The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

There is a striking sketch from the late 1830s by transcendentalist artist and writer Christopher Pearse Cranch that was made to illustrate the concept of the “transparent eye-ball” in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature. Emerson felt that nature was the closest we can get to experiencing God, and he believed that in order to truly appreciate nature, you must not only look at it and admire it, but also be able to feel it taking over the senses. The transparent eyeball absorbs—rather than reflects—what it perceives: Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. In the Cranch illustration, a giant eyeball on long, gangly legs and bare feet stands in an open meadow with hills on the horizon. The eyeball wears a top hat and an Emersonian waistcoat. It’s a funny and beautiful image, and it is exactly how the drugs make me feel: I am a ludicrous eyeball: I edit nothing out: All currents circulate through me and I take them all in.