When Jacques Lusseyran was eight, he was blinded in an accident. In Nazi-occupied France in 1941, aged 17, Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty two boys, using his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually he was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters. He was one of only thirty from the transport to survive.
Lusseyran’s discoveries about the power of touch mirror the experience of touch in Zero Balancing. This is an excerpt from his memoir And There Was Light:
Yet there was something still more important than movement, and that was pressure. If I put my hand on the table without pressing it, I knew the table was there, but knew nothing about it. To find out, my fingers had to bear down, and the amazing thing is that the pressure was answered by the table at once. Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead. I have never had to go more than halfway…
As soon as my hands came to life they put me in a world where everything was an exchange of pressures. These pressures gathered together in shapes, and each one of the shapes had meaning. As a child I spent hours leaning against objects and letting them lean against me. Any blind person can tell you that this gesture, this exchange, gives him a satisfaction too deep for words.
Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light