“I grew up in a nest feathered with words, texts, and books. I am made of words, the organized chaos of text, ant colonies of characters streaming over paper.” The first few lines of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press, 2024) read like a riddle: Who am I? the reader anticipates, but the question is never asked. Instead, reading on, we are shown who through a series of short prose-poetry entries arranged in alphabetical order, like an encyclopedia.
This memoir, running from Academia through Zutz, is linear only in the frankly arbitrary sense of the English alphabet and its applicable words (which, ironically, include “Jardin des Plantes,” “Zorro,” and “Zutz”—all non-English). Just as an alien would have an impossible time looking up anything in an encyclopedia—as a certain grasp of language and a firm understanding of the basics of living on Earth are prerequisites—Cohn’s reader can’t possibly know what to look up since they too lack knowledge of the world of her life and experience. Hence, we read from A to Z. Instead of the scientific, data-driven feel of a traditional encyclopedia, or the more chronological form taken by a traditional memoir or biography, this encyclopedia-memoir gives the reader a sense of a beautiful, abstract, self-referential, fluid untethering in which only by reading each piece does it fall into place.
Author Naomi Cohn grew up intricately interwoven with literature, until, as she calls it her “illegal blindness”—characterized by the American system of choosing an arbitrary point along a spectrum of sight loss at which point the government will offer assistance and accommodations—turned legal, bringing Cohn to Adjustment to Blindness Training. There, a braille teacher named Cindy helped Cohn experience books in the self-paced, reflective way that an audiobook cannot mimic.
In “Blood,” Cohn describes how, after copious doctors’ visits, she was diagnosed with “progressive retinal decay,” an untreatable condition in which the eye’s blood vessels pierce the retina. The usual red of blood is interpreted by Cohn’s eyes and brain as “a green cloud” obscuring Cohn’s vision. Then, the green cloud dissipates and heals in a cycle of ever decreasing vision. This is where I’ll stop, however, since Cohn herself says in the author’s note:
“I’m more interested in adaptation than diagnosis or, for me, nonexistent treatments. The medical system, doing its best to fix the unfixable, often made me feel like my body and I were a problem. My life got a whole lot better when I focused less on medicine and more on how to adapt, including engaging in vocational rehabilitation, which I experienced as empowering me to live fully in the body I had.”
Much of the book is centered around the ways Cohn and others have found to adapt and live with ever-decreasing vision in a world that is scaffolded and decorated for sight. She takes a multifaceted approach, providing historical examples of how vision-impaired people have navigated this hardship through the centuries, as well as stats and discussions about disability justice, and—as one would hope for in a part-memoir—personal experiences. Cohn reveals how everything by default is inaccessible—unless it’s pointedly trying to be accessible. In the “Literacy” section, she describes the imagery-laden how-many-stop-signs-in-this-photo Captchas that encircle the web like a crocodiled moat. In “Cindy,” Cohn tells us, “New vision loss rehab students usually have their story—how they lost their sight, what they did for a living before, the spouse who left after,” showing how intricately vision loss is linked with occupational loss and the loss of close relationships. In “Out of Print,” Cohn relates how her relationship with disability activism irrevocably changed after she too became disabled. Her story is a reminder that disability will likely affect everyone in one way or another as they age—which is why regressive policies, revoked support, and limited accessibility are personal issues for us all. Finally, in “Tapping,” Cohn delivers that which is possibly the most universal sentiment, “Like a woodpecker I’m just trying to live my life.”
Cohn informs us of other tactile ways of writing and reading information, such as raphigraphy and quipus. We learn that raphigraphy is another invention of Louis Braille, designed to help the families of those who read braille communicate with them through written letters. A quipu is colored string using the language of knots, used by the Inka Empire to communicate across distances. In these examples, we see that a tactile learning system has been and could be used by those with vision loss and the sighted alike. Perhaps it is a more inclusive choice than the visual text that’s commonplace today.
The entries are repetitive at times: giving us the same information about conditions, experiences, ideas—this is noticeable but doesn’t detract from the book. In fact, I find it reminiscent of the human experience, and seemingly, likely purposeful. All that’s missing is a parenthetical encyclopedic reference: “See page X for _____.”
One of these repetitions is an awl, which appears throughout the book in different forms. This is significant because, according to accounts, an awl damaged Louis Braille’s eye, while he played with it in his father’s workshop. A stylus, one of the forms the awl takes, is used to punch paper to write braille dots. Cohn describes her condition as “blood needles” piercing and damaging her retinas—more awls. And finally, a sewing needle makes an appearance—and might I point out that sewing needles have eyes—which Cohn used to quilt and now only uses to secure buttons. Then in “Thread,” she asks:
“What thread connects this life—braille reading, lost button ignoring—to that needle-wielding person that I was. . . . How can my life be one unbroken thread? What still ties me to the myopic copy editor in her twenties or the girl who sculpted a mouse out of a mini Tootsie Roll, the rodent’s brown sticky eyes smaller than millet seeds?”
Are these awls the ephemeral thread? One that also connects Cohn to Braille? Their repetition clues us in to the reverence Cohn gives these tools and their significance as cairns in her life.
Cohn applies a similar treatment to the words “cell” and “mirror.” She explores them literally by evoking each of their multiple meanings (for “cell”: biological, carceral, the box in which the braille dots are housed; and for “mirror”: the looking glass, neurons, a way to create a self-portrait). In fact, writing braille is a mirror of reading it since the stylus must punch from behind. Cohn then expands these words out to encompass the grand themes and facts of a life.
All of these themes are bolstered by an astute sense of imagery. Yet rather than rely on universal, catchall depictions like golden fields of wheat, swans on a winter lake, rainbooted children puddle-jumping and giggling about the fancifulness of it all, Cohn evokes unusual and surprising images, such as the aforementioned Tootsie Roll mouse. In the “Body,” she writes, “The rest of the body works to compensate for what the eye can no longer do. A constellation of degenerated disks twinkles in my neck and back from years of vulturing my nose ever closer to printed page or screen.” Then in “Ointment” she describes how, “In the medicine cabinet, half-used tubes wait, their emptied ends coiled like scorpion tails.”
The chapter entitled “Motivation” contains a piece of writing inspiration that has done more for me than whole tomes of writing advice. Cohn describes a worm that she remembers reading about in a childhood encyclopedia, saying she still remembers “How it lived by eating its way into a cliff face. Over the years as it tunneled, it grew, boring a wider hole as it lived deeper into the cliff, eating mud and stone. I carried with me the story of how it could never turn around, the tunnel behind it too narrow for its present larger self. The way a writer just has to keep gnawing, writing forward into the future.” And the reader asks, “Who am I?”
