On Becoming a Dictator

My computer has dictation software that I’ve never used.  Setting it up is more difficult for people who live with less than perfect vision.  Since I took a full year of typing class in high school and type at a speed that must be slowed down to allow the computer keys to keep up with me, I haven’t even thought about dictating what I write—until now.

 

When I was making many choices about creating this new blog, Blogger tried helping me choose the URL.  Some sort of artificial intelligence connected some dots and came up with “The Blind Librarian.”  I considered it, tried it, deleted it.  It just didn’t feel right.  I decided to research “blind librarian” on BARD, the NLS audio book download website.  I found biographies of the Argentinian writer and blind librarian (who had no library training), Jorge Luis Borges.

 

I downloaded books about him in order to learn how this blind librarian performed his duties.  He did some library business for one hour and spent the rest of his shift writing until his vision became so bad that he dictated everything he wrote and was promoted to Library director.  His mother, other family members, friends, colleagues, fans, and a wife much later in his life, wrote down each word he said and then made corrections as he revised every sentence before going on to the next one. 

 

This is anew century, and I live in a world where independent living is preached as if it were a religion; therefore, the people who lack the candor to say, “I am not going to be your eyes,” generally run in the opposite direction.  “Read the expiration dates in your refrigerator?  Isn’t there an app for that?”  Indeed, there is and for a lot of other things.  When my mother was alive and read a doctoral-level course-pack article to me, she stopped in the middle of a sentence and asked, “Do they really expect you to read this crap?”  (Mother never attended high school, but she was the funniest and most brilliant person I’ve ever known.)  I miss her, and I miss my church volunteer and now friend who is on vacation in Florida for two months.  “Try these potatoes,” she’ll say as she helps me shop.  “I like these better.”  I wonder if Borges had this kind of “Help.”

 

Today I picked up my recorder and dictated the content for this post.  The recorder is still off because this is the longest introduction I’ve ever written.  I am supposed to be telling you about the Longfellow poem, “The Arrow and the song,” and how I made it the first page of a scrapbook I started sixty years ago when I published two light verse poems for $2 each.  I had no idea who would be reading what I had written and no way to receive comments from them.  When Charles Dickens published his American Notes, he had no idea that Helen Keller’s mother would learn about the Perkins School for the Blind from his book and change the little girl’s life forever.

 

  In the past week, I’ve located three authors and let them know that the literary “arrows” that they shot into the air made a friend because they gave me important information, healing, hope, or laughter.  Suddenly it has occurred to me just how important my words might be to someone (Maybe not you, but to someone.)

 

Edwin Williamson, the author of Borges, a Life, has shown me how to work with readers and stenographers more efficiently.  If dictating my words into a recorder and using dictation software might also make me a more prolific writer, then it is time for me to become a dictator.

 

 

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