The photograph posted above tells its story: a man whose eyes are inchoate, splayed, "of or pertaining to" an argument. The eyes are imperfectly positioned. The man is visually impaired as they say in contemporary circles. In turn, his smile, the raised brows, attempt to remediate the primate's instinct–both the apes and the human being hold the crooked gaze in some contempt. Some days the man imagines himself at a border crossing–Ellis Island comes to mind–where he sees how he is pulled from the line and sent away from his family. He would not have been permitted to enter America. The border guard would have detested the failing eyes. Out you go!
I took this self portrait with a BlackBerry phone. I knew it would come out this way: the man who can't look you in the eye. As a writer I like to think of a lineage: Kafka had a wandering eye; Joyce was legally blind. Everyone knew those guys were fishy. Bad eyes are fishy fish eyes–incompatible with social honesty. And this matter is made worse if you also wear thick glasses. In Cambodia, under the tyranny of Pol Pot, men, women, and children with glasses were routinely exterminated–you were especially likely to die if your glasses were severely corrective. My lineage, the literary one, can't help me any more than history can. At best the literary canon suggests I'm a malcontent and a victim.
Of course literature suggests no such thing, the bad eye and a contrarian's nature in no way form a singularity. But the bad eye is a marker of loneliness, particularly in childhood, and of lonely children who become writers there are perhaps too many to count. George Orwell's essay Why I Write contains this useful assessment:
"I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life."
Isolated, undervalued, and a power of facing unpleasant facts. I've always admired Orwell's candor and precision. (His bravery also.) I too began writing as a solitary child. I continue to write as a man who can't look you in the eye. That is my compensatory practice given my physiological failure in everyday life, for make no mistake about it, strangers are troubled by the face you see above–sometimes very troubled for this is an age of globalization and the wandering eye is, as Carl Jung would say, a problem of the collective unconscious.
The bad eye is still, in the 21st century a mark of stigma. As I write these words it's still the case that rural women in Kenya who have cataracts are thought to be witches and are shunned or treated with violence. Unpleasant facts, the broken eyes…
The structural preconditions for stigma are carefully and famously articulated in Erving Goffman's classic book. It's enough to say that a damaged identity is, in relation to physical abnormality, entirely a matter of social construction. A simpler way to say this is that physical perfection frames the rules. And an even easier way to say it is that perception is, when linked with perfectionism, an easily teachable language. We have all seen Nazi comic books–or ought still to see them.
I have to say that I do not write an easily teachable language. Some years ago when my first memoir Planet of the Blind was published, a man who was serving on the board of directors of the guide dog school where I was then an administrator said to me: "I read your book. You've got a lot of verbal pyrotechnics in there." Then he walked away. The setting was a country club. We were at a fund raiser in Westchester County, New York. His message was clear. He didn't like the book! It's not an easy read. It's loaded with poetry, allusions, fragments of philosophy, and sometimes it is unflinchingly truthful about the abjection of disability, particularly in childhood. Old Bob (I'll call him Bob) didn't like my book because it made him feel dumb. The damned book has words like "heliographic" and "hypnogogic" in it. It also has the "F bomb" and a rather fine description of an LSD trip. The contemporary Hollywood game would say it's: "Tom Wolfe meets Wallace Stevens meets Ved Mehta". And that would be about right.
Old Bob didn't like me very much. He saw that I was in favor of Trotsky; knew a boat load about Sojourner Truth; probably wasn't a Yankees fan. More to the point: I was a blind man with a can full of tennis balls and a strong serve. What Bob did not wish to hear is that the world of physical difference is a place of uncivil twilight, to borrow Auden's phrase. Auden was of course referring to the moment when, as darkness falls, the homosexuals of his generation could be themselves–in the uncivil twilight each can wear his own face. Others, can, if they wish, look away. Yes, even those with crooked eyes do better at twilight. That's the way it is.
I want to be understood because I can't see you. I want to be misunderstood because I can't see you. The world has already complicated my station for me. I agree with Italo Calvino who said that literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and thought.
Blindness is not what it seems. It's not the man or woman entire. It is like having a left hand that's heavier than the right hand. It's an interesting fact. And stigma is another fact. Stigma is dated. The fact of the left hand is not. The latter is a form of intelligence.
"What matters finally is not the world's judgement of oneself but one's judgement of the world. Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America". (Gore Vidal)
One writes not to be entertaining but to put things right. And if you can be entertaining along the way, then you've put spin on your English.
This is why literature is an adult's art and not that of the lonesome child. The child gets the first taste of literary escapism. It's the man or woman who decides overtly to make judgement of the world. The adult writer decides that it's sometimes preferable, perhaps often preferable, to not be liked, at least in some circles.
I write so that you will walk in my shoes. I write because my eyes make the shop keeper nervous. I write because nervous shop keepers are funny, like those professors and ministers who don't belong in public but still must attempt it daily. I write because like George Bernard Shaw my way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
Once, in London, in a jewelry shop, the proprietor couldn't look me in the eye–he was supremely bothered by my fractured gaze and by the sight of my white cane. I was lookin
g for a wedding ring. But in
stead asked if he had one of those nice, Italian "evil eyes" since I'd lost my own.
Be vengeful but only just so. I'd stand up for that shop owner under other circumstances. The adult's art is to know when and how you will not be liked and not to flinch.
Likening the art of the poet to that of the composer, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote:
"A language of angels! Before you mention Grace
Mind that you do not deceive yourself and others.
What comes from my evil–that only is true."
If I had grown up in Poland in the 20th century I too might have risked those lines. It is more quintessentially American to say "What comes from my goodness–that only is true." And obviously neither is true.
My crooked gaze is just a footnote to bad history if I say so.
I agree with Milosz: "What is poetry if it does not save nations or people?"
Perhaps the ars poetica is simply: Don't deceive yourself with the words on the common street.
S.K.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Planet of the Blind 