Seeing

To

We need an eye exam.  This has probably been true for a while.  We can’t recall the last time a professional challenged us to look at a poster of letters and report back.  We’re not sure, now that we’re writing this out, that they even do that any more.  Maybe eye exams have become more sophisticated.  Machines have maybe taken the place of posters.  Sensors have maybe made mere report obsolete.  Our vision has been, as far as we have known, good enough for long enough that we’ve just gone about our life without worrying whether our eyes were optimally translating the outside world into inside images.  This is no longer true.  

We aren’t, we don’t think, losing our sight in any serious way.  But we also haven’t yet booked that eye exam, so who’s to say?  We know that what we see now is slightly unfamiliar.  There’s a new haziness or blur to it.  In visual terms, it’s not without appeal.  The world has gotten a little softer.  Our ability to focus is now more limited.  We can see things at a reasonable distance; nothing too close to us or too far away.  Of all the ways to find one’s sight changed, this doesn’t seem so bad.  What, really, were we doing with near or far sight anyways?  

We only found out about our slightly (??) altered sight because we started taking pictures again after a while of not taking them.  Our camera died (RIP), we were preoccupied with other things, etc. etc.  There are always reasons not to do something.  But we started taking pictures again last week and as soon as we placed our eye to the viewfinder found everything fuzzy.  We were immediately certain and heartbroken that this new camera was defective somehow.  We knew that what we were seeing was not what we were meant to be seeing.  We fiddled with the buttons, dove through menus, then tried using our other eye in the viewfinder and found everything magically sharp, clarified.  Our eye rather than the camera was the problem.

The exploitable parallel between a desire to take pictures (i.e. wanting to see in a different way) and a recognition of altered natural vision (i.e. being forced to see in a different way) is unfortunate .  It’s the lamentable kind of coincidence that inspires creative nonfiction.  We’d roll our eyes at the premise if we weren’t worried that non-essential eyerolling might further fuck with our vision.  But all the same we’ve been out taking pictures and looking at the world wondering broadly about what we’re doing exactly with our sight.  What are we trying to do by seeing and, more broadly, by taking pictures of what we see and sharing them with others? 

These questions aren’t unfamiliar.  They’re just different branches of the same old existential tree.  We have, for what seems like forever, wondered why we write and what writing is for.  More dangerously, we have wondered why we live and what life is for.  

We tend to end up in one of three places with these kinds of questions.  

We do X because we like to do X.  We find X to be pleasurable or fulfilling somehow and that is enough.  X can be anything.  We don’t need a grand or irrefutable argument to back up our habit of drinking coffee in the morning.  It is enough that we like it.  This works with most things, but also mostly with trivial things.  

We do Y because Y yields money or some other good.  This rationale isn’t much different from the above.  Whereas the above yields internal benefits (e.g. pleasure, satisfaction), this yields external ones.  So long as doing Y nets us something that has value beyond us and does not cause too much displeasure or moral discomfort, we keep it up.  We try not to avoid doing things merely or exclusively for this reason, but it’s been known to happen. Of course following this argument through, we end up back at the one above.  We do Y for money because money allows us to do X which we find pleasurable or fulfilling.  Y is sometimes a precondition of X.  Such, it seems, is life.

These rationales, though, don’t really hold up well in regards to some things.  Writing, for instance, is mostly unpleasant and frustrating.  It does not fulfill us.  And yet we keep returning to it.  There must, we imagine, be something in us that derives some benefit from doing this - but that benefit is utterly inaccessible to us.  We rarely remember the things we’ve written, we never re-read a single thing we’ve written.  We would stop writing forever entirely if we could.  (And yet would suffer greatly if we were forced to stop writing entirely forever.  More sort of re: this later.)  Taking pictures is more joyful than writing, but only slightly.  We are momentarily pleased when we succeed in taking a (to us) nice picture, but that’s rare.  The majority of the time we’re forced to reckon with what amounts to a series of small failures.  We haven’t been taken pictures for long enough to resent it in the way we resent writing, but we’re sure that at the end of this practice lies a nagging and persistent dissatisfaction.  A kind of dissatisfaction that isn’t somehow demotivational.  A peculiar twist of the knife attends these things.

