The difficulty of seeing clearly haunted me long before my eyes went bad, in life as well as in art. It’s a problem of the viewer’s perspective—as Matt pointed out that night in his room when he noted that when we look at people and things, we’re missing from our own picture. The spectator is the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas, the zero. I’m only whole to myself in mirrors and photographs and the rare home movie, and I’ve often longed to escape that confinement and take a far view of myself from the top of a hill—a small “he” rather than an “I” traveling in the valley below
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