I find this particular book too heavy to read in more than a few pages
at a time:


"What is continuously and immediately present in a world of pure sound
is the repeated experience of passage and impermanence. Where the
voluntary and discontinuous nature of seeing as looking procures the
sense of a continuous 'world-for-the-seeing', which can be relied on to
hold its form even when it is not being looked at, the involuntary and
continuous nature of hearing exposes us to a world of sound the primary
characteristic of which is its impermanence. The world of sight appears
to be there; pressing on us without remission, the world of sound is
only ever there at the moment of our hearing it. The world of pure
hearing would therefore be, so to speak, unremittingly intermittent.
Sounds build and fade, break in and break off, blend and attenuate, in a
pure plurality without background. Of course we filter and select the
sounds we hear, just as we filter and select the objects that we see. In
giving sounds a structure, we attempt to fix and spatialize, perhaps by
borrowing the visual power to segment and synthesize, what is in its
nature transient. We attempt to create as a picture what does not
dispose itself as such. In its 'native habitat', Walter Ong suggests,
'the word is something that happens, an event in a world of sound'. To
be reliant upon sound rather than sight is to be exposed to the sense of
'something going on, something active, a kind of evanescent effluvium
which exists only as long as something or someone is actually producing
it'. Such a reliance upon sound, as John Hull discovered during the
process of losing his sight, and as he records in his remarkable memoir
of that process, can involve an exposure to time which renders one passive:

"When you are blind, a hand suddenly grabs you. A voice suddenly
addresses you. There is no anticipation or preparation. There is no
hiding round the corner. There is no lying low. I am grasped. I am
greeted. I am passive in the presence of that which accosts me ... For
the blind person, people are in motion, they are temporal, they come and
they go. They come out of nothing, they disappear."

The power of capturing, retaining, and therefore reordering the world
which is associated with sight, and with a view of the world formed
around its domination, is expressed in the creation of a sense of
manipulable, permanent, homogeneous space. It requires and allows the
sense of clear and coherent distinctions between the inside and the
outside of the body, and the relative disposition of different bodies in
space. A world apprehended primarily through hearing, or in which
hearing predominates, is much more dynamic, intermittent, complex, and
indeterminate. Where the eye works in governed and explicated space, the
ear imparts implicated space.

When the reliance upon hearing is unusually intensified, as in John
Hull's case, the switch from a sense of governed to a sense of produced
space can be extremely disorientating. The loss of his sight meant that
Hull began to lose the sense of his own body, as the vehicle or location
of his consciousness. His description of this experience seems to
suggest that the very division between consciousness and the world, and
thus of individuality itself, is dependent upon the sense of sight. In
blindness,

"one can't glance down and see the reassuring continuity of one's own
consciousness in the outlines of one's own body, moving a distant foot
which, so to speak, waves back, saying, `Yes, I hear you. I am here'.
There is no extension of awareness into space. So I am nothing but a
pure consciousness, and if so, I could be anywhere. I am becoming
ubiquitous; it no longer matters where I am. I am dissolving. I am no
longer concentrated in a particular location, which would be symbolized
by the integrity of the body."

The blind person, or the person relying on hearing alone, is permeated.
The blind person lives in his body rather than in the world: but it is a
particular kind of body, a body given compelling but impermanent shape
and volume by the experience of sound, which establishes strange
continuities between the inside and the outside."

Dumbstruck, A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Steven Conner, p17-18

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