I was born with my two eyes functioning well, but separately. The right eye tended to cross. The state-of-the-art of ophthalmology at the time indicated a correction for this problem of operating on the deviant eye to shorten the outside muscle so that the eye would no longer tend to wander inwards. I had this operation done when I was five years old. Afterwards, I had to do eye exercises to learn to use the two eyes together. Looking into a stereoscope that displayed one picture to my right eye and another to my left eye, I was instructed to “put the bird into the cage” or “put the person inside the house”. I got really good at seeing the bird and then the cage and then the bird and then the cage, in rapid succession. But I never saw the bird inside the cage, the two of them both at exactly the same time. One of my eyes is nearsighted; the other, farsighted. This separation of responsibilities is actually quite useful. I read with my left eye, and (until recently, when I got glasses for distance vision that correct both eyes) drove and did other distance-vision activities with the right. I am, my optometrist tells me, an alternator.
What this means is that, generally speaking, I do not have binocular vision and lack depth perception. I have learned to compensate for this by using slight movements of my eyes or head and time-sequencing the images. The few times I’ve managed to make both eyes work together, the experience of true depth perception that most normal people have all the time has been stunning.
I also function reasonably comfortably in either right-brain or left-brain mode. Those little self-quizzes that tell you whether you are a right-brain (intuitive, artistic) thinker or a left-brain (logical, scientific) thinker map me onto the corpus callosum.
All of this has never been a problem, as it’s easy enough to switch to using the right tool (right brain, left brain, left eye, right eye) for the job. In fact, I’ve always felt that, rather than a handicap, I have more perception opportunities than many people, both visually and in terms of mental acuity.
But now there’s Charlie.
Charlie always leaves me a bit off balance. I don’t see him straight. He slips back and forth in time. Like the bird and the cage, I see today’s Charlie and the Charlie of 37 years ago alternating back and forth in rapid succession, and I can’t quite make them come together. One instant, he is a portly, silver-haired gentleman with damaged lung, hips, and knees; and the next instant, he is a tall, dark-haired slim, athletic sailor. He is a ramrod-straight man of honor to whom winning is important. He is an unhappy husband who would do a great deal to avoid confrontation with his wife. He is an engineer. He writes better poetic imagery than he knows. Dark–silver–dark–silver…. Charlie is one thing to one part of my vision and another thing to the other part, and there is no “right tool” for the Charlie job.
I am a person who has never before had a problem with delegating understanding to the part of me that does it best, but all the parts of my understanding lay some claim to Charlie. The confusion engendered by this experience is a pleasure.
And what I can’t figure out is if Charlie is different from other people (at least to me, perhaps in part because of the 36-year gap in our acquaintance) — or if this is simply the first time I’ve managed to see a human being with true binocular vision.
Is this the way Proust saw the world and everyone in it, all the time?
