Eyes by Hand: Dan Roche’s deep dive into the world of oculastry

 Ocularists; Glass Eyes; Healing from disfigurement; Eyes by Hand; Dan Roche, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

Dan Roche and I have been friends since graduate school when a mutual friend in the English Department, a poet named Phil Terman, suggested we all rent a house together.  Dan, a good looking, athletically built essayist, shared not just the house with us, but Saturday morning Basketball games with the English Department, some of the best (and worst) parties thrown at Ohio State, and, with me, a history of having been an army brat, that pretty closely mirrored my history of having been a corporate brat, both of us moving from place to place as children.

Dan differed from Phil and me in that he was married.  Or at least purported to be married.  I am told that I met his first wife, Julie, at some point.  She would later be the teacher of my younger reluctant daughter, but I kidded Dan that she was imaginary, especially after having made a trip with him to her home in West Virginia, only to find her not there.  His relationship with her resulted in his first book, Love’s Labor: A Story of Marriage and Divorce.  I still think it would have been better titled A Marriage Apart.  In any case, it was written during the first year of his marriage to his second wife, Maura, who is a saint…

His newest book is, according to the blurb on the back cover, autoethnographic academic writing.  That’s a mouthful.  And this book chews off a lot in its slim 176 pages.  It is about the process of preparing for, creating, and wearing a prosthetic eye – what I grew up calling a glass eye.  These prosthetic eyes, I learned, are still made from glass in Germany, but here, in the United States, they are more likely to be made from resin – which is a fancy name for plastic (Fountain pens, for which Dan and I share a passion with his saintly wife; especially when they are expensive, are also described as being made from resin – never plastic).

Dan begins the book talking about repulsion: the pushing away that someone experiences when they look at someone with a deformity.  He uses as his source writers from the 1800s, ocularists advertising their services who promised a diminishment in the repulsion people would feel looking at the person with a missing or deformed eye.  My reluctant son enthusiastically stole away this book before I could read my copy having read Dan’s other books and he commented that this is an interesting advertising strategy – to tell your prospective customers that they are repulsive.  Of course, it is often how we sell products – mouthwash, weight loss programs, but even cars and clothes – the fear of missing out (FOMO) is just a version of this: being the one who doesn’t know, who is out of the loop, and who is therefore less than, and we are highly motivated to diminish our feeling of being an outcast, in whatever form.

Even though I love Dan, I almost didn’t make it through chapter two.  Here, in the chapter titled removal, Dan was writing in his academic voice, and describing the processes of extirpation through enucleation (complete removal of the injured or diseased eye) or evisceration (emptying out the contents of the eyeball).  Even writing out that sentence made me squeamish, much less reading the details, but Dan is now a journalism teacher and he has long been observing the treatment of his own diseased and ultimately extirpated eye from among other perspectives, at a journalistic, “objective”, remove.  He also needed to get some technical aspects of the physiology on the table so that we could understand something about the craft, as well as the art of creating objects that, he would clarify, are integral components in what can be life changing experiences.

(I feel comfortable telling you that, if you haven’t read the book, and become interested in the latter chapters and, like me, you fear this chapter would be too gross to read closely, you can skip it.  I feel comfortable telling you that because Dan has told me that when he reads my blog posts, he routinely skips the paragraphs in which I describe the psychoanalytic insights I have derived from whatever object I have been interrogating.  Also, because the information in this challenging chapter, while useful to the technical components (Dan was trained as an engineer before being trained as a writer) of the rest of the book, are not necessary to what I see as the most psychoanalytically meaningful parts of the book…)

All but one of the eight chapters are followed by transcripts of interviews with ocularists or their patients about the transformative process of creating an object and doing that in the context of relating to the person who would receive that object.  The object, the glass/resin eye, is fascinating in itself – and the process of creating it, and seating it, and the technical challenges in creating a working illusion of the presence of something that is not there are detailed.  We learn about the challenges of creating something that moves – the decisions about how large to make the pupil – the technical details of painting a realistic three-dimensional object, but we also learn about what it means to be seen by a person who is looking at you – when, for much of your life, you have avoided wanting to be seen.  And we learn about the care that the oculist provides – the care for their craft, but also the care for their patient – and the intense, powerful, and healing relationships that can be not just auxiliary to, but feel to Dan to be, at least in some cases, essential to the reparative process of being fitted for a prosthesis.

I am embarrassed to realize that, as Dan’s friend, I never realized the impact his disfiguring diseased eye had on self-concept.  Frankly, I was jealous of Dan’s good looks.  I travelled with him to Las Vegas when my first wife and I won an all expense paid trip for two at a fund raiser and, because she was planning to leave the marriage, she didn’t want to go with me.  I called up Dan and figured out how to get the plane tickets (first class, no less, for the first time in my life) to include him and me.  He was excited to go, in part because he wanted to look up old friends from when he had lived there in High School.  A picture of him with washboard abs at 16 was consistent with my experience of his comfort putting on a pair of jeans and t shirt to go out for a night on the strip looking like a million bucks with no effort – while I was feeling that no amount of preparation would lead me to look presentable.

