Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Views of My Glasses

Black plastic frames top the top halves of the lenses that are outlined below with silver wire rims. Silver rivets at each top corner of the frame and at the points where the temples are attached. The delicate clear plastic pads rest on each side of the nose. The pads are connected to filaments of wire that corkscrew with the twist of a dental instrument and then, with a touch of solder, are stapled to the wire frame. A silver metal bridge, etched with streamlining filigree, spans the gap between the plastic brows, grafted into slots, pinned by pins just slightly larger than this period. Men's glasses. The glasses of the Eisenhower administration, the Kennedy administration, the Johnson administration. NASA glasses. Vince Lombardi glasses. Colonel Sanders glasses. Malcolm X glasses.

E

"I will never see you again," the optometrist told me as he fit my glasses to my head. Delicately, with two fingers of each hand at each hinge, he wobbled the frame on my nose and then removed it. He turned away to bury a plastic earpiece in the chemical sand. "These will never break," he said, looking at the sand. "They were built by NASA engineers."

E

A pair of glasses. It is like a pair of pants, a pair of pliers-one object composed of two joined similar parts that depend on each other. My left eye has always been stronger, though both have needed correction since I was in fourth grade. My first pair was from Sears. The temple pieces were anodized aluminum and contained, in a compartment near each hinge, hidden tiny springs that tensed the temples to hug my head. They left a mark, an indentation even.

E

The plastic part of mine is black. The company calls it ebony. And the metal trim is silver. There are variations of color. Black Briar. Grey Briar. Mocha. Tortoise. All can be combined with gold wire fittings instead of the silver. All the plastic colors can be molded to simulate wood grain, but that is a whole other line in the catalog.

E

The silver metal bridge piece, the ligature between the contrasting black plastic brows, can look, if you look quickly, like it actually has been broken there and then taped. I have worn glasses taped that way. I used black electrician's tape but the adhesive was gummy. White athletic tape was better. I've taped the temples too, swelling at the hinge, a gall at the fork of a twig. The tape on the bridge turned gray after I punched the slipping frames back up my nose. The frame's internal integral supporting spring was sprung by the break never to be right again. The tape grew spongy and soft.

E

Printed in white on the inside of both temple pieces is SHURON 53/4 USA. The USA is in a generic sans serif type. SHURON, the company name, is more eccentric, complicated, a brand after all. The S and the H are in caps but the u, r, and n are lowercase, though printed the same size as the S and H. The 0 can go both ways. The name is definitely a homonym advertising fit. It might also be a pun on a founder's name. Several lines of frames retain "Ron" in their names. The style of my glasses is the "Ronsir." The "Ronwinne," an all wire frame, made its seven millionth sale on September 3, 1946. The brand itself, SHURON, has remained hidden, unlike the contemporary designer eyewear that prints its signature on the temple hinge or temple piece or even on the lens itself.

E

"SHURON" makes me think too of the great lake, a lisp, slur and all. I picture a kind of lake like a lens draped over the bridge of the state's northern peak, wedged on Michigan's cheek. A pool of organically shaped glass, its surface glassy.

E

Others have pointed out Superman's unique take on secret identity. That is he puts on a disguise when he masquerades as one of us, wholly un-super men and women. As a hero he is singularly maskless. His civilian glasses are his mask. The style of Superman's glasses is closer to the SHURON "Freeway" or "Sidewinder," a big, black chassis, plastic all around. In Clark Kent's case, glasses distort the visage if not the vision. I remember that the lenses of his glasses were crafted from the porthole of his childhood spaceship, all the better to surreptitiously deploy his heat vision, his X-ray eyes, without a tell-tale meltdown of the standard terrain material. No one could see how he really sees. Think about it. When Superman uses his X-ray vision all he would see is lead, as the vision would penetrate everything, layer after layer, until the beam ran into the lead layer somewhere that would finally stop it. Glasses do change a face but we read glasses in a certain way. "Weakness," in this instance, is the disguise. The glasses are a visible visual crutch perched on the nose. Helpless without them, stumped and stumbling. Those glasses also clue nearsightedness and manifest in the wearer a concave hunch. Picture books held up to the face; a kid bent over comic books. Superman adopted glasses as his disguise, an emblem of the vulnerability of mere mortals. The glasses show he sees us while he sees through us.

