf Goodman to Lane Bryant.
And, you know, they don´t really want somebody stumbling around,
nearly blind, knocking over things,
so the only thing left to do
was to pursue the career that I had intended to do,
which was to be the next Alfred Stieglitz.
I figured out that I could see without my eyes,
and it was my secret,
that no one knew that, you know, before or since,
and I literally was so excited.
For days, I couldn´t sleep at night
because I knew that it would be easy to continue my photography,
and it actually became better.
Not so much about the shine on a shoe,
but about what just happened to me.
And I created a huge diary of photographs --
maybe 5,000 of them -- using a 19th-century process.
Had you been using 19th-century processes before the stroke?
Only when I could find enough time
in between catalogs and advertisements and stuff,
which was just an accidental career that I had.
It wasn´t really what I ever meant to do.
But now that it´s 20 years later,
I don´t know how else
I could have gotten to the point that I´m at
if my sight didn´t change.
It´s never seemed like the wrong thing to me.
It´s always seemed like exactly what was supposed to happen.
And, you know, it has never -- It´s not the same.
Every day, I wake up,
and it seems like I can see the aurora borealis inside my eye
because my optic nerve is failing.
And it´s so beautiful.
Sometimes it looked like Saturn.
And darkness isn´t dark at all to me.
There´s fluorescent orange and brilliant violet
and beautiful reds and yellows
and things that look like a half-moon passing by.
But I always tell people
that I have the entire constellation in my one eye.
[ Laughter ]
Sounds pretty fancy. It makes people feel envious.
[ Laughter ]
And you´ve been turning to larger and larger cameras?
Yes. But, you know, I don´t even look behind the camera anymore.
The pictures -- While I was in the hospital,
I also found, to my delight,
that I couldn´t move for a long time at all.
I was strapped down and things.
But I had a tiny tape recorder, and that as each thing happened,
almost simultaneously an image appeared in my mind --
that I knew that I would get back to my studio,
which is only a few blocks from St. Vincent´s Hospital,
which we all dearly miss.
And I brought that diary home with me.
And as soon as I could walk again
across the apartment, across the studio,
I started to illustrate those photographs.
But it had nothing to do with looking through the back.
I played the camera like a violin,
and I felt it was my Stradivarius.
And I just -- endless words that --
Being half Italian, I never stop talking.
And it really serves me hugely in the studio
with my assistants, who became my eyes for me
and executed my thoughts just beautifully.
Your powers of visual imagery, or visual imagination,
do you feel these changed for the better, for the worse?
Oh, for the better.
-For the better. -For the better.
I was saying to my friend Anne before we came here
that, you know, in my dreams,
I often dream as a perfectly sighted person.
I don´t seem to identify in my subconscious as blind,
except for a number of times.
And the most beautiful one was not too long after the change.
Do you know the old Universal opening
of those beautiful black-and-white movies,
with the airplane circling around the planet,
with all the stars around?
I dreamt that I was the size of a fly
and that I was circling the rim of a Staffordshire teacup,
close-up, and I could see the design,
and just flying around and around in circles.
And then just recently, 20 years later,
a very dear friend of mine was at the house in my dream.
She gave me her large glasses, and I looked through them,
and I could see perfectly clearly.
And I woke up.
I was a little disappointed when I woke up,
but during the time in the dream, it was really lovely.
And I think I have something analogous myself.
I had a passion for stereo photography
and was very oriented to using both eyes.
Now I´ve lost my right eye,
as I think you´ve lost your right eye.
Mm-hmm.
I have no more stereo while I´m awake,
but occasionally I have what I think are stereo dreams,
but they take the form
of dreaming that I´m looking into a stereoscope.
Wonderful.
And I feel, then, in those dreams
that it´s all okay again, you know?
I feel I just had a bad dream that I lost the right eye,
and then I wake up to just this flat world
in which there´s no space
and the ceiling fan is about to crash into the bedside lamp.
