THE GHOST OF TWO EYES

They said my right eye was “lazy,” as if there was something slothful and so a bit decadent or indulgent about that eye. Oh, they could fix it alright. If I didn’t start using it more, they’d patch over the left, more achieving eye and make that right one work. boyo. Later, it was determined that the back of my eye was not spherical like a marble but egg-shaped, like the dip in a spoon. It couldn’t see properly, no matter how hard my brave little eye tried. It was astigmatic and everything was fuzzy. Even with glasses, they couldn’t completely correct it. Unless, they said ominously, I lost my good eye, and then measures could be taken. They never said which measures or why they couldn’t just correct the eye now. And so I’ve never been able use binoculars or 3D glasses in the manner in which God intended. Or those antique stereoscopic things where two very slightly different images (the left-eye and right-eye view) of the same scene make the combined effect into 3D scene.

*

I’ve just turned 59. LIX in Roman numerals which perhaps better convey the one-less-than sixtyish feeling that I have. I’m nearly there. About to turn a corner. Open a door. About to step over a precipice and hurtle…where? I’m not sure. Into being older? Old. Is it to a place where I’m less worried, where I’ve arrived beyond some concerns I had throughout my younger days? I suppose I’m feeling that the end is in sight, even if I’m lucky and it is thirty-something years away. In truth, I’m liking this life, where I’m at, what I can do, and I want more of it. I want it to continue. Yeah, me and (almost) everyone else. 

I once told my wife that I wanted to grow old together. We have. Now we’ll grow older.

*

I was thinking about the stereoscope because I misread a word in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and in Sebaldian style, realized how it was a good metaphor for the past. Or memory. Or history. Our two views: how we saw something then, how we see it now. Or maybe, how our view of the present is affected by the past. We see the same image but from two different perspectives and it literally creates greater depth. This is either a good thing or a kind of illusion where we are tricked into thinking our view is closer to reality. Two different views blended as if they were one and we lose the ability to see the two distinct components.

*

I’m beginning to think of the past—my past—with tenderness. Like it was an old dog. It waddles. Its eyes water. It leaks. I remember its leaps, its appetite, how it barked and protected us. The time it got away and worried us. The times it crapped on the floor. On the bed. I’m getting sentimental about even the bad things. At least they were my bad things. I’m lucky that nothing truly tragic or traumatic happened. Just loss, sadness, worry, a slow accumulation of troublesome experiences or knowledge, the ground slowly shifting rather than a sudden earthquake or tidal wave. I sense something like an accumulation of debris, sediment—fine sand with occasions sticks, stones, old tin cans—shifting around, forming dunes and undulations. It slows me down, but it is much less sharp that the rocks which of it was formed.

*

I never dated as an adult. My wife and I first began seeing each other when I was eighteen and she was twenty and we never stopped. Or, rather we got married a few years after we met and here we are, forty years later. We met at university and she tells me that she’d seen me around residence. Before we’d even spoken she’d had a dream where hundreds of people were being led somewhere and it wasn’t good. We were in the line. It was an Irishy hill, grey sky, mist, a drystone wall. We picture it now as the Mourne Mountains. The dream-me led us away from the line and to a patch of brilliant sunshine. We sat on the wall in this bright warmth under a large and iconic tree.  We were two people, coupled by our escape. A few years ago, when I went to Ireland, I bought her a tree necklace which now she always wears. 

*

Or she did. It got lost and so, I had to buy her another identical one. I visited a giant thousand-year-old bell in China some years ago. It looked in perfect shape so I asked about it. It was a perfect replica. In China, I was told, they don’t think of a recreation as any less authentic than the original. It carries its spirit. Ship of Theseus: solved. 

*

Regrets? Yeah I’ve had a few. Thousands. Mostly, I’d like another chance at some things which I was too anxious, or impetuous or unprepared for, so I could really appreciate them, enjoy them. But that’s hindsight. Mine isn’t even 20-20 with corrective lenses. Unless I lose my good eye then I could be 20. Just 20. But you can only know what something was, what it will mean to you after it was, and not during. If there’s too much, “oh this is something I’m going to remember forever,” you aren’t entirely in the moment. You’ll only remember your advance memory of it. If I could only live my circumcision again so I could really be in the moment. It recalls when I was playing squash and teh ball would arrive in the perfect for me to slam in with triumphant and stylish bravado. I’d be so aware that this was a perfect opportunity, I’d flub the shot.