E

Call 800-242-3636 and ask for John Rogers. He is the spokesperson for the SHURON Company. He wears glasses. He will point out that, to a certain extent, the company is now a costumer more than a regular manufacturer of eyewear. A company employee does nothing else all day but handle the liaison work with Hollywood, and Mr. Rogers will reiterate the company line that they are the source for "retro" eyeglasses. See SHURON frames, he says, in almost every major motion picture and TV series where "retro" frames are worn. The company could provide a list of such appearances. Their glasses are stars. They are the glasses of stars. Mr. Rogers is less sure who actually wore the frames before the frames settled into a fixed time, were indicative of an era. Kevin Costner, playing Jim Garrison in the film JFK, is wearing a pair of SHURON's Ronsir frames. Mr. Rogers is less sure that the real Mr. Garrison wore SHURON Ronsirs. But chances are he did. Style implies change, seasons. SHURON has been making the exact same Ronsir frame since 1947, but the frames they make today are encrusted with cultural quotation marks like the simulated jewelling available on SHURON's NuLady Deluxe line that was introduced recently as a "retro" style. My glasses grew into their self-consciousness. They were glasses, and then they were "glasses."

E

I am not sure that Malcolm X's glasses are a SHURON Ronsir. The design of the device in the upper outer corner of the frame is slightly different. The studs on the temples too are a variation. These fittings are the showy side of the hinge apparatus. They are the decorative rivet heads. The business end of the hinge is hidden behind the frame and attached there and on the temple with two screws, each sunk into the plastic. The screws are set in reverse fashion. One screw is screwed inside out so you can see the slotted head. The other has been screwed from the outside in, its head hidden by the detailing devices mentioned above. In the detailing of my devices, the metal caps are horizontal and inscribed with parallel horizontal lines. The rivet on the frame then flairs out like a spearhead pointed toward the lens and the eye. This detailing, I imagine, is all proprietary, the actual trademarking subtleties of the manufacturer. Look closely at the famous picture of Malcolm X. The one where he is pointing up and outward. He is before a microphone, and his lips are caught forming a fricative, the upper teeth visibly biting the lower lip. Look! The temple piece and the frame piece appear to be capped by a device more diamond shaped, the arrowhead without the shaft, the mathematical symbols (> <), "more than" and "less than" aimed at the eyes. Spike Lee noticed the detail of the detail, or, at least, I think he did. The glasses Denzel Washington wears playing the character of Malcolm X seem an exact match for the ones Malcolm X wears as Malcolm X. I am amazed by this attention to detail. The glasses, and getting them right, are that important. In fact, the rivet heads' > and < are like two halves of the X separated and pointing at each other.

E

It was Jack Rohbach who designed the Ronsir frame in 1947, the first frame to combine the wire rims with the plastic ones. At the nexus of midcentury the frames looked both forward and back. Their styling retained the feel of the recently successfully prosecuted war as well as the sensation of the industrial conversion of war production to civilian consumption. That is to say, the glasses' design seemed both serious and delirious. Their style became known as the "Clubman" as other companies-Bausch and Lomb, American Optical-knocked them off. SHURON popped in smoked lenses and called the resulting sunglasses "Escapades." By the mid-1950s half the frames sold in America incorporated the "Clubman" style. SHURON sold the sixteenmillionth pair of Ronsirs on August 6, 1971. Rohbach wasn't a NASA engineer but a vice president at SHURON. They were his glasses but they appealed to engineers. There is a redundancy in the design, a design to their design. They seem to articulate the mantra of the era, the very current hip ethos. Form follows function. Form follows function. These glasses look like glasses. The glasses are all about seeing.

