On Sight

March 16

I want to talk about the way I see. Imagine a world that is flat: undifferentiated, in your eyes, from a painting or a photograph, in which distance and depth are intuited rather than seen. ‘Far away’ is not far away, but up—higher in your field of vision than things that are close to you. You know that the coffee mug at your elbow is closer than the coffee mug on the kitchen shelf beyond it, because it looks bigger; you know the orange in the bowl before you is spherical rather than flat because of the way light and shadow bend around it. Superimposed over this flat world is another world, dimmer and flatter still: a fleeting double or doppelganger that hovers like a halo over the first, disappearing when you scrutinize it closely. When you look at a person you see two faces: one flat, one ghostly, clumsily meeting; this is your brain’s attempt to simulate the third dimension. The reality you cobble together from these disparate images is tinged with fiction—you don’t ‘see’, not really. You guess. You imagine. You have stared for hours at your hand with its painted-on shadows and its prismatic twin, and wondered how other people see.

I was diagnosed with strabismus when I was less than a year old, and have lived with it ever since. When I was young, science didn’t yet comprehend how many visual disorders are rooted in the brain, not the eye. Even though I could hold both eyes perfectly straight—though only one at a time—my malady was said to be muscular, and surgery was suggested. I had three; each failed. My brain only knew how to see one way, and that was by splitting up the images it received from my eyes. When science and I got older, doctors began to ask me how I thought, not how I saw, and discovered the intricate way my mind had worked to compensate for the lack of depth perception: like a blind person, I had some facial vision, and an overdeveloped sense of hearing. I would walk through an optometrist’s office blindfolded and identify, with 100% accuracy, which doors were open and which were closed. I could hear sounds that were just a note or two out of the typical human register, flinching at dog whistles. My first and second vision therapists were half-admiring, half-exasperated: the way I saw was so complex that disassembling it and reassembling it along the normal pattern was a daunting, perhaps impossible, task.

I didn’t see any reason to try, beyond the cosmetic. I worry more about the way people see me than about the way I see. On good days I’ve been told it seems as though I look past people, or through them; my husband calls my expression ‘ecstatic’. On bad days, or when I’m tired, it’s clear there’s something wrong. If I try very hard, I can appear as though I’m looking straight at things for a moment or two—but it makes the world go blurry and gives me a splitting headache. My first meetings with people are usually spent in a great deal of pain as I try to appear focused. The irony, of course, is that the more focused I seem, the less I see. After I’m comfortable with someone, I drop this pretense, and look sibyl-like into the middle distance. Sometimes I catch people staring at the same point I am, trying to figure out what is so interesting in the space that hangs just beyond their right shoulders, a space inhabited (though they don’t know it) by their halo-selves, their shimmering non-selves, beloved of my intractable eyes. What am I looking at? I can hear them thinking. Well, you, I’m looking at you. Where you probably use cues in facial expression to judge how a conversation is going, I use tiny changes in voice modulation, pauses you don’t know you make, word choices, breathing patterns. After one conversation, I will be able to identify your prose on paper—the words you use are, to me, as unique as your face, and they will be what I remember, handily stored in the hyperfunctional language center of my brain. I am looking at you, with steady affectionate attention.

Would I rather be normal? Of course I would. I would like to see in prose instead of poetry. I would like to pass a vision test at the DMV without having to move heaven and earth in my own visual cortex, telling half-truths (I tell them what I should see, not what I do see), and emerging exhausted. I’m not going to pretend this is a gift. But my strange sight is a constant reminder that the only things we truly own, the only things that are divinely and solely ours, are our obstacles. If I have to give up literal perspective for this perspective, well, it’s not a bad trade. It’s not a bad trade at all. When you turn away at the end of our meeting, saying “I’ll see you later,” you mean it; when you turn your head, I am gone. But for me, who never saw you properly at all, you persist. I can conjure you in the air, not as an image but as a collection of linked sensations, habits, a vibrant lingual pattern. I can feel a finely attenuated pressure on my face; the echo of the precise distance you like to put between your body and mine when we speak. In this way, I never stop seeing you. Not a gift—far from a gift. But, in its own way, perfect.