*

A qualification about my ability to save our lives and escape that long forbidding procession of people going over the hill. I’d say, for the first ten years we were together, I had no idea what I was doing or how to live, so I just clung to my wife as if she were a liferaft. Gradually, I learned and we learned how to guide and support each other.

*

The first time we spoke was when someone suggested she talk with me because I’d explain the concept of “existentialism,” which she needed to learn for an English class. I wasn’t able to explain. Our first date, we went walking in a cold mud-filled field. We took our shoes off and stepped through the mud until our feet became name. Was that existentialism?

On our fifth date, we went on the rickety old The Flyer rollercoaster at the Canadian National Exhibition. It was the 80s and Beth was wearing a floofy sweater. I had braces for the second time. I turned to say something just as the ride began and I got my braces caught in the elaborate fabric of her shoulder. She thought I was just scared, but I was trying to extricate myself and my braces for the entirety of the ride as we went up and down and around.

I think I read an essay where this happened to Umberto Eco.

*

I wake up and think about the time he somehow convinced me to cross a river barrelling through a steep gorge with my 7-year-old son. The park ranger was shouting for us to stop. But I’ve put my wallet in my shoe and thrown it across the river already, I said. We begin to cross the river, lost our footing, swam like mad and both made it to the far shore. We survived. We might not have. It was extremely dangerous and I was the one in charge. But I’ve had this retrospective fear, this charge of “what was I thinking,” so many times, it has lost much of its piercing terror. 

*

When that same son was fifteen, our family was swimming on a Hawaiian beach. We hiked down a cliff to a remote beach because it had black sand and was a nudist beach. The sand was amazing but, much to our sons’ disappointment, the naked people comprised only old hippies with sagging scrotums that looked like hackysacks in a long bag. 

We went for a swim but then the tide began to go out, and the waves suddenly became huge.  We were being tossed around, pulled from shore. Beth is a strong swimmer and she made it back to the beach, albeit deposited unceremonious on her bum, her bathing suit filled with sand. I was struggling and unable to return to the beach but then I felt strong arms around me which lifted and swam me in to shore. My son, recently qualified as a life guard. He’d rescued his little sister and then came back for me.

*

Some of the fears I’ve had over the years, have gone underground, have become part of what I am, part of who I am. Like toxins, my body has worked to process them, to integrate them, to neutralize them. I know they affect my thinking and behaviour. Some experiences never go away and are always a ghost inside, haunting you. Whistling or howling, giving your guts chills. 

*

When I first went for glasses, my father, a young man at the time, tried on several pairs himself. He found some that were just like his boss’s, a more senior doctor. These are the ones you should get, Gary. And indeed I did get them. I once told a therapist this, and we thought it was telling: issue around the separation of father and child, the possibility of being who you really are, the expectation of parents and so on. Now, I see my father as young, with all the fears and worries of a young man trying to establish and prove himself in a serious career in a new country. Of course, he shouldn’t have tried on the glasses himself and made me get them, but after fifty years, perhaps I’m ready to see this moment with compassion. And with distance. I’ve had plenty chances to become who I am and who I want to be. My parents did provide me every opportunity in other ways. And maybe there was more to this memory, or perhaps it wasn’t quite as I remember it.

It’s entirely different than the time I tried on some jeans in a store in London, England and the store cleck said, “Perhaps the young gentleman is too husky for those dungarees.” Details like that you don’t forget.

*

In Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, my mom used to campaign for the Aliance Party. It stood for what it sounded like—an alliance between the Catholic Republicans who wanted to return Northern Ireland to the rest of Ireland and the Protestant Unionists who were in favour of continuing to be part of the UK. Our neighbour, Dr Heel, an entomologist, made a huge A for alliance on his front lawn by letting the grass grow long in an A shape, and cutting the rest short. He wanted the overflying British military helicopters to see. Another neighbour, Molly, used to call Roman Catholics “Rice Crispies,” because of initials R.C. And whenever anyone woke late she’d say, “The dead have arisen and appeared to many,” which is a line from the Gospel of Matthew describing an event after the resurrection. One time, my mom—who had a South African accent— while knocking on doors for the aliance party was asked, How long have you lived here? She explained, proudly, ten years. Well, the Protestant woman said, we’ve been here for three hundred. Come back when you’ve been here as long as us.

