Object: Glasses

I brought my old eyeglasses to the retreat as my object. In a large, cold cabin on Saturday morning, over coffee and chocolate, I invited the workshop participants to write about their objects. “And if you can’t think of anything,” I added, “then write about its opposite—for instance, what’s the opposite of eyeglasses?” The question hung over chocolate, a little deep for early morning thinking.

Old glasses feel weird to the touch. Like an old friend, familiar, but strange to consider the changes that we’ve been through since our last meeting. Or maybe the changes I have been through. Glasses, inanimate objects, do not change. This black wire frame is still delicate and fragile. One earpiece is still higher than the other, which always made the top of my right ear ache as the glasses balanced precariously on my nose. Instead of a straight frame, the view through which I saw the world was jilted. Tilted. Skewed.

I brought my old glasses instead of my current ones because I wanted to consider them. To remember old perspective—skewed perspective. A worldview hedged by black lines, black boxes. Anything outside the box is fuzzy, undefined, and blurry. Anything viewed from the inside is clear, definite, and safe: identifiable—named.

For instance, that is a lamp, not an intruder ready to pounce. That is my cat, not a pillow. Those are the digits of my alarm clock, not a glowing red glob in the dark. By naming, by identifying, by seeing, we are safe.

But what happens when we do not see? When our glasses shatter, our vision fails even more, and the world’s lights become frayed, and we can’t see the white line on the edge of the highway when we drive?

I knew I needed to shed these glasses when I couldn’t wear them at night. When the streetlights became fireworks, their light shining out in concentric haloes, obscuring everything else. Instead, I wore my contacts, which became dry quickly with night driving. It was the lesser of two evils: dry eye instead of blurry eye.

The inverse of needing glasses is not needing glasses. The inverse of blurry vision, clear vision. Perfect 20/20. The annihilation of the need for lenses. Does this logic also extend, then, to world view? Is there a blurry and a clear? What happens, then, when our worldview becomes cloudy, frayed, and indefinable?

It has been two years since I wore these glasses. My current pair is brown with a thick, sturdy top frame and no bottom frame. Frank Lloyd Wright designs edge the earpieces. I wear them at night, in the morning, whenever I feel sick, whenever my contacts fail me. While I sleep, they lie on my nightstand, under the Eiffel Tower lamp.

In the morning, they are inevitably on the floor. My cat—my white gracious loving affectionate sharp-claws-going-for-the-jugular-vein-to-wake-me-up cat—upon failing to scratch me awake, goes for the glasses, pushing them off the table, trying to wake me up by going for what she knows I need first: my vision.