Flash (1)
Eye
It started on Easter Sunday two years ago. During the daylight hours, I noticed an increase in floaters in my left eye – large spidery ones but also dozens of tiny specks. To stare at the sky during my walk that day was to seek its promise of cloudless blue through a worsening liquid of shadows.
After sunset, I began to notice the flashes. Tiny, arc-shaped lightning strikes in the periphery of my vision in the same eye.
I went for a night stroll as I like to do after dinner, but on the dark street, I realized the flashes were coming fast and I became alarmed. I turned back home and rang NHS 111. They sent me to A&E. This was early in the pandemic, a nervy and uncertain time. I tried to talk them out of it, but they insisted that my eye be checked for retinal detachment.
It was a glimpse of the front lines. Doctors and nurses in masks and visors. No other patients in the emergency waiting room, doubtless due to a combination of more aggressive phone triage and patient reluctance to venture anywhere near a hospital as Covid took hold. I suppose I felt what any urgent visit makes you feel. Slightly scared, grateful to the NHS, anxious for the examination to be over. I sat with my arms folded across my chest, trying not to touch anything, including my face. I silently implored the waiting room – its air, the empty seats opposite and either side of me – for nothing serious to be found.
When you are not a believer, you tend to reach for the nearest simulation or memory of faith. Usually, I compose an inner chant of the please-don’t-let-me-get-any-bad-news-today variety, or failing that, I conjure a memory of snow and ice skating, calming childhood memories. But on this occasion, I struggled to pull my thoughts inward. Instead, they skipped across the physical surfaces of my immediate surroundings. Please let there be no virus on the plastic seats. Please windows, let my eye be okay.
It occurred to me that faith might be a handy thing during a pandemic. But I had cast my vote early on that one. My mother once told me that to her initial amusement (turning later to disappointment), my first reaction to church was, “It’s all very nice, but where is God?”
Thereafter and throughout my childhood, God was the promise of a chocolate milkshake at Big Boy after the service. My church attendance was the fast-food compromise of a postwar suburban girl as yet lacking the lexicon of belief and unbelief. It would be some years before I realized that many, far more thoughtful unbelievers had gone before me. The most initially helpful among these would be George Eliot (Marian Evans, 1819-1880) whose novels were full of religious characters, some struggling with questions of faith, some not.
Upon losing her faith, the young Marian struck a compromise with her devout father: she would attend Church but must be allowed to think what she wished while there. In 1854, she translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), which (in simple terms) argued that God is not an external reality but humanity’s projection of its own desire and capacity for goodness. What we worship is an image of our best selves, an image that we have made and externalized. Eliot retained a lifelong (and not unsympathetic) interest in the effect of religion on individual lives, without wavering from her own renunciation of it. W.H. Mallock (a contemporary reviewer) would describe her as England’s “first great godless writer of fiction.” Yet Eliot’s novels are full of religious characters, some wrestling with faith, some not. Her deep interest was in our human striving for goodness. In Middlemarch (1871), Dorothea Brooke tells Will Ladislaw,
"I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me. […] That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil – widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower… What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult to each other?"
Dorothea would become the greatest of Eliot’s morally earnest and authentic characters, and the novel is in many respects an affirmation of such beings, many of whom are women, whose opportunities to act upon the world are narrowed and whose histories are lost:
“Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable... for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” (Middlemarch)
These were the digressive thoughts that got me through my wait in the emergency room. In the end, my retina was not detached. I was told I have a common/passing condition called Posterior Vitreous Detachment in which the jelly-like substance (vitreous) between the eye’s lens and retina, peels away from the retina in a process that can last many weeks or months. Its principal symptoms are floaters and flashers. They sent me home, warning me that the flashes might continue for some time. The floaters would never go, but the brain adjusts and so we come to believe they have gone. Tricks of faith again.
Finally, the doctor told me that if the flashes worsened, or if a dark shadow, rather like a curtain, fell across my vision, I must contact them as a matter of urgency, as these were signs of retinal detachment, a sight-threatening development. So, I went home. Sighting my floaters and flashes, hoping - but not praying - that the latter would soon recede. And hoping it wouldn’t be ‘curtains’ for me.
The flashes gradually diminished in number and size. For the few that recurred, I tried to unsee them. I changed what they were. Imagined them to be mini-silver sparklers, Fourth of July in the eye, or the speed and burst of a flash when we take a photograph in low light. I told myself they were nothing but a pack of little flashbulbs that got lost, then settled temporarily in my eye. I would defuse them, coax them back out into the world.
I stopped thinking about faith for the time being and remembered photography. The mind will flit and flutter at times.
Next up: flash and photography