literary aesthetic for the visually impaired

After reviewing the sample syllabus for my spring creative writing course (one that demands writing be a pleasure for sight, sound, and . . . taste, was it?) I've been thinking about literature for the visually impaired, and by visually impaired I do mean legally blind.

Growing up with an Uncle who lost his sight as a premature infant I always had a hard time knowing how to entertain him.  He was entertaining, when engaged, he always had a sense of humor of someone much younger, or the ability to show it -- I guess -- when every other grown up was so obsessed with the identity of grown ups.  But on days when he stayed at our house while he was in town I remember not knowing what to do for him.  I knew he "watched" television but so much of what goes on in a movie or tv show is lost if you can't see it.  He listened to music.  I never saw him read, although I knew he could read braille.  Mostly I just tried to keep him fed and fill the cd player with popular alt rock bands of the 90's, being that it was the 90's.  

As I  grew older I came to see some of the injustices he endured because his lack of sight made him particularly vulnerable.  It is amazing what people can do to other people when no one is looking, when they think they can get away with it.  The blind live in a world that caters towards the sighted.  Art, as subversive as it can be, as freeing and inclusive it can be, can also exclude and overlook. 

So, what I've been thinking about lately is how so much of writing requires readers to experience emotions and understandings by using images, often very specific images, things that would be much more subjective if you had to conjure them from your own imagination.  I wonder what it would be like to write something using no visual aids but instead emphasizing touch, smell, taste.  Measuring physical distance not by sight but by time, or by footsteps.  Are there books like that?  Poems?  I never really thought of it much before but recently it's been on my mind.  I need to do some research. 

Of course the visually impaired student should read the classics and the same books other students read, but I wonder what it's like to read a book knowing so much of the prose is lost in the translation. And what would it be like for a sighted writer to write without sight?  What possibilities would open up for both the sighted and those who are not? 

I think that for my creative writing class I'll use one of the free write journaling assignments we'll have to try and create something that relies on a reader's senses but not the sense of sight.  Sight, after all, can be one of the weakest senses despite how much we use it.  It can trick us.  It can't tell us everything.  A piece of raw fish on a bed of rice may LOOK fresh but it's the smell that'll really let you know.  Looks never mattered much when it comes to good and evil, in many classic stories it often does, but in real life it doesn't matter a bit.  If you're better trained in your other senses you may look at a face and see the truth but in the voice you may hear a lie.

I mean, I definitely don't think a sighted person, or a person who is sighted for much of their life, can create this literary aesthetic but it would I think that a sighted person could write for a blind person in mind.  If I was in love with someone who was blind and I wanted to write them a love poem (not that I would actually do such a thing) I would want to express something without using images.  I'd want to use something that I knew we both could understand, that we could both share. 

I wonder.  .  .    I wonder.