I know there´s six foot between them,
but when you have one eye -- and probably similar with you...
...in some sense, there´s no near, no far,
and things are on the same plane.
Or at least that´s the case for me.
But I was sort of, you know, intensely biased to stereo
and maybe didn´t use other cues, like perspective, as much.
Someone looking at your pictures chronologically
would be able to say, "Something happened here"?
You mean something happened in my life?
Well, something.
Would they see an abrupt change in style or scale or emphasis?
From the commercial work to my personal work, it was enormous.
A whole universe of difference.
But rather quickly, the pictures define themselves,
and I don´t think you would notice.
There´s really no difference now, say,
with maybe 4% of my eye left
as opposed to the 20% that I had for most of the last decade.
It doesn´t change at all.
Actually, that´s what makes me so happy.
It becomes -- I see the pictures in my mind.
And because I´m a very good director,
it´s not hard to make them appear on the paper.
It´s sort of like magic, and it´s not that hard.
Anyone can do it.
There´s not anybody who couldn´t close their eyes in here
and think of a rose perfectly in every detail,
but because we don´t have to, we don´t.
Some years ago, I read a book
and wrote a review of a book by John Hull,
who is a professor of theology in England
who lost his sight finally in his 40s.
And he said that after he became blind,
his visual imagery,
his power to evoke visual memories and images, declined.
He found it more and more difficult
to evoke the faces of his children,
and finally all visual imagery disappeared.
He said he couldn´t visualize a "3."
He would have to make it in the air.
Now, when I read this and when I wrote about this,
I assumed this was the case with everyone who became blind.
But I had a torrent of puzzled and indignant letters
from blind people
saying their world wasn´t in the least like this,
that they not only retained a visual world
after losing their sight,
but their visual world had become heightened.
And I remember the first such letter was a woman who said,
"I can see my hands as I´m typing."
DUGDALE: Oh, my goodness. Me too.
I can see my hands when they move in front of my face.
I can see them.
With no question, I can see them moving.
It´s a marvelous feeling.
Can you see other people´s hands?
-No. No. -Ah, that´s interesting.
-Just mine. -[ Laughter ]
But this suggests, then, that...
Well, I have something similar.
At one time, I had a large blind area --
a so-called scotoma -- in my right eye,
and objects would disappear in it.
And I remember once scotomizing my foot
so that I didn´t see anything below mid-shin.
But then as I twiddled my toes,
a sort of strange protoplasmic effulgence appeared, sparkling,
and which gradually formed itself
into the semblance of a foot.
It was a reasonably good foot that followed --
It followed my movements.
So it was this visual phantom.
I should add I can´t see anyone else´s feet that way.
But, so, obviously, the visual part of the brain
seems to become more sensitive to one´s intentions
and to proprioception and whatever it is.
DUGDALE: I´m so happy.
I´ve never spoken to anybody about this before.
I thought it was just mine.
I remember being in church at St. Luke in the Fields,
and I looked down at my hands,
and it was almost like I could see an X-ray of them,
and I moved a little bit.
I thought, "I hope no one´s noticing what´s going on,"
you know?
[ Laughter ]
Then, also, I said to my friend Nancy, also,
"Some of the things that happen to me sound so strange."
And she said, "If you couldn´t tell Dr. Sacks
about these things, who are you gonna tell?"
So, sometimes I can see --
Sometimes I can see the inside of my face,
and not in a gory way.
It´s like I have a mask on, and I can see my --
everything from the inside, just as if I had on a mask.
And that´s astonishing.
It doesn´t happen all the time. Just now and then.
But you would have to have some way of checking the validity
of what you visualize.
-Of checking it, you said? -Yes.
Yeah. With my hands.
No, but, for example, if you´re...
There was a book some years ago by a woman called Tenberken,
who lost her sight at the age of 4.
She´s an amazing woman.
She went single -- She went alone to Tibet,
where blind people were regarded as less than human,
and she introduced schools, invented a Tibetan Braille.
