Like the Water...

... Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. ___ Wendell Berry

Responsible Sight

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me. (Walt Whitman)

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. (Jesus Christ in Matthew 6:22-23)

There is a passage in Plato that shouts to me. It is from the Timaeus and is an account of the origin of vision. Plato writes that when the gods assembled the human body they placed "in the vessel of the head... a face in which they inserted organs to minister in all things to the providence of the soul... Of these organs they first contrived the eyes to give light." Not to receive light but to give it. As the Timaeus states, the gods made "the pure fire which is within us... to flow through the eyes in a stream smooth and dense." Not what Norman Maclean meant when he wrote, "a river runs through it," but the river runs nonetheless. When the outer light of day meets the personal inner light that streams from and through us and the two lights "coalesce" upon a certain object, the result is "that perception which we call sight."

These thoughts complement Christ's own: "The light of the body is the eye." And Walt Whitman's: "From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight." And Fernando Pessoa: "We narrate when we see." However, such a view of sight runs counter to our Kodak-education in America. We are raised to believe that the eye works like a camera: an external light falls on an object, glances off that object, enters the iris (adjustable lens)through the pupil (aperture), alights upon the retina (film), is delivered by the nerves to the brain (darkroom/Walmart photolab), processed instantly (1 hour photo processing), then stored in the memory (photoalbum--hardcover or online) as an image (snapshot/digital image). This metaphor works well as a mechanical analysis of the eyeball. But what we Walmart photo afficionados tend to forget is that the eye is only "the instrument of sight, not the sense of it." If we focus not on how the eyeball works but on how we experience sight, the camera becomes a wholly inept model.

Human vision is as remarkable for what it screens out as for what it actually perceives. At times our focus on certain details blinds us to "the other"; at other times our sight pans across the other, giving us a view but no sight. In the words of David James Duncan; "This is hardly the performance of a Kodak product. If our eyes were intended to be cameras, we all deserve our money back." Allow me to illustrate. While writing this, I swiveled my eyes from the yellow legal pad balanced precariously upon my crossed-over leg to reach a dark green ceramic coffee cup from a wooden table beside me. En route to and from this cup, my eyes moved across dozens of plainly visible objects. Yet I perceived none of them. By retracing slowly my eyes' path to the cup, I see that they swept across a glaring gold lamp, a photo of my mother and father situated in an wooden oval frame chipped asymmetrically by time, a small wooden hippopatumus whose head is carved out of proportion to its body, a small plate made from stone with a single tree etched into its surface by Korean hands, a Swahili New Testament balanced on top of a burnt orange journal held closed by an elastic band of matching color. Yet, I saw none of this. Something in me sought an object it knew to be green, to the side of me, and full of hot caffeine--sought it so decisively that I turned 180 degrees, "filming" all the way, yet made an essentially "blind turn."

This "seeing blindness" is the great contradiction of human eyesight. Vision is a form of selection and projection. How to see more? How to see more clearly? Can we aspire to aim our inner light? Our seeing seems to illuminate so little of our world! I want to know how to aim my inner light, how to cleanse its lenses, to know just how and when to aim it, and how far and deep it can shine. Without a reliable, directible inner light source, I fear I have sometimes looked at living objects, even beloved objects, and have seen merely illusions, shadows, and, at times, nothing at all.

It has been said that our eyes are the windows to our souls. Eyes cannot be the soul's literal windows, but they are, quite literally, openings into and out of living beings. "When our eyes are open, they become not one of our many walls, but one of our very few doors." Like breathing, through our eyes we inhale light and images we cannot own, and exhale either light or darkness that is the spirit in which we perceive. This "visual exhalation," this personal aiming of perception is the eye's speech. It is a shaping, it is something we make; I am responsible for my vision. I am responsible for slowing and aiming and perceiving, for humanizing the humanity all around me within my "field of vision." My eyespeech changes the world when I convey responsible sight.