II
Preserve us, Lucy,
From the eye’s nonsense, you by whom
Benighted Dante was beheld,
To whom he was beholden.
If the salesman’s head
Rolls on the seat-back of the ‘bus
In ugly sleep, his open mouth
Banjo-strung with spittle,
Forbid my vision
To take itself for a curious angel.
Remind me that I am here in body,
A passenger, and rumpled.
Charge me to see
In all bodies the beat of spirit,
Not merely in the tout en l’air
Or double pike with layout
Shouldering gait of the legless man,
The calm walk of the blind young woman
Whose cane touches the curbstone
Correct my view
That the far mountain is much diminished,
That the fovea is prime composer,
That the lid’s closure frees me.
Let me be touched
By the alien hands of love forever,
That this eye not be folly’s loophole
But giver of due regard.
I happen to be writing this paragraph on a bus where I am, in fact, “a passenger, and rumpled,” having risen at four A.M. to be shuttled through a TSA check and scanned (randomly) for sequestered knives, flown two thousand miles, and funneled toward ground transportation. As I look around at fellow passengers, I think about Wilbur’s prayer, slightly abashed at how accurately it reflects my own need for correction. Several across the aisle are fingering their phones. One is looking out the window. She appears preoccupied and wistful. It’s impossible not to wonder what demanding conversation she has just left behind, or is facing. So I make up stories about them, not all entirely compassionate. I have chosen to sit at the very back where there is more legroom but where, also, it is easier to “take my vision for a curious angel,” to play reporter or spy, among, but not of, this quiet assembly gathered for an hour on a highway outside Chicago.
This prayer by poet laureate Wilbur is the second half of a 1976 poem that begins with a longish musing about a morning when the speaker idly watched, through borrowed binoculars, the activities of unsuspecting strangers on a neighboring terrace. Taken aback at his own slightly prurient curiosity, he wonders what “kept me goggling all that hour”—what was he hoping for? “Lewd espials?” or a moment of fine aesthetic pleasure in seeing what an “almond leaf became /within the sudden premise of a frame”?
Conscious of something more than a breach of propriety, the speaker turns his guilty musings into this remarkable prayer to St. Lucy, the figure in Dante’s Paradiso who “did not abuse her eyesight for the sake of evil.”* It begins as a general petition that we be preserved—we with eyes to see? We who hope to see with eyes of faith and compassion?—“from the eye’s nonsense.” One might stop right there and inscribe the sentence wherever one records prayers for life’s occasions. How pervasively we are afflicted by the eye’s nonsense as we stare at screens and thumb through tabloids at doctors’ offices and peer at others’ odd behavior in parks and on beaches.
A PBS series some years ago focused on our media-saturated environment—particularly on the barrage of larger-than-life and mass-produced images we face each day, especially if we live, as more and more of us do, in cities. Young children are routinely exposed to images of violence and indiscriminate sexuality. The poor are surrounded by occasions for crushing envy in ubiquitous depictions of casual affluence. And we learn to gaze at two-dimensional animations rather than meeting the gaze of the truly animated beings who stand with us in long lines or sit beside us in a pew.
By the second stanza, though, the prayer takes a more personal turn. The speaker, troubled by his voyeuristic tendencies, recalls how he sees those he encounters in the course of an ordinary day—how he sees and judges what is unappealing or unsettling. The sleeping salesman, open-mouthed, the legless man, and the blind young woman represent so many from whom even the more compassionate among us might momentarily recoil or turn away, unsure whether we’re exercising diplomacy or self-protection.
Susan Schweik, a leader in disability studies, has documented the dismaying history of the so-called ugly laws, ordinances that made “exposure” of “unsightly” bodies or embarrassing public behaviors associated with mental illness punishable. Horrifying as such laws seem, they testify to attitudes that continue to make the lives of people with visible disabilities harder. We tend, unless we consciously resist the inclination, to avert our gaze from the homeless person on the sidewalk who is also dirty and muttering invective. Or from the person in the wheelchair because it’s “impolite to stare.” Or sometimes we shudder in self-serving gratitude when we see someone severely disabled or injured because we wouldn’t want to be them, or hurry our children past, praying catastrophe will never leave them disabled or disfigured. Most of us, assuming we are among those who enjoy the privilege of healthy, able bodies, find ways to overcome such unworthy feelings and self-correct. But it’s good to check in with ourselves periodically about how we’re seeing what we see—how judgment, fear, anxiety, or moral insularity affect our gaze.
Another petition the poem offers that is worth praying in its own right is the bold request for a deeper, subtler way of seeing: “Charge me to see in all bodies / the beat of spirit. . . .” Not merely in the dancers and athletes, the Olympic skaters and the exquisite children on the playground, not merely in the beloved, but in the unlovely. To see like this demands a reorientation of the will that so easily veers toward self-satisfaction and self-focus. It requires a second or third look, a gaze sustained long enough to notice what dignity or patience or wit or justified indignation another may embody. To see others in terms of their stories, which we may never know, but may benefit from imagining.
Then come the more arresting petitions: that we remember that what we see is not the way things are—that the human eye is a limited instrument and the human perspective confined to a small bandwidth; and that we not kid ourselves that if we don’t see it, it isn’t there. That last may seem a laughable self-deception because it recalls small children who cover their eyes, thinking either they will disappear or we will. But the temptation to do exactly that is strong and pervasive in adult lives where much of the world’s brokenness is so visible and overwhelming. The desire just not to know about horrors we can’t help makes some sense; it isn’t entirely culpable to preserve sanity by shielding ourselves from chronic anguish or the ache of costly compassion. So we may need to pray to be willing to look, and see, and perhaps weep, and gather and act.
The final stanza is, again, a single petition and a prayer complete in itself that’s worth praying. To ask to be touched by love’s “alien hands” is to recognize how love calls us out of the familiar and the comfortable and may lead us into strange encounters that disturb our peace. It is to pray that we not, finally, be counted among those who have eyes and see not, but among those willing to look on tempests or twisted lives or others’ sorrow or, indeed, their success, giving all of them “due regard.” The final phrase calls our attention to the social contract revised and sealed in the Gospels, where love of neighbor, as Jesus assured the disciples, may cost us not less than everything.
Each of the short, four-line stanzas in this poem directs both will and imagination with power and economy toward whatever has hovered at the periphery, waiting to be witnessed or discovered by someone willing to put down the binoculars and venture out and seek today’s answer to the consequential question, “Who is my neighbor?”
*. See http://taylormarshall.com/2012/12/saint-lucy-in-dantes-inferno-and.html.