ways of not seeing

i am obsessed with the eye doctor

I am obsessed with going to the optometrist. I find it to be an experience like no other, beguiling and thrilling at the same time. Perhaps, in an abstracted way, it could even be considered erotic. Ever since my eyes started failing me in the wake of my concussion, I have presented myself to the eye doctor with a misshapen childlike glee, one that’s a little too chipper towards the receptionists who cannot possibly understand what about my being there could so enthrall me.

It is not so much that I enjoy doctors (in the Munchausen’s sense or otherwise) or, as one might suspect, that my doctor is particularly attractive (though he does wear glasses, perhaps to circumvent accusations of conspiracy.) No, for me the reason this is all so exciting is because a visit to the optometrist is distinct from all other modes of seeing and all other modes of being seen. If you haven’t been, and your insurance covers it, it may be worth faking blurry eyes just for the experience.

We are so used to the eye as a symbolic, moral, and metaphysical object — the eye as a technical challenge from art history, the eye as the window to the soul, the eye as an expression of beauty or character, the eye as the locus of narrative emotion: the quivering eye, the downcast eye, the searching eye. Then there is the eye as identification; one thinks of how, in Wagner, for example, the characters so often come to know either themselves or the Other by way of a gaze, especially into a body of water, a reflection. Meanwhile, a more nefarious ocular gesture can be found in the retina scanning stations now used by Customs and Border Patrol at airports around the country. This brings us, of course, to the eye as the symbology of nefariousness and surveillance, a notion that is perhaps most extensively explored not in 1984 but in the work of Lemony Snicket, wherein the eye forms the symbology of a mysterious and questionably benevolent secret society whose mission is nothing less than to reinterpret the world.

How loaded the language of the eye is! Whither Narcissus! Whither Oedipus! Whither Georges Bataille! The verb to see can simultaneously mean to locate, understand, interpret, acknowledge, identify, identify with. To look is also to probe, to search, to interrogate. We wrap our whole lives in seeing and being seen, especially we boring little writers who think it’s nontrivial to write sentences like “The verb to see can simultaneously mean...”

My working life as a critic is itself predicated on how well I can see in new and interesting ways, search for flaws and weaknesses, metaphors and historical precedents, and, more often than not, for times when the contractors working on very expensive architectural projects have been skimping on the job. Even the practice of criticism as a whole, when defined most magnanimously, is an education in ways of seeing.

That’s all well and good, but do you know who (besides my readers) would quickly tire of such platitudes? The optometrist. The optometrist defrocks the eye. He strips the sentimentality from seeing.¹ This is because the eye of the optometrist is based neither in myth nor in literature but in modernity. His ancestral teacher is not Sophocles but Newton. As far as the optometrist is concerned, everything before the Optics is little more than a bunch of stumbling around in the dark, belying, perhaps, that his greatest dream is to render blindness a metaphor. The optometrist’s obsession is the kind of seeing unimaginable to the rest of us: a form of seeing without meaning, little more than a means of transduction by which light is converted into image. As such, his is the instrumental eye, the eye as apparatus, the lens, the membrane. How we see is a very answerable question for him.

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I seek the optometrist because all my life I have wanted interpretation stripped from me. Since childhood, I have longed for a situation in which I am relieved of the burden of what is most important to me, the ability to make things known, by way of reducing it to a mechanism. Such a mechanism would free me in so many ways, would, through the simplest processes of objectification, remove from me the burdens of uniqueness, performance, and adjudication — and through this mechanism I would finally find relief from doing, being, and obeying. But most of all, as a mechanism, it would be inherently state-dependent, which is to say, it could be turned off and on again. With it, I could both have and relinquish to others a newfound agency. Thus, my greatest fantasy of the Eye.

These perverse desires are the only explanation for why I have always been so envious of people who wear glasses. Unlike those with healthy eyes, the near and farsighted among us can throw off, for however long they wanted, the tyrannical yoke of the visual; could cut themselves off from the world with the simple, albeit expensive shattering of glass. In short, they had what I wanted, especially in childhood: a magnificent out.² And within their kingdom of exalted agency, their kingmaker is the optometrist.

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Only the optometrist can truly strip language from text. In his hands, words and letters, dissected into pyramids and squares, become tasks, mere means to an end, an end that isn’t, strictly speaking, reading or writing. The reading that does go on in the optometrist’s office is often curiously fractured, such as looking at a page of text as prisms are held up to one’s face, or nonsensical, like the letters on the Snellen chart.

In such a situation, only the optometrist is properly interpreting both the text and the reader, and his methods of interpretation must remain a mystery to us. How does he know what it means, to name just one example, that I have confused a B for an D on the third lowest rung of Dr. Snellen’s opus? Later, he holds a two-columned piece of text in front of me, which may or may not be about deals on travel, and alternates the phoropter’s lenses in front of my eyes so rapidly that even if I wished to make sense of the text, I wouldn’t be able to because I am so focused on the basest properties of sight. The only words that matter — to him or to me — in such a scenario are better and worse. That is a very unique reading condition, indeed!

