Nearsight

Every morning I’m reborn into a bloomy nebula of semiaquatic light. A blue-yellow glow suffuses the ceiling above the curtains and seeps into the corners of my bedroom, only the room hasn’t any corners, or edges, or borders. Its foggy geometry consists entirely of surfaces melting and melding together, a luminous soup. The only detail I can really see is the checked pattern of the pillowcase stretching off into a bleary distance.

Without my glasses, my eyes only focus a few inches from my face. The nitty-gritty of it is that my eyeballs are too long. Light vaults into my pupils but fails to stick the landing, flopping into focus well before it reaches the retina. I’ve learned a few handy tricks to work around this, in the event that I reach for my glasses in the morning and they’ve vanished into the ether. If I squint at a fuzzy circle on the opposite wall, I might be able to make out that it is a clock. But if I spiral my finger into a tiny telescope, and peek through that, I can tell which hand on the clock is the long one.

As a photographer, I have an inkling of why this works: just like with a camera lens, looking through a smaller aperture increases depth of field, so more of the scene appears sharp. It’s the same reason pinhole cameras can produce clear images without any lens at all.

I’ve recently come across an even niftier bit of hocus-focus. If I push gently on the top and bottom of my eye—reshaping my cornea—I can see well enough to read the numbers on the clock. It works startlingly well. If civilization ever collapses and contact lenses become as scarce as honey crullers, I’ll just skulk around like Mark McKinney on Kids in the Hall, crushing everyone’s heads into focus.

Being as nearsighted as I am, I often feel as though my natural state is to look at things close up. Myopes can focus more closely than regular-eyed folks; our elongated eyes have built-in extension tubes. I read in bed with the book three inches from my face, using one eye at a time. With only a line or two in focus, it feels like wandering through a forest made of words. I feel more absorbed in a book when reading this way, with the page filling my field of view. It’s immersive, especially if you’re an eight-year-old poring over one of those Owl magazine comics where the Mighty Mites shrink down to investigate diving beetles or dust bunnies. A diminutive world, whimsically imagined, charms my innermost being. As a kid I loved stories like Watership Down, with its rabbit’s-eye-view into tunnels and hedgerows, and The Littles, about a family of mouse-tailed micro-humans who inhabit the walls of a house. I remember being thoroughly enchanted by Evelyn Lambart’s animated fables, such as The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. Her paper-cut creatures scampered through a two-dimensional world that felt like it could fit between two blades of grass.

In high school, my favourite part of Romeo and Juliet was the Queen Mab speech—a hazelnut chariot, a whip of cricket’s bone! With her “wagon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs,” Queen Mab always reminds me of Christy Moore’s Reel in the Flickering Light, an entrancing folksong about a lovelorn, dance-crazed Daddy Longlegs (“On his thin and wispy spindles he was deft and he was nimble”). My own dad, who plays accordion and has collected insects since he was a kid, introduced me to both folk music and bugs. My parents have operated the Newfoundland Insectarium for more than twenty years, so I’ve spent much of my life in close proximity to tiny many-legged creatures, from stick insects to spiders to centipedes. I’ve admired Atlas moths and jewel beetles, fed crickets to tarantulas, and peered into many a mossy terrarium.

When I got a macro lens for my camera a few years ago, the first things I photographed were pinned insects. Magnified, a dragonfly’s wing became a matrix of dark lines, the floorplan of an alien hive. The wing of a morpho butterfly resembled a roof of iridescent blue shingles, some wind-damaged and dangling. The butterfly’s body was soft, feathery, and punctured with a pin that looked, through the lens, thick as a javelin. A macro lens is a marvellous way to widen one’s world— it transforms moss to rainforest, frost to Fortress of Solitude, and the underside of a mushroom to a fabulously gilled planet. The more I use it, the more I find myself looking closely at things even when not using it. Gaston Bachelard, in his classic text The Poetics of Space, muses about this magic of the miniature: “To use a magnifying glass is to pay attention, but isn’t paying attention already having a magnifying glass?”

Other lenses allow me to look closely in different ways. One of my favourites is a bulky old Minolta 58mm, with a large f1.2 aperture that lets in light by the bucketful. This reduces depth of field, and translates into a world where whatever I focus on is set adrift, barely anchored to its surroundings. A bird or a berry seems to swim in a sea of bokeh, those glimmery sequins of unfocussed light that are beloved of cinematographers. Opening up the aperture also vignettes the image, shadowing its edges, and lets me shoot in lower light. The lens is ludicrously heavy, but it has a way of lightening and isolating things, making tangible the spaces between them. Dreamy-eyed, it churns backgrounds into butter. It lets me capture the way the world looks to me without my glasses, that feeling of holding something up close to your face and really seeing it for the first time.