E

When combined in costume with a white button-down shortsleeved shirt and a narrow necktie or bow tie, the glasses in ensemble create a uniform for a type of crazy. I always thought that Edgar Allen Poe's great contribution to dramatic culture was an insanity that seems sane, that stems from rationality in the extreme. Add a flattop haircut to the above accoutrements and you have the recipe for an outfit of that brilliant insanity. It is the look Michael Douglas selects when dressing the part in the movie Falling Down. Logic run amok. The glasses, like the other details of the style, try too hard. They are so sane. It is the artifice of control out of control. They are not, not even in their fake wood or tortoise-shell variety, organic. They are the furthest things from organic. They speak robot, automaton, android, machine. A human so attired is aching to fly apart, to fall down, to stop making sense. The glasses are sensible to the point of senselessness. And the resulting explosion breaks up into all angles and lines-the jazzy cubist, vectors of the atomic age. The design of my glasses holds all its various parts of their construction in place, a very public architecture of tension, compression, gravity, and glue. My glasses are edgy, on the edge, sharp and turning sharper. There is the cliche gesture in the movies of the homely woman taking off her glasses, letting down her hair only to be transformed into a beauty. The glasses usually are the homely making part. Girls who wear glasses… A man puts on these glasses, my glasses, and he puts on the potential for frenzy, the spectacle of the berserk. The spectacles of the berserk, the eyewear of the berserker. The glasses are way too sane. Crazy, man, crazy.

E

Floyd the Barber on The Andy Griffith Show wears my glasses. I don't watch the show, but, occasionally, I will come to rest on it as I flip through the channels. The show has been on the air all my life, and it is on today in reruns on at least four channels to which I have access. The show aired originally during most of the sixties. It was filmed and broadcast in both black and white and color. Floyd the Barber's glasses look best in black and white. Floyd, played by Howard McNear, is constantly startled. The glasses give him an owlish look and, with the white smock he wears, he looks like other goggled practitioners of close work-surgeons, dentists, eye doctors themselves. The lenses distort the eyes, spook them, draw them out. He doesn't blink. The joke is that he never cuts hair but cuts the same hairs over and over. Cut and comb, cut and comb. Then talks to Andy or Barney in the chair. Advancing the plot through talk. His own hair is slicked and shiny, plastic looking, like it's drawn on. The residue of ancient pomade. His hair is an advertisement for hair. His hair, his glasses, his smock, the flatness of the black and white all create the sense that Floyd the Barber has been cut out, a paper doll. The hair, the smock, the glasses have been crimped on, tabs folded tight behind him out of sight.

E

I make love wearing my glasses. I need to see what I am doing when I am making love. So I am completely naked except that I am wearing my glasses. It must be strange to see that. My lover is used to the glasses, perhaps is even clued when in bed I put on my glasses. The glasses and their putting on a kind of foreplay, an erogenous gesture. Still it must be crazy to see me wearing my glasses, naked except for my glasses. I, of course, can't see the glasses I am wearing to see. I see through my glasses. There are moments, when I am making love, when I am imagining I am seeing myself making love, that I am a third party and I am watching and seeing this lovemaking. And watching and seeing this feeds back into the stimulus loop of the fantasy. But the fantasy I am seeing never pictures the glasses I am actually wearing to see. I imagine there are times my lover looking into my eyes is reflected in the lenses of the glasses I am wearing when we make love. My eyes are clouded over by that reflection. My lover's eyes see my lover's lover's eye-a palimpsest, a pentimento. My eyes, my lover's eyes, not really seeing at all.

