vitreous detachment | Kingsview & Co

In a prior post (“Seeing with an Injured Eye”) I told of pondering my blind spots after an eye injury created flashes and floaters my brain needed to learn how to filter out. As I wrote, it didn’t occur to me to ponder the reverse–what about if we couldn’t stop seeing everything in front of us?

That thought hit me when pondering eyesight factors, literal and symbolic, with a friend who had also just experienced a vitreous detachment. I had been focusing on the realization that if brains filter out symptoms of such eye damage, this means we see only in part, only what our brain lets through its filters.

But then I was reminded that this ability of the brain to filter is also nearly miraculous, a healing power indeed. Any of us who have permanent visual disturbances know how challenging they can be. I don’t fully know what some sufferers experience, but I do know that it was a blessed relief when my brain mostly did away with my conscious awareness of floaters and flashes. Until then, particularly as my eyes first adjusted to them, there were times I found them nearly unbearable as they blocked my easy access to the visual world, dancing ever more prominently across the landscape the more I tried to ignore them.

Once when as a young seminarian I presented a colloquium paper, a professor asked if I saw any value in ability to be in denial. Given that my paper highlighted the power of openness, I saw little in denial to appreciate.

Maybe his question was more important than I could acknowledge back then. Imagine being confronted endlessly with raw reality, unfiltered, unsimplified, its floaters and flashes insisting on being seen no matter how this overwhelmed us.

Imagine never being able to deny our mortality, our vulnerability to being hurt or worse, emotionally or even physically, at any given moment. Imagine never been able to forget, even for brief moments of respite, that the same is true for our loved ones and our happiness hangs every second by a thread.

Imagine remembering with each breath and bite that the poisonous byproducts of what we make and eat and consume are everywhere. Imagine constant awareness that the judgments and criticisms of others we often luxuriate in are not a one-way street. A grandchild once told me, “PawPaw, you would not want to be inside my brain; it’s scary in there.” Imagine if we all were exposed all the time to each other’s “scary in there.”

Or imagine if we could look straight at God’s face. According to Exodus 33, when Moses pleads with God to “Show me your glory,” God speaks of allowing God’s goodness, name, graciousness, and mercy to be shown and proclaimed but not God’s face, “which you cannot see and live.” It’s not that God is insensitive to the human longing to see glory; God promises to hide Moses in the cleft of a rock under protection of the divine hand while passing by, “then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.” Blind spots, then, are perhaps even God’s hand protecting us from seeing God’s face while allowing us, through the floaters and flashes, a glimpse of God’s back.

So I want to be regularly aware of how often my brain creates blind spots by editing out reality. I also want regularly to be grateful not to have to handle every moment of every day the unfiltered actualities whose glory could even kill me and us.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which publishes many of his Kingsview & Co posts.

Amid age-long arguments of philosophers, brain experts, and more about the extent to which we see the world as it is, by faith I commit to the reality of a world external to my perceptions. But slamming a bike lock into my eye also underscored for me that we see that world only in part, as if, to echo the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, through a mirror dimly.

By the day after the injury, my eye hurt and qualified nicely as a “black eye” even as nothing otherwise seemed amiss. That morning my wife Joan and I headed out on what seemed a routine jaunt to work together from the road. Until mid-afternoon at the Minneapolis airport. At the same time as we were temporarily trapped by ripple effects of a delayed flight, I suddenly realized that no, sun glare couldn’t account for the frequent flashes on my right no matter where I was, even in the restroom.

Suddenly it hit me: injured eye. I Googled: symptoms like mine could be no big deal–or could signal retinal tear and “medical emergency.” Should we risk breaking airport security and maybe lose another flight while hoping to figure out where in Minneapolis to try to get immediate care? It was getting late. A supportive Joan who works regularly with the Montana health care system phoned Kalispell, our ultimate destination, and got me an appointment for early next morning.

When at last we got on the plane, it seemed I was literally glimpsing the image shouted out by the man born blind after Jesus healed his sight (John 9): I saw people as trees walking. Floaters dangled over my vision and bright flashes radiated into them whenever I blinked.

Next morning the care was, thank God, superb, as was the news: I had experienced not a retinal tear but a vitreous detachment, which afflicts perhaps half of us over 60 when the vitreous at the back of the eye detaches from retina. There can be complications and follow-up is important, but treatment is often tincture of time.

That proved true for me, as several ophthalmology visits confirmed. Day by day the floaters and flashes faded. What startled me was this: the eye has mostly not repaired itself; this is not how the symptoms resolve. Rather, the brain learns to filter out the floaters and flashes. I sense this when I’m particularly tired, in certain light conditions, or if I make a deliberate effort to focus on the symptoms. Then again I can sometimes see the floaters snaking across my vision or a flash firing.

This power of the brain to decide what I will and won’t see is quite striking. It has taught me that in fact I don’t reliably see what’s in front of me. Rather, I see what my brain’s endless synaptic communications across 100 billion neurons send into my conscious awareness.

It also turns out that all of us have a blind spot. A small part of our eye is blind at the point where optic nerve connects with brain. Our brain fills in the missing information.

If a brain can so effectively detour my and our consciousness around actual physical realities, then how much more must it make choices about what I will and won’t see as the endless welter of environmental, cultural, economic, and political stimuli flood in. And how regularly must my perspectives be based on simply not seeing even the countless floaters and flashes of life that do exist despite my being oblivious to them.

I wonder if the fact that we see only with injured or partly blind eyes is worth pondering as a few billion of us seem to be concluding that my job is mostly to proclaim and yours is mostly to submit to my amazingly perfect visions.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which publishes many of his Kingsview & Co posts.