How Clockenflap founder was inspired by a blind traveller
Jay Hoffmann-Forster says the tenacity of James Holman – an Englishman who did not let his blindness stand in the way of his travels – renewed his appetite for risk taking and helped him launch what is now Hong Kong’s biggest music festival
A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (2006), by Jason Roberts, is a biography of Englishman James Holman (1786-1857), whose career as a solo traveller, writer and social observer was prolific despite the fact that he had been left blind by an illness in his 20s.
Jay Hoffman-Forster, artistic director of Magnetic Asia, the company behind Clockenflap, Hong Kong’s biggest music festival, and the local edition of the Sónar electronic music celebration, explains how the book changed his life.
It’s an incredible book about this dude named James Holman who went completely blind when he was 25 years old. He managed to secure himself a position as a Naval Knight, which was kind of an unofficial position that didn’t really require any work, but it gave him free accommodation at Windsor Castle, on the outskirts of London, so he could just have taken it easy.
Holman discovered that the act of travelling into the unknown offered respite from the agony. This was remarkable and inspiring due to his complete loss of vision, and because people didn’t really travel in those days. It deeply touched me; the notion of stepping into the chaos and confronting the unknown as a means to challenge his suffering was quite heroic.
I read the book just before the first Clockenflap festival, in 2008. I was inspired by how Holman refused to allow himself to be labelled and just cracked on. He was unbelievably tenacious and it’s hard to not be inspired by him. It all filtered down into a big mishmash of things that eventually resulted in Clockenflap.
Back in Holman’s day, people who were blind or had lost at least some physiological or cognitive functionality were labelled defective and just handed a begging bowl, but Holman refused to accept that. His strategy was to use a steel-tipped wooden cane to tap around his immediate environment and listen to the sounds: he developed echolocation.
A Sense of the World and the exploits of Holman renewed my appetite for creative risk taking and I like to think that some of Holman’s spirit manifested through me when we were launching the festival.
The theme of the artists’ programme at Clockenflap this year is “Sensorium” (the sensory faculties considered as a whole), so I feel we’ve come full circle.