M. Leona Godin - There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness

THERE PLANT EYES

M. Leona Godin (pronounced like French sculptor Rodin) is a writer, performer, and educator. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times; Playboy; O, The Oprah Magazine; Electric Literature; Catapult; and other print and online publications. She produced two plays: The Star of Happiness, about Helen Kellers time performing in vaudeville, and The Spectator and the Blind Man, about the invention of braille. She is currently working on Worlds We Live In, a feature-length documentary about blind culture for the American Foundation for the Blind. Godin holds a PhD in English, and besides her many years teaching literature and humanities courses at NYU, she has lectured on art, accessibility, technology, and disability at such places as Tandon School of Engineering, Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the American Printing House for the Blind. Her online magazine exploring the arts and sciences of smell and taste, Aromatica Poetica, publishes writing and art from around the world.

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FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION 2022

Copyright 2021 by M. Leona Godin

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2021.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Some of the material in this book originally appeared, in very different form, in Catapult, Playboy, and The New York Times.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

Name: Godin, M. Leona, author.

Title: There plant eyes : a personal and cultural history of blindness / M. Leona Godin.

Description: First edition. | New York : Pantheon Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020045789 (print) | LCCN 2020045790 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : BlindHistory. | BlindnessSocial aspects. | Blind in literature. | Blind in art.

Classification: LCC HV 1581 . G 63 2021 (print) | LCC HV 1581 (ebook) | DDC 305.9/08109dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045789

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045790

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN9781984898401

Ebook ISBN9781524748722

Cover design by Janet Hansen

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For Mom, in loving gratitude

For Dad, in loving memory

Seeing and Not-Seeing

When I was ten years old, I suddenly could no longer see the writing on the blackboard from the back of the class. This at first seemed a trivial issue of my needing glasses, but it turned out that my vision could not be corrected. Several optometrist and ophthalmologist appointments came in quick succession, in which the men in white coats provided increasingly absurd explanations to cover their impotence, including one who told my mother, Her eyes are growing too fast for her body. Or perhaps it was, Her body is growing too fast for her eyes.

After visiting several doctors in the creaky bungalows on the outskirts of the Presidios medical complex in San Francisco, my mother and I finally found ourselves face-to-face with a hotshot ophthalmologist in the impressive upper floors of the Letterman Army Hospital, where Lucasfilm now has its headquarters. Although I had spent my first three and a half years living in the Netherlands, after my parents divorce, my mother and I had moved back to their hometown of San Francisco, while my father (an officer in the Air Force) continued his travels around the world. Thanks to him, I received benefits with my military dependent card, and so my mom and I often drove into the Presidio for free health care and cheap commissary groceries.