In the Palazzo Pitti in Florence hangs a painting by Raphael of the Renaissance humanist, poet, scholar, orator and prelate Tommaso Inghirami. He is depicted at his desk, dressed almost entirely in red, in a typical contemplative pose, as he stares upward, but look closely at his right eye and you will notice that something is wrong: there is too much white, as if his eyeball is a peeled egg. , the small pupil was dabbed as an afterthought. Inghirami lived with strabismus – a misalignment of the eyes, possibly caused by his fall from a mule – and his right eye is almost twisted to look behind him, like a lizard. If one were to follow his gaze from those two eyes and reach outward to see what he was looking at, you would draw two lines to infinity, lines that would never cross. Inghirami saw two things at once.
I had never heard of Inghirami and his misaligned eyes until I fell backwards—not from a mule, but in a skiing accident several years ago that cracked the back of my skull against the compact winter ice of a Vermont resort. I had played rugby until I was 16 and knew what it felt like to have a knee or elbow to the head, but this blow had its own character: disturbing, strange and electric. I remember, as I rose from that icy slope, thinking that this fall would exact a price, although I did not know its currency at the time.
Concussions are so common that they often no longer arouse much concern or sympathy, but it is worth recalling the origin of the word, the Latin word: concussionmeaning ‘a tremor or earthquake’. Shaking the brain is not the same as shaking the liver or ligament, and concussion patients often present with a bewildering array of symptoms: severe headaches, light sensitivity, oculomotor deficits and anxiety – a range that reflects the complicated nature of the brain and its functions. At its mildest, a concussion causes headaches; in the most extreme case it can alter perception and cause death.
For weeks it felt like the ground beneath me had shifted. I cowered in my apartment in Philadelphia, with the blinds down and my ears plugged. Outside my apartment, construction workers were digging a hole in the sidewalk, and I wanted to beg them to stop: it seemed like every vibration and sound of the city was somehow seeping into my head, unfiltered by any shell or shield. I slept and slept, and when I wasn’t sleeping I obsessively massaged my head, trying to restore what was inside, and stroked the shell to release the yolk. By week eight things had settled down sufficiently, although I noticed with dismay that reading had become difficult and even unpleasant.
When we read, we usually don’t notice the movement of our eyes across the page; it should feel effortless, as smooth as drawing a knife through water, and yet this is an illusion: we actually dart our eyes across the page or screen in rapid movements called saccades, before pausing and recording what we have seen (in such so-called fixations). In my case it was as if a veil had been lifted over the functioning of my eye muscles and the start-stop mechanism was exposed. Instead of skimming through the text, I strained, as if trying to push a viscous liquid through a membrane. Much later, I would discover that my fall had caused a misalignment of my eyes – the very condition Inghirami suffered from (although fortunately my own misalignment was much less severe).
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My fall was followed by two difficult years during which I struggled to read without headaches, eyestrain, light sensitivity, and almost catastrophic mood swings. The very thought of reading, which was fraught with pain and fear, began to repulse me, and I shunned all text, from lines of poetry to the phrases on highway billboards. You cannot simply decide not to read: as advertisers know, the urge to read text is instinctive, and I have tried to limit its irresistible pull; I shunned books, newspaper articles and foreign films whose subtitles, which changed rapidly on a screen, caused intense pain. I stopped visiting libraries and bookstores, and instead of talking about books, I talked about concussions, a source of frustration for myself and those around me. Like dreams, concussion symptoms usually make the most sense to those who experience them.
Normally I read a lot during the day. Although I rarely say this sentence out loud, I am a writer, and this loss of skills affected not only my routine and work, but also my sense of self; a concussion is an earthquake, a shock, but it also involves an involuntary shift of the foundation. In place of text, I tried to substitute clay, a material I had often valued as a metaphor for words: I thought of throwing clay as trying out ideas; drawing clay as actual writing; trimming clay as editing, baking clay as printing a manuscript. I went to a pottery studio every day and had earthly ideas that I would become a potter, but it’s hard when the thing you use to understand something, clay, moves from the edge to the center of your gaze. Clay is not a text, and my refinement of the material only emphasized its difference and inadequacy. There was also the small problem that I wasn’t throwing particularly good pots.
Strabismus is a common condition (one source estimates that it can affect up to 4% of the adult population) and I sought comfort in the accounts of patients such as comic actor Marty Feldman and Sartre, who developed strabismus after developing an infection while was three. But it was to Inghirami’s portrait that I returned again and again, combining my own desires and insecurities in Raphael’s oil painting and the biography of this Renaissance humanist. How had a man so obviously handicapped managed to become the Pope’s librarian? In severe cases of strabismus, where the brain receives two images, one eye may become redundant, but reading must still have been a major challenge for Inghirami. (Sartre copied the entire page and suffered greatly from his eye problems.)
I studied the portrait and noticed not the man, but the objects around him: his pen, inkwell, notebook and book. Inghirami read and wrote not long after the invention of the first printing press; paper was scarce and expensive, and it is not a stretch to say that his reading habits would have differed enormously from those of even the most disciplined and monkish writer of today. If I was honest with myself, I was an overly casual reader, a skimmer, like many of my generation (perhaps it’s no coincidence that the word “skim” didn’t migrate from dairy to text until the 1930s). In reality, I wasn’t as disabled as I thought; Much of my pain and discomfort was related to the speed at which I ran my eyes across my laptop screen. How we read, how we use our eye muscles, is as important as what we read.
These days I read well enough. Early this year, an Edinburgh optometrist did what no other specialist had thought to try: he tested my eyes for a vertical deviation, in addition to the horizontal, and ordered a pair of prismatic lenses, which bend light to ensure my eyes fit properly. are aligned. vision is aligned. I no longer need such a restrictive textual diet, although I do try to read carefully, respectful of my eye muscles and their silent labor. After surviving his accident, Inghirami commissioned a painting of his fall as an ex voto, an expression of gratitude to God. I’m not sure if Inghirami’s God exists, but this piece is my own ex voto to my optometrist.