E

Today in the newspaper on the obituary page is the notice that Samuel C. Sumerlin Jr. has died. A picture accompanies the brief article. Samuel C. Sumerlin Jr. died at seventy-seven though the picture displays a younger man. He is wearing my glasses. The picture is taken in the sunlight out-of-doors. Beneath the lenses he is squinting. The lines of his eyes squinting are solid lines. The glasses seem timeless here. In part we learn that Samuel C. Sumerlin Jr. was known as "Sam, the Bicycle Man." He lived on Queen City Avenue most of his life. He was a friend to many. I am not sure what the glasses can tell us about him. Did he die with his glasses on? Perhaps in the Heritage Hills Nursing Home the glasses on his bedside table were not these glasses. But those who are preparing to remember him or you who have been already remembering him remember him in these glasses, his glasses. I am tempted to visit the viewing. The paper lists the time and place of the viewing but not if it will be an open casket or not. I know from past participation in the viewings of bodies that glasses are a problem. The dead are meant to appear to be sleeping. But one does not sleep in one's glasses. At the same time the dead must look like themselves, themselves sleeping perhaps. But the fixture of glasses makes most people who wear glasses look like themselves. Often there are the telltale marks left by life-long wearing of glasses to be considered if the glasses are not being worn in the coffin. I have helped undertakers attach glasses to the heads of the dead. It looks finally uncomfortable. I like better the folded glasses, folded and tucked in the clasp of the hands folded on the chest. The illusion of a nap. The glasses, with their ability to fold, to contract, have in their collapsing a kind of off/on switch. The glasses too are sleeping, napping, off.

E

People are forgetting that the man who was Colonel Sanders was an actual human being. Harlan Sanders was born in Indiana and in his lifetime turned himself into the cartoon trademark he has become. The white plantation suit, the black string bow tie, the goatee were essential to the transformation. It was, I think, the high contrast of the look. His glasses, my glasses, do the same thing. The black plastic brow and the white metal rim create a smiling aspect. He smiles, a cherubic smile. His eyes smile cherubically. His frames frame all that smiling, replicate the smile and amplify the smiling eyes and the smiling smile. I saw the living Colonel Sanders once at the Hobby Ranch House Restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The Hobby Ranch House was one of the first independent local restaurants where Colonel Sanders franchised his secret recipe. Later he would sell the concept, and the new company would create their own freestanding shops, the Colonel evolving into the revolving trademark on the side of the revolving bucket sign. When I saw the Colonel in the Hobby Ranch House Restaurant he was standing next to a life-sized posterboard placard of Colonel Sanders. They looked identical but for the depth of one. I remember the glasses. How strange they were in the flesh, dark meat and white, but fleshless too, all plastic and wire. His secret was not the herbs and spices but the use of the pressure cooker to fry the chicken quickly. All of this-the marketing plan, the cooking technology-was new but dressed up, camouflaged as very old and traditional. The glasses are the fulcrum of that moment. The smile now is hard, fixed in print. The glasses disappear into the cloudlike creases of the image's smile, explode in a vapor of Benday dots if you look at it closely and for a long time.

E

During my eye exam, I tell my eye doctor I am writing this essay about my glasses. He has never heard of the SHURON Company, tells me that almost all frames now are manufactured in Italy, a few companies in Japan, but most in Italy. There are a handful of firms in America still supplying niche markets, he tells me as he looks at my eyes in various ways. I show him my glasses, and he marvels at their construction and, of course, remembers them, remembers the famous people who wore them. That gets him thinking about new technology, and he mentions laser surgery again as a possible option for me. He attempts to explain how computers map and cut lenses now, making it easy to fit any frames with specific optics. In the past, different frames demanded different specific blank lenses to be cut. "Does this look better or worse?" he asks me through the machine I am looking through. "Read the bottom line." And I do. "Better or worse," he asks again, flipping lenses around in the machine. For a while I wore contact lenses, but the impermeable plastic prevented oxygen getting to my corneas. My eyes compensated, building new networks of capillaries to feed the eye more oxygen. Had this continued, my lenses would be wormy with capillaries all mined out. So I got glasses, my glasses. My eye doctor, who does not sell frames, says he sees the ruins of my now abandoned capillary compensation, ghosts and fossils in my eyes. The damage has stopped. My doctor has a collection of eye charts from around the world. Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Cyrillic. Today I am in the Greek room, the alphabet that looks like a ruin of our Roman one. I think about the big eyes of the big-eyed Greek icons. Their elongated faces and bodies save those eyes from being the eyes of the cute. But they are that big, and they are washed over by the reflected window on the pupil, the glossy stare of Japanese anime. Those eyes are glasses made out of eye. Finished, the doctor gives me a new prescription.

