Conversations don’t end when people take leave of one another. We are made of conversation remnant, other people’s thoughts interacting with conversations heard, information culled from people, event and the encyclopedias we have perused with senses. Words have legs, thoughts have wings.
Last Friday, I made an observation:
‘if someone’s eyes are not transparent, I will never trust him’. There was a referent, a real person. It was just a mentioning of a rule-of-thumb
I’ve picked up along the way through lives and living, being used and abused,
just like any other detection-device that people develop through experience.
My friend, who was present, wrote a
beautiful commentary based on that single assertion, titled ‘Blindfolding the
charms of transparent eyes’. It was a reflection on eyes and transparency,
those who knew, especially those belonging to women. It had occurred to him that he hadn’t really
looked into their eyes and examined them for transparency. He submitted that he
had instead chosen to blindfold himself with love and other sentiments. When the blindfold was removed little was
left, he wrote.
He maintained that some eyes
prevented him from seeing hearts, some delusional (‘most’, he added).
He made me re-think eyes.
I wondered, given the number of
times that I have trusted eyes and believed them to mirror heart, whether
there’s any truth about the transparency or otherwise of eyes in the matter of
revelation. I wondered if it was the flaws of seeing rather than the seen that
made for misreading.
It took me to a short story written by
Liyanage Amarakeerthi almost twenty years ago.
If I remember right, a woman asks a man if he is deceiving her (‘maava ravattanavada? Or was it ‘maava
ravattannada hadadde’, are you trying to deceive me?). The man responds ‘mata one oyaava ravattanna nemie, oyath ekka revatenna!’ (I don’t
want to deceive you; I want to be deceived with you).
Love-blindness explains a lot and
maybe whoever came up with the dictum ‘love is blind’ might have been on to
something regarding eyes and transparency.
My friend seems to have seen
something important: ‘yes, I know some eyes are non-transparent, but I love
them’.
People change, eyes change and
transparency can be compromised. There are always degrees, in the transparent
and the opaque when it comes to people we love and people who love us. It holds for other too. I was not talking of love when I came up with
that line. ‘Shifty eyes’ is a term that
has connotations. Back in the eighties
there entered the Sinhala lexicon a term called ‘Rubber Ehe’ or the rubber-eye,
meaning a false eye. Someone who ‘puts’
the rubber-ehe is one who looks
through you, refuses to acknowledge or deliberately snubs. Lovers do these things, either because
they’ve stopped seeing or are not interested in seeing or, in some cases, to
feign un-seeing. Sometimes people hurt
just to test love.
I am no eye-expert but I think for
all their deceiving potential, eyes reveal even when they are ‘opaqued’. Or
else, I like to think so, for I have over the years learned to be more wary
than average when I encounter non-transparent eyes.
But here’s something my articulate
and perceptive friend, Rasika Jayakody can reflect on and perhaps write an
equally beautiful comment about:
‘Is the finality with which doors
are closed designed to test the blindness of blind love?’
It is something I wrote about 7
years ago. It was love-wrought and about
a ‘de-transparenting’ of eyes. In the
un-blinding that followed, though, I found things to be more transparent than I
believed them to be. Those eyes that
inspired the question were, all things considered, more honest than most eyes
I’ve encountered. Maybe it was because
she un-blindfolded herself.
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