My Brothers' Eyes

Imagine you're 4 years old, and the world begins to vanish from the center out. You compensate by sitting closer and to the side of the television. You learn to look out of the corner of your eyes. You are 4 years old; you have no idea this is not what happens normally. You don't question it. Knowing nothing else, you accept it. This is what happened to Lucien and then to Duncan, two of the author's brothers, in the late 1950s. Their mother quickly recruited her other four sons to act as their brothers' eyes. Lucien and Duncan died in their early twenties, but the experience of being their eyes affected the author profoundly throughout his life, helping him see the world better, and with empathy and tolerance. They showed him how to cope with obstacles that became constraints, constraints that became impossible barriers. They helped him understand the arbitrary distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, in athletics, science and the arts. The author has woven an homage to Lucien and Duncan made of text and images representing events in his life from late 2006 to late 2007. The photographs place non-visual physical sensations in a visual context for sighted readers, verbally manipulating a non-visual world into a visual reality.