The Object Stares Back

Work on Thomas Hardy took me back to a good book on sight.

James Elkins, _The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing_ New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, pp. 12-13 (the very opening of the introduction) and 225-26 (in chapter on "Blindness," near the end).

At first, it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just point our eyes where we want them to go, and gather in whatever there is to see. Nothing could be less in need of explanation. The world is flooded with light, and everything is available to be seen. We can see people, pictures, landscapes, and whatever else we need to see, and with the help of science we can see galaxies and viruses and the insides of our own bodies. Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought.

Each one of those ideas is completely wrong. The truth is more difficult: seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. If we imagine the eyes as navigational devices, we do so in order _not _ to come to terms with what seeing really is. Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in the passions -- jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in affect -- in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

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... I might entertain the idea that there are two kinds of seeing, instead of the single equation that says seeing equals thinking. The first would have to do with expressions such as "illuminating a problem" or "shedding light on an idea." When it's put that way, then thought is the illumination, and the truth is what needs to be lit by thought. On the other hand, when I say I'm "reflecting" on a problem or something has "just dawned on me," then it's as if the truth is already luminous and my thought merely collects the light.

According to the first model, thought takes place in darkness. Ideas and things and selves must be in a primordial darkness until thought sends out its beams to reveal them. But if I reflect on something, then I exist along with various objects in the world, all bathed in a light that comes from somewhere else. In the first model, blindness is all around: it is the condition of the world, and a thought is like a flashlight that temporarily reveals some local object. In the second there is no place for blindness, except in my own mind. If I fail to reflect, if I decline to try to understand the world, then I become blind, or rather I give way to the blindness that is already within me. The second model, where the world is bright and suffused with thought, really has no place for catastrophic, ongoing blindness. If I live in such a world and I choose not to see, then I suffer a momentary blindness -- it might be a slip, and error, a blunder, or a mistake, or in visual terms, a blind spot, a moment or a day of hysterical blindness, amnesia about a trauma, or just a misapprehension, something I overlook, something I fail to notice. No matter how serious these blindnesses are, I can recover from them: I can become aware of my mistake; I can look again and see better. In the first model, where the world is dark and only thought can illuminate it, blindness is more permanent, and I may not be able to recover from it at all. That kind of blindness would include ingrained prejudices, permanent gaps in my thought, failures of imagination, psychotic breaks, fanaticisms and dogmas, and in visual terms, all the things I cannot see or that I refuse to see. Blindness would be all around. Every image would be a light in the darkness, and seeing or thinking would take place against a backdrop of blindness. In this way of setting the problem, blindness is the precondition and constant accompaniment of vision. It cannot be fully seen, but it must always be present wherever there is seeing.

I would be more content to think of the world as it looks each day, filled with light. The sparse shadows and dark spots that remain would be like the few gaps in my sight—the blind spot in each eye, for instance. If I choose to think this way, thought is beautiful and easy. All we have to do is conceive of an idea and it appears in front of us, bathed in the light of thought, clear and distinct in all its details. And sometimes this happens: if we know an issue very well, we can call it to mind and see all its contours, everything that is involved in it, without effort and in great clarity. But there are many other moments when the other model seems more true. If we do not understand a problem very well, then we cannot form a mental image of it. It seems dark, and thinking about it requires great effort. Even if we think hard, we may illuminate only a small portion of it, and the light we throw may make it look distorted. In that case we might say we can't see the problem very well, that we cannot generate enough light to illuminate its outlines. It is sadder, but it strikes me that this is much closer to the truth: like seeing, thinking is intermittent, unreliable, and difficult. Both take place in darkness and both depend on light. Blindness is their constant accompaniment, the precondition of both thought and sight.