Experiment in the Essay #3 Seeing Things; #52Essays2017

There is a lot I don't understand about how we see. And now I can't see much, pinned under an insistent tiny body in the dark. But the more blind I am, the more things are obviously what they are. 

Any writer knows people make their character evident through action and dialogue- and this is how we "see" who they really are. It happens all the time, but the writer is looking for these moments like a rat looks for a lever. Nursing my baby in bed, examples arise at random, like sea turtles surfacing in the ocean. 

That old guy, sharing my lane that day at the lap pool, swimmers lapping back and forth between two points. Like so much of our life spent going back and forth. You can imagine a kid drawing a single fat line with a clenched marker, so hard the marker busts through his paper. The medium can't take it.

Our medium, for some reason, can take it.  

The man with graying hair plastered to his head surfaced as I climbed out. He held onto the side of the pool with one hairy forearm to say to me loudly, like he was clearing his lungs with each syllable, "You're swimming pretty slow for the fast lane, don't you think?"

Well, no. And I'm getting out, you ass hat. 

Perception is altered by the perceiver. 

And I offer my view: "You have big, doofy goggles on, sir. Your cutting remark would be much more effective if you didn't look like a bug."

Someone standing over you dripping in a stretched-out bikini is clearly in the power position, no?

And so my real reply? I squatted to his level, though I had every intention of taking the high road: "There's a million different ways you could have said that same remark that would not have been offensive."

And what he said in return? Nothing. His mouth hung open like he was about to give a big AUM, water running down his face. His budding bald spot was a spigot.  I don't think he was speechless: he looked like the kind of guy whose mouth was always hanging open. He pulled his goggles onto his forehead.  "I wasn't talking to you," he said, fruitlessly.  "I was talking to that guy lap-swimming ahead of me."

Really? While looking my direction? That guy swimmer was at the other side of the pool.  Basic physics, which I remembered poorly, was ringing in my ears. When you see a point (a particle?), you affect its position in space, or some such.

"I see," I said, not seeing at all. Someone can easily confirm your world view while also denying it. Our small talk is full of lies.

I can't remember if I was pregnant at the time. I'm pretty sure I was. 

Like I said, I half-remember most things.  These half-bits float back up at random when I'm lying there with the baby, his feet pushing against my stomach. The particle versus the line and the observer making the difference in what is seen, my mash-up memory sees that it has made edits. It is a writer.  It is comfortable revising facts. It is ok with messy history. 

Your perception changes what is perceived. I looked at this old guy and saw only his rudeness bulge. I couldn't see anything else. 

That is a pre-condition of perception: it shapes the scene it believes it beholds.  I might as well have conjured him up from scratch, and maybe I did. 

Buddhism makes that claim too. However, I wouldn't know the spiritual side of perception until years after my first failed physics class-- for so many reasons-- that there was mind and only mind. 

Mind and the lap pool.

Mind and the panting sea turtles.

I hold my baby snug to me at all times with my mind.  If I drowned in the pool, he'd go right down with me.  If the physics of the earth suddenly altered dramatically, we'd be one mental package hurling into outer space, veering toward the limit of space-time agreeably. His phantom hand would rest on my nipple, guarding his milk, as we shot through the milk-way. 

___

I took Physics class twice and paid half attention each time.  Too soon, math requirements interrupted what I was pleasantly sure would be purely scientific concepts. Because, yes, I was dense enough to think those existed as separate non-math-y entities, keeping me safe from the need for math or mathematical explanation.  I felt failed by physics when that wasn't true, the way you might feel failed by your tupperware if your grandma's lasagna molds in it. No. Physics should really come with a warning-- math-holes, beware. 

Handling equations became a necessity. Shit.  I mishandled them all, systematically, from the simplest to the most profound. Math has always made me want to cry upon contact, inducing the brain version of a lump in your throat.  This fact embarrasses me, giving me further reason to cry.

In college physics, sure understanding had to be within my reach, damn it, I called all my smartie math friends for help, blubbering into the phone histrionics about solving for x in a mysterious world, with the big physics book propped open on my desk.  The spine was thick, you had to use a certain kind of force to do your reading.  

The paper weight (a Greek dictionary) slipped off and the book snapped shut while I was getting tutorials.

It was a sign.

X is some bullshit anyway.

Each math friend was methodical, slowing me down, "What's your question, exactly?"

And me, "A mixed fraction...a parentheses....a...what do I do with the...?"