Meanwhile, the optometrist’s devices encompass both the technological sublime and the cheekiest of postmodern gags. After all, the eye, for all its subjectivity, is itself a terrifying object because it is both essential and exceedingly fragile.³ To expose it to obscure technology approaches an almost unspeakable violation. One feels as though the eye, being something inherent to primordial humanity, should not, for superstitious reasons, be subjected to domination by the Machine. And so, it is not so much the phoropter’s harmless yet startling many-eyed mask that so offends but its proximity to the eye.

The more specific machines — the keratometer (used to discern astigmatism), the tonometer (for glaucoma), the slit lamp (incredible name; used to look more closely at the eye structure) only intensify this feeling of violation, this denuding of the meaning-discerning eye in favor of the eye as a glob of water, vitreous humor, collagen and sugar which, in ordinary life, is grazed only by eyelids and lashes. There is something darkly poetic about the fact that, to be touched in any other respect, the eye must first be partially blinded; the world itself must be dissolved with a few drops of rather unpleasant liquid. One need only make their own psychoanalytical inferences.

Should you end up at the ophthalmologist, this peril only increases, for only the ophthalmologist can see into one of the most intimate, secretive places within the human body: the eye cavity. In doing so, he exposes the liminal space between seeing and thinking where there is only darkness. This subsequently disproves the myth, a myth that even the optometrist plays into, that it is the eye that sees. The vulgar truth is that the eye is only a means to an end. It is a sophisticated evolutionary apparatus allowing light and darkness to collate — via the optical nerve — so that the brain, the real organ of the hour, can make meaning from it. And don’t get me started on the brain.

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Faced with these wretched facts, the other equipment in the optometrist’s office feels almost offensively trivial, a real laugh of juxtaposition. Take, for example, the auto-refractor, the device one has to look at before sitting in the exam chair. The auto-refractor measures the patient’s refractive error, briefly, the degree to which their eyes are off the mark. It’s a complicated, whirring machine situated in a dark room in which one has to situate one’s cranium, chin down. (A Clockwork Orange always comes to mind.) However, this seriousness is immediately undermined by the ridiculousness of its mechanism: the image the subject must look at for the machine to do its work. In some offices this is an image of a road leading up to a barn on the horizon; in others, such as mine, it is a hot air balloon. In all offices, it is cheerful, colorful, and uncanny.

This brings us to the last great indulgence of the optometry exam: how infantile it is. It is one of the few situations in which an adult can be made to feel so utterly like a child. Even the optometrist’s patient room, with its strange machines, nonsense posters, drawers of magical objects, and books of shimmering, deceptive shapes is as though the Dadaists had once embarked on designing kindergartens.

The optical tasks themselves are almost obscenely regressive. Read these letters! Touch the circle on the picture that looks like it’s floating! Follow the letter A with your eyes! Look at this slide as I move it back and forth! Put these prisms over your glasses! The only thing more delightful than doing these tests is failing them. For a brief, wonderful moment, one reverts to an ancient baby-state in which letters and pictures become nonsensical and useless. What a relief, the overburdened young professional thinks to herself! What a relief to not know anything!

No, seriously, it really is transformative, going to the eye doctor. One begins the appointment as an ailing subject, oft reminded of the realities of growing old, only to leave with the satisfaction of having reconquered toddlerdom. In the interim, one is granted the rare frisson of remembering that, for all our social sophistication, the body is a body, that it contains fluids, terrors, and mysteries, which, within the parameters of Mr. Bataille, perhaps explains the erotism of optometry: to temporarily forego seeing anticipates the blackness of death, whose inverse is, of course, the drive towards new virility.

At any rate, to wrap this all up: so often in my working life, I am taxed by the futility, in ways that extend beyond the physiological, of seeing. This is especially true in an age of delusion and hallucination, of over-stimulation and visual insatiability. Hence, it is solely after having sight itself so utterly deconstructed that I feel in awe of the ability. Only the eye doctor can do that for me. Sorry, Derrida.

1. My optometrist is a man and i’m running with it. this is all for you, dr tom. thank you for telling me i have the vision of a 41 year old

2. My opinion on this matter has not changed after successfully needing glasses. Given the neurological problems I am currently experiencing, which make writing very slow and difficult and reading even worse, the actual stripping of my creative faculties is not very pleasant. However, every day I fantasize about losing my glasses simply because I can put them back on again.

3. batialle was cooking when he symbolically linked it to both the egg and the testicle, all of which were shoved into a vagina in story of the eye. that’s so true king. something is really going on there.