One or two eyes

'She is looking through me' observed my friend. She was referring to one of four figures in a painting I'd been working on. All of them are looking at something and where their eyes are directed is making a difference. One figure is behind a camera, and his "eye"is taking in the sight through a technical device. Another figure is looking at the two others which gaze out at the viewer. These two are layered on eachother, and the one in the fore is someone I know personally, and the one underneath symbolic. This last was causing trouble. She was looking at us, with one eye was obscured, and indeed she seemed to look past you. I tried various things; a hooded eye,closed, squinting, frowning, smiling, but the gaze was still blank. Finally I tried two eyes, and going from eye to eye she was suddenly less staring, though I had done little other than make sure both pupils were centred. Could it be the fact that by absorbing that she had two eyes, it became apparent that she could triangulate, and that we felt seen? Her eyes could now train in on us, whereas before that was not a sure thing? This then suggests how much our eyes are connected to our understanding of spatiality, and how much we rely on our eyes to give us a sense of how someone else is looking at us. The nature of the look is deternined by how we understand the eys function. However having four eyes trained on me was disconcerting. I briefly considered her face turned away but then she was less present. Then I wondered about a mask. Would she be too wooden? She was not. She became a presence that was not distracted and nor did it compete with the immediacy of the fore figure. I did not catch all the iterations, but here are four. I think I like the first one best!

Ambivalence to the present

My daughter is about to arrive, and I am very much looking forward to seeing her. There are some chores that need to be done before she comes. They may not be. But it would fulfil the picture in my mind if they were. Where to start? I am unmotivated to begin, and I am suddenly feeling at a loss, and I want to get away from the feeling I have that is unidentifiable at the moment. But I don't want to go to what I know, either, and neither do I want words for this that I do not know. I do not want to succumb to needing to know the way I normally do. Sitting with deeply ambiguous feelings- ones that are unformed, reforming, inidentifiable, is for the most part uncomfortable for me. I am uncertain of how to read what is happening, and I resist swinging to conclusions in order to find something concrete. There is also a time factor. It might be crucial I make decisions and if I do not know the feelings, I cannot proceed. The survival button gets pushed, whether that is necessary or not. Ambiguous feelings leave me ungrounded, and therefore possibly not as resident in my body. I wonder if it is this latter that makes me most uncomfortable. If I can stay in the moment, with awareness in the body, those times might be more bearable. Rather than easing or cloaking the anxiety produced with other activities or distractions, I could remain in the not knowing. I cannot say I am successful. Pema Chodron calls the unknowing the ground of being. Her words help me! This irritates me somewhat (somebody else's words have rescued me), but at the same time I realize that is a vanity and am wholly grateful for the words that guide me to that place of acceptance and in fact a deep peacefulness. I am left with the question of how we recognize an image and its meaning, and the use of language in that process. Language is visual, spoken and written. There is an area between feelings, image and words that have different functions in coming to one's 'ground of being'. I might call that a natural state of ambivalence to staying present, felt in the body.