E

In the movie Enemy of the State Gene Hackman plays Edward "Brill" Lyle, a deeply paranoid former NSA spook who stumbles into the main plot, featuring Will Smith enmeshed in an elaborate electronic-surveilled chase. At one point the characters repair to Brill's secure hideout. There, in a slow panning shot, the camera rests for a second on a photo of a much younger Gene Hackman, and we are to take it as a much younger picture of a much younger Edward "Brill" Lyle. In the picture the young Hackman/Brill is wearing my glasses. The glasses add depth of time to the picture, of course, and a kind of innocence. The glasses make the character in the picture innocuous, a middleclass father of a certain era, a salary man, a civil servant functionary. The photo in the movie is actually another movie's movie still. The movie is The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a paranoid eavesdropping spook who overhears and misinterprets conversations he is paid to record. The photo that one movie placed into this other movie is, first, an injoke. And I was thrilled to spot it. But it also creates the reality of this particular illusion created by the films. Both films worry the reality of reality and how sense is made sense of by collecting and interpreting the residue of action or its purposeful construction out of abstraction. Clues are left behind by accident and design to confuse or make clear. I see I see. A caul is a portion of the amnion, the birth sack, that covers the head of the baby at birth. In The Conversation Caul covers his head with the covers of a bed so as not to see the consequences of his action. He sees too much. He doesn't see enough. He sees nothing at all. But it's just a movie, an art form based on a trick of the eye, all those still shots racing by fast enough to move. When I watch movies I watch out for characters wearing my glasses. "Nice glasses," I say to the person next to me. I think I wanted my glasses to be my glasses after watching so many movies in which my glasses appeared. I was attracted to those glasses. The frames were empathic conduits. They sparkled and winked. They were caught in space halfway through time. I pictured myself in those glasses, imagined myself transformed by their simple adoption. The picture in the picture, the one where Gene Hackman playing Harry Caul is wearing my glasses (nice glasses!), focuses on the eyes. The glasses are used to focus the eyes, the eye, the Eye, and the I.

E

I return to the optical shop-the one who said he would never see me again after selling me my Ronsirs-to have new lenses made for my frames. My eyes have gotten worse. When I arrive, I discover the office, a small glass box building, is closed. Staring in the many windows, I see the rooms completely empty. I am reflected in the big plate glass windows, my hands cupping my eyes and my glasses in an attempt to knock down the glare. It does not appear the company has moved to a new location. There is no sign left behind directing me to a new address. When I got my glasses here several years ago, the optician showed me several other frames, had me try on many pairs. I was there at the moment the global eyeglass style was shifting once again. In this transition, there were twice as many options as usual. Frame size was shrinking fast with small-shaped lenses. The newer frames were more playful with the way they beveled color into the plastic edges, sandwiching layers of color in the frame. But there were still many examples of the previous style with their huge lenses in a simple plane geometry of shapes-circle, oval, square. And there were odd combinations of plastic, the double bridge piece of the massive aviator frames or the migration of the temple pieces to hinge on the bottom corners of the lenses, the temple pieces themselves distorted and twisted. Some looked like bolts of lightning, a series of waves crashing on the ear, or the spiraling meander of smoke. In the end, I had him look up my glasses. He knew exactly what I meant and cut into the huge catalog to the SHURON offerings. "These never change," he said. Except for the "OPTICAL" signage there is nothing left. The building is a shell. It seems to stare back at me. I turn to go back to my car. I can drive with correction. I blink and blink in the bright sun. My eyes have gotten worse. My glasses are like new.