When I use my f1.2 lens I often think about In Praise of Shadows, an essay about Japanese aesthetics by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Writing in the 1930s, Tanizaki decries the encroaching Westernisation of Japan, complaining that bright electric lights disrupt the shadowy beauty of traditional houses. He expounds on the delicacy of dimly-lit alcoves: “An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. […] Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void.”

In Praise of Shadows is a paean to quintessentially Japanese things, and Tanizaki writes lovingly of candlelit lacquerware bowls, umbrageous Nō theatre, even murky bathrooms. He invokes an aesthetics of restraint and reticence, and laments that Western inventions (such as photography and audio recording) often fail to capture the nuances of Japanese music and art. “Had we invented the phonograph and the radio,” he muses, “how much more faithfully they would reproduce the special character of our voices and our music. […] Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless.” Tanizaki writes of learning to appreciate the shrouded and barely-seen, the very limits of vision. “Our ancestors,” he hypothesizes, “forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.”

Another writer grappling with how seeing-instruments affect one’s world view is Patrick Trevor-Roper, a British eye surgeon who in 1970 published a curious book titled The World Through Blunted Sight. In it, he proposes ophthalmological explanations for quirks in the work of certain artists. A common example is the painter El Greco, whose elongated, slightly off-balance figures are sometimes attributed to his astigmatism (though the author is skeptical of this). Trevor-Roper trawls art history for visual evidence of myopia, colour blindness, cataracts, glaucoma, and other ailments. He also turns an eye to literature, describing Keats as a typically nearsighted writer who “avoids describing details that are outside of his limited focal range.” “His subjects are usually auditory,” the author observes, presenting as examples Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale and On the Grasshopper and Cricket. James Joyce is similarly diagnosed—Trevor-Roper notes that as Joyce aged he “increasingly withdrew into his interior world of associations and dream sequences, and his fascination with sounds became even more compelling,” and attributes this to Joyce’s deteriorating eyesight.

“It must be remembered that all these inferences are simply loose conjectures,” the good doctor notes. And while Trevor-Roper’s speculations are often imaginative, in many ways The World Through Blunted Sight feels hopelessly dated. It is, after all, a fifty-year-old medical treatise. Even so, I can’t help but see a glimmer of myself in its description of a typical myope: “A near-sighted child cannot do well on the playground because he cannot see. […] But in school the situation is different, it is so easy to see and so wonderful to read […] Ball games, hunting and fishing are a waste of time. What does it matter if one cannot do those things? He sees the fine details.”

It’s true that as a writer and artist I have tended towards the small, preferring the pocket-sized practices of poetry and photography over heftier visions like novels, bronzes and oil paintings. In another life I might have been one of those miniaturists who paints landscapes on grains of rice. Or a watchmaker, a jeweler, a model train enthusiast, a numismatologist.

Trevor-Roper naturally finds vestiges of myopia in the dappled, dreamy paintings of the Impressionists. Monet is once said to have rejected a pair of spectacles in horror, exclaiming “Bon Dieu, je vois comme Bouguereau!”—Bouguereau being a realist portrait painter whom he despised. The poet Lisel Mueller imagines Monet feuding with his doctor in her poem-manifesto Monet Refuses the Operation:

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

The last time I visited an optometrist, a machine puffed air directly into my pupils. The specialist pulled up a 3D scan of my eye on the screen. She pointed at a bright dot on the monitor and told me it meant I had high cholesterol. I had already been aware of this, but I was amazed that she could see it by stargazing inside my eyes. It just glares, she said. She also told me I’d be a good candidate for laser eye surgery, which I had also already known, because every optometrist I’ve ever gone to has mentioned it.

I think about it sometimes—not having to worry about losing or breaking my glasses, not having to spend money on eye exams and contact lenses. But I love my close vision, my nearsight, and LASIK would destroy it. I would surely feel differently if the convenient miracles of corrective lenses had never been invented, but as my fogginess is optional, it’s something I’ve come to cherish in small doses. Peering into the exuberant jowls of an orchid, or reading in bed with the page a few inches from my face, my close-focus feels like a minor superpower. On long flights I wear my glasses, not my contacts. When the plane shudders skyward I take off my glasses so that everything blooms and blurs, and the luminous world feels soft and safe.

 

Photo by Luca Bravo from Unsplash.