Badsightedness

Elise Largesse

Interview by L. Valena

November 27, 2022

First of all, can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to? 

Yeah, I think it was a mostly or entirely digital piece of art depicting an old-fashioned metalwork lantern with what I thought of as tentacles. They were these purple strands that ended in eyeballs. Also, there were eyeballs on all the facets of the lantern, on a halftone printed orange background. Is that a sufficient description? [both laugh] 

That’s perfect! What was your first reaction to it?

I thought about how it felt reversed, the dynamic between what is seeing versus what is being seen. It felt uncomfortable to have a lantern, something that helps you see things, looking back at you. I thought, “Oh, that's interesting and uncomfortable.” I just ruminated on that for a while. I didn't write anything for, I don't know, a couple days after seeing it. I was thinking about what it is that makes us able to see. A lantern is something that helps us to see, but we don't usually think about light as the tool. That was my first impression, thinking about that reversal. 

It's cool to think about light as a tool. I've never thought about it that way. That's a really interesting reframe.

That's what the piece provoked because I hadn't thought about it that way either. We just think that whatever gets us the light is the tool, but really what's doing the work is the light. 

It's crazy to think about, I don’t know, our eyes as the tool that we use to see. Or our bodies as the tool that we use to move around in the world.

Yeah, it's a chain between whatever is producing the light, whether that's a thermal reaction or whatever, the light itself, and then it reaches your eyes. And then there's a mediator of glasses. Are the glasses the tool? I'm supposed to wear glasses and I often don't, and more and more I have to, and it drives me bonkers. So yeah, it's this chain that finally gets us to where we're understanding or moving through space. 

Love that. Where did you go from there? 

Well, I guess I think about vision more than the average person. I have bad eyesight, but I’m also able to get around without glasses for the most part unless I get really tired. The edge cases, like when I'm very tired or it's very dark, are starting to creep up on me. It does come to fruition virtually every night now that my husband Rajen and I take turns cooking versus cleaning, and now he's on the cooking track. And he doesn’t turn the kitchen lights on. I walk into the kitchen, and I can smell and hear things going on, but I literally can’t see anything. Like, how is he doing this? It's totally invisible, whereas to him it is perfectly visible and perfectly fine, although he is someone who’s had good sight for a long time and is just starting to wear glasses. So I’m thinking about that. 

Also, I'm on this small research project involving an ion beam scope. You can't call it a microscope because it's not optical, but it uses mass spectrometry to be able to scan a tissue sample. It's a completely different way of seeing! It's a way of visualizing something we can't see with the naked eye. It’s looking at it and registering information, but not in a way that we could really comprehend. We have to translate it into a graphic, since we can't see the mass spectrometer working. It's something we take for granted as really concrete and direct, but it can be so different for different people, even in the same household, or for different animals, things like that. 

Totally. Just thinking about the way that we perceive color differently is something that I know I could trip out about for a long time. 

Yeah, like the classic “Is my green your green?” There's literally no way we can figure that out, ever. It’s just a barrier. Or the way that we start to think of history differently when we colorize old photographs. I don't remember what the technology was called, but there are some very old color photographs that were taken like three images at a time and then dyed. They're authentically colored, not colorized, and from a hundred years ago. It makes us think differently of those past times. It brings it into our world, or the way that we think of our lives as alive, versus in the distant past.

It's so interesting that because our images of the past are in black and white, it’s easy for us to forget that there was color. [both laugh]

Oh, was everything just dreary? 

You can see paintings from way back and think, “Oh wow, that’s some really crazy fashion you guys had going on!” I went down this rabbit hole a little while ago researching the history of leopard print. Apparently, there was a fad back in the 18th century or something for women to have their portraits painted as the goddess Diana. So it was this huntress aesthetic involving a leopard skin. It's the weirdest thing to see these very beautiful, proper, old-school paintings, yet there's this strip of leopard print in the mix. 

Oh my gosh! It seems anachronistic, but that was just a trend at the time. That’s so cool!

In your poem, I think this question of “What else am I missing?” is a big question and it seems like it's pointing to something really profound. Is this something that you think about a lot? 

Oh yeah. I try to comfort myself with the idea that you always miss something, and to try to grasp everything is to grasp nothing at all. If you're looking everywhere, you're potentially missing the bits that matter. But at the same time… 

I’m very farsighted and these glasses help me see near. Well, I didn't wear glasses for a long time, and then when I put them on after probably a decade of not wearing them, all of a sudden everybody looked like those… Do you remember on Ren & Stimpy, there were these very grotesque, zoomed-in moments, where everything was sort of hairy and goopy? All of a sudden, all of these people looked like that to me, and I thought, “Oh my God, do I look like that??” I looked in the mirror and realized everyone has been seeing me this way this whole time! This is the world that everyone else was in and I was just floating along, everything looking like, I don't know, shapes? It was that moment of realizing that people were existing in a different reality. 

And of course, there are many of those. Not everyone is perfectly nearsighted either. But I've had a few of those stark moments, knowing that the way that I understood the world as I was moving through it was fundamentally different in some way than a bunch of other people, if not most other people. Even from a sensory way, not just a political or social way. A really visceral way. 