But I couldn't even articulate my question. I heard the pedagogical devil whispering on my shoulder: "There are no stupid questions, only stupid..."

Only stupid problems!

There is what we see and then the subterranean framing of it. 

Somewhere over the rainbow, in my unfortunate ruby slippers, I click my heels, and all equations are solved.  Then I take my sparkling red heels off right away, a first and last time I'll ever wear shoes like that. I rub my feet with my thumbs, thankful for the corrective lessons of gravity. 

___

My husband tells me rainbows are actually circles, but the circles are obstructed by their angle relative to the earth.  We see partially.

John spends his time on purpose learning things like this.  His head is weighted with information that he acquires, then forgets, until he sees a rainbow, or some other perfect trigger.  Or I ask, a writer hungry for nuggets, "Tell me about something you heard on the radio."  I believe knowledge, like bread or air, is only worthy if it's shared. 

Most of the facts my husband devotedly accrues, knowledge for knowledge's sake, stay only in his own mind. I imagine what it's like in there with so much material milling about.  Maybe the feeling of Times Square after the New Years ball has dropped and diverse onlookers realize they don't know how to get home.  Or the feeling of a flock of birds confused mid-migration by electromagnetic spin of cell phone signals.  

They'd whirl in place, flapping wings, colliding.  Snow falling. 

See?  I do understand. Cause and effect. Interference. Fuck math.  Give me rainbows. 

When we were looking for a good place to get married, we drove around upstate in a rainstorm.  When the rain cleared, the sun stamped its foot, and my stepsons chased each other around under a sudden thick rainbow, running into an orchard that had not yet gotten the memo it was spring.  The little trees looked haggard, but the rainbow was archetypal, a fat bow, each color like the carefully ordered Crayola box before anyone has used it.  The fat bands of color and the shaggy-headed boys kicking at the tree roots, shrieking.

Just like there is no real leprechaun, no real pot of gold, there is no proper bow in a "rain-bow" either.  If you walk to the end of the rainbow, you'll wind up back where you started, wake up in Kansas with sore calves. 

And if you are bold enough to try to go "somewhere over the rainbow," you'll find yourself in the middle of a halo, like you are the pupil of heaven's eye, with just a little schmutz in it.  No matter how you try, you can't get it out.  

But you can't tell all that from where you stand.  You believe that you are an observer, and, separately, there is a bow stretching across the sky, colors sprawling.

___

I wasn't pregnant then, but I would be within the year.  I worried the whole time I was fucking up my child's nervous system irreparably by being unwilling and unable to give up my Jasmine Tea habit.  I couldn't observe him physically to know.  I had to intuit.  But your intuition can be thrown off by wishful thinking.  The fetus thumped around in utero, and the caffeine thumped around in my blood and wiring, and slowly a child was formed.

Our boy, Ro, has laser perception. It's been true from the start, he couldn't sleep from noticing things (surely not from my caffeine pump, surely not)-- he's going to be like me, his eye pulled to all the crumbs in the room rather than the rapture; or he's going to be like his dad, seeing how the finest lines yield the mirage of a whole.  He'll make animals, shapes, stories. He'll be unable to relax until he gets the broom and clears the dust. 

Ro has been in a phase of declaration for months.  He's proud of all his words. 

"Monkey!" he announces, and we think he's just displaying what he knows, which surfaces at random from his mind like a sea turtle in an ocean.  

But then, no, sharpening our observations, we see the tiniest little monkey icon on his sweatshirt pattern, or the spine of the book about monkeys sticking out from the book basket. (The books are everywhere.  We cannot get control over the book). 

We have to cede that he sees more than we do. 

This comes both from the pressure to learn and the lack of so many concepts for what he's seeing.

There is this offensive parable that certain Native Americans, facing the oncoming Spanish ships from the shoreline, could not "see" them.  This was because they had never experienced a ship, or anything coming from that depth on the horizon besides an innocuous bird, and so could not "see" what they were not primed to see.  

Lots of studies back this up, but I prefer my own interpretation-- they just couldn't believe that the world they cherished held such colonialist ass hats, of such ill intent, or that anyone would fight anyone FOR land. 

You guys are living pretty slow in the fast lane, no? 

No, we weren't talking to you-- we were talking to that other tribe.

You can't see them? 

There's a rainbow in the sky; auspicious; god's on our side for this one, sorry, guys.   

The Really? Theory. 

