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by Arnold De Villa
April 17, 2011
“The eyes are windows to the soul”, says an old cliché. A weary anatomy student recalls the vitreous body, separating it from the iris and the pupils.
Lovers gaze at the stars, looking at each other, enraptured by the excitement of their sheer presence. Meanwhile, the ophthalmologist carefully hunts for symptoms of macular degeneration. In all these, the eyes stand unique from the rest of its senses. While an audible sound takes place as a vibration inside the ear, sweet and sour transpire from the buds on our tongues, and the sense of touch begins from our tactile nerves, the eyes start their tasks from the outside. Every image that comes through it, a reflection of light, begins from a world, separate and external to its anatomical structure.
As kids, we once tried to roll our eyes towards the inner portion of our brains only to end up having double vision with a funny cross-eyed look instead. In our innocence (or ignorance), we wanted to see what was inside our heads, until we grew up and learned that the eyes could never witness the internal affairs of our skull. Our eyes are literally the windows to this world. For those who have not been blessed with sight from birth, there are obviously other portals, but for those with physical vision, these eyes triggered the comprehension of images.
On the other hand, Paul Gauguin, a post-impressionistic artist said: “I shut my eyes in order to see”. And so he saw the symbols of his world, colors and sketches of exotic lands in Peru (although he was from France). He wrote as if the actual sight of things were a distraction to the essence of the objects that surrounded him. Vision came from what his mind perceived.
Windows to the soul…? How so? Well, there must be some truth in the saying that when a soul can speak, its eyes can also gaze with a kiss. We have heard about those tantalizing eyes, the seductive look, and the teasing stare. In the same token, when we are able to hear what the eyes can say, then we can perhaps listen to what a heart whispers. From this point forward, everything becomes a metaphor. Or is it so?
From a physiologist’s angle, the heart’s basic mission, to transport blood around the different organisms that carry oxygen, is all there is. So how do we correlate the emotions of loving to the heart? How do our eyes send romantic messages to a throbbing myocardium that spins the head of an infatuated adolescent and ushers him to the borders of quasi insanity? Ah…the windows to the soul…?
While empirical Physics commenced from the introspections of Metaphysics, poetic metaphor must have started from the principles of crude Anatomy. Science and art were once two faces of the same coin. When industrialized specialization replaced the medieval skills of the Renaissance man, Science and Art divorced; the former being more physical while the latter apparently becoming more spiritual.
And then, “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly”, said the Little Prince. Through the pen of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, he insisted: “What is essential is invisible to the eye”. From here, it seems that the eyes are dethroned by the heart. Rightfully so, until we go back to the window of the soul.
There is something in our eyes that reveal something we do not see and cannot see; yet can be seen by those whose eyes can see with a heart that functions more than the mere pumping of hemoglobin and other connective tissues. Their function ceases as a rhetoric tool and begins as a spiritual faculty among humans who believe they have a soul.
Reflections – a circuitous process of echoing an image beyond the synthesis of our senses, an act pertinent to nature’s innate wisdom, purified through reason, delivered through our emotions. The profundity of thought is like roughage that helps absorb the different environmental stimulants so as to condense them into a sensible idea. And so perhaps we talk about “mental diarrhea”, once more a metaphor that probably started from a surgical table before it landed on a writer’s tablet.
From here, I could not help but prance into the Parables of the Gospel, succinct tales that illustrate a lesson, like that of a fable from the land of Disney. This is how I reflect, how my mind works, how I move from one phantom of linguistic cadence to another, dancing through the waves of Science and faith. From the visible to the invisible, from the palpable to the sensible, from the rational to the emotional, we see the eyes of our reflection. In the end, we arrive at the bottom line of a dead end that is not really dead. It is merely transformed.
And so is Easter. And so is the humanity and divinity of Christ. And so is the resurrection Sunday that we expected to happen after the pains of a Good Friday. Will you and your kids hunt for Easter eggs? I asked a friend why she does it with her kids and I was quite disappointed with a response that the whole neighborhood does it. Just like so many modern tribes who perform in our current culture, tradition has been devalued as an empty ritual motivated by childish games, disguised as innocence yet conceals the face of deprived ignorance.
When reflection is stripped from our regular milieu, we will tend to diminish and denigrate our acts into a vacillating activity of “hallmark” greetings – void, sentimental, maudlin, yet empty of any significance; all mushed up without the flash of any spiritual push.
I started with the eye, landed in my heart, pushed back to the eyes, and then went around in a brief, unfinished parable of an Easter Egg hunt.
Before I end, I would like to borrow a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting — a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”
And that, my friend, is my Easter Egg hunt. Happy Resurrection to all my readers: believers or not!