Here’s what Hull’s doing in those recordings, and why it matters: He’s a religious education professor, right, teaches people how to teach people about God, and in 1983 his eyes just… quit. Detached retinas, failed surgeries, the whole deteriorating nightmare, and he’s got this Sony cassette recorder and he starts documenting what happens next, not because he thinks it’ll be profound but because he’s terrified he’s going to forget what forgetting feels like, if that makes any sense, and what he captures is this SLOW-MOTION APOCALYPSE of the self, where first you lose the images but you’ve still got the memory of images, you can still conjure your wife’s face, your kids’ faces, the way light hits a room, but then, and this is the part that should keep you up at night, those memories start to dissolve too, they just… fade like old photographs left in the sun, and three years in he can’t remember faces anymore, can’t remember what his own children LOOK like, and he’s honest enough, raw enough, to say this isn’t some beautiful journey into enhanced perception, this is LOSS, this is grief, this is standing at your own funeral while you’re still breathing.
But here’s where it gets weird, where it gets truly strange: Hull doesn’t just mourn what’s gone, he starts EXPLORING this new territory, this place past vision that most of us will never know, and he discovers that rain, simple, boring, utilitarian rain, becomes this incredible ARCHITECTURE of sound, where he can suddenly perceive the entire landscape, the buildings, the trees, the empty spaces, all of it revealed through acoustic texture, and he’s walking through Birmingham hearing the world paint itself in his ears, except it’s not compensation, it’s not his other senses “heightening” like some bullshit superhero origin story, it’s that his CONSCIOUSNESS is restructuring itself, the whole thing is liquid, rebuilding from the ground up, and he’s documenting it in real-time with this unflinching precision that would make Beckett weep.
The recordings, and Oliver Sacks lost his MIND over these recordings, they capture something nobody’s ever captured before: what happens to identity when you pull out one of its major load-bearing walls. Because Hull realizes, and he SAYS this, that the continuous sense of self we all carry around, this precious feeling of being the same person from moment to moment, it’s mostly a CONSTRUCTION, it’s neurons firing and memory playing telephone with itself across decades, and when you lose vision you don’t just lose seeing, you lose visual THINKING, visual DREAMING, the whole edifice crumbles and something new, something genuinely OTHER, starts to build itself in the ruins, and he’s there with his tape recorder going “here’s what it feels like when the person you were slowly becomes someone you don’t recognize but who still has your name, your history, your wife, your kids.”
And the documentary doesn’t flinch, doesn’t beautify, doesn’t do that inspiration-porn thing where disability becomes a learning experience for the abled. It just LISTENS. It sits with Hull in the dark, and it IS dark, the film is mostly black screen with these recordings playing, his voice coming out of the void – and it lets him describe what it means to lose not just sight but the IDEA of sight, to enter what he calls “deep blindness” where you’re not a blind person who used to see, you’re something new entirely, unmoored from the visual world the rest of us are drowning in without even knowing it.
That’s the thing that gets me: we’re all stumbling through existence half-blind anyway, building our little models of reality out of the poverty of our senses, and Hull loses one sense and suddenly he’s forced to admit what we all know but can’t face, that the self is permeable, that consciousness is contingent, that everything we think is solid is actually fluid, AND YET, and this is what saves it from being nihilistic, there’s also this strange beauty in the reconstruction, in rain becoming revelation, in the self that emerges from the wreckage still capable of love, still capable of thought, still trying to make sense of being alive in a body on a planet spinning through space.
Hull died last month. The recordings remain. The darkness speaks.