What you see


Time Enough At Last

Part Two

In the last hour I’ve reached for my glasses five times. They’re not there. I’m feeling nervous as a racehorse that has to wear blinders. Spooked is the equine parlance for that sense of needing to pull back from something in your periphery that isn’t there. My vision seems clearer if I keep moving my focus, chair to cabinet to wall to my arm then hand then around the room again. Sustaining that initial clarity demands a conscious effort, an effort I can maintain about long enough to identify letters on a Snellen chart during an eye exam. But currently without my glasses I’m at a higher state of subconscious alert. Even though I’m in my favorite chair, alone in a sunny morning in a familiar house, I’m vaguely alarmed, called to vigilance by something near-visible. Sometimes you can see a similar expression exaggerated on men who wait by the freeway exit.

In photographs and in general my expression appears solemn or severe. People often think I’m more serious than I feel. What they regard as deep thought is my struggle to keep things clear. Binocularity and depth perception have always provided a questionable quality to my vision life. I’m astigmatic in one eye and myopic in the other. I perceive detail probably better than motion and distance.  That anomaly made it easier for me to draw things than judge fly balls. Drawing is the illusion of deciding where a line should travel, catching is calculating a fixed point. I became better at anticipating than sustaining. Measured in those diopters was the frustration that shaped my early education. It’s in those minute levels of perception that we effect the habituation of our mental processes.

We construct reality because of what we expect to we see, not what we actually see. Our sensorium is wondrously flexible. We can feel terrified by a wasp buzzing on the other side of a window, yet delight to a lion’s roar on the other side of a glass barrier. We make our own sense. We transform the light reflecting off objects into what we expect to see. Consider the last time you were looking for someone in a crowd. You are going to meet a friend on the mezzanine.

You search faces, scanning for the features you identify as theirs. The other faces constantly disappear; their bodies don’t register as immediate motion. Nearly every object quickly goes out of focus except for the object that isn’t there, your friend. That kind of perception requires conscious, trained effort. When people meet in these situations they generally respond in one of two ways, glee (You’re here!) or dismay (Where have you been?). It’s the response we learned as infants waiting for our mothers. We recognize our mothers first by smell, then develop vision to add meaningful detail to the relationship. We teach ourselves to see.

Over time vision becomes our dominant source of information. Homo Sapiens are constantly attending information in front of them (as opposed to horse’s lateral vision). Without a specific task our other senses tend to diminish in the same way the crowd on the mezzanine diminished. They are present, but we disregard the information they present. Learning to accomplish that is a primary lesson of school, to concentrate on visual focus. A child must first be taught to ignore their instinctive impulses to wander and explore, and then taught to sit in close proximity to other children and focus on symbols. It’s the technological miracle and operatic tragedy of our educational system.

Books and economics were the machines that brought us to this perceptual form.  Public Education as a trope was essentially a construct to socialize children into workers as traditional economies gave way to urban industrialization. As Huckleberry Finn reminds us the disciplines demanded of a schoolboy are fundamentally different from those of a school aged boy. In prior centuries children physically followed their parents around and learned how to survive in the world, parents had to be respected not because of any moral dictum, but because they were the fountainhead of knowledge and survival. Life made immediate sense.

If I ask an Econ student at a community college to define the world. She may describe it in a language of terms beginning with capital, Industrialization, mention choices at the margin, express a curve model, game theory, or any of a number of meaningful perceptual tools. For approximately 80% of families in the world, their economic definition of the world is a little under $10, a few days of food, shelter and tentative safety. For most of that world, siblings are day care and the relationship with your daughter-in-law is your long term care insurance. Family traditions were crucial to survival before religion, culture, or politics. Religion follows food; economic culture follows abundance. The more fundamental difference is some are allowed to consider what they’ll eat for dinner, and others if they can have dinner.

Anyone reading this blog functions in a physically removed yet subtly interdependent world. Collectively we can be effected by the stock market in China, an erratic router, the price of a barrel of oil, the last cell phone message of a deranged murderer, or in my case, if I can negotiate a replacement for my glasses between my doctor 1,000 miles away and a stranger following the policies of an invisible bureaucracy. And all of strands of this web are credited to an unseen economy no one can explain, but everyone believes exists. This symbolic world is a world of perceived abundance and physical disengagement.

