John Lee ClarkMETATACTILE KNOWLEDGE*"How did you know?" That's a response I often get when I interact with people. How did I know that their shoulder needed a massage, or that they were hungry or sad, or a spot on their arm was itchy? The owners of pets I meet are also amazed. Almost immediately I've found their pets' sweet spots. "That's right! She loves that. But how did you know?" On one of our first dates, my future wife asked, "How did you know?" Without realizing what I was doing, I had pressed her Melt Button. (She wishes me to inform my readers, lest their imaginations run away, that it was nothing naughty.) When our twin sons were born prematurely (now a happily meaningless fact), the nurses in the NICU were impressed by what I did. I felt right away that my sons' skins were too sensitive to stroke. I just held them or squeezed their arms and legs, even firmly, but I knew not to stroke. The nurses were going to give instructions to that effect, but there was no need. I wasn't conscious of it. It was natural. So natural, in fact, that I didn't have a name for it, this skill that goes beyond just feeling texture, heft, shape, and temperature. I'd like to call it metatactile knowledge. It involves feeling being felt, being able to read people like open Braille books, and seeing through our hands and the antennae of and within our bodies. It involves many senses, senses that we all have but which are almost never mentioned—the axial, locomotive, kinesthetic, vestibular…. All "tactile" to some extent, but going beyond "touch." I did write about it in passing. I even wrote one poem that's all about it, without realizing what I was documenting. Here's "Clamor": All things living and dead cry out to me As my little ode to metatactile knowledge attests, it extends to interactions with objects. I know, I know, objects are dead and have no feelings. But they still respond to tactile contact and actions. Their design and the materials with which they are made do draw people to handle them in certain ways. Indeed, product developers study this all the time. But there are quirks, unpredictable things that we do or discover. Take the little subscription-form inserts inside magazines: One of my earliest memories is of tearing such subscription forms into handfuls of soft, fuzzy confetti. The paper those are printed on is pulpy and so rippable! Other kinds of paper do not have the same delicious give, but they may be perfect for folding into airplanes—their lines so crisp and taut! Probably most people can relate a little to what I'm talking about when they think of bubble wrap. Do not those rows of little tight buns clamor, as it were, to be popped? Another example that should be familiar: Reese's peanut-butter cups. Remember those old TV commercials where kids would play with a cup, pushing out the center and leaving a hole in the middle? Think on it. There is nothing visual to suggest how one might play with these cups in this way. Tactile investigation is what uncovers the fact that the center is softer than the rim of solid chocolate. So this is nothing new. It's an element of human life. Yet, as Lyle Crist asks in his fine 1974 biography of Richard Kinney, a DeafBlind poet and true explorer of the world: "How much do we ENJOY what is around us? How many really understand the melody inherent in—what shall we use?—the Golden Gate Bridge? How many ever get out of the car, feel the bridge moving gently in the wind swells, how many of us put our hands out to touch the cables, feel the bridge sing to us?" I inhabit it all the time and apply metatactile knowledge to all my interactions with people, things, the world, and myself. I have Reese's "fun things to do" for a thousand things. A thousand other things sing to me. Of course, when I play King Kong and crush an empty water bottle like it's so much New York City skyscraper or when I snap off the cotton ends of a Q-tip in order to unroll the stem and fold it into a flower, it's more about me than the objects. The point is that we all are in continuous conversation. Except that not everyone is as engaged in conversation as they could be. As a second-generation DeafBlind person, I took it for granted that most DeafBlind people knew and interacted with the world as I did, through an abundance of touch. After all, we don't have the same visual and auditory distractions that hearing-sighted people have, istractions which leave their tactile skills in a neglected, dormant state. Of course touch would be everything to us! When I began my work as a Braille instructor and a Pro-Tactile trainer, however, I came to observe things that weren't always apparent in social settings. One of the first things I noticed in my Braille sessions was how poorly my students figured out their surroundings. Or else they waited to be told where things were, to be guided, as if they could move about in spaces only pre-approved by others for their use. Many also had trouble locating things on a page of Braille—yes, it takes practice to be able to read those tiny dots, but there are broader details that I thought wouldn't be elusive. I found out more about this troubling pattern during Pro-Tactile trainings. Random example: A man came up to me during a snack break, asking for help opening his bag of potato chips. I was puzzled, and learned that what he always did, or tried to do, was to take hold of two sides and pull them apart. I inquired if he was aware of the hole along one of the seams, placed there expressly to help open the bag. He was awestruck. In his years buying chips and other snacks, he never knew about the little holes or tears in the seams provided by the manufactures. "Who told you about this?" he demanded. No one had. I just picked it up and have always "known" about this feature. Something as small and simple as a bag of chips, I just KNOW. What the man had was a bad case of tactile freeze. Isabell Florence, a fellow Pro-Tactile trainer, explains, "Tactile freeze is learned. It is natural for us to explore everything tactilely. But when I was a kid, they hit my hands for touching." I would hope there is less hand-slapping going on these days, but DeafBlind children are surrounded by hearing-sighted people—their parents, teachers, peers, and the horribly but uncannily titled "interveners," their constant adult companions/interpreters/teacher's-aides/sighted-guides—whose visual biases and values serve to mentally, socially, and emotionally slap their hands. Everyone in DeafBlind education pays lip service to touch, yet the people who know most about how to