But she has an extremely vivid imagery.
In a place she knew well,
she was with a friend and described what she "saw."
It turned out that she was facing in the wrong direction.
DUGDALE: [ Chuckles ]
-But -- -Doesn´t matter.
So this great power of visualization might mislead one.
Now, there´s -- I´ve also mentioned another blind man,
an Australian.
He is, in fact, the son of a film director,
and his father had always asked him to visualize scenes.
And then when he was 22, he was blinded in an accident.
But he was told that he should turn to the other senses,
and he determined not to do this,
but to create a virtual reality of sight
as vivid as the one he lost.
And with this, he may work on the roof of his house at night.
But he checks things all the while.
But I can´t visualize in that sort of way.
And although, say, I could visualize my hands and feet,
I couldn´t visualize my face or my head
because that´s not mobile in the same way.
But...
DUGDALE: I set my house on fire once.
[ Laughter ]
-By accident? -Not exactly.
You know, what could be worse?
I was talking to my mother, and somebody knocked on the door
and said, "Your house is on fire."
And the point of bringing this up
is about facing the wrong way.
And I said, "Mom, I´ll have to call you back in a few minutes,"
and all I saw was a bright orange light.
The porch was on fire
because of an ember from some leaves that were burning
and smoldered in the wood stack.
And, well, I´ll tell you what.
My house is like my temple or my parish, and I --
In my bare feet, in the cold,
I had just put the hose away on the other side of the property,
rolled in a ball, tied with some rope.
I ran in the dark around trees, past the house,
in the gate, around the potting shed,
into the potting shed, grabbed the hose,
ran directly to the faucet, and ran back out with the hose
to hand it to my neighbor to put the fire out.
If I were to be conscious and do that,
if somebody asked me to do that, it would be a nightmare.
But in that heightened sense, I thought I had to stop the house
from burning down any further than the porch.
And I think about that sometimes.
What am I capable of that I don´t even know yet?
I don´t really know.
I am not sure how much that´s visual memory
or how much is the sort of procedural memory
that you are -- you know, which running and doing things are.
I would never run in normal circumstances.
I would be too afraid, you know?
Even if it was procedural, I would be afraid to hurt myself.
But with, you know, complete abandon like that,
it was very, very exciting when I realized what I had done.
No, all sorts of things can happen in an emergency.
And people with Parkinsonism, Parkinson´s disease,
who have been in a wheelchair for 10 years
will leap out of the wheelchair
and sort of, you know, save someone from drowning
and then sort of fall back in the wheelchair.
Or catch a baseball, like in your movie.
-That´s right. -[ Laughter ]
I´ll tell you the best part about putting the fire out.
Upstate, when there´s any kind of fire alarm,
every volunteer fireperson in the entire county
puts a blue light on top of their car,
and they race to the scene.
And they were so upset when they got there
that I had put the fire out
that they hacked the whole place to smithereens anyway
with some axes and sprayed enough water
to make the entire front yard into a swamp.
[ Laughter ]
I couldn´t stop them,
but I threw myself in front of the doors.
I said, "You´re not chopping my doors down," you know?
They were so disappointed.
That has nothing to do with sight, but...
[ Laughter ]
I often remember that.
How do you deal with reading?
-With what? -Reading.
Oh, my goodness.
When I was in the hospital, very quickly I realized
that I was not going to be able to read.
And I thought my life would be over
because, you know, as I went through my young age,
I was gonna be everything from an expert gemologist
and work at Sotheby´s to being a geologist.
And I researched everything.
Nattily going to the Ferguson Library
in Stamford, Connecticut, with bookloads under my arm.
And I thought, "I´m gonna die."
Then somebody simply said to me,
"Do you know about the Library of Congress?"
And I did not.
They have thousands of things read, mostly beautifully,
on cassette.
Now they´re on digital.
Well, obviously,
vision of all sorts is constructed in the brain.
