If Your Eye Intrigue You . . .

For a second there I thought the type was going to have to start under the picture, and I definitely wanted wrap-around text.

It's 7:30 and I haven't done anything with Flickr, but that's kind of fun, to have more than enough. This could be where I learn how to do illustrated books.

The original text is "If your eye offends you, take it out," but I'm remembering what Donald used to say about taking offense--how much of the problem started there--and thinking how I don't look at my own experience the same way I look at the detritus I see on the street, the worn surfaces of buildings, the broken windows and defaced storefronts that I find so fascinating and so visually appealing. I thinking about some of the rundown areas of MacArthur Boulevard, where I would so much like to take pictures but where I am afraid my presence would be seen as intrusive or offending condescension, where I would be an "other" come to use the stuff of people's poverty and misfortune in a way that is perceived as insensitive. I don't know how I would say, "But let me thank you. I see such beauty here, beauty alongside and in the presence of the hardship and the public/private pains you are right to tell me not to assume I can appropriate without understanding."

I know the eye I carry with me makes my Paratransit trips through "bad neighborhoods," derelict sections of town, often a delight because I am able to see without judgment. "Back alleys and formal beauties": the phrase that came to me at the laundromat in Berkeley all those years ago. "If thine eye be whole." Maybe I can come to let myself extend this same kind of interested appreciation to how I work, what I'm going through--all the issues of aging, and weight, and loneliness, intensified as they often are by the borderline--by extending a benign eye upon myself. Somehow "a thousand years are as a day in your sight" fits in here too.


Note: The photograph "One open eye" can be found in my photostream at Flickr.com