*

It’s been one of my favourite lines of poetry since bpNichol quoted it in a second-year creative writing class of his that I took at York University. “Goodbye like the eyes of a whale say goodbye, never having seen one another.” It’s W. S. Merwin. I never thought of this line as sad until my friend Elee said so.  Incidently, blue whales’ eyes—and I do imagine a blue whale here—are surprisingly small for such a large creature. For example, their penises are sixteen feet long, but their eyes the size are quite small. I wonder about these eyes: they saying goodbye to each other, these grapefruit-sized eyes which have never got to know one another, living in two solitudes on either side of the massive head? I imagine the whale as having access to two mysterious and separate parallel worlds, the left and the right, tied together by the braid of its giant cetacean brain. The brain connects just like a stereoscopic image. Each eye relies on the other to explain its side of the world.

*

It couldn’t have been later than Primary 4 when I joined the entire Dunmurry Primary School to sit on the gym floor to hear a bible story, told with the aid of a felt board and felt figures. A felt camel. Felt shepherds. A felt baby Jesus, a felt 33-year-old Jesus. Mary and Joseph in flowing robes. A little felt manger. A felt Pontius Pilate. Was there a felt cross? Felt beads of blood and felt nails? I do remember the felt figure of Jesus being moved in procession, carrying his cross. And when they said, “The Jews killed Jesus.” I looked around to catch my younger brother Kevin’s eye. He was the only other Jew in the school, as far as I knew. What should we do? Be cool. Say nothing. And so I did. 

*

“The eye you see is not an eye because you see it;
it is an eye because it sees you.”  ― Antonio Machado

Are there any creatures which can see their own eyes? Many have eyes on the opposite sides of their head unlike others such as humans which have both eyes pointing in the same direction but from slightly different horizontal positions for both depth perception and peripheral view. Imagine Wayne Gretsky with eyes on the side of his head like a whale. Now one of the great ones, skating between the waves, deking out the limitless sea. And then there are the horizontal slits of the pupils of goats, made, so I understand, to better see across the length horizon. Permanent landscape view instead of portrait.

*

This schoolyard carol parody from my childhood when there were few television channels, only the government’s BBC and the Independent Television Network ITV.

While shepherds washed their socks by night
While watching ITV
The angel of the Lord came down
and switched to BBC.

Another schoolyard memory, this from the private school. Inchmarlo, I eventually attended. A game where a boy wedged himself face forward in a corner and other boys lined up behind him. The goal was to push the first boy from his position and take his place. Each boy pushed on the one in front of him, trying to squeeze him out. The pressure on each other was enormous, especially those near the front—the combined force of all those boys, like a reverse tug-of-war. 

*

We had little red hymnbooks which fit perfectly into our black uniform jackets. If you were quick you could pull out the hymnbook, hit a boy on the head and return your hymnbook to your pocket before a master saw you. I was never caught. Eventually, because I was Jewish, I asked to be excused from morning Chapel where the hymnbooks were used for singing. I was directed to wait in the dim boy-scented cloakroom among the coats, snacks (rock cakes!), and outdoor shoes. With me was a pale curly-black-haired boy with a network of purple veins over his thighs. Julian. The only other Jew in the school. We became friends of a sort and I’d go over to his house to play chess.

*

I feel a bit badly having told the story about my dad and the glasses. There's always two sides. I was recently thinking of an incident around this time when we were in a restaurant airport and, across the room, a man in a wheelchair had turned bright red. He’d stopped breathing. If I recall recall correctly, he was choking. My father leapt up, ascertained the problem, unblocked the guy’s throat so he could breath again. I remember being amazed my father’s rapid dance of symptom-taking. Airway, pulse, pupil dilation, lips and tongue swelling. I’m not sure what else he checked, but I was thrilled by the quick grace of my father a young doctor, that he could rise from his sandwich and instantaneously switch into doctor-mode, following this emergency protocol and literally save this man’s life. 

*

In bpNichol’s writing class, I doodled as I listened. One day I drew an image of two eyes. The right with a single pair of legs, the left with two pairs. The first eye held the other on a leash. A human eye leading a dog eye. I’ve begun to think of this image, over the years, as my logo. I like its tricky wink to hierarchy, as if one eye could be led by another, as if it could be a pet. What exactly is going on here? Is it a trompe d’oeil, a visual pun, or something from a folk tale? And here it is at the end of this essay as if it always belonged here, as if the metaphor of stereoscopic eyes on the past had already literally been embodied by me forty years ago. Is this the revisioning of history, something just to the left, just to the right of the truth and yet somehow connected, relational? The I of the present, the Thou of the past.