With both of these activities, it feels like we’re after some value that isn’t ours.  It feels like we’re trying to get something that isn’t for us.  That the unpleasantness that subtends them isn’t really relevant.  It’s not a price we pay or anything.  It’s just a thing that happens because it has to happen.  Writing sucks.  More broadly, trying to capture something about oneself and the world in such a way that does something like justice to the truth about oneself and the world sucks.  It’s difficult and doesn’t yield clear tangible or intangible good (despite common and shopworn arguments otherwise).  We’re not at all convinced that we’re providing a service.  That is, we’re not writing or taking pictures for your benefit or anything as awful as that.  We are not improving the world or even meaningfully changing it through our actions.  It is nice if people derive pleasure or something else from what we do and share - but that isn’t really the goal.  It is also nice if we please ourselves along the way with a decent phrase or nice composition or whatever, but that’s also very much not the goal.  There, in point of fact, might not at all be a goal.  

We do certain things, it seems, for neither internal gains nor external ones.  We do them because we can’t not.  This seems silly or evasive on first glance.  It’s tautological at least which, for those inclined a certain way, must be frustrating.  We do this because this is what we do.  It took a while to accept that this, in the end, is the best explanation for some of the activities closest to our heart.  Communicating what we see somehow - with words or pixels or whatever - is just what we do sometimes.  Not always and not for any particular reason.  It isn’t always or often pleasurable.  It isn’t always of often beneficial or successful.  It’s imperfect and upsetting, but we keep it up and mostly don’t even question why.  These activities are, in many ways, a lot like love.  (Sorry!) We do not choose to love those we love nor do we get to decide whether we continue to love them.  We just do.  We have suffered as a result of love as much as we’ve derived unspeakable joy from it.  We have wished not to love before and will, we’re sure, wish not to have loved again.  We love regardless of the possible outcome. Reciprocity is great, but non-essential and not expected. It is, in many ways, superfluous and intangible and often a terrible distraction. It is also, in just as many ways, necessary and concrete and the only thing worthy of attention. It is not always a net positive, but it’s also never a net negative.  It is too much and varied for simple math.  We love because we can’t not.  Thankfully?  We write or try to take pictures or communicate about what we care about because we can’t not.  Thankfully?  We try to find ways to somehow express some inchoate thing in us or out there that we can’t avoid because it is inconceivable that we spend our hours, days, weeks, months, or maybe years otherwise.  It doesn’t feel optional.  We live, finally, because what would we do otherwise?  We continue doing what we feel we need to do unreasonably.  Sometimes.  Other times we do things for orgasms or cash.  Such is life, we suppose.

We still, though, need an eye exam.  But an eye exam falls outside the rationales laid out above.  It provides us no pleasure, no money, and we aren’t compelled to do it due to some vaguely metaphysical drive - so who knows what’s going to happen?  I guess we’ll see.

P.S. We’ve been working on a project during all this time we haven’t been posting and are exciting/terrified to share it with people at some point in the new year.  We likely won’t be posting here regularly (or at all???) until that’s done.  In the meantime, we started posting the pictures we take on Instagram and are trying to get into the habit of doing that regularly.  It might be a terrible mistake to share our username since it’s just our IRL name and our pfp is just our IRL face but (for no reason) we’re compelled now to let you know that if you want to see what we’re seeing on a regular basis you can follow us at  www.instagram.com/jracasey.  There’s nothing personal on there. Just questionable crops of the pictures we take around the city (sample below or look through old posts if you’re curious about the kind of picture we take). We’re not Winogrand, so adjust expectations accordingly. Also, please don’t make this weird and force us to edit this postscript later today. Thanks. xoxo