Vision

He has me bound to a chair in a pitch black room. The walls are closing in and he’s in my face going over everything I say, every letter, backwards and forward, looking for inconsistencies. Come clean, Levine, first you said better now and then you better Now.

I can’t keep my story straight. With sweaty palms, I break down, admit my life of crime: road rage, tax returns, return trips to the salad bar, the time I reused an uncancelled stamp.

Suddenly the lights go on. The optometrist says, No prescription change, as if he hadn’t heard a thing I’d said.

If I ever had pretensions as a visionary, I am now only half of one. It seems that the lens in my right eye from cataract surgery has become dislodged which renders everything to my right murky and up to no good. Politically speaking that’s my default position anyway.

Oculus sinister is the Latin name for the left eye. Sinister would now describe my other one. It is Oculus dexter, the squeaky clean right one which has gone deviant, misbehaving. This may account for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or, at least, the decline. 

The vision thing as George, the elder, Bush put it, was never my forte. I have always had better hindsight than foresight. In a previous incarnation as a soothsayer in ancient Rome I would have warned Caesar about the Ides of March the morning after.

My penchant is for antecedents rather than prophecy. Seeing around the corner is suspect particularly without any concern for how we got there. It seems to me science fiction simply extrapolates the known into a usually cataclysmic setting with props as characters to serve the author’s agenda, as if the human condition were not enough as it is. 

There is a long tradition in literature to assign extraordinary insight to the blind. When Tiresias spoke everyone listened. Metaphorically, loss of sight conferred a certain inner wisdom to those afflicted. I’ll settle for viewing the world astigmatically, with an Emily Dickinson slant. I’m not even sure I would recognize myself if I met me in a crowded elevator. When it comes to tea leaves or palmistry I have a blind eye though I think I once saw Mahatma Gandhi in my oatmeal.

Next week my doctor will recenter the floating lens. I hope he gets a good night’s sleep. I don’t expect I’ll ever umpire a major  league baseball game but I’d rather gain insight than oversight at this age.