Meditation 86

7 August 2020

The girl with magic eyelashes loves her sister and her parents. Who is this person? they ask, wondering how eyelashes might make the eyes softer, and the mouth. The word has a history of violence and the preposition out. But her lashes perform another proposition: that to extend an awning over the eye invites the other in. Lashes are not a wall, because the light comes through. Sight migrates, crosses over a line that’s marked so we think it’s true. You wander out through striated fern shadows and plump hydrangeas to clear the retina of its rust. It’s a trust exercise, this looking in each other’s eyes, though one student said, “men don’t do this,” when I asked. Put your eyelids at half-mast, the teacher told me. There’s a lash there, if only to hold us to our seats. A student, suspended for posting a photograph of a crowded school hallway—no masks—said she’s making “good trouble.” She’s punished for what we see, She must be a real mirror, he said, if she sets off so many reactions in others. The mirror is a eye that doesn’t see, though it shows. Tell me how this works, this exchange of self for other or itself, which is not exchange but a throw back to the pitcher. The assistant coach greeted his players with a Nazi salute, then apologized for his inadvertent expression of hatred. One of his relief pitchers pushed his right arm down to touch elbows, but he turned and re-saluted the empty stands. Nuremberg with no one there would not be Nuremberg, would it, but only a sign to take or steal on the next pitch. The problem with charisma is there’s so little behind it. He’s a poof of hair without a head, bloated body lacking spine, though body-shaming is not thought to be good form. What we see behind our lashes is either fast ball or curve. Another player tests positive. Another game postponed. We learn patience from our lack. The eyelashes last six months only. Time enough for quarantine.