Tunnel Vision

March 27 2016

Even lovers

who know us best

are left with half-truths

and guess-work.

So how much better

do we know ourselves?

I try to write myself out,

consumed, compulsive, obsessed.

But the words build walls

brick-by-brick,

reaching-up on tip-toe

cementing them in.

How disconcerting

to be in the dark

this time of year,

enclosed

in my tower of words.

When the sun is high

the snow

still blindingly bright.

It floods in through the glass

as if it had weight.

I can feel its strength

bleaching colour, boiling-off paint,

tiny motes of dust

dancing excitedly.

But, like a 6^th sense

my eyes are tuned to the dark.

The acuteness

of peripheral vision,

flinching

at a flicker of movement

far to the side.

Like a high wire, stretched taut

I surprise even myself.

How well I see

caught unaware.

Yet how unknowable she is

in such unforgiving light

looking directly in.

Her face, illuminated.

Her skin

a thin translucent layer.

I wasn’t sure what to write today.

I really wanted to say something about the essential unknowability of others.

I wanted to write about falling in love. Why is the operative verb “to fall”? It seems almost ominous:  involuntary, inescapable, terminal.

And I wanted to write about the brilliant light today, when the sun has risen above the trees, and the snow on the lake is a smooth unsullied white, fiercely reflecting. But, of course, I always resist these straight descriptive “nature” poems:  because they’re just too easy to write, and way too boring to read.

Other things were on my mind, as well. I had been reading about Franz Kafka, and so the process of writing was there. I’d recently listened to a podcast about a severely premature baby, and the description of its delicate paper-thin skin had stayed with me. And maybe the sun has created shadows in unexpected places, because the last few days I keep finding myself getting caught off guard by tiny flickers of movement, far off to the side. How uncanny is this peripheral vision:  a good example of all the deep processing and mind-games of which we’re unaware, like the submerged ice berg to consciousness’ small visible tip. After all, central vision – where we see acutely and precisely – constitutes only 3 degrees of the visual field.  

In the end, they all managed to find their way in. Sometimes, this is how writing works:   a scatter-shot brain harnessed to a stream-of-consciousness, which is then somehow distilled into poetry. What’s unusual is writing this blurb soon enough to capture all those fleeting inspirational impressions before they disappear.

I feel conflicted about revealing this process:  like the magician, revealing his tricks. Because you have probably read more profundity and intention into this poem than I can justify. Yet that incoherence and serendipity can be a strength. That’s because at heart I’m an essayist, not a poet. I tend to write in a logical sequential way. So liberating a stream-of-consciousness like this is extremely useful to me. It’s how I achieve ambiguity and implication. It takes me to hidden depths. As the poem says, sometimes I “surprise even myself”!

I like guess-work. It’s a simple word that contains so much. And I like it aurally, as well, bracketed by the sound of best …left, and then better …obsessed  ...cement(ing).

I like “write myself out”. On the one hand, it means writing myself out of the story in order to focus outward, pay attention to others. On the other, it implies writing myself out as one finds one's way out of a box:  that is, using language to resolve, explain, exhaust; as a means of self-knowledge (at best), and escape (at worst). What irony, then, to end up enclosed in (my) …tower of words.

I like illuminated face immediately followed by translucent skin:  the one reflecting light, the other transmitting it; yet neither revealing anything.

Central Vision would have been a more accurate title, because it’s normal – something we all have in common; while Tunnel Vision is pathological – not at all universal:  and I very much want this idea of the unknowability of others to be a universal one. On the other hand, Tunnel Vision is much more evocative, and gets to the heart of the idea.