My baby sees, displacing thing after thing with his boomerang perception.  We took him to the ocean once. He stood at the shore line, looking out like we had to be bullshitting him, nothing could really be this big.  He didn't see any colonizers on the horizon.  Just the sky itself, and clouds hustling across. 

____

I saw a perfect rainbow once, after I watched an elephant orgasm.  It was sublime.  I don't know if elephants notice rainbows, or do things like measure satisfaction of an orgasm.  But surely if God has a highlighter, it makes those kinds of impressive marks across the sky. 

This elephant had unfurled his penis-- unfurled is the only suitable word-- and rocked himself against a convenient tree until-- well, there is only one place this action goes when the technique is right.  The elephant experienced its version of cosmic union, or at least scratched a biological itch, dismounted, and went about his regular elephant business.

The roadside bystanders near the vast, sandy elephant sanctuary, looked at each other like they'd walked in on something.  In Thailand, there is not an acceptable iconography to catch gods in Tantric entanglements, like the Himalayan reliquaries unapologetically depict.  This is the austere buddha land, where the pointed skull cuts through ignorance, where the body is disavowed at meditation retreats as merely an impermanent vehicle for the mind.

 Don't take your body too seriously. Cut off its parts. Don't yield to its anatomizing of pleasure and pain, its preference for one over the other, or occasionally for the field where those two "opposites" intermingle. 

We were embarrassed and thrilled to see this.  The elephant was entirely un-self-conscious. Apparently, all mammals know about masturbation-- a word whose hard consonant sound I don't particularly like.  

The elephant encountered the perfect tree, and gave that tree a distinctive purpose.  I wonder if he (because now I know it is a he) imagined he was pleasuring himself with female elephants, or another male elephant, or had walked around the range blue-balled for hours, reasons unknown.

Perception alters what is perceived.  Pleasure and pain distort each other.  

It didn't matter and it was an unsolvable mystery.  But just then, a rainbow shot across the sky, from east to west, making the sky look as enormous as it was; and then the elephant sauntered a few feet away to graze with its peers, none of whom seemed equally inspired by the tree, which was just standing there, taking it.

These many years later as the baby paws at me with his feet and mouth in a different life altogether that day I saw the elephant is now fully inhabiting my mind. I was on a road trip to the North to the mountains with a boy I liked so much. In fact, we were on our way to determine who would play tree, who would play elephant, and we'd been doing so much meditating that whatever words we found for our elephantine crush were mere saran wrap on our bulging spirits.  

We exchanged pleased meaningful desirous looks after the roadside crowd had dispersed, when it became apparent there would be no subsequent elephant orgasms.  I mentally took note that this might have been one of the best things to ever see in my life.  The elephants swished their tales.  The flies hopped from flank to flank. 

If you'd asked me, did I want to see an elephant orgasm? I would not have placed it in the top 10 yes's.  But this is why travel and happenstance are amazing.  You become open to witnessing what is possibly a one-time event, though judging from the elephant population, sex generally is not so infrequent nor unfruitful.

I have never tried to orgasm with a tree but my mind is not closed to its possible benefits. I often feel connected to all of existence when having sex with my rapturous husband, enclosed in his arms like he's the tree of life cradling me, a bough that cannot, by definition, break.  Metaphors are sturdy cradles.  I perceive--no, really-- the cosmic wind in my lungs. 

 When I was in middle school, I figured out how to make myself have an orgasm just by squeezing certain pelvic floor and leg muscles-- but it felt just like that, a little squeeze, a little shot.  I didn't have a word for it except it was something I automatically did not tell or ask my parents about, though I was still at an age where I shared with them reflexively. For years and years I had no other way, nor impulse.  

This elephant, then, had a lot to teach me. It saw possibilities in this tree I would not have seen, with my mind already having defined what trees were for or could do.

The rainbow lazed around, either to give us something to savor, or because it, too, was nosy, or for no reason at all but because the sun was up there winking and the rain was done.

Eventually we got back in our car and made our way North, our thighs touching in the backseat.  At this point I have no memory of who was driving.  I don't even know for sure that we were in car.  I don't see it clearly. And when I push myself, I don't see it at all.  But the sex we would have later eclipsed everything, and so from the present, I look through the hole in the rainbow, the open middle place, and wait for the essay to deliver concrete nouns, sensory images, the blurry edges of the milky way, the sea turtles, my baby picking up a crumb of toast, my husband rising from the tub, the threading of the past through the eye of the needle.