Planet of the Blind

By Tina Mintz

Stephen Kuusisto s life was a lie. Born premature, his retinas were damaged by too much oxygen in his incubator. He was legally blind (less than 10 per cent of normal vision), but he hid this from almost everyone until he was in his 30s. No white cane, no guide dog, no special schools to give his secret away.

"I didn t want to be blind, I didn t want to look blind, I didn t want to be revealed as blind," the author said in a recent interview on NBC s Dateline. His parents hardly ever used the word blind, and even bought their young son a bicycle.

"My parents were pretty much in a state of denial," he recalled. "Children really want to be heroic -- to do the things their parents suggest. I picked up on my mother s desire for me to be less blind or more sighted and wanted to be that person."

Written in a very literary, poetic style by a man who refers to poetry as "the most reliable lover," this memoir may be inaccessible to those who don’t have the author s vocabulary or background in world literature.

A graduate of Hobart College and a Fulbright scholar, Kuusisto’s s depictions are extremely vivid, intensely sensory, and often beautiful, as when he describes how he sees: "My eyes dance in a private, rising field of silver threads, teeming greens, roses and smoke."

This is no ordinary memoir. It s not a straightforward account of an interesting life. Kuusisto frequently uses obscure references and, although they may impress, they can frustrate. If forced to repeatedly consult a dictionary or reference book in order to grasp a point, or appreciate a metaphor, a reader s enthusiasm can quickly wane.

Kuusisto, for example, describes a foray into the attic of his childhood home in New Hampshire: "This is a treasury, and I open it: the attic closet is my sebeel, my Mohammedan drinking chamber." And of the tormenting taunts of other children, he says: "The laughter is like a caliope, steamdriven."

Even if you are not nonplussed by big words and you can decipher Kuusisto s literary illusions, you may need happy pills just to make it through the first two-thirds of this book. It is a dark account of a pain-filled existence which fostered self loathing and led to bouts of self-mutilation, compulsive eating, anorexia and drug and alcohol use. Fermented in an extraordinary mind and honed with a superior mastery of the English language, Kuusisto s story is told via some very bleak and disturbing prose.

Harsh realities shaped Kuusisto s life, but after assimilating the litany of repeated frustrations and devastating humiliations, I couldn t help but wonder if this man ever remembers experiences that aren t profoundly unhappy or centred on his disability.

It isn t that I m unsympathetic of his plight -- I too am legally blind and have shared a number of his experiences, but I found myself losing patience with his penchant for reckless behaviour and self-pity. People who are blind are too often the objects of unwarranted and unwanted pity, without resorting to wallowing in it ourselves.

Interestingly, the book s tone takes a sudden upswing when, after more than three decades of perilous pretence, Kuusisto finally accepts help -- in the form of first a cane, then a guide dog. Abruptly deviating from his angst-filled poetry, Kuusisto adopts a more expository style of writing to describe his experiences at guide-dog school and his life with "Corky" thereafter. I found the switch refreshing and better suited to the subject matter.

"Planet of the Blind" draws us in with the intriguing notion that a person who is almost completely blind can "pass" for sighted for more than three decades and live to tell about it. Once we are inside, Kuusisto makes us see that poetry and literature can flourish in darkness, because words belong not to the eyes but to the mind.

Stephen Kuusisto is currently the director of student services at Guiding Eyes for the Blind Guide Dog Centre in Yorktown Heights, New York. Planet of the Blind, 193 pages, is published by Bantam Doubleday Dell, $22.95.

(Tina Mintz is a freelance writer living in Montreal, Quebec.)