New Eyes
Posted July 13, 2001
And the end of all our searching shall be to return to the place where we started and know it for the first time. T.S. Eliot
I've always loved that Eliot quote. My whole adult life has been a quest for new eyes. It's a theme you will find in my poetry again and again. I hear a lot of people talk about being in the now as if it were some sort of denial of the past; but I think it is only when we return, only when we look back on something or come back to something that we truly have the perspective to know it. There are so many moments in my mind that I had no idea how precious they were at the time they were happening. They were veiled in the familiar, and I took them for granted, which is just another way of going blind.
We can only know things in relation to other things, and that includes ourselves. I think that's the impetus for a lot of marital cheating. People sometimes need to be loved with new eyes. The love they have at home is so familiar, so expected, that it doesn't feel like what they think love is supposed to feel like. They feel invisible, but it is their own eyes that are clouded with the cataracts of the taken-for-granted.
Seeing with new eyes is like having sex with someone you deeply love for the first time. Ten years later, you still love em, but the sex is a whole lot more perfunctory. It's not preceded by meaningful gazes; every nuance is not savored; it lacks that sense of exploration, that expandedness that comes when you are one hundred percent there.
At a craft show a couple of years ago I bought a ceramic pot to hold my wooden spoons, garlic press and that sort of thing. It's kind of a creamy vanilla with pale blue fish. I remember being struck by its beauty. And yet in my kitchen, I do not see it. My eyes register its presence, of course, but its beauty does not impact me. It just blends in with all the other stuff in my kitchen. I know, however, if it got broken and years later I found an exact replica at a yard sale, my heart would open real wide.
I think new eyes are somehow connected to the heart. Not that we necessarily love the experience, but that we take it in in a full, kinesthetic way. This sort of seeing is difficult to sustain because our nervous system works on the principle of contrast. If you walk into a lumberyard, you are intensely aware of the aroma, but if you work there, you stop smelling it. To know something, you have to really look at it with all the senses, and when something is familiar, assumption takes over. As we get to know someone, we cease being "all ears" because we think we know who they are and what they think. Often, we fall into "Yes, dear" mode.
It's like the difference between seeing yourself caught on video and seeing yourself in the mirror.
I often now think of how special it felt to sit on my porch in Florida amidst my tropical plants, playing cribbage with my husband as his steaks and spare ribs sizzled on the barbeque; but at the moment, it was just how life was, and more often than not, my mind was someplace else, not seeing the specialness and, more likely than not, caught up in some dissatisfaction or other. I also remember how it was when I first came here, how exhilarating it was to be a "northern girl" again and how after the many years in Florida, I was just blown away by the ever-changing deciduous trees and the beauty of this Victorian neighborhood. I watch my home movies (now on video) and am left breathless at the gorgeousness of the place where I grew up, though at the time, all I saw was that it was provincial and boring.
Is it possible to live life with new eyes? I don't know. Although I have been studying the effects of familiarity for years, I still am not there. Many of my poems are attempts to pry open some moment and really know it. I have little practices I sometimes do. When I remember which, admittedly is not that often, I think of a friend who had Lou Gehrig's disease. I sometimes use her to remind myself what a special thing it is to be able to walk to the mailbox to get the mail. She was in a place where she could see that simple act with eyes that are hard for me to come by.
At Christmas, my sister and I were talking late into the night, and she mentioned how she would give anything to be little again for just a day; to feel safe and unfettered by responsibility, to have all those now dead who made up our world then alive again, and to have the whole journey still out in front of us. I realized that when I'm an old woman eating strained peas in some nursing home, I will look back on this period of my life with the same longing. The trick is to appreciate it with that sort of depth now as I live it.
I think if I had to sum up the meaning of the Eliot quote in one word, that word would be gratitude.
Share about when you saw with new eyes --- or just leave a comment.
