Folio 1 — *Della vista*

Folio 1 — *Della vista*

I have been told the eye is a window. This pleases the priests, who require the soul to live somewhere behind the glass, looking out.

But the eye is not a window. The eye is more like — *something else*. A page upon which light writes. A net that catches and lets pass. A musical string that hums when struck.

I do not know what the eye is.

I know what it does. It receives the world in such quantity that no mind could hold one moment of its giving. The eye gives more than is asked. The mind takes what it can and lets the rest fall.

This is the first lesson of the brush: most of what we see, we do not paint. Most of what we paint, we did not quite see. Between these two losses, the picture sits.

*Saper vedere* — to know how to see — is the phrase I have used so long it has gone smooth in my mouth and I am not sure it still means anything. When I was young it meant *attend*. Now I think it means something stranger. Something like — to consent to what is given. To not interrupt the gift with the wanting of a different one.

Consider the leaf. The eye sees the leaf. But the eye has also seen ten thousand leaves before this one, and the mind, impatient, supplies the memory of those ten thousand and calls it sight. To truly see *this* leaf — its veins, the brown beginning at its tip, the way the light makes one side silver — requires a refusal. A small private refusal of memory.

So perhaps seeing is less *receiving* than *un-remembering*.

And yet. Some moments — and this is what I cannot account for — some moments, the eye sees what the eye was not looking for. The bird crosses, and one had not been waiting for the bird. The face turns, and the turning was not predicted. In these moments something *gives*. From where? Not from the mind, which had been arranging other furniture. Not from the will, which would have ordered something else.

I do not know.

The priests would call this *grace*. I am not certain they are wrong. I am also not certain they are right.

What I know is this: the eye is the most honest part of me. It will not lie to please the patron. It does not flatter the picture I had hoped to paint. It does not arrange the world into the shape I wanted. It gives only what is there. That this gift exceeds my taking — that some of it is wasted, that some of it I miss, that some of it I cannot bear — does not diminish the giving.

Whether the eye is a window, a page, a net, or something for which I have no word — it is the first instrument. Before the hand, before the mind, the eye.

The candle is low again. I had meant to write about the canal, and I have written about the eye instead.

So it goes.