The Act of Seeing

Abstract

The Act of Seeing Ciaran Berry (bio) The optometrist tapes a patch over my left eye and asks me to read off the rows of capitals he projects onto the white wall opposite. I can make out only blurred bellies and dismembered stems, fragments that represent nothing except themselves or the first crude letters a child might scrawl between parallel lines as he negotiates the alphabet. Between slides, there's an empty square of light onto which I could throw shapes with my fingers, long-necked giraffe, a dog with floppy ears, or one of those rabbits my brother and I found on that stretch of no-man's-land above the beach, where two hundred of them scurried to and fro, unable to find the way back to their holes. For months now, I've been joining dots round everything that's more than a few feet away, adding eyes and ears to blank faces, letters to subtitles and street signs, redrawing the lines that fall short of my retinas and seeing mostly what was never there, like those creatures beyond the beach that seemed so unlikely, so out of place, even before we captured one and held it up into the light and stared at the thick layer of white that obscured its opened eyes, silenced and only then realizing that all of the rabbits were blind and terrified, that winter would see the beach littered with bones. And maybe there as well we saw, just a smidgen, into the world to come, saw something of what Samuel Johnson knew, almost sightless, and muttering violently under his breath [End Page 90] as he added a third definition of pain to his lexicon, writing sensation of uneasiness from Bacon, then putting aside his empty quill until the spasms subsided, the shaking quelled. It takes the doctor only five minutes to confirm I need glasses and have needed them for at least ten years. Now he adjusts the chair and lays me down and drops a thick yellow liquid onto the surface of my eyes, dilating my pupils to five times their normal size, so that my irises almost disappear, leaving just these two black holes into which he stares, through a lens the length of a shot glass, to read what's written on my retinas. How strange and intimate to be seen into like this, the back of my eye flashing onto his as he scans its mother-of-pearl surface for any sign of change, the act of seeing reduced to its viscous minutiae: conjunctiva, cornea, and lens, the same layers thirty of us cut through in the soft, bloody bulls' eyes our teacher brought back from the abattoir so we could see, for ourselves, the bright clusters of rods and cones, and the severed optic nerve that had, just a few hours ago, borne images of grain, grass, mate, and water trough into the damp whorls of the creature's brain. That day we learned that sight was not a miracle, but a funneling of light into the flesh through the same portals now pried open in me that allow another man to see inside until, satisfied that everything's in place, he sends me out into an afternoon that's become distant, smudged, a blur of gray buildings and passing cars through which I carry just this crumpled note— instructions for the lens crafter who'll shape metal and glass, set a neat frame round all that's before me. Ciaran Berry Ciaran Berry received his MFA from New York University, where he was awarded a New York Times fellowship. His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, the Three-penny Review, Green Mountains Review and the Southern Review. He currently teaches at the Expository Writing Program at NYU. Copyright © 2005 The Curators of the University of Missouri