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My clergyman grandfather was talking to a woman in a hat. After a while he said he’d enjoyed meeting her and hoped to meet her husband too. “You are my husband,” she said. I blame the hat.
It runs in our family: prosopagnosia, or faceblindness, recently featured in the programme “Who are you again?” My paternal uncle and aunt chatted for ten minutes at a party before working out how they knew each other. I’ve sometimes failed to recognise my own children, while one of our sons seldom has any idea whom he’s talking to: he asked a pretty girl he’d known all his life for her name, then said, “I know someone called exactly the same.” Our daughter spots people by their dogs.
I do, however, recognise voices and names. And it’s not that I can’t see you. When I’ve had to give Police statements, my pages of detailed description have caused admired astonishment. But my brain interprets sound over sight: my laptop is covered in irritating, incomprehensible icons instead of easily intelligible words. My disability, if it is one, was being born into an age of vision.
It was not always so. Shakespeare’s plots are full of mistaken identity that seems far-fetched to some – but not to me. Clothes, being then far more expensive and perhaps limited to one or two outfits, provided vital social as well as personal clues. Viola, posing as a boy, modelled her wardrobe on her lost brother’s... so of course was taken for him. These plays, written for an audience rather than spectators, provide all in the language: scenery and weather, gesture and action as well as character.
It was not just the Elizabethans. On Easter morning Mary didn’t recognise her risen Lord... until she heard His voice. Saul of Tarsus realised the truth when he lost his sight and heard his name called. Tiresias, like the visionary Homer, was physically blind; but the only one who recognised Oepidus.
I wonder what we lose, with the art of the aural. On a television presenting course I heard that adage that most communication is body language. I didn’t believe it until we saw the rushes: the smile, the outfit were all. Unlike on radio where content is paramount, words seemed virtually irrelevant.
But how can we change our minds, let alone our lives, without the logic of listening?
The modern idea that seeing is believing is at odds with Judeo-Christianity. When Thomas – like Viola, a twin used to visual confusion – said he couldn’t believe until he’d seen, Jesus commended, by contrast, those for whom testimony is proof. Seeing merely shows us evidence: speaking explains and interprets it.
Faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the Word, wrote Saint Paul.
In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Apostle John illustrates how language illuminates.
Listening is learning. In an astonishing paradox, it is the Word that shines light in the darkness.
