EIGHTEEN 

Raise the Soul to Flame 

Unknown those powers that raise the soul to flame, 

Catch every nerve, and vibrate through the frame. 

Their level life is but a mouldering fire, 

Unquenched by want, unfanned by strong desire. 

“To be sure, many blind persons have been cowed by the myth of helplessness into remaining in their sheltered corners. Holman’s story is important for its demonstration 
that blind people could wear such seven-league boots almost two 
centuries ago—before Braille or the long cane, before residential 
schools or vocational rehabilitation.” - Kenneth Jernigan

There will never be another James Holman, a sightless person 
dedicating a lifetime to ranging the entire world “alone, without 
counsel, and without attendance,” as he [Jernigan] put it. Life on the planet 
has speeded up, to the point where even the most extraordinary 
nonvisual perception cannot be relied upon. 

The modern age of blindness began in 1918, after the use of 
mustard gas in World War I claimed the sight of thousands of soldiers. 
These blind were actively discouraged from relying on compensatory 
senses, at least when it came to navigating the outside 
world. Rubber-soled shoes had muffled the footsteps of pedestrians. 
Horses were rapidly giving way to automobiles, running swiftly 
and lethally on rubber tires and smooth asphalted streets. They 
were issued canes, ones usually silenced with rubber tips and too 
short for effective sweeping—shorter still than Holman’s walking 
stick. These were painted white, to warn the sighted of their status 
... When crossing the street, they were taught 
to hold the cane straight out in front of them at arm’s length— 
to maximize its visibility to motorists—then trust that traffic had 
come to a stop. Mobility became a matter of the eyes of others: if 
not passersby, then “seeing eye” dogs, ...

Yet by the second half of the twentieth century, the blind were 
beginning to reassert their independence. The “long cane” that Kenneth 
Jernigan spoke of made an appearance—a slender, flexible pole 
for sweeping, ... made of fiberglass, in collapsible segments. 
In the late 1960s, mobility-supporting laws began to mandate tactile 
aids to navigation, such as raised crosswalks, dipping curbs, and beeping traffic signals. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that a spiritual 
successor to James Holman emerged. 

Daniel Kish, executive director of World Access for the Blind, 
is a contagiously enthusiastic young man, with a lifestyle that is 
quintessentially, if not stereotypically, that of a native Southern 
Californian. His hair is longish, and tousled. His wardrobe runs 
to the informal: comfortable slacks, colorful short-sleeve shirts. 
He’s fond of mountain biking, and mountaineering. He multi-
tasks relentlessly on a cellphone as he strides through the sunshine 
of Orange County. His greenish brown eyes are beautiful, as well 
they should be—they are the product of a talented prosthetic artist. 
His organic eyes were surgically removed at the age of one, as 
part of a treatment for cancer. 

Pity was not an element of his childhood. Encouraged to keep 
pace with his active, sighted siblings, he climbed fences, explored 
trees, played sandlot games—all situations where a cane was useless. 
To keep from lagging behind, he began to experiment. He 
discovered that sounds, when decoded carefully, carried their own 
form of spatial perception. 

Where Holman used the tap of his walking stick, or the strike 
of his horses’ hooves, Kish used a simple clicking noise made 
with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The sharp sound 
bounced off objects, and with practice he learned to “read” the 
landscape through the nature of the echo. It was, he recognized, a 
form of echolocation, the same technique used by radar, and bats 
in flight. 

This realization not only added a new dimension to his mobility, 
it became his life’s work. After earning two masters’ degrees, one in 
developmental psychology and one in special education, he began 
a pilot research project to see if echolocation could be successfully 
taught to blind children. The results were impressive. Now 
Kish lectures internationally on the subject. He works with the 
National Institute of Health, studying the methods by which the 
brain processes acoustic input into physical awareness. He’s part of a team designing an enhancement technology ... “which will triple echo efficiency.” But he’s best known as 
the founder of this nonprofit organization, devoted to “developing 
and using a comprehensive approach to replace vision with other 
ways of seeing.” 

It is uncanny, how much of the world Kish and his students 
have learned to extract from a spark of sound. When a television 
crew asks one of them to describe his surroundings on camera, 
the pupil emits a few quick tongue-clicks, as if they were a nervous 
habit. Then he gives accurate positions for everything in a fifteenfoot 
radius: the boom microphone overhead, the light refl ector 
behind him, even a tree in the background. He’s confident enough 
to reach out and tap the camera directly on the lens. 

Yet the most impressive aspect of Kish’s work is the organization’s 
Team Bat. If there is a modern version of James Holman riding 
horses across the wilds of Africa, it is the members of this team 
riding mountain bikes at exhilarating speeds through the dirt trails 
of Southern California foothills. With clicking devices attached to 
their bikes, striking the spokes as the wheels turn, they listen to 
the unfolding terrain, to the approach of obstacles, to the bends 
of the path. 

As was the case with Holman, the team rides with a sighted companion. 
But that person is decidedly not the leader—if anything, he 
or she does their best to keep up. The blind bikers are not reckless, 
but it is thrilling how deeply they abandon themselves to the ride. 

“We are interested in more than just the meeting of minimal 
requirements for functioning and life satisfaction,” Kish says. “We 
believe there should be no limits.” 

There will never be another James Holman. But there will always 
be people who must summon the courage to plunge, wholeheartedly, 
into a world complex beyond our illusions of comprehension. 
It was to them that Holman addressed his most unguarded 
words. Contemplating his circuit of the world, he confessed that 
the most profound moments left him feeling not blind, but mute. 

"On the summit of the precipice, and in the heart of the green woods 
. . . there was an intelligence in the winds of the hills, and in the 
solemn stillness of the buried foliage, that could not be mistaken. It 
entered into my heart, and I could have wept, not that I did not see, 
but that I could not portray all that I felt."

Time, if not space, renders all of us travelers. Cling as we might, 
we are ultimately compelled to let go of the familiar, to forge affinities 
with the new, and to sense the approach of the more unfamiliar 
still. We feel our way. If we are as fortunate as the Blind 
Traveler, we are given the grace to listen, with equal attention, to 
the intelligence of winds and the solemnity of silence. To remain, 
joyfully, awake to the path itself. 

"In Memory of 
The Celebrated Blind Traveler, 
Lieut. James Holman, R.N., F.R.S., &c, 
Of Travers College, Windsor 
Who died 28th July, 1857, age 70 years."