One has these cameras in one´s eyes, if you want.
But the picture then has to be taken apart
into probably 30 or 40 different things --
color, movement, texture -- and then put together again.
When you have a strong visual imagination
or you hallucinate visually,
then you´re just using your brain.
Some people who have lost their sight
may say that when they read Braille with their finger,
they see Braille.
It´s not felt in the hand, but they see it.
And with people like this,
you find that the visual part of the brain
is being strongly activated.
It´s even been wondered whether people who have never seen --
Well, no, I won´t jump to that,
but there´s a fascinating sort of sensory substitution,
and if one connects the output of a video camera
to a grid of electrodes on the tongue,
100 tiny electrodes, you can form a picture on the tongue.
And when one has that, at first,
people somehow are seeing with their tongue,
or it´s just a tongue world.
But then it becomes visual for them,
and their visual brain lights up.
-DUGDALE: Wow. -And it´s --
So even if you do become blind,
the visual brain is still in good shape.
It may indeed be in particularly good shape
because it becomes hyperactive on the whole.
And so there are other ways of seeing.
And this has even been done instead of --
having tiny video cameras in the spectacles and computers
and just moving one´s head.
And so here, without any stem cells
or without, you know, anything invasive,
is a way in which blind people may be enabled to get --
It won´t be 20/20 vision, but it may be 20/200, which isn´t bad.
DUGDALE: No.
I mean, 20/200 could read that easily.
I think you could drive with 20/200.
[ Laughter ]
The first thing I´m gonna do is I´m gonna buy an S.U.V.
And I´m gonna drive through my town with my dog.
I´m gonna put my dog, my guide dog, Manley,
on the front seat with me with a cigar,
and I´m gonna drive around town and just wave to people.
[ Laughter ]
Why not?
It wouldn´t be any stranger than me sitting here right now,
across from this marvelous and incredibly talented writer,
speaking with a smile about being blind.
Who would have thought?
Not me, although I knew.
All my family stood around me in the hospital and said, "Ohh."
I said, "What´s the matter?"
They said, "We were so -- We were so proud of your career."
[ Laughter ]
I´m, like, lying there, hanging on for dear life,
paralyzed, having seizures, going blind,
and I found that right away.
You´d cheer people up in the hospital
when they come to see you.
And I said to my mother,
"What makes you think I´ll stop taking pictures?"
And she said, "Honey, you´ll still make pictures?"
I said, "Of course I will."
And then she walked out, and I thought, "What am I gonna do?
What is gonna happen? Why wouldn´t I do this?"
And I´ve found that traveling around the world,
speaking to people,
and just by my example, just by being cheerful,
which I am all the time, you know,
and just doing what I love to do.
I used to think I would speak
just to my gay, ***-positive community.
The first time I went out,
on the first of 150 shows around the world, to Houston,
and they gave me a microphone and said,
"Could you say a few words about how you made these pictures?"
And I did.
I was overwhelmed by people
who had nothing to do with *** or the gay community,
but they said, "Oh, I´m gonna get Grandpa
to take the boat out again."
"I´m gonna take up my knitting."
"I don´t know why I´m not sewing anymore."
"I think that I´m gonna take up my garden."
I realized that it was universal
and that I could, just by being me --
It was such a wonderful gift,
´cause it made the sense, the eyesight,
seem to have another purpose -- the loss of it.
I just had to do what I loved
and tell people about it briefly to encourage them.
I´m sure they thought every time,
"Well, if he could do that, I could do anything," you know?
And I´ve had people tell me that hundreds of times.
And that´s been really the fuel,
besides my Rolodex and, you know, my genius assistants
and my family and my friends, you know?
That´s been the thing that´s kept me so, so satisfied
and curious about my life.
Well, certainly when Chuck Close had a neurological disaster,
a spinal stroke which largely paralyzed him,
this made no difference to his career, you know,
of doing these gigantic faces,
although he became unable to hold a paintbrush,
and it had to be attached to his arm.
