Yesterday I collected my new reading glasses, which I am wearing now and which make this page and my knee very clear but my toes, the chair, the desk, increasingly soft-edged. I am not used to this vaseline world. It may be that I will only use these spectacles for reading, but when writing will put up with astigmatic page and my colorform jumble middle-distance. I’ve lifted the glasses onto the top of my head, to get back to yesterday’s looking-through. With naked eyes, the page seems to be two pages with a slight skewiffiness on the second. If I close my right eye, these letters are chunky, chewy and dark; with left eye closed they are lighter, spindly and crunchy. Together again and it’s like a duo on close harmony but one of them sitting on a washing-machine gone into spin cycle. There’s a kind of bouncy vibrato – pinching your nose and karate chopping your throat or your Adam’s apple with gentle regularity (as we did, in imitation of Spike Milligan, in the last 1970s). Or maybe it’s not that comical. It’s time-split: one auspicious and one drooping eye, as Shakespeare has Claudius put it in Hamlet. My right eye is forward-looking, goal-oriented; my left is in need of anti-depressants and grief counselling. Isn’t this how everybody sees and looks? I remember my art teacher, when we had a painted portrait up on the slide-projector, saying that the subject had one eye gazing outward at the world and one inward at the soul. This is untrue. I don’t believe they used the word soul, and I may be attributing to Mr Cox or Mr Lynch (both of whom passionately believe in Protestant and Catholic souls, respectively) something I later read in an artbook. Lynch (short, fair, curly-haired) and Cox (tall, dark, curly-haired) were, themselves, two ways of looking at the world but, paradoxically, Cox’s was more Catholic (more forgiving, more carnival) and Lynch’s more Protestant (less justified, less authoritative). They both taught me the importance of seeing clearly and looking again and again.
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