The Mind’s Eye

Marching_band‘Time marches on…’ my teacher would declare expansively, as if it was a revelation never shared before. ‘…so what have you done with yours?’ Experience taught me to expect that addendum, but seldom how to answer satisfactorily. Often caught staring out the window, it wasn’t hard to figure out I’d been daydreaming again. Escaping into my imagination was my favorite pastime and the best way to control an environment unfailingly skewed in favor of the adults in my world. And besides, my imaginings were just plain fun, which most of my real world existence in school wasn’t.

I remember now how I’d slouch back against the chair after the teacher left, picturing the line of sentinels in perfect, relentless step with each other, all representing the onslaught of time marching on in my mind’s eye. I’m sure that’s why I’m sensitive today to any discussion of a timeline in my writing work, be it memoir or fiction. How could time be a line, I wondered, picturing those marching soldiers of my youth still goose-stepping their way to infinity? It seems to side-step the issue of perspective, a move at best foolish, and at worst disastrous.

Clearly it depends on which end of the time line you’re at, and in which dimension as well, since the viewpoint from well above the line affords the viewer an omniscient perspective lacking those on the same plane as the line, who also have very differing viewpoints depending on where they are along it. Having enjoyed this private argument for many years, I was shaken by the recent revelation that I’d never thought about the topic of memory and the mind’s eye. Surely that’s another dimension where perspective is vital, and you’d think I’d be an expert on it by now with my early start at developing the skill. But in the interest of full disclosure, it never occurred to me until I read a passage in a little book by C.S. Lewis.

The book is called, A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis), and although there’s no doubt about the topic at hand, in typical Lewis fashion he explores many peripheral adjuncts to the topic of grief, including love, loss, marriage and (dare I say) time. It’s that last one that took me by surprise. Lewis suggests that it’s our perceptions of something or someone that change, not the thing itself. It’s the adjustment of our inner lenses that moves the focus of the mind’s eye. Now I’ve always thought of myself also as an expert on the workings of the inner omniscient ‘eye’, or ‘I’ as one of my writing teachers liked to quip, reminding us that they’re pretty much one and the same; but I instantly realized when reading Lewis’ passage that I’d never understood how the eye wasn’t omniscient at all, but really quite particular and specific. It focuses on exactly what the director ‘we’ tell it to, ignoring things beyond our mental depth of field.

Only the presence of the actual reality of something can change the characteristics of our imagined version. His reference was to his fear that as time marched on, his remembrance of his departed beloved would become his fiction rather than her reality, due to the inner lense he’d naturally bring to bear on his memory of her. He uses an example of a friend he hasn’t seen in ten years to illustrate this, telling us he’d had a very clear picture of the friend’s idiosyncratic behaviors and features, only to find when they met again that his focus on some and not others had skewed the image in his mind’s eye until it bore almost no resemblance to the real man when they finally met again.

Knowing that we set those mental lenses to work instantly when we’re not confronting reality (or sometimes even in the face of it), I’d say he made the perfect argument that our mind’s eye is the ultimate defense against the March of Time, wouldn’t you? It isn’t time that does things to people, places and things; we do. I must have known that all along. Children are so smart!

 

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