Recent travails with my first pair of contact lenses has reminded me of one of the themes of my life which I know I shall have difficulty expressing. Instead of trying to explain it anew, I’ll quote a very short story I wrote years ago and supplement it with a few expoundings. It’s called “Sight.”
Stevie Villarreal has just slapped me in the face. I don’t know why he did that. Granted, I just pitched a pebble between his pointy shoulder blades, but not so very hard that he should need to come over and strike so crassly.
It must be because I made him look lesser then he feels he should. Such a breach demands swift and exact and stinging punishment. Otherwise, to him, he’d stay that way.
We had stared at one another, inches apart, wrestling in our eyes. There was a trilling flash of green and he reached to me and lashed me. I winced, obviously, but didn’t look away. Even if my glasses are gone—and they are; even now flying across the classroom—breaking the gaze now is to fail utterly; to lie down, take the kicks and die, right here in my seat. Being up there in the eyes says it isn’t done. Here I am. You can’t make me into what you are.
It’s easier for me to stare like this without my glasses, because then I don’t see Stevie staring back.
Far be it for an author to dictate “What It Means” to his audience, but among the ideas behind this is sight—what it is to see a thing as it is.
There's a splendid quote by Madame Curie that I'd like to think absolutely true: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood." But it’s difficult, isn't it, to qualify whether or not anything can really ever be fully comprehended and understood as it is?
For me, just because I believe I am seeing something for what it really is does not automatically lessen my fear of it. Obviously "believing" a thing to be real, and the fact of it's actual reality, can be--and often is--completely separate from one another. And, interestingly, as I have observed here in this short story, fear will also evaporate when my perception of the thing is obscured—the fine lines blurred, the fangs blunted, sharpened edges dulled to a fluffy cream.
So: Is impaired sight a benefit, simplifying matters to what they really are? Or is it a retreat--a distortion of reality into something less threatening and more manageable?
I have no idea. Intuition suggests that it’s important for me to wonder about this, but like most things I suppose the only sure thing I’ll ever settle on is the ambiguity of it all. I still have difficulty answering the question, when others put it to me, of why it even matters, and aren’t you wasting time?
Perhaps. But if it’s pointless, I probably wouldn't know it til I voiced it.
