gozzterLeave a Comment on Corner Vision

Corner Vision

Eyes are wonderful things aren’t they? Mine even have corners through which amazing things come and go. Before I had my cataracts removed and clever substitutes installed in their place, the lenses of my glasses limited the scope of recognizable shapes; movement only – blurred shadows- lurked beyond the purview of the Buddy Holly butterscotch frames. In those as yet unexplored regions, I had to content myself with what medieval mapmakers often explained away as ‘Here be dragons’.

To begin with though, the whole world was pleasantly blurry until my second grade teacher complained to my mother that she wondered if I might have a bladder problem because I was always fidgeting in my seat. Well, one thing led to another, and after a flurry of visits to the school nurse, the family doctor, and then to a woman who kept asking me about letters on a screen, I was presented with owl-like eyeglasses as an unexpected gift on my seventh birthday.

It was only after they arrived that I became fascinated by the ‘corner world’ as I called the never quite recognizable fleeting images that snuck past the corners of my eyes outside the frames. It was a ready-made fairy tale world out there at the unexplored edges. Still, no matter how quickly I turned my head to characterize any sudden shifts in the peripheral Dasein, I would only be greeted with a disappointingly normal tableau. It was unsatisfying because I had hoped for more.

Of course, as the years wore thin, I learned to live with the mysterious terra incognita that surrounded me like a dream. But then, as I imagine happens to any person who sits too long in a garden, even the delicious smell of flowers becomes an unnoticed background after a while. The bedtime stories fade, and the images they provoked become vague -remembered, if at all, merely as introductions to adult metaphors. Any remaining corner-magic for the elderly is stored unused on dusty shelves along with unregarded age in corners thrown as Shakespeare put it.

In fact, I think I’d even stopped noticing the corner-world until, like the mythical Phoenix, something else rose, albeit slowly, from the ashes of the freshly discarded eyeglasses after I had my cataracts removed. As strange as it may seem, although there was no frame to delineate a ‘here’ and ‘over there’, whatever lay beyond the bounds of what I was specifically looking at again began to assume an eerie presence. I suppose I’d become accustomed to boundaries and accorded testable reality only to that which lay within them. For a while, I tried to ignore the ma: the Japanese name for empty space between the delineated edges of things; there seemed no specific edges in my vision, so no boundaries to delineate the corners. Instead, I began to notice things like the feel of wind on my unshielded eyes, and the wrinkles in the mirror that had accumulated like tire-marks beneath my now naked ocular apparatus . And although everything was cosmic and untethered, there was no longer a fence to constrain my vision. What I couldn’t see was the magic that adorned the corners like those memories from my youth.

But, like any initial appraisal of novelty, that was naïve. Of course there was still a corner-world; it existed in the microseconds before I could train my eyes on it; there were still dragons there, but explainable dragons. As time passed, I almost saw what the blurry shadows represented, and what really lived out there. The world as I’d once known it was modified, sieved through a more unimaginative, more boring adult explanation. I longed for the ancien régime.

Fast forward from then to a few months ago during a cold and seemingly interminable snow-filled winter. I live in a rural forested area of a small hilly island in the Pacific Ocean just off the lower mainland of British Columbia that usually does not suffer much from snow -just tourists. Winter is a welcome adventure for them I suppose, but a challenge for the rest of us. In fact, the recent unexpected snowpack and dropping temperatures even made a few of the shy forest dwellers rethink the wisdom of their usual homes. That’s how I explained the arrival of the mice, at any rate.

At first, they restricted themselves to my corner-world as is their wont, and although I was never quick enough to identify them, nonetheless they managed to reinstill a magic that I’d almost forgotten. The only difference was that I could also hear them as they scurried across the wooden floors of the kitchen. Mice are cute if you can turn your head quickly enough, which at my age I certainly couldn’t, and yet they awakened no primal fears in me; they remained denizens of Narnia, by and large: mythical creatures. I was willing to accord them a time-limited access to warmth if they were willing to restrict themselves to the shadowed regions of my re-awakened corner-world.

But, unlike the boundaries imposed by my youthful lenses, unlike the supernatural world spun by my father about silent faeries dancing in the darkened bedroom of my childhood years, these undaunted spectres made skittering noises which my poor heart would fain deny, yet dared not…

Still, as I contemplated the fallen years gathering at my feet, I realized I no longer wished the mice ill or anything. I know that I change my mind a lot about mice though: like Montaigne, my opinion varies with my mood. I suppose if I’d really wished their riddance, I could have resorted to spring-loaded traps with peanut butter bait like I did in my younger days, but frankly, I’ve come to accept that mice are just a nuisance, not a menace. I am old now and no longer a credible predator; I do not wish to be accused of cruelty after I, and not they, are gone.

In fact, I thought of adding a paragraph about the welfare of the mice as a codicil in my will, but after a lengthy phone call from my daughter I’m now leaning more towards getting a cat. They use the corners of their eyes more effectively than me, and I doubt if they’re as troubled with guilt.

Who knows, maybe my kids might even start visiting me again…

, , , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close