touch, DeafBlind people whose fields of touch are large and who don't suffer from tactile freeze, are not welcome. What of those who become DeafBlind as adults and didn't have their hands slapped as children? When they start to become deaf or blind, their first contacts are doctors, who try to save or fix their sight and hearing. Next, they get into vocational rehabilitation, whose agencies often have policies that insist on touch-related things being the last resort. It is also a field that has almost no professionals or instructors who are themselves DeafBlind. Most people becoming DeafBlind are left to figure out tactile communication on their own. It often takes a long time before they enter the DeafBlind community and meet culturally DeafBlind people. And there's our society, which is extremely anti-tactile, Reese's peanut-butter cups notwithstanding: Do Not Touch. So many things are buried in tactilely blank boxes and packages. Vital information is printed on flat surfaces. Many businesses prohibit any contact between their employees and customers. Police recite the mantra that "Hands can kill." Things of great tactile import and beauty are placed behind glass. Knobs, switches, handles, levers, keys, and buttons are giving way to things called, strange to say, "touch screens." … Fortunately, there are some who have escaped such oppression with their tactile fields relatively intact. One is a young man named Ben Reid, who is currently attending my alma mater. I first met him five years ago when he was eleven and his family visited Minnesota to check out what it had to offer. The instant he came into the room, he found me and sized me up. He also found the small latch on my Braille display and opened it to examine the device. There was a quick, wordless exchange in flutters and pressures that, if translated into words, would run something like this: "Careful with that latch." "Yeah, it could easily break." "Okay, you know what you're doing." "Thanks. This is really cool!" Then his first words: "Is it expensive?" As I gave his family a tour of the skyways in downtown St. Paul, I smiled and smiled because Ben was all over the place. His orbit of exploration was huge and all-encompassing. I'm very glad to report that it still is. I don't believe it's an accident that the young man's mother is also DeafBlind. Christy Reid understands that touching is seeing. She bristles whenever sighted people attempt to restrain her. "Often when I reach out and start exploring," she says, "people would say something that makes me feel foolish, and I explain, ‘I'm just looking and I need to touch it.' I hate it when they try to stop me from touching." This is one of the things the Pro-Tactile revolution is addressing, this awful way we are conditioned to yield to visual culture at our expense. As much of my tactilehood I've enjoyed, I still catch myself holding back for something as stupid as appearance—appearance within a visual context entirely outside of my reach. Take a line of people in an eatery. I'm sure most DeafBlind people would try to follow the line, be cooperative, all the while trying not to touch anyone. It takes conscious effort to establish new habits, such as cutting in front of a line if the set-up isn't accessible, firmly reaching out and establishing contact and some tactile-gestural communication with a person in front of me, or bypassing an impractical counter to go directly to the person I need to communicate with about my order. Also, when shopping with an access assistant, it used to be that he or she would pull me back at times in order to prevent my touching a stranger. It took some doing, but I've retrained my assistants to allow, even help, me establish contact with anyone near me or near the things I want to grab off a shelf. Indeed, establishing such contact has made my tasks go smoother, since I can tactilely tell someone she doesn't need to move away, that I just want this item. It saves a lot of time, too—no more wasteful waiting for someone to move when what I want isn't even directly in front of her. Besides the practical benefits of establishing tactile contact as much as possible, there is something more primal at stake. Sighted people take this for granted, and may not appreciate how important this is, but, every day when they go out, they receive acknowledgment of their existence in the form of smiles, waves, nods, and murmured greetings from others. Where is my share in this reassurance that I am here? Such experiences and thoughts made me appreciate why many sighted Deaf people in the past refrained from speaking ASL in public. They instinctively felt that ASL did not belong in open society, and imagined that their moving hands would startle, offend. They also took all responsibility for communication, either attempting speech and lipreading or carrying a notepad wherever they went. Then something happened. Deaf people began to impose visual culture wherever they went, forcing hearing people to make eye contact and to gesture back. They spoke ASL freely in public and thought nothing of breaking mainstream rules. They thought nothing of staying in a restaurant hours after ending their meals, much to the consternation of the owners, occupying tables like that. Occupying space, transforming it into Deaf space. The Deaf Pride movement was what happened. My parents' generation was the first to not carry a notepad. It was now hearing people's responsibility to look for paper and a pen. Older notepad-carrying Deaf people would point out that it was faster to have a notepad ready, but my parents and their contemporaries couldn't be bothered with it. It was a different world. And now the world is undergoing another change. Whereas touch was once forbidden and accidental, now, for a growing number of people, it is a right. Yes, it startles. It may offend. But in my efforts to exercise and expand my tactilehood by seeking people out and touching them purposefully, I have found that sighted people can handle it. Metatactile knowledge exists in everyone, and it surges forward to meet us, to respond in kind. Some strangers I encounter are so responsive I wonder, "How did they know? That's exactly it!" One truth that has been impressed upon me is that one can know only so much without being known. We've hidden ourselves for too long, our hands tucked away, letting the world go by. No more. It's time we introduced ourselves and got to know you.
*This essay was originally published in John Lee Clark's blog "Notes from a Deaf Blind Writer."
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