But people´s resilience is amazing.
And, obviously, you could have caved in at that point,
and you didn´t.
DUGDALE: Mnh-mnh.
You know, I call that "I´ll show you."
-DR. SACKS: Yeah. -[ Laughter ]
I lay in bed at night and think,
"These people think my career is over?
That´s what they think."
And the other thing that people say to me all the time --
I´ve had hundreds of people approach me at openings
everywhere in the world.
They say, "I couldn´t possibly do what you did."
And I say, "That´s because you have not been challenged.
You´re as much of a hero as anybody."
When you´re presented with a challenge,
it´s unbelievable what stamina that you have.
Everybody in this room has the same stamina, I believe.
DR. SACKS: Though it´s not --
I mean, one needs that moral stamina and decision,
but all sorts of things go on physiologically
and unconsciously.
One of the people I describe in my book --
In a way, this is analogous
to a painter or photographer losing their sight.
But he was a writer, a novelist,
who suddenly became unable to read because of a stroke.
There´s a thing called alexia,
and part of the visual brain is knocked out.
You can see.
You can recognize everything else fine, but you can´t read.
Whoa.
And he felt this as a great disaster.
He couldn´t imagine how he would go on.
Interestingly, when this happens, you´re able to write.
No problem.
But you can´t read what you´ve written.
So how would he revise a book?
How would he go on?
I´ve actually seen --
I´ve seen a number of people with this.
One man who had it turned to talking books and dictation.
He turned to an aural mode, an auditory mode.
Howard Engel, the other man, didn´t want to do this.
He had been a reader all his life.
And after struggling and getting nowhere -- or not very far --
he found reading became easier,
and he thought, "The alexia is disappearing."
But, in fact, it wasn´t.
And what was happening
was that he was unconsciously copying the shapes of letters
with his hand
and then with his tongue on the back of his teeth.
And since, in this condition, writing is --
So basically he was reading by writing with his tongue.
DUGDALE: Wow.
And so you never know what the nervous system
is gonna come up with.
DUGDALE: I think that people are afraid of that sort of thing.
I had a woman come up to me at a show and say --
She said in my ear, she whispered, "Oh, this is so sad."
She said, "You make all these beautiful pictures,
and you can´t see them."
And I thought, "She needs an intensive at my school."
[ Laughter ]
You know, because she completely missed the point
of the whole thing.
I could have spent a couple of hours with her,
but I don´t know if I could have changed her mind
about that, you know?
But I think people -- I just thought --
I hear myself thinking, "Oh, my God.
What if I had to read with my tongue?"
You know?
But you know what? If I had to --
-You would do it. -DUGDALE: I bet I would.
-Yeah. -DUGDALE: Yeah.
I´m glad I don´t have to.
I´m happy with the Library of Congress.
[ Laughter ]
So, the reason I mentioned this
is that I thought earlier about eyesight and spirit
and who the people are that are my heroes in photography.
And they´re people --
It didn´t matter if they could see or didn´t see.
They all saw fine.
But people like Cameron didn´t know
there wasn´t supposed to be spirit in the pictures.
And the gentlemen
in the photographic societies of the time derided her
for things being a little blurry
or the plate being cracked in half,
and she would still print it.
But all those people are, like, gone now.
And as it turns out, it was not that she was deranged
and couldn´t make a clear picture.
She used to kick the tripod, you know, to get the effect
that she wanted -- the emotional and spiritual effect.
She knew what she was doing.
DR. SACKS: I love her pictures.
For some reason, in my mind´s eye,
I can see her picture of Carlyle, which was --
although I dislike Carlyle, but...
[ Laughter ]
DUGDALE: It´s a beautiful photograph.
I love it, too.
