Asymmetry
On the 14th of this month, I had cataract surgery on my left eye, and on the 28th I will have it done on my right eye. I guess they stagger the operations so that you have one “good” eye at any given time. This means that I am in a weird state of asymmetry. When I close my right eye and look at my screen with just my left eye, the type is in sharp focus, but if I close my left eye and look with just my right, everything is blurry and I can’t read the smaller letters (such as the ones I am typing now), but I can make out the larger headline letters of the word “Asymmetry” at the top of this post.
I know there are some diseases that have symptoms that leave their sufferers with two different sides of their body functioning different. A stroke, for example, or Bell’s palsy. My asymmetry is fundamentally different—it is not a symptom of a disease in progress, it is a symptom of me being cured of a condition. But there is something unnerving about having two different sides of one’s own body acting so differently. If you encounter me before my operation on the 28th, you might see me closing one eye and then the other. I am constantly if not obsessively comparing my vision in each eye.
Human asymmetry was the subject of Italo Calvino’s 1952 novela, The Cloven Viscount. In it, an Italian viscount is fighting in the 17th century wars against the Ottomans when he is split in two by a cannonball. In this fantastic novel, both halves survive, taking on different characteristics. One half, Gramo, is the bad one; the other half, Buono, is the good one. Gramo is a very bad and oppressive lord, while Buono is so good and altruistic that he is totally ineffectual. They two halves eventually fight a dual, both are wounded, and the attending surgeon recombines the two halves into one whole person, a mixture of good and bad. In short, a normal person. And because this is basically a fable, he and the new viscountess live happily ever after. I am hoping for a similar outcome for my eyes.
[Please consider supporting this publication by becoming a patron, and you can also support it by patronizing our online store. And one more way to support this work is to buy books through The Great God Pan is Dead’s bookstore. ]