Vision

1.31.07

Hanah got glasses this week, a dark purple pair of Barbie spectacles with sparkles on the earpieces. I was 8 as well, when diagnosed with myopia, and my first pair were tortoise shell cat's eyes, ironically much like the ones I now wear. She posed in front of the mirror, giggling at how "smart" she looked and knew exactly which pair she wanted. She can now read signs and the world sparkles a bit more for her. I look at her and love this child with her exuberance and take charge attitude and wonder what I was like at her age, have so few memories to draw on that I can only speculate. One thing I know, she has self confidence up the wazoo, something I could not have claimed with her zeal at any time until recently.

The NYTIMES today reported on a documentary about the photographer Sally Mann whose controversial photos of her children created a stir in the early 90's during the pre-school sex abuse scandals. Her photos depicted her spawn in various poses and undress, prompted cries of sexual voyeurism to which she responded that she was only shooting what children do naturally. Now, it appears that she staged many of these scenes, imposing on her kids an adult affectation that she had claimed to have merely witness rather than prompted. I would like to see the photos again, knowing what I know, to see if they have a different impact.

What we see and how we process it is so affected by context, our cultural and psychological filters, personal and epochal timing. What was once considered, lewd, crude and decidedly rude is now broadcast on mainstream, primtetime television. The very porno many decry as obscene is of course the favorite hit of many websites and Janet Jackson bared breast searches. When I saw the Mapplethorpe exhibit years ago, I was struck more by the beauty of the photography than the content. But then again, I grew up in Greenwich Village with many of the men who could have been his photographic subjects, so the imagery was no big surprise to me. What I saw was probably very different than what a homophobe or straight-laced bible thumper would see.

Studies have shown that people can look at a scene and not see certain elements of it. We take cylocibin (sp?) mushrooms and see lion's heads in carpets and faces dripping off of skulls (well, at least I did in college.) Images that are not there in real life, but in our mind's eye, absolutely. We wake up from dreams convinced we were there in our somnabular struggles. We look at a loved one's face and see beauty when they are present, yet that same face turns ugly when trapped in anger. ONe day the front lawn is a glowing carpet of green, the next merely a covering for dirt and earthworms.

Hanah talked about rods & cones the other day; I think of Roshoman, how different people will remember the same event in as many distinct ways as witnesses; two people have polar opposite understandings of the same words or event. Philosophers ponder what is "real." There is a website where you can live and trade commercially in some virtual reality. CHildren play on-line games in "real-time" with others around the world. I look at my face in the mirror and some days do not recognize who looks back.

What you see is what you get. I no longer believe that to be true. Especially now that you can alter phsyical realities through surgery, mental realities through drugs and sprititual realities through the whatever belief system is in vogue this week.

Hanah's glasses lay snuggled in a bright patent leather pink case on the kitchen table. She wears them proudly as a fashion statment as much as anything else. I see in them the world made clearer, a link to my father's gene pool (all bespectacled Byfield's we), a gift of "reality." When we cannot see what is before us, we must speculate. We must fill in the empty space and imagine the boundaries. The light and dark become our only clues in their various gradations. When I take off my glases the world becomes soft and fuzzy and shapeless, even though the objects I see remain the same. There are some days of acute awareness when I think it would be easier to not see what I see, to let fantasy refine my near-sightedness.

Life through rose colored glasses. One's glass is half full; the other half empty. Now that she can see, will Hanah see what I see? Will her world, as she grows older and learns more be one of endless possibliities as it is now? Or will she start to see the shadows, the garbage dump at the other end of the rainbow? Will she know when to take off her glasses and just take in the world with all of its uncertainties and vagaries, or will she always wake up, look around and say "this is going to be the greatest day ever!"

I'm going to the optomestrist tomorrow to get my own pair of sparkly Barbie Glasses.