My father and grandfathers lived their lives in a small industrial city where nearly everyone still labored to produce products. Their work was physically demanding and required skill and experience they delivered through their bodies. At the end of their work days they could look out on a flat car of steel bars, a two ton milled part, or a rack filled with baked goods. They came home worn, and I don’t recall any of them having difficulty falling asleep watching television. Grampa Hetner could fall asleep standing up “like a horse” he said. I loved and admired their lives, but I can’t live that life, except in a romanticized fantasy.

The city we shared disappeared. The children of the steelworkers who used to go to Waterford Park bet on  futures in Texas and Florida. The next generation of family members suddenly saw themselves as visitors. We became economic migrants, nowhere as tragic as the nomadic existence facing millions of our fellow human beings, but genuinely distressing. In the shift of the economy from manufacture to information we fell into the category of unintended consequence. Capital was redirected, labor became superfluous. But my vision of myself never included a life in a steel mill. The world my astigmatism envisioned was going to be filled with formal language and poetic transformations, and include level of predictable quiet. We perceive what we desire.

Now I’m an at will worker for a second chance charter high school. The tools I carry to work are a pen, a magnetized photo ID, and sometimes a jump-drive which I carry in a company branded briefcase with a book or some poems to read after lunch. I read at two computer screens, go to meetings, answer my cell phone, occasionally use the land line intercom, walk through classrooms, compile reports, plan out details for educational programs and once a month participate in an Internet conference.  Any complaints I have are minor or broadly existential. I’m treated well, my work is engaging and useful, and I enjoy the people I share my days with. The reports I conscientiously compile are randomly audited, otherwise seldom read, in three years they’re archived, and then in five destroyed. My year’s records of meeting notes and observations will be shredded, the dividers will be saved, and the notebook will be refilled. At the end of my day I try to make my office space to look as exactly as it did at the beginning of the day.

My tasks get completed, if I have to come in early or stay late, but I still have a time clock. Many days after work I’d like to go out to drink, but I’m too old for that, so I go to the gym or run (where I may be too old as well). There was only one person older than me who set foot on my campus, mostly I work advising smart, younger teachers and students with hanging thin thread stories. The skills I possess and sell are invisible and conceptual. I’m useful because I can manipulate landscape visions of information into complicated action. When I do it right, I believe the world is a better place. My success has been in part because I am like a racehorse in  one other way, I’ve been over-engineered to one task.

I admire racehorses. That I type badly is a tribute to that affection. As a youth I cut Intro to Typing in night school to sneak off to Waterford Park in time to make the Daily Double. After a brief luckless career as a tout, I abandoned the betting windows, but never the rail. Thoroughbreds are aptly named. They’re born to do very little else than eat well and run on a racetrack. The accumulation of their physical characteristics and hard training that make them a race horse, also makes them worthless in nearly any other equine endeavor. Injuries, falls, collisions, the long term effects of being forced to run dangerously close to other horses, and factor in the now common extension of racing careers, long term side effects of drugs and travel, when they’re through at the track, if they’re lucky, they’re pasture ready. Every May before I sign next my year’s contract I run a slow, serious lap around Memorial Park and ask myself how close I am to being pasture ready.

Having my lenses ruined reminded me how I have been delicately constructed by an extended dialectic that includes the genetics of my birth, refracted light, the class values of a disappearing city, the corporate policies of businesses I do my best to avoid, my learned capacity for enduring sitting still, vague skills in making discrete adjustments to a changing real and symbolic landscapes, my ability to remember and manipulate language…and that my body is on its downward trajectory.

It’s not uncommon for me to wake up on the couch wondering what the outcome of whatever I was watching was. Physical tasks are harder, my joints and ligaments are giving way; HIPA prohibits me from listing all of my nagging ailments. The metrics might be less organized than The Daily Racing Form, but my obituary wouldn’t read much differently from that of a midlevel race horse. Game.

Happily, my optometrist friend sent contact lenses through the mail. I found a place on the Internet that will make me a pair of glasses for $65,no questions asked. In the meantime, I bought a pair of pristine readers at Family Dollar that my wife said make me look European. “What you see” sang The Dramatics “is what you get.”