Also, I sometimes feel that I’m made a bit vulnerable by my bad vision. In a city, obviously, unless you're really diligent about closing all of your blinds all the time, which I always forget, everyone can see in everyone's windows. And I probably need light way more than the neighbors do or even my partner does. With that light differential, can you see outside? Or can they see inside? It's like how two-way mirrors work, too. One person is exposed and the other person is observing, which is a power differential in a way. 

There’s that classic Twilight Zone episode. This guy only wants to be alone and read his books. He finally goes to the end of the world, where he's the only person and so no one's bothering him, and he has all his books with him, and then he steps on his glasses. It’s the vulnerability of needing this tool in order to just function in this basic way. 

I just started wearing glasses a few years ago. I really didn’t wear them unless I was legally required to, like to drive. It was so weird to suddenly have that day when I woke up and decided, “This no longer acceptable. I want to be able to recognize people in the street.” I would just kind of smile at people who walk by just in case I knew them. 

[laughs] That’s so smart! I should do that! I'm just in the zone, making everyone feel like I don't like them or ignoring them or something. I'll just smile at everybody. That's the best tactic. 

It's funny, the elaborate things that we do to compensate for these things and how we figure it out. I like the way that you say, “wayfinding like a pinball.” It's a cool visual.

It’s unfortunately really, physically true. If anything changes in my normal path through the house, I just walk through it because I'm not actually looking at anything. I’m just moving. So I’m always stubbing my toe on stuff. But also, we have all these other strategies for moving through space. If your vision’s not great, you just know where things are. I don't actually have to see them. I just have to see a color or know where it is in space. Also, I move too fast in general, so I think it's a double whammy. Literally and figuratively.  

[laughs] Definitely a double whammy. Tell me about your writing process. Did you make this piece like you usually do?

If you want to write, sometimes the best ideas come at night when you really don't want to get out of bed and write it down. So I used to try to keep a notebook by my bed, but then I’d also have to turn on the light, and find my glasses, and then also write it down, and I have terrible handwriting, and blah blah blah. I resisted this for the longest time, but now I use my Notes app on my phone. I never thought I would ever want to do that, or that it would even work, but I now have a whole folder where it's just the stray sentence or whatever comes to mind when I’m in bed. I don't have to turn the light on. Because I have my phone on massive text mode, I can see what I'm writing. 

That first line about my husband cooking in the dark was written while I was falling half-asleep, turning the artwork over in my head, thinking about why it felt odd to have the light looking back at you rather than the other way around and all this stuff. And then I grabbed my phone. I guess that’s been interesting to me because I've always hated cell phones, even flip phones, which seem so benign and nice now. A little flip phone that doesn't have the whole world in it. Despite that, I'd recommend anybody who struggles to get themselves out of bed to write that thing down, just use your Notes app. It’s great. 

I totally hear you. I feel like there's some resistance to that because it seems so unromantic somehow, you know? But the thing is: whatever actually captures the thought is great. 

Yeah, it's worth it! It's worth the weird, jarring feeling of, “There's a smartphone involved in my writing process now. I hate that so much.” But at the same time, there are so many other things working against writing, and the phone is one of them, right? But if you can make it work for you… Yeah, it's not romantic. I take photos sometimes and I always hate when there are phones visible in the photos and stuff like that. I don’t know why, but I had to get over it and it's made a big difference for me, being that easy to just get that sentence out of my head, rather than forgetting it in the morning. I always convince myself I won't forget it, and then morning comes and I’ve forgotten that I even thought of something.

Oh me too. It’s the worst. How does this relate to the rest of your work?

I haven't had a lot of mental space to write more creatively in a long time, but I think that whenever I do it, it's a matter of allowing something to get written down, as opposed to sitting down and proactively writing something. With this, there was the wonderful catalyst of this publication and then this artwork. That was great to get the wheels turning. I’ve found that, more and more, it’s a matter of making myself welcome the idea of writing creatively. It's more about letting whatever is inspiring come and inspire me. The day-to-day is what makes up what we find meaningful. It's not always an epic, or the most glorious or horrible moments of our lives. To me, it’s day-to-day moments or patterns over time. 

I think that's right on the money. Do you have any advice for another creative person approaching this project?

Let it do its work on you. Consume the image or the work, or the sound, or the food (which was cool that to see that that was an option!), get that into your brain, and then walk around with it and sit on it. Don't worry whether something will come out of it because something will. The longer you spend with it in your head, the more whatever associations you have already are going to do something cool with it. Let it work its magic.

Call Number: M62VA | M64PP.laBa

Elise Largesse (she/her) is a Massachusetts-based writer, environmental sociologist and design researcher with expertise in place, climate change, inequality and environmental justice. Her work focuses on the co-creative relationship between the human and non-human ‘natural’ environment - between place and space, the social and physical. How do we alter the space around us and imbue it with meaning, and how does the place we’ve made then shape us and others in return?

Research: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7664-2817

Other work: ghostsafe.com