Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia is one of the year’s most striking memoirs, a book that defies genres as its language builds and defines it’s world.
Ilya Kaminsky wrote of the book:
“Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia is a story of a life told in moments, in asides, in meditations, in lyric observations that can be as nuanced as they are sweeping. There is an impressive unity to this collection and a momentum that casts a spell as the pages turn.”
In her own words, here is Naomi Cohn’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Braille Encyclopedia:
The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, my debut memoir, explores vision loss and adaptation, particularly as a writer and book lover. It’s about transformation, in my case, relearning how to read and write in midlife due to progressive vision loss. The book takes the alphabetical form of an imagined encyclopedia, and its brief entries shape-shift between prose poems and lyric essays, which felt like the right way to write about a life that’s had its own share of shape-shifting. Chronicling my evolution over decades from sighted to legally blind, as well as the demands of the alpha order structure, means that neither life nor this book fits a simple linear narrative. Also, as a poet who’s only relatively recently begun messing around in the creative nonfiction playground, my words sometimes smell more like poetry than prose. As in words that sit somewhere between song and plain speech. As in what, in prose craft, is often called “lyric” as in lyric essay. As in writing that cares about how language sounds and feels as well as what it means. So music and the moves music makes reverberate in the DNA of this book. Here’s my Braille Encyclopedia playlist.
Joan Armatrading, “I’m Lucky”
Most folks born with sight don’t consider going blind in mid-life to be a stroke of luck. I know I didn’t when I started to lose my central vision in my thirties from a rare retinal condition. But figuring out how to live with vision loss led to one of the great love affairs of my life, learning and falling in love with braille, a tactile system of reading and writing invented by the nineteenth century teacher, inventor, and musician Louis Braille. The more I learned about Braille, the man, the more curious I became about his life and luck or its opposite. As a result, many of the pieces in the book trace his story as much as my own. Armatrading’s “I’m Lucky” is a perfect soundtrack both for the exploration of luck and the mood of falling in love. And Armatrading’s “I’m Lucky” riffs on both these themes—the luck—ill and good—that keeps cropping up in Braille Encyclopedia, and that glorious mood of falling in love.
The Jackson 5, “ABC”
This one was part of the pop soundtrack of my seventies childhood, growing up in Hyde Park, the bookish child of academic parents, which the book touches on in entries including “Academia” and “Cobbler.” It’s also an homage to the scaffold of alphabetical form that I used to organize The Braille Encyclopedia.
Django Reinhardt, “Minor Swing”
When I first started learning braille, I was awed by my teacher Cindy’s facility. She could read two braille books at once, left hand following one text, right another. It reminded me of Django Reinhardt, the Parisian jazz guitarist known for his extremely virtuosic playing. “Minor Swing” is also one of those numbers that is quintessential Paris. Louis Braille spent much of his life in Paris. Of course the music of his time, the first half of the nineteenth century, would have been different than Reinhardt’s in the twentieth. But allow me this anachronism. There’s another echo with Louis Braille’s life—both Braille and Reinhardt experienced life-altering injuries. Braille lost his sight as a small boy due to an accident in his father’s saddle-making shop; Reinhardt survived a fire as a young man, and the injuries he sustained left him with limited use of one hand, which made his technical prowess all the more remarkable. I wonder how the challenge of relearning to play with his altered body inflected his creativity.
People living with disabilities, in my experience, are often intensely creative. Life often requires it, hacking ways to complete the most basic tasks can require a lot of ingenuity. Living in a society that does not welcome or accommodate bodily difference likely absorbs the creative juices of many. And then there are the Django Reinhardts, and the Louis Brailles, where the crucible of adaptation seems to amplify their genius.
Desmond Dekker, “You Can Get It If You Really Want”
I love braille, but the learning, starting as I did at age 47, did not come easy. Dekker’s beat and lyrics always remind me to keep at it.
Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
There were so many Cohen songs I wanted to include (“You Want it Darker” comes to mind), but ultimately I chose “Anthem” and how it celebrates imperfection. Adapting to altered sight involves embracing imperfection, and in some weird way that Cohen evokes, sometimes what breaks us makes us. Much as I still miss the ways my former self used to be able to see, that former more fully sighted self could never have envisioned the ways that vision loss has transformed my being, not just my seeing.
Bonnie Raitt, “The Fundamental Things”
Losing sight means embracing the other senses, including, essential for learning braille, the tactile. Raitt’s song is an encouragement, an incitement to lean into the non-visual senses. It doesn’t hurt that she shows off some classic blues raunch in this number.
Koko Taylor, “Wang Dang Doodle”
While we’re in blues mode, let’s go back a bit farther to Koko Taylor’s Chicago. A shout-out to the Chicago Blues scene of my youth, but really it’s on my playlist because one of the critical roles music plays in my writing life is the need to get up and move around frequently. Sometimes I go for a walk; other times do some stretches or yoga. But the best thing is to stand up and dance, trusting no one can see me bopping to this Chicago Blues homage to a good-time dance party.
Anouar Brahem, “The Astonishing Eyes of Rita”
On the other end of the writing process spectrum, there’s the kind of music that keeps me in my chair. Because of my altered sight, I do the bulk of my reading and writing work by ear, most often the synthesized speech of a computer or other device. This makes listening to music while I’m working complicated. A lot of music I love to listen to doesn’t fit well with my ways of taking in information. Born sighted, I have trouble listening to the stream of words that my computer turns into digital text into while, at the same time, listening to music. My brain can’t multitask in this way—so I either write in silence—or sometimes work listening to instrumental music or music sung in languages I don’t understand. Brahem’s haunting oud playing always keeps me settled in my chair.
Elmore Janes, “It Hurts Me Too”
Elmore James rendition of Tampa Red’s 1940 song radiates empathy, that ability to feel what others are experiencing. Halfway through The Braille Encyclopedia, in a piece called “Mirror Neuron” I question the connections between sight and the capacity for empathy.
Another reason this number made the final cut on my Braille Encyclopedia playlist is that
James’ slide guitar feels apt for a book that’s so much about blurred boundaries. There’s no bright hard line between one note and another on his guitar, just as —there’s no clear binary separation between sight and blindness.
Tom Waits, “Rain Dogs”
Some days, going blind over the course of decades puts me in a bad mood, and for a gritty, quirky urban melancholy, anything by Tom Waits has always been close to my heart. My first copy of “Rain Dogs” was on a cassette tape my musician brother gave me—One side Alpha Blondy the other Tom Waits. The term “rain dogs,” according to one Waits interview was an illusion to the way dogs, their sense of smell befuddled by rain, can’t find their way home. This resonates so strongly for me with the challenges of learning to rely on senses other than the visual one I’d grown so used to depending on.
Bill Withers, “Lean on Me”
Vocational rehabilitation, or Adjustment to Blindness Training has given me skills to live independently, despite my dwindling eyesight. At the same time, this training was also one of the places I experienced the strongest sense of positive interdependence I’ve ever felt. I write about this in The Braille Encyclopedia in “Mutual.” Lean on Me evokes the way fellow students in Adjustment to Blindness Training had each others back.
Indigo Girls, “Closer to Fine”
When my retinas started falling apart in my thirties, initially I got absorbed in seeking answers—especially medical answers. My life improved radically when, after years, I shifted my energy from answers and fixes to adaptation. “Closer to Fine” evokes this transformation that can be so essential to getting on with life.
Naomi Cohn is a writer and teaching artist whose work explores reclamation. Her past includes a childhood among Chicago academics; involvement in a guerrilla feminist art collective; and work as an encyclopedia copy editor, community organizer, grant writer, fundraising consultant, and therapist. A 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow in Writing, her previous publications include a chapbook, Between Nectar & Eternity (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), and pieces in Baltimore Review, Fourth River, Hippocampus, Terrain, and Poetry, among others. Cohn has also appeared on NPR and been honored by a Best of the Net Finalist and two Pushcart nominations. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota.