Body - Softcover

Eyes

Michael Knight

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selections, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.-- Charles Darwin

Darwin himself worried that the human eye would be the spoiler of evolutionary theory. Seventeen major parts in the standard textbook diagram--cornea, iris, assorted nerves, et cetera--each one integral to the working of the others. And, so far, science has yet to produce a definitive explanation for the way in which these components have come to develop. One day blind amoeba danced in a prehistoric soup, some hundred million days later, give or take, they knew light and varieties of dark, they knew the dazzle of color, they knew what it was to be on the ground and watch galaxies spinning in the sky. There is nothing gradual in the case of the eye, the way I understand it, no fins morphing into legs, no gills snake-charming into lungs. There is no straight line between blindness and sight.

Witness my wife: Each morning she stands before the mirror in our bedroom preparing herself for work. She believes that I am still visionless with sleep, believes that she will wake me in a few minutes and we will adjourn to the kitchen for a cup of coffee before we say good-bye. But I am not asleep at all. I can see everything. Her elegant legs and bare shoulders flushed from the shower. Her fragile neck made pale by a recent haircut. Her hands flicking from a makeup kit atop the dresser to her face. Her eyes peer mysteriously into themselves. She has blue eyes, my wife, flecked with green and gold. I want to say, My eyes are a secret, as are yours, beyond methodology and science. Even now, I cloak them in lowered lashes and pretend that I am dreaming.

The eyes can't be trusted. The ciliary muscle, for instance, is a band of tissue with no other purpose than to regulate the flattening and hardening of the lens. The lens, in turn, throws light on the retina, the retina contains the rods and cones and is connected to the optic nerve and so on, and, like a network of spies, not one of them can be explained except in terms of its compatriots. Demand evolution from your vitreous humor and it dissolves into gelatinous ooze. More than that, eyes are full of pranks and distortions, half-truths and outright lies. A woman in Mississippi glimpses Christ in the condensation on a convenience store refrigerator. A man in the desert spots shimmering trees and cool water where there is only sand. My wife wakes screaming in the middle of the night because the lovers in a painting have stepped out of the canvas and are standing beside our bed. Much to my surprise, as I jar awake and reach across to comfort her, I see what she is seeing--their arms linked in the half-light, matching pairs of pupil-less eyes--and I can't help but scream with her. I ditch the covers and paw the air. My wife gets a lamp going and we blink away our fear. Later, when she is asleep with her head on my chest, I remember how she looked in the nightmareless light, her eyes aglow with worry-her eyes, her eyes-pillow lines drawn like filigree on her cheeks.

The first time I really looked at my wife, slowed down and let my gaze linger a while, she was drinking from a water fountain, bent at the waist, water playing against her lips. She wore a suede jacket, I recall, and a white turtleneck and blue jeans. Her shoes were brown leather. Her hair was pushed behind her ear. I had seen her before, passed her in hallways and on sidewalks, spoken to her in class, but this time, as my eyes broke her into light and recast her as herself, she cocked her head and smiled, still drinking, her own eyes crinkling at the comers. She curled her fingers at me and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. That was no lie. She swears, these days, that she wasn't interested in me then. She was just being friendly, she says, she hardly remembers the day at all. But I was there, my heart racing, my brain wiped clean of conversation. I know what I saw.

Now and then, my wife jokes that she would like me to gaze more amorously into her eyes--in the practiced manner of romantic leads on television-before kissing her. But whenever I try it, whenever I make a conscious effort to summon all the things that I am feeling and project those feelings through my pupils, both of us dissolve with laughter over how ridiculous I look. My eyes bulge with love. Nose to nose, my eyes go crooked with desire.

Simply put, the eye works like a camera. Light enters the pupil, is focused by the lens which forms an inverted image on the retina. No fossils bear prehistoric examples of the human eye, something rudimentary and flawed like the smoking box cameras in old Westerns. Variations of eyes are manifest in different species, of course: The bumblebee's faceted eyes, like peering through diamonds, or the dog who sees the world in degrees of black and white. Primitive amoeba possessed patches of photosensitive cells, but sensitivity to light is not the same as seeing any more than knowing the sun is in the sky is the same as witnessing light streaming down through the branches of the trees. Tracking an evolutionary path for the eye is akin to leaping zigzag across a river from stone to distant stone. All of which are part of the reason, I suppose, that the. . .