Yes, Dan’s eye was a prominent feature, but I had long before learned to have what my friend Bede, the Wired Hermit, calls “custody of the eyes”.  I looked at Dan’s good eye when I looked at him and didn’t notice his other eye.  Of course, I can see now, this meant that I was also not noticing what Dan was feeling about that eye.  When he would talk about feeling self-conscious about it, which he did, I would minimize that – pointing out my experience of him as I have articulated it in the paragraph above.  When, during a basketball game when I was guarding him, my fingernail lifted the contact off his good eye (a very strange experience of feeling small motor feedback while performing large motor movements), Dan was seemingly unworried about how close I had come to injuring his good eye.  I imagined him to be as impervious to concern about his appearance as he appeared to be about his physical vulnerability.  Or, perhaps, I hoped that my comments, intended to be supportive, about his presentation when he would mention his self-consciousness about his eye, had made him impervious - rather than unheard.

My empathic failure is mirrored by a therapist Dan describes having consulted in the book.  Dan listed a litany of concerns to the therapist and then opined that they might be related to and waved at his head.  Confused, the therapist asked him what he meant, and Dan responded, “My [deformed] eye.”  The therapist stated that he hadn’t noticed.  Dan curtly characterized the therapeutic relationship as short lived.

Would I, as Dan’s therapist, have taken his concerns to heart?  Would I have offered the kind of care that he received from the husband and wife team who created the prosthesis for him when he finally received the ophthalmic care that he wishes he had received earlier in his life?  Does caring for a friend differ from caring for a patient?  Should we join our friends in their infirmities and vulnerabilities?  What keeps us from talking about the things that are most important in our lives?

Here is the paragraph Dan might skip in his reading of this post:  Peter Fonagy, in talking about the sexuality of men, talks about our sexual selves as being ignored by our parents and peers – when infants have erections, he says, care givers frequently look away.  This preserves our sexual selves in a child like state, he opines.  Thus, when we become sexual, there is the potential for a delightful, child-like connection with our sexual partners.  We can explore sexuality with the joy of discovery that children have – we don’t turn from it with the jaded sense of having been there and done that; something that can spoil other new and challenging endeavors.

Perhaps the deep connections that Dan articulates between the ocularists and their patients – and this would mirror the connection between therapists and their patients – and all healers and those they heal – is access to hidden aspects of the patient; the parts they have kept hidden or, perhaps even when they have invited others to see them, as Dan did me, they have been repelled – as if to minimize those parts would protect the person from feeling shame – or perhaps would protect the “friend” who might care from having to explore his or her own feelings of being vulnerable, disfigured, or whatever the friend is hiding.  What we might miss, at these moments, is the opportunity to connect with the childlike, undeveloped, and therefore perfectly lovely and accessible parts of the person that we care about.

Dan describes the moment when a person who has long had a visible deformity see themselves in a mirror for the first time with the prosthesis in place as an experience of seeing themselves as they have always hoped they would be seen as profoundly validating.  I have a friend, Virginia, who does research on plastic surgery, and she reports that often the opposite occurs – especially on reality TV shows where patients are given a big reveal.  They often see themselves, and still see flaws, and this leads them to… more plastic surgery.

I imagine that, for some of the patients that Dan describes, especially those for whom a prosthetic eye is just part of recovering from a traumatic disfiguring accident, there may be disappointment that, for instance, the prosthetic eye doesn’t solve the entire problem.  But I think that Virginia would wonder if the patient who is simply having plastic facial surgery to repair being unsightly – is disappointed because they were looking forward less to a physical change than to a psychological change.  They want to feel desired or connected, or to feel that they won’t continue to be overlooked.  The physical change does not assure them of the result they want.

For the individual with a prosthetic eye, the defect is more focal, and thus the remedy is more clear – and it may inspire hope that the desired social effects can now be pursued.  Especially, and this is the central point that Dan makes, in the context of a relationship with an ocularist who has heard and understood the impact that their disfigurement has had on them, seeing the eye in place gives them hope that they can achieve both the personal integration they desire, but also the social acceptance of them as a whole person.

If you are curious about Dan and his eyes, you can see a quick video of him talking about the book here.

Addendum:  After writing this post, I realized that I was being less than candid in my "objective" experience of Dan.  When his eye was withered, I purposely avoided looking at it.  I practiced what my friend the monk called custody of the eyes.  When I did look, I felt, Okay, I hate to say it, revulsion.  I imagine that Dan read that on my face - I don't have a good poker face.  Or if not on my face, on other's faces when they experienced something similar.  This might be a momentary reaction, but that moment surely packs a huge punch.  I put that squeamish feeling (perhaps that is a better term than revulsion) aside, in part by retaining custody of my own eyes and making eye contact only with the good eye, and my overall impression of Dan is what I report above.  I overlooked, as it were, the blemish - something that we do in relationships with others - but when others have seen that we have seen that blemish (whether it is visceral or psychical) I think they don't forget that we have seen it, and neither do we, even if we have successfully directed ourselves away from it and believe we have constructed them without it...  So I applaud Dan for acknowledging what he and I would rather not acknowledge.

 

  

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