| (no subject) |
[Feb. 9th, 2006|01:17 am] |
When you don't wear glasses everyone looks at you weird as though you were crazy, because in a way you *are* crazy -- simplest, earliest meaning of the word: distorted, tilted, askew, mis-angled. To see faces you have to push your head forward and tilt up -- you need to see the darks and lights of people's features in sharp contrast to make absolutely sure that the forehead, nose and chin end where you think they do. You look like a feral animal -- like a dog, who hasn't been given the human capacity for color recognition or facial recognition and has to find its master by shape and odor.
You *think* like a crazy person, because a crazy person doesn't see the world, a crazy person only sees what... they see. Sanity is the ability and the willingness to take the inchoate mess of random perceptual units you accumulate throughout the day and plug them into the framework we call "the world". It's the willingness to accept the definitions of things -- to accept that the important part of a room isn't the floor or ceiling but the walls, that the important part of a person isn't their neck or shoulder or the very top of their head but their face.
When you're not wearing your glasses, unless you want to squint all the time, the middle range of vision in which life happens for most people -- the range in which people walk up to you and say "Hi" -- doesn't exist except as a blurry fog. On the other hand, the glass of Coke in your hand, the plate of food in front of you, the grain of the desk just two feet from your nose -- these things are microcosmic universes unto themselves, each one invested with enough nuance and detail to fill a dozen art galleries.
When you're not wearing your glasses, your best friend is an unimportant hovering blob of colored fog. Your peers are a bigger blob; your society, an ugly and meaningless sea. But a cross-section of a piece of hot dog is a multilayered rose, infinite pink layers folding into pink layers in an almost sexual fractal grace, each facet gleaming in the light like a miniature sun. You can see spices rather than just tasting them; every tang, every sting, every bite of cumin or oregano or cayenne is a glowing colored speck. Bread crust is a spiderweb of cracks that shift with tectonic complexity when you touch it. Porcelain is a magic mirror that lets you see the geologic past; an old wood table is a network of canyons you can imagine leading an expedition into for years, charting and mapping until you find a cozy knothole to build the city in which you will retire.
When you're not wearing your glasses the world ends two feet away -- not three months away, not ten years away, certainly not centuries or millennia away. Centuries or millennia don't exist. People don't exist, only disembodied voices attached to moving lights; thus, how could society exist, or its laws, rules and expectations?
Most blissfully of all, text does not exist. Severe myopia is only a disease thanks to automobiles; mild myopia, only thanks to literacy. When you don't have your glasses, your computer screen is a harsh glaring rectangular sun that pales next to the window beside it; trees and grass and clouds are wonderfully real, in a muted watercolor way, but dialog boxes and browser windows and text messages are horribly unreal, in a Dali -- no, a Jackson Pollack splatter way. Your e-mail is a waterfall of dancing blacks and grays, and only by squinting and forcing your focus outward can you make any sense of it, can you snap back into a world where "Deadlines approaching" and "Apply now!" and "Order soon!" mean anything.
The blaring signage that assaults you when you walk up and down the hallways is muted, a relief as disturbing and yet welcoming as punctured eardrums after a lifetime of piped-in Muzak and barked orders through megaphones. The harsh, angular world of the written word is conquered once and for all by the simple power of an inflexible lens, scattering its demands and entreaties and manifestos into a blurry interplay of light and shadow, as relaxing as the meaningless dance of sunlight through leaves onto a white wall.
Reading, when you must do it, becomes an intimate, voluntary act, as different from the torrential shower of advertisements and notices you habitually endure as brushing past a dozen warm bodies in a subway car is from a lover's touch. You lean close so as not to strain your eyes; your fingers reach out and touch the words you read, one by one as your lips shape them to make certain of what you see; you are four years old again with your big cardboard book of cartoon farm animals and teasing meaning out of individual letters is once more a merry adventure, each accomplishment to be celebrated by shouts and grins. No horrifying, choking _gestalt_ of collapsing words; the words are in your hand, gentle and tame as kittens, entering your eyes by invitation and consent. You gently peel away a notice for a concert this weekend from the wall and hold it close to your face as though your hands were buried in the hair of a blushing fifteen-year-old in too-heavy prom makeup; you read the date and time like a kiss. Passersby stare at you as you read a bulletin board with your hands and your eyes and your body all in concert, as a child would, as though you were halfway to being truly blind and reading Braille with your skin; what bursts into their consciousness in an instant's glance, so quickly that it passes straight through and is given no more than a second's thought, you let trickle through your tired eyes, slowly, deliberately, like a feast.
Without your glasses the quality of light matters. Freed from distracting details of shape, size and location of objects you truly understand what light means, just as you never notice the texture and color of paper except on a blank page, you never really perceive the character of a particular typeface until it's written out as a complete alphabet, with no distracting meaning in the words it's used to spell. Just as you never notice how beautiful some actors are until you see them walking down the red carpet as themselves, freed from the banal or neurotic or hackneyed roles they are forced to play.
You see how rich and golden sunlight is, the rainbow of colors there are in the simple glow of yellow-white light, the way everything is alive when the sun is up. You realize how much you'd like to fly away from this earth into the sun's heart and bask there eternally, how much more beautiful the light is than any of the things it illuminates; how the things you thought beautiful, faces and artwork and nature, only grow more beautiful the more they blur and combine and dissolve into the purity of light.
You see the petulant, stern hardness of the fluorescent lights inside your school's buildings, how they wash out all color with their parody of light; the stoic calm of the incandescent bulb in your upright lamp and how it tries its best to hold a reminder of the sun's flame at night; the austere alienness of the moon, and how the night -- all night -- is a different country from the day, a country that does not want you, and does not need you. How the constancy of reality is an optical illusion and how, without your glasses on, you can see that the world no longer exists at night; the color and line that you could navigate by the light of day becomes a horrible fearscape of shifting shadow.
You see that the world is made of lies; the lie that this shape is the same as that shape is the same as another, that things exist regardless of whether the light is there to bring them into being -- that there are solid objects behind the endlessly twisting glowing smoke that makes up the world; that there is essential, unchanging meaning in the spinning web of black hairline cracks in paper that make up words; that you can really know where something is if you're not touching it.
All lies, and by losing your glasses you've become free. You've squeezed the world together into a paper-thin sheet and wrapped it around you in a cylinder, a cylinder where cramped amorphous masses flow and merge and melt and separate in an endless torsioning vortex that acts and talks like it means something, but to you is as serenely insignificant as the bubbling oils in a lava lamp. Something to sit and watch and hear in surround-sound while you remain in the tiny space of clear air in the middle, contemplating what, without your glasses, you can see in perfect 3-D holographic vision. You have shoved your classes and your friends and your obligations into the burbling colorful void and you are alone, on the inside, where with infinite clarity you can contemplate the scintillating multiverse that lives and breathes and grows on the palm of your left hand.
And then, of course... you find your glasses, covered in dirt and grime, and reflexively your hands slip them on over your ears, the familiar weight on your nose and ears registering for a fraction of a second before you stop noticing it, and then -- it only takes you an instant to look past the crust of anonymous whitish cruft that's covered the lenses in your neglect -- the world snaps back into focus. Back into existence. Why, there is your desk. There is your bed. This, here, is a room, only so large and no larger -- walls this far away and no farther -- and one look at your computer and the words start talking loud and clear and incessant again, inescapable again.
And you laugh, and you laugh, and you can't stop laughing, because you realize how much of a joke it all is, and you realize that it doesn't make any difference at all that you realize how much of a joke it all is, and that only makes it funnier. |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7){kind=small}
arctangent's journal