Notes on sight
There’s a peculiar visual sense that living in a large city gives you. Everything is foreshortened. The buildings loom over you. The constant presence of cars, cyclists, other people leaves a cramped sense of space, an eternal end-of-your-nose vigilance. Perhaps more so in London, home now for a decade, with its high density of low-level housing, its crumbling infrastructure, its ancient alleyways and winding streets. You get a different sense of space again new, or planned cities. New York with it criss-crossing avenues, the giant building all seeming to reflect our own image back to us. Paris has its wide boulevards. Budapest, its grand vistas, the giant sweep of the Danube driving through its heart.
I’ve been aware that my eyesight is getting worse for a couple of years now, albeit vaguely. They ache if I spend too long on a task, cramping up after a day answering emails or reading manuscripts. Some days, by 9 o’clock, they twitch and pulse. Over the past few weeks, though, I have realised just how bad they’ve become. I’ve been in Margate, on the Kent coast of England, a little over an hour away from London by train, but visually a different country. It’s a ridiculous cliche now to play on its fading Victorian glamour. It’s not like that, not at all. But there is a strangeness to the town that is hard to overcome. The buildings, the sense of dereliction, all is familiar Britain, and more than that, it is still the familiar ever-expanding-outer-London-surburb. What is actually different though, for me at least, is the sense of space, the density of the light and the air and the feeling of openness that surrounds you.
I’ve been taking walks either in the mornings before work or at lunchtime out along the seafront. A little walk from the house is a tidal pond, and from the vantage point of the sea-wall, even in the depths of winter, I can make out the dotted shape of those hardy all-year sea swimmers bobbing in the water. It’s rare in London to look, or attempt to, beyond your immediate surroundings. Yet here, with the empty expanse of the English Channel, the beautiful, bucolic open country, you can’t help but stand and watch across the sea, the beautiful blue-grey water. Earlier in the week, we saw a seal, just beyond the edges of the beach. It’s gleaming head popping up from the water.
Further than 10 or 15 metres, everything becomes a blur. A hazy mix of shapes and colours, outlines lack all definition, as I strain to focus on a single spot. I can’t see what the people, huddled together on the seafront are doing — is that a camera? A rope? I can’t read the writing on the walls, I miss the graffiti and the doodles on the concrete plinths. It’s only when a tool stops working, when it ceases working, that you begin to notice its existence, its importance. It’s only now that they have begun to fail me, to weigh down in their sockets, that I have even noticed sight.
It’s been 7 years now since my mother went blind. Earlier in December, I was back home visiting my parents, the first time since the pandemic struck. Then she reminded me how long it’d been. It started with cataracts, her eyes had taken on the milky-sheen a few years before and leaving her struggling to see in bright light or in darkened rooms. Surgery had miraculously cured it and restored her sight, but even still the left eye continued getting worse. The doctors worried it was something else. Not long after that she was diagnosed with glaucoma, which is caused by a build-up of pressure inside the eye that starts to damage the optic nerve. Thus began another round of surgery — the vitreous, the gel-like liquid that fills the eye, was removed and replaced with a type of oil that the surgeons hoped would reduce the pressure and offset the symptoms of glaucoma.
7 years on and she had lost all sight in one eye, the remaining sees only shadows, blurry outlines. Because of the loss of vision in her left eye she can’t see depth, making any trips out of the house into a potentially hazardous endeavour.
For Edward Hoagland, who lost his sight aged 80, “blindness is an emergency; the window shades are drawn, and one deals with it in myriad ways.” The kindness of strangers is something she can rely upon at least. The person on the check-out at the supermarket helps to pick through her loose change, passing back the £20 note she thought was a fiver. The driver stops to help her on onto the bus. People guide her across the road, help her feel her way up a curb or with stairs.
She’s considering whether or not to get a glass eye now. After an infection earlier in the year (gruesome detail as it is: her neighbour told her, she told me, that her blind eye was “luminous green” for several weeks), it has taken on a dead, cloudy quality. It’s no longer the clear, round shape it once was, it’s now misshapen and indistinct. It’s difficult to describe the exact difference between the two eyes, not because it’s not clear what it is but because I find it hard to look at the dead one now. When I see her, I focus elsewhere. Other people look at her differently too. She can’t see them, but she knows they stare at her. My young nephew calls her, cruelly, “Nanny Fish Eye”.
As it fades, other senses rise to take up some of the slack — or, at least, this is the common understanding. I’m not sure she’d agree. It’s hard to rely on your hearing when what you hear most is the sound of the TV blaring across the room. Yet, she does need to use other ways to navigate the world. Everyday tasks take on a new meaning for her. How can you cook an eye if you can’t tell whether or not the water is boiling over? How can you make toast when you can’t see the toaster?
For most people, the loss of sight is the worst thing that could happen to them. How do you fill your days if TV turns into a dull thrum, all sound and no vision? Suddenly, there’s no books, no fleeting glimpses of smiles on the faces of strangers. Body language ceases to be, now all there is speech. You don’t realise the necessity of a tool until it breaks.
Ageing acts remorselessly, on everyone. The fading of my own sight can be easily rectified. I need glasses, that’s all. It feels wrong to even think of it in the same way as my mother. There is no such fix for her. But it is here, reminding me of what is lost, how we so easily loose it.
