Wednesday, August 03, 2005
(11:14 PM) | Anonymous:
On the Eye: I Rant.
When Craig's optic nerve detached from his retina he described the experience as bizarre. He was blind out of one eye, but not completely; it was like looking through oiled paper. These things do happen though. I read about another such incident in W.G. Sebald's
Austerlitz. There it happens to the narrator, who informs us that his doctor said it happens to academics who read away most of their days. I have to wear my glasses now to see the computer screen well. I have a prescription for new lenses, but I've yet to take advantage of this fact. My right eye is worse than my left and sometimes it feels as if there is a small disc just to left in my right eye. There isn't though, my optometrist checked. Bizarre is a good way to describe the feeling when your eyes are more tired than the rest of your body. When they have been dancing around a page for four hours, between two computer screens for six, and between a cash register,
Books in Print, and a pile of un-priced books. So much of phenomenology is taken up with the eye, but not the actual organ so I should say with seeing. The eye is only the mediator for what is seen and the seer in the transcendental logic. Bataille, dirty old man that he was, plucks out eyes of priests and puts them in his vagina as if they were bull testicles. The eye doesn't pass judgment though, it is the seeing - the seeing decides what is and what isn't socially correct to do. The seeing decides if a painting or a tattoo is art. Not the eye. I've seen it, I've seen the way you handle them and I think you may be abusive. You lack gentleness, you lack grace, you treat them as if they weren't human (which of course they are not). I know that you can’t see them like I do, I know you can’t but I wish you’d, at the very least, just turn a blind eye and not be a fucking baby. My eye hurts, but I know he will see me if I stop reading. It's always a he and never a they. Tomorrow, if my eye can handle it (and it will damn it!) I will finish the first volume of Hegel's
Philosophy of Religion. This will likely happen on a blue line train, though it is Thursday and on Thursday's it is hard to find a seat on the blue line and I have to stand in the commons area huddled next to some Mexican immigrant who will smell like the restaurant he just closed for the night and next to two proto-yuppies visiting from somewhere else, probably Idaho. They will smell God, but the Mexican won't see me. He may look at me, but he won't see. The yuppies, the one's who smell good (did I say God before?), they will see me. They will make a comment about tattoo's or they will look suspicious of me and the Mexican. Mostly the Mexican, who can, he can. I just did it, when the guy makes some comment about how he's morally superior because he feels a closer affinity to the poor Mexican than to those within his own race and relative social background. The truth be told there is no way to not be morally superior, even if I were to say, "I will see the Mexican." If I were to say that I would only be saying to show that I have a reflexive understanding of my own racism which makes me better than those who are ignorant racists or who embrace their racism. The truth is I won't see the Mexican, I will smell him. I will see the train blowing up more than I will see the Mexican, because every time I'm on that damn train and it stops I worry that some A-rab who wasn't shot on a beach in France is going to set off a nuke in my city (and, really, I can't blame the guy though I'd prefer he didn't). So, that's the truth as I see it. Judge it or not, if you can read this and you aren't too tired of me and my fear of using comma's where they shouldn't go.
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(Anonymous has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)
