Reviewed by Justin Goodman
The Braille Encyclopedia
by Naomi Cohn
Rose Metal Press
Paperback, 160 pages, October 2024, ISBN: 978-1-941628-33-1
What are we doing when we review? As if at the unbelievable, we view again. Here is this white orb off-center, like an eye, but vapor in the instance, an artifact to be explained unlike, we think, an eye. Re-viewing, then, is the purview of meditation – lexicography, poetry, memoir, essay, encyclopedia, so on. This is everything Naomi Cohn strives to do in The Braille Encyclopedia, what must function as her debut since her first work, the 2013 insect-themed poetry chapbook, Between Nectar & Eternity, is out of print. Apt. The distance between “view” and “re-view,” as Cohn’s meditations on her own blindness, writing, and history suggest, is like her experience with braille’s privacy: “braille conceals…something opens up in the place of concealment.” As in Cohn’s 2011 poem “Legend,” where Emperor Sejong has caterpillars chew hangul into leaves so that his manmade alphabet is sanctified, absence can outweigh presence. In the same way that she is, as she writes, “made of words.” Being non-linear, an assortment of clustered unfoldings, prose poems and essays, The Braille Encyclopedia invites us to experience both her and itself like artifacts in search of revelation – where explanation instead reveals the “something” that takes the place of concealment.
What first strikes the reader as strange, given this, is the encyclopedia format. In the preface to the first Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s then-revolutionary 18th century project, they stated their goal is “to define as well as possible the order and structure of human knowledge.” This is the way they’re commonly understood; what aught’s child didn’t love the factoid nature of The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology? Neither The Braille Encyclopedia, nor Rebecca Solnit’s “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition,” which influenced Cohn, are mere catalogues though. While Solnit comments on the act of remembrance, a travelogue about a vanishing place using the form’s citational structure, Cohn’s use resembles remembering itself. If the absence of this web structure is felt, it also highlights how the book is less about its valid critiques of legalistic definitions of blindness or a piquant connection between the Andean abacus-like Quipu and braille as devices where “stories were stored in arrangements of strands.” Rather, you quickly realize this is an “arrangement of strands,” that this order and structure is its knowledge. In Cohn’s words: “what started as a form of support has become the form itself: the armature has become the sculpture.”
And this produces a feeling summed up in a phrase from Stephen Kuusisto’s more traditional memoir, Planet of the Blind. The Braille Encyclopedia is a “blind sensorium of language.” From the beginning, where Cohn notes under “Academia” that she “grew up in a nest feathered with rods, texts, and books” to the self-effacing comedic twist under “Zutz” where Cohn “finds it’s spelled, and pronounced, zetz.” Still, “Zutz.” You feel that Cohn herself is productively grasping in the dark of memory, the flicker of Pauline Boss’ Ambiguous Loss on the kitchen counter after her father’s dementia diagnosis, the vividness of the Perkins Brailler “[shaking] the floorboards” as she’s learning to write braille at home, as if to say that the grasping in the dark stereotype (and most blindness is, in fact, full of light, if not clarity) – is all knowledge is. “The mind’s memory fails. What takes over?” She asks, answering, “my fingertip remembers more braille than my hippocampus.” It’s a subtle irony, this “blind sensorium of language,” best depicted under “Torah.” In 2021 Rabbi Lenny Sarko created a braille Torah. The only problem is that “it is not, strictly, kosher since it…needs to be touched.” Touch desacralizes in order to make knowable something sacred.
Which is the greatest shame of the book for me. While an authentically encyclopedic “See:” linking one section to another would have added flavor, it’s fitting that it wasn’t adapted from Solnit’s piece. The Braille Encyclopedia simply garlands itself in knowledge and language. It’s for wearing, not seeing. In a magisterially small instance of this, Cohn observes that the word “ice” when written in Braille is a “tactile pun.” When written in a braille cell, “I” is a upward diagonal slope, “C” a two-dot plain, and “E” a downward diagonal slope. This was so viscerally magical that I bought a Braille slate and punched it out, learning firsthand the unsettling effect of writing both backwards and inside out (having to flip and convex a piece of paper). This was the sole invitation for the reader to enter into this bodily language, and the one that distinguishes The Braille Encyclopedia against other memoirs meditating on braille and blindness as a blind person with “born-sighted blindness” inside a born-sighted culture such as M Leona Godin’s There Plant Eyes or Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen. While Cohn is “made of words,” this brief and shimmering glimpse of ice makes you wish more of those words were in braille.
You simply wish there was more, that’s to say. It’s a rare intimacy in a genre full of intimacies, medical and personal, even as Cohn’s Avant approach distinguishes The Braille Encyclopedia. There’s always the risk that curiosity bleeds into voyeurism. Or, worse, into the conqueror’s paradigm of translation that Bernard Cohn, American Anthropologist and Naomi Cohn’s father, described as “establishing correspondence [to] make the unknown and the strange knowable.” We might refer to Naomi Cohn’s own reflections under “Knowledge” – “what I have come to know is: we don’t always get to know.” A concealment that reveals the truth. And yet, punching orbs in paper, haphazardly, slightly off-center, you want to understand in Cohn’s own unfolding way how, in her late forties, guided by her braille teacher Cindy, she learned that braille “thaws out something I had to put on ice over the years.” What a tactile image, what a beautiful mirror where the “tactile pun” of ice finally melts under the heat of learned language. Unfortunately, for the reader, all body heat. Unfortunately, for the reader, even eye-to-eye with that burning white orb, you’d still need to reach out and touch it. As with everything concealing.
About the reviewer: Justin Goodman received his B.A. in Literature from SUNY Purchase. His writing has been published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, TwoCities Review, and Prairie Schooner.