Lin Xue - Near-Far
An accidental injury to my left cornea left me unable to keep both eyes open for more than two weeks. During this brief but intense period, I had to keep my eyes shut to ease the pain, rendering my glasses useless. With my myopia, my world dissolved into shifting, unfocused shapes, ripples of color and glare and shadow. These unique visual experiences lingered long after recovery, prompting me to reconsider not only the refractive error of my eyes but the nature of seeing itself.
We tend to believe vision is reliable, a clear window to the world. But when I tried to examine my own reflection, struggling to bring my eyes into focus, I understood how fragile and uncertain sight can be. Just as Merleau-Ponty wrote: “The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the 'other side' of its power of looking.” My eyes were both seeing and being seen, yet nothing felt truly in focus.
My experience of blurred vision was not just a distortion; it became an alternate way, or perhaps the intrinsic way of sensing the world. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that vision isn’t merely about receiving images; it’s about how we move, how we inhabit space, and how our bodies shape what we perceive. Seeing, then, was no longer only about looking. It was about feeling, remembering, and imagining what lay beyond the haze.
Near-far moves between these states, focus and dissolution, presence and absence, intimacy and distance. It makes me wonder what it truly means to see, and how much of our vision is shaped not by the eyes, but by everything else we carry within us. It could be near, and still far.