He apparently was her neighbor and used to take the back path
past her house in the Isle of Wight
because she was famous for grabbing people
and putting them in her husband´s greenhouse all day
-and torturing them. -[ Laughter ]
And if you walked by the front of her house,
she was liable to run out in her bare feet and her skirts
and grab you and pull her into her greenhouse.
She really had a lot of spirit.
[ Laughter ]
DR. SACKS: If you were to get your sight back now fully...
DUGDALE: Mm-hmm.
...would you greet this with unmixed joy
or might it be difficult to reaccommodate?
DUGDALE: I´m realizing this day by day.
My identity as a blind person is --
Not only is it not a weakness,
it feels like I´m able to surprise people,
you know, time after time.
You know, I´m not sure.
Isn´t it funny?
I´m such a creature of the United States.
I bought my first car when I was 14.
The one thing I miss the most is being able to jump in the car
and drive to Mister Donut or something or Dunkin´ Donuts.
You know, just that jumping and going forward.
But what I found, like the aurora borealis,
which I use that analogy a lot
because I did a show based on the writings of Emily Dickinson,
who I tried in 1999 --
I tried many other times in my life to read
but couldn´t make heads or tails of it.
And then I thought, "I´m supposed to like this person.
She´s ingenious and incredible."
I found a research library, and I found all 1,776 of her poems
and read them three or four times in a row across that year.
And one of the stories that was in there
was that they lived in Amherst, in that small town,
and her remarkable father went out one night
and started ringing the church bell madly.
And they thought the town was on fire,
and they all ran out in their nightclothes in 1840,
and he said, "I just wanted you
to see how bright the aurora borealis is tonight."
And I thought, "Oh, my God.
That´s just about as beautiful as anything I could think of."
And I said this earlier, but it bears repeating --
that when I feel like I´ve got a constellation inside of my mind,
it makes me feel like I´m on some kind of space journey.
I can´t see the ground I´m stepping on.
I wanted to tell you this before.
You said something that I meant to respond.
When I got the guide dog
and I stopped tip-tapping, tip-tapping with the cane,
which I found unbearable.
People treated me
like they would catch blindness if they came near me
while I was having my coffee on Hudson Street, you know,
in front of Taylor´s, if anybody remembers Taylor´s.
And then I went finally --
A partner that I had got tired of me,
and he signed me up for a guide dog.
And he drove me out there, and he just left me there.
I never heard from him again.
[ Laughter ]
But he did me the biggest favor in my entire life.
And what I want to talk to you
is, like, the sense of things being fragmented.
I often feel when I´m with the dog,
when I stopped having to toddle
and we flew forward when I got used to how to work with him,
I felt like I was the prow of a ship cutting through molecules.
Like, I could feel the air around me streaming forward,
like some ship sailing up the street.
And I felt, again, like, "Oh, my God.
If I told this to anybody, they´d think I was crazy."
But it feels almost like I´m flying when I´m walking
and not being able to see the ground
and trusting, when you have full trust in the dog,
and it feels like I´m splitting atoms when I walk.
The air around me is palatable --
the same way, you know, you saw your toes.
Like it´s alive.
It´s alive.
DR. SACKS: How long have you had the dog?
DUGDALE: Just about 10 years. Mm-hmm.
And he shows no signs of wanting to not work with me,
so if I have to carry him around, I´ll take care of him.
I don´t care. I´ll walk him.
[ Laughter ]
It´s gonna take a lot for me to not have him in my life.
He´s not working right now,
but he´s listening to every word we´re saying.
[ Laughter ]
DR. SACKS: I think he knows we´re talking about him.
-WOMAN: What´s his name? -DUGDALE: Manley.
[ Laughter ]
He´s oftentimes very girly, also.
[ Laughter ]
But that´s the name he came with,
and most of the time he lives up to it.
People say, "Is he your guard dog, also?"
I´m like, "Oh, no."
[ Laughter ]
Not a chance.
He´d walk off with the first person that took the leash.
[ Laughter ]
That´s what makes him a Buddha, though.
[ Laughter ]
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