Eye-Eye?
You already know how easy it is to become fixated on something that nobody else seems to care about, right? Many of you out there in Mediumland are writers, so I know you do…
When I was a kid, I was introduced to a poet named John Hegley by my music teacher, a man named Richard Court. Richard — actually, Dick — was another of those unknown, unsung, unrecognised heroes of the British education system who was truly passionate about his subject matter and managed (despite the best efforts of an apathetic, apocalypse-ready 1970s comprehensive school student body) to pass that passion on to the few he identified as potentials.
I remember his lessons very fondly. Not just the once-a-week compulsory shout-fests that were in the timetable, but the countless hours outside of school time that he dedicated to attempting artistry with a selection of battered brass band instruments and a raucous scattering of spotty Liverpudlian teenagers — of whom I was one.
We made music, sometimes. Most of the time it was almost certainly awful, but it was a start for some of us, and we went on to do better, for a while.
Unless you’re a prodigy of some sorts — of whom there are really very few — acquiring and maintaining the ability to play music with any real competence requires a level of effort and focus that’s usually only found in the obsessive compulsive. Translating what start out as nothing more than ideas into accurately reproducible muscle memory actions takes repetition. Endless, identical repetition of dozens of physical movements, coordinating parts of the body that generally do their own thing in their own uncoordinated way. There are certainly parallels with writing. The need for self discipline is there, if you want to get anything done. The development of a voice, and the need to balance a set of fairly rigid rules with the right amount of expressive improvisation is something I believe that both activities share.
Music lessons with Dick Court rarely involved any of what you might describe as teaching for us pre O-level bunch. We would listen to records or have Mr Court play something on the piano or guitar that would somehow maintain the attention of everyone but the problem kids in the back row for half an hour.
One day, he made me sing Don’t Cry For Me Argentina — a hit in the charts for Elaine Paige at the time — a capella, solo, from my seat in the front row of the class, where I couldn’t see all the smirks and buffoonery that carried on behind me as I gave it my prepubescent falsetto all. It wasn’t punishment. It also wasn’t the beginning of a dazzling career on stage and screen…
But for a few short moments I was in the song, outside of my life, and it was beautiful.
Dick saw that in people and allowed it to be.
Another day, with a jumbo acoustic guitar on his knee and his tie tucked into his shirt, he sang us a song about not being able to see very well. That was a John Hegley song, and like so many of his works, it was about his glasses.
Me and Dick understood that song. We had double glazing in common too.
My face has borne nose furniture since I was around four years old. Contacts never appealed, and progressive lenses just don’t work for me (although that really is another story), so I’ve always worn bifocals. Have you any idea how hard it is to get optometrists to sell you those things now?
Although the lenses have thinned a little over the years, that’s entirely as a result of the magic of technological advancement rather than any reduction in my need for glazing, but it has allowed me to drift slowly from the ugly face-scaffolding that my parents favoured towards something slightly funkier — although it has to be said, my definition of funky eyewear is just black with a hint of red… I am not (after all) Elton John.
It seems weird now — from my current perspective, somewhere maybe two thirds of the way or so through my life — that more emphasis wasn’t placed on the importance of my one working eye as I grew up (and I use the term “working” in its loosest possible sense), reminding and encouraging me to take care of the thing a bit more diligently. It’s not as if I’ve spent my days dangling my face over pits of vipers or running with scissors (the quintessential eye removing activity), but I have engaged in a lot of petty recklessness down the years and ignored the sort of niggles that could easily have been the precursors to visual disintegration.
How many times have I decided that my actual glasses were really just as good as safety glasses, and exposed myself to flying debris or noxious fumes? How many times have I ground at an itch with a dirty balled-up fist until my vision is filled with stars and my face has been streaked with tears…whilst the itch remains?
Not daredevil feats, I admit, but when this ball of goo is the one thing that keeps me mobile and able to do what I do, I really ought to have been trying a little harder to manage the risks.
Blindness is not utterly debilitating. I get that. The closest I ever came to experiencing it was during my first retinal detachment.
There have been three, so far, starting a little over a decade ago. The first two were very inconveniently in my one good eye, and because of the requirement to remain face down for a couple of weeks as part of the essential post operative recovery period, I was left suddenly and unavoidably isolated from the people in my life, all of whom were translated into disembodied voices, recognisable but somehow unrelatable.
Hearing is nice. If it were not for my ability to hear, and the incredible genetic accident that gave me a good ear for tone, I would never have engaged with Dick Court all those years back, would never have been singled out by him as somebody worth investing time in, and — as a result — I would have missed out on the countless moments during which my poor eyesight mattered little, as a piece of music took me places nobody else could go. It has made me a better writer with more things to write, of that I am certain.
But for me, in the life I’ve led and continue to lead, seeing things is what pays the bills. Seeing the few people who are most important to me is what connects us.
I cannot deny that I worry about it.
If something happens to my one and only peeper, permanently, what then?
Musical instruments that belong to me are left in places I’ve lived all over the world. In many ways, that’s the legacy of Dick Court and the way he made me feel about music, but I’ve been away from that feeling for far too long.
It’s time I bought another guitar. I need something to cling to that doesn’t need my eyes.
Merton Barracks lives in Hong Kong after a life literally and metaphorically on the road.
He is a security technology expert, an autonomous vehicle expert, a counter-terrorism expert, a writer of fiction, a father, a ranter and an exposer of bullshit.
He is also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, who took half a century to face up to what that did to him and also what it made him. You don’t recover. You don’t repair.
Take a look at some of his fiction
Or read about the process of coping
