A new friend of mine had the idea that we would write on assigned topics and share our writing. This project didn’t last too long, but the first topic was “from the corner of my eye,” which I decided to post here:
From the corner of my eye, a tiny spot of blood blossomed, overflowed, and slowly bled down my cheek. As I felt its smooth descent trenching my face, I imagined that it burned into my skin, creating a red scar. But that’s all in my imagination.
I must watch carefully, without being seen to be watching, peripherally, though with focus, from the corner of my eye—as one must do in order to see the faintest star, not looking at it directly but just to its side. This sort of watching is studied, unlike the casual way people typically walk through life, blind to all but their own thoughts projected on their inner lids. To be seen as a studied watcher is to be disdained as one who is too serious, too determined to understand what lies beneath the façade of faces with pasted-on smiles or blankness.
This watching-without-watching made casual friends at work nervous, like my former students, who were slightly afraid of me, wondering (in the way students must) how this might affect the difficulty of tests, their grades, the practical matters that fill ordinary students’ minds. These would-be friends asked me probing questions that I responded to according to my mood, either seriously (which might be like listening to a doomsday report) or not (which may turn them on their heels feeling they’ve been spoofed).
But just as we must watch from the corners of our eye, we find ourselves being watched. Is this merely part of our consumer culture, to watch, to assess, to take in, to devour with our eyes?
I remember feeling as a teenager that maybe I would be better off blind* than living as another judging member of the sighted, another person who thought she fully understood merely because she saw something. How quick others were to judge based on how a person looked, and how this attitude pushed me farther and farther away from what I perceived as the judgment of others, which I never wanted to participate in.
Reading and seriously taking in every word of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan didn’t help, either. For Don Juan stated that we should not tell others our history because in this stated history were chains that bound us to another’s view of us, probably a limited, and definitely a temporary, slice of our lives.
And so this watching is frequently done from the corner of my eye, yet sometimes, it is a bold staring, a staring that has resulted from my feeling invisible at times. As one ages in this culture, as hair grays and wrinkles appear, one also fades from the view of others-----especially from the young who don’t know John Prine’s lines about passing some hollow, ancient eyes and saying “hello in there.”
*I recently came across the yellowed hand-copied poem by May Swenson that encouraged my youthful self in these ideas about the benefits of blindness. Here it is:
The Blindman
The blindman placed
a tulip on his tongue for purple’s taste.
Cheek to grass, his green
was rough excitement’s sheen
of little whips.
In water to his lips
he named the sea blue and white,
the basin of his tears and fallen beads of sight.
He said: This scarf is red;
I feel the vectors to its threads
that dance down from the sun. I know
the seven fragrances of the rainbow.
I have caressed
the orange hair of flames. Pressed
to my ear,
a pomegranate lets me hear
crimson’s flute.
Trumpets tell me yellow. Only ebony is mute.
May Swenson
