your eye and your brain

I start new posts all the time. I don't post many of them because I don't finish thinking through them. ...there's a variety of wonderfully incomplete witty titles and bullets and no explanations in between. (I do this with picking up books too.) ...i fear it's almost indicative of a deep problem I'm only vaguely conscious of how to work around. But to reference a new writer I discovered (new to me, Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist On Mars.):

The study of disease, for the physician, demands the study of identity, the inner worlds that patients, under the spur of illness, create. But the realities of patients, the ways in which they and their brains construct their own worlds, cannot be comprehended wholly from the observation of behavior, from the outside. In addition to the objective approach of the scientist, the naturalist, we must employ an intersubjective approach too, leaping, as Foucault writes, "into the interior of morbid consciousness, [trying] to see the pathological world with the eyes of the patient himself."
This sense of the brain's remarkable plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sensory mishap, has come to dominate my own perceptions of my patients and their lives.
Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, it's "creative" potential, that forms the central theme of this book.

Mr. Sacks is talking about one, the indefinably vast concept of disease and the opposing noun, "wellness." Do you know how sick or well you are? Perhaps. When a doctor diagnoses a problem, he simply has a much better idea of whatever illness ails you. He's studied it and recognizes the signs. The point is the disease has you. Some part of it infected you and you hope you'll get better. "Betterness" too is simply something of degrees. The old man who eats from his garden every day might have remarkable immunity and mental acuteness, but his hearing is poorer and he's more feeble because his body is worn down. The Chicago Bull's center might be remarkably fit and energetic, but he has an enlarged heart. Two, Mr. Sacks is talking about how we as people adapt and even become different people (for better and worse) because of weaknesses. He calls it the "paradox of disease."

I have taken the Grey Hound twice, both times to Washington, D.C. Both times I was there I noticed lots of homeless people. In fact, the bus station in D.C. is in a bad part of town, and I remember once getting off the bus and waiting to be picked up at the main entrance and across the street were three men lying on their backs on the ground at the curb. One was yelling madly. I don't know what he was saying and to hear it was almost comical, but the sight was not. I remember feeling a bit afraid.

The second time I visited D.C. I ate in the most fascinating nightlife district. It's called Adams Morgan. It's so interesting because it is mostly ethnic bars and eateries that line the street at the tree lined walk, and all are renovated in what appeared to be old brick two and three story townhomes and brownstones. I was sitting on the sidewalk patio at an Ethiopian cafe drinking excellent Ethiopian coffee and thinking how attractive our Ethiopian server taking care of us was, when a man came up to the patio gate staring at me. He was thick and taller than me. He wore a blue coat and he was unshaven. If I only told you that he was a homeless man, black, and demanding, you might not think much of it. After all...most of us have had similar experiences at one time or another, but I have never met a homeless man like him since.

Matthew 6:22 The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

There is what you see with your eyes, and there is what you see with your brain. Color is color because of the rods and cons in the retina, but the brain assembles those colors. The brain names and classifies and attaches emotion and memories to those colors. I was sitting on the other side of the gate, and I remember most the mans eyes. I remember I think because I remember how i felt. He looked at me and I think maybe he hated me, and that was because I was sitting on the other side of the gate. He knew nothing about me. He probably has no memory of me. What he viewed with his eyes was precluded in his body because of hatred. He seemed to hate the whole world, and I remember it in his eyes. I think that if I had said the wrong thing or been in a different place, he might have been violent. But we weren't anywhere else, and I was mad that he ignored me, defiantly, malevolently (as if he didn't even hear himself), and I was mad that I felt hated. What had I done? I believe I hated him in back. I felt it in me. What is the point?

It's simply that we are born into "brokenness", this condition, this paradox. We are passing through, and sin and life through us. Do we know it? We participate. How great is that darkness? There's a war in us. It has us. I think maybe if I had not returned such a dead stare, that man may have relented. If I had been more humble, less defiant, and treated him as a poor man filled with a lot of hate and problems he didn't even recognize, then maybe something different might have happened. In fact, I'm certain of it. Next time you meet one of these men, don't be afraid. Ask God to be in your eyes and in your looking. In fact, ask Him to be in your heart and in your thinking. We're not that much different, you know? We're all patients in a way.

Mr. Sacks says, "Sickness implies a contraction of life, but such contractions do not have to occur. Nearly all of my patients, so it seems to me, whatever their problems, reach out to life - and not only despite their conditions, but often because of them, and even with their aid."