What is seeing?
Next Friday, S will have a CT scan at St. Justine Hospital.
I have cried so many tears already. There aren’t even any results yet. The paediatric ophthalmologist wants to rule out a brain tumour. A brain tumour or something else of a body that hasn’t even lived for four years yet. Maybe it’s nothing. Most likely it’s nothing.
His eyes don’t align properly; his eyes orient themselves in contradictory directions. I have started crossing my eyes to see how he possibly sees. But my eyes barely move as I cross them and the pupil moves outward and not in like his does. It’s easy for me to fade out my eyes. I am doing it more and more now. How do we know another? Can I know how he feels in the world by mimicking his gestures? How dominant of me.
His skin is sensitive to the world and his eyes have a difficult time focusing on details of the world.
When I was young I refused to wear my glasses and rely only on my myopic eyes. This way everything around me could be blurry and I wouldn't have to arrange my behaviour to follow the parameters of space. In this way I became attuned to my other senses and refused to move in prescriptive ways. Is this his way of rejecting the world too?
What is seeing? A question that Maurice Merleau-Ponty devoted his life to and in some ways I have too. For Merleau-Ponty, the ontological question of ‘seeing’ was not one of vision (taken up by Descartes as the primary sense) but one of perception — an embodied sense that make us beings-in-the-world. How does S’s arrangement of the world change when his eyes refuse to orient themselves? Perhaps his way of seeing moves him toward and of a perception most of us don’t have access to. This perception is what thought rests on and presupposes.
“A child perceives before it thinks” writes Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and Invisible (1969). Taylor Carman, in the foreword to Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception (2012) also notes: “As children, we do not learn how to attach thoughts to a sensory world we encounter in the course of already thinking; rather, we learn how to think about what we already find ourselves seeing, hearing, grasping." In short, we have to learn how to think about what we perceive. Is this S’s way to learn how to think on his own terms?