"Glass Eye"

...an essay on seeing and being seen.

When I was about 11 years old the medical professional in downtown Ann Arbor who had long been entrusted to my vision care told my mother during what I thought was to be a routine exam that I had a “glass eye.” Now, let me be clear: I did not in fact have a glass eye. I had one eye, my right, that was pretty nearsighted. My left eye did not require corrective lenses. So I had good vision in one eye and weaker vision in the other. But that was the term the doctor used: “glass eye”. He meant, I can only assume, that I was effectively sightless in one eye.

My mother was devastated by this news. Her son had a “glass eye”. I could see she was in a terrible state of anxiety over what this meant for me, for my future. As a registered nurse, she had gotten bad news on patients before. She told my father. She became even moodier and more anxious looking than normal for a while.

“Mom!” I said, “I do not have a “glass eye”! Look! I’ll cover my good eye. Now hold up some fingers, I’ll tell you how many!”

She just looked at me. She appeared to think it was sad, how unaccepting of reality I was. My eye was sightless. The doctor said so.

“Mom!” I said. “Watch! I’ll cover my good eye and walk across the room. Look! I can stop exactly six inches from the piano. Okay? And now I’m about a foot from the wall! Mom!”

It made no difference. It was sad to her, it seemed, how in denial I was. My denial was understandable, perhaps. I mean, I had a “glass eye,” I was effectively blind, and who wants that? She treated me as if I were simply not accepting reality.

Now, it may help here if readers know that as a child I’d been through the works with my eyes and vision. Because of a muscle imbalance that showed up long before, around age two, I was wall-eyed. With my eyes pointing in different directions, my vision didn’t fuse into one stereoscopic picture. I had no depth perception. For most purposes, I preferred and mostly used my left eye. In consequence, my right eye got weaker, more nearsighted over time. I was terrible at softball - as a batter I couldn’t hit. But I was okay catching a Frisbee and even playing ping-pong, and although I typically saw double after about 20 minutes playing the game, I could hit the ping-pong ball nonetheless.

Now, in fairness, my eye doctor had done everything he could to address the situation. As a young child, for a time I wore patches over my dominant eye after school to encourage the use of the other. This did nothing. Later, in addition to a standard corrective lens on that eye starting in 5th grade, prisms were tried, bending the light to encourage my brain to fuse my vision and see stereoscopically. I was referred to a specialist at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor. A variety of other therapies were attempted, such as taping plastic color filters on the TV screen, green on half, red on half, while wearing glasses with different color filters on the lenses at the same time. All of these interventions, except the single corrective lens in my eyeglasses (I could have worn a monocle at the time) added up to nothing.

However, I was not sightless in my right eye. That was an untrue thing for the doctor to imply. Given that he had done the testing and prescribed the correction for my eyeglasses, he knew exactly how well I could see out of my non-dominant eye. Yes, he knew the attempts to get me to see normally out of that eye hadn’t worked, but he knew I could see. True, he may not have known that I used my non-dominant eye primarily for reading, where nearsightedness doesn’t matter. But he should have.

Regardless, I’m not sure why he said what he said to my mother. All I saw were the effects it had on her. Maybe he was frustrated, given that he was old by then and nearing the end of his career. Maybe it bugged him, the fact that there were problems he still wasn’t capable of solving. Maybe he just had a touch of indigestion from something he’d eaten for lunch that day. Or maybe he was just bored with it all, staring into other people’s eyeballs his whole life when he could have been doing something really exciting, like devising remedies for his own kinds of blindness and finding new worlds in the process.

As it turned out, he soon retired and we found another eye doctor, closer to our new home in Chelsea. His name was William Hawks. Dr. Hawks was very well credentialed by conventional standards, being an eye surgeon in addition to his other qualifications. I don’t recall how we found him. My mother and I went together to my first appointment at around age 12. Dr. Hawks checked my eyes and tested my vision. After the exam my mother explained the dire situation. She told him what she’d been told at my last checkup: I had a “glass eye”.

Dr. Hawks was shocked.

“What?” he replied, visibly aghast. “That’s a completely irresponsible thing to say. Your son has fine vision. Plenty of people in the world would be happy to see as well as he does!”

And it’s absolutely true. I mean, I could see pretty well then, good enough to do most things. In fact I only had a corrective lens requirement added to my driver’s license a few years ago. I also continued, with the help of surgery from Dr. Hawks and through means of my own, to work on my vision and rebuild my eyesight in a very profound way, even, against all odds, recovering a measure of depth perception and stereoscopic vision. These achievements were clinically verified, but the real triumph was finally blasting softballs one after another after paying five bucks for a hundred pitches in a batting cage at the university.

But at the time of that fateful first appointment, my mother was visibly shaken at hearing what Dr. Hawks had to say. She’d already digested the terrible news delivered during my previous eye exam. The earlier pronouncement by another lab-coated doctor had become her reality. However, I could see hope beginning to dawn in her, right then and there.

Not that I cared much, by that point, about my mother’s “hope” in this regard. She’d allowed herself to be bamboozled and bent out of shape by a strange, ill-advised and provably false remark made by a person with the aura and public vestments of authority. This was something that even as a kid I knew better than to do— in this instance, at least. But basically, all that was on her.

What I did care about at the time was that I had been vindicated.

On the ride home from that appointment I felt a strange mixture of furious anger and deep relief. My relief was that in Dr. Hawks I’d found a powerful, authoritative ally in my fight to be seen and heard. My fury was that I had needed such an ally, and that I’d needed one because one stupid comment by an eye doctor had rendered my mother unable to see, even when I was demonstrating the capacities of my vision right before her eyes. Suddenly, thanks to the words of another doctor in a different office, it seemed that maybe her vision of me could be corrected somewhat. Through his words alone, Dr. Hawks had given my mother a new lens to see through.

That happened about fifty years ago now, but basically that’s all I’m trying to do for you with the words I’m sharing here, today, right now: give my readers a new lens to see through.

I know what it’s like to live in a world that is rendered flat — flat without even knowing it's flat. I know how hard it is to recover the perception of depth when we don’t even know what that means. I know what it took to reverse that loss. For 20 years after surgery I would periodically put my hands over my eyes and scream in pain. These episodes frightened Mary when we first met. But with the physical changes I underwent and the inner work I did, I learned to see the world in a new and different way.

I have never stopped recovering my vision, and for that I am grateful. It’s a defining feature of my life. One thing I can say for sure is that vision is not just a thing of the eyes alone, and it involves both projection as well as reception. Our vision actively shapes our world. Our way of seeing affects other people. Our vision affects everything.

And I can also see, more than ever now, all the things in the world that stand arrayed against the recovery of our perception of depth. I see how unconscious confinement in a flat world of limited vision can translate into confinement of the mind, and how confinement of the mind does the same thing to our vision.

However, we can learn to see. We can recover our depths, and when we do, we can see more deeply into the world and find new capabilities in the process.

Heaven help me, that’s what I’m really trying to share about here.