Читать книгу The Art of Seeing - Aldous Leonard Huxley - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The most characteristic fact about the functioning of the total organism, or of any part of the organism, is that it is not constant, but highly variable. Sometimes we feel well, sometimes we feel poorly; sometimes our digestion is good, sometimes it is bad; sometimes we can face the most trying situations with calm and poise, sometimes the most trifling mishap will leave us irritable and nervous. This non-uniformity of functioning is the penalty we pay for being living and self-conscious organisms, unremittingly involved in the process of adapting ourselves to changing conditions.

The functioning of the organs of vision—the sensing eye, the transmitting nervous system and the mind that selects and perceives—is no less variable than the functioning of the organism as a whole, or of any other part of the organism. People with unimpaired eyes and good habits of using them possess, so to speak, a wide margin of visual safety. Even when their seeing organs are functioning badly, they still see well enough for most practical purposes. Consequently they are not so acutely conscious of variations in visual functioning as are those with bad seeing habits and impaired eyes. These last have little or no margin of safety; consequently any diminution in seeing power produces noticeable and often distressing results.

Eyes can be impaired by a number of diseases. Some of these affect only the eye; in others, the impairment of the eye is a symptom of disease in some other part of the body—in the kidneys, for example, or the pancreas, or the tonsils. Many other diseases and many conditions of mild, chronic disorder cause no organic impairment of the eye, but interfere with proper functioning—often, it would seem, by a general lowering of physical and mental vitality.

Faulty diet and improper posture^[1] may also affect vision.

Other causes of poor visual functioning are strictly psychological. Grief, anxiety, irritation, fear, and indeed any of the negative emotions may cause a temporary, or, if chronic, an enduring condition of mal-functioning.

In the light of these facts, which are matters of everyday experience, we are able to recognize the essential absurdity of the average person’s behaviour, when there is a falling off in the quality of his seeing. Ignoring completely the general condition of his body and his mind, he hurries off to the nearest spectacle shop and there gets himself fitted for a pair of glasses. The fitting is generally done by someone who has never seen him before and who therefore can have no knowledge of him either as a physical organism or as a human individual. Regardless of the possibility that the failure to see properly may be due to temporary mal-functioning caused by some bodily or psychological derangement, the customer gets his artificial lenses and, after a short, sometimes a long, period of more or less acute discomfort, while they are being “broken in,” generally registers an improvement in vision. This improvement, however, is won at a cost. The chances are that he will never be able to dispense with what Dr. Luckiesh calls those “valuable crutches,” but that, on the contrary, the strength of the crutches will have to be increased as his power of seeing progressively diminishes under their influence. This is what happens when things go well. But there is always a minority of cases in which things go badly, and for these the prognosis is thoroughly depressing.

In children, visual functioning is very easily disturbed by emotional shock, worry and strain. But instead of taking steps to get rid of these distressing psychological conditions and to restore proper habits of visual functioning, the parents of a child who reports a difficulty in seeing, immediately hurry him off to have his symptoms palliated by artificial lenses. As light-heartedly as they would buy their little boy a pair of socks or their little girl a pinafore, they have the child fitted with glasses, thus committing him or her to a complete life-time of dependence upon a mechanical device which may neutralize the symptoms of faulty functioning, but only, it would seem, by adding to its causes.

Defective Eyes Capable of Having Flashes of Normal Vision

At an early stage in the process of visual re-education one makes a very remarkable discovery. It is this. As soon as the defective organs of vision acquire a certain degree of what I have called dynamic relaxation, flashes of almost or completely normal vision are experienced. In some cases these flashes last only a few seconds; in others, for somewhat longer periods.

Occasionally—but this is rare—the old bad habits of improper use disappear at once and permanently, and with the return to normal functioning there is a complete normalization of the vision. In the great majority of cases, however, the flash goes as suddenly as it came. The old habits of improper use have re-asserted themselves; and there will not be another flash until the eyes and their mind have been coaxed back towards that condition of dynamic relaxation, in which alone perfect seeing is possible. To long-standing sufferers from defective vision, the first flash often comes with such a shock of happy amazement that they cannot refrain from crying out, or even bursting into tears. As the art of dynamic relaxation is more and more completely acquired, as habits of improper use are replaced by better habits, as visual functioning improves, the flashes of better vision become more frequent and of longer duration, until at last they coalesce into a continuous state of normal seeing. To perpetuate the flash—such is the aim and purpose of the educational techniques developed by Dr. Bates and his followers.

The flash of improved vision is an empirical fact which can be demonstrated by anyone who chooses to fulfil the conditions on which it depends. The fact that, during a flash, one may see with extreme clarity objects that, at ordinary times, are blurred or quite invisible, shows that temporary alleviation of mental and muscular strain results in improved functioning and the temporary disappearance of refractive error.

Variable Eyes Versus Invariable Spectacles

Under changing conditions, the defective eye can vary the degree of deformation imposed upon it by habits of improper use. This capacity for variation, which may be towards normality or away from it, is mechanically diminished or even inhibited altogether by the wearing of artificial lenses. The reason is simple. Every artificial lens is ground to correct a specific error of refraction. This means that an eye cannot see clearly through a lens, unless it is exhibiting exactly that error of refraction which the lens was intended to correct. Any attempt on the part of the spectacled eyes to exercise their natural variability is at once checked, because it always results in poorer vision. And this is true even in cases where the eye varies in the direction of normality; for the eye without errors of refraction cannot see clearly through a lens designed to correct an error it no longer has.

It will thus be seen that the wearing of spectacles confines the eyes to a state of rigid and unvarying structural immobility. In this respect artificial lenses resemble, not the crutches to which Dr. Luckiesh has compared them, but splints, iron braces and plaster casts.

In this context it seems worth while to mention certain recent and revolutionary advances in the treatment of infantile paralysis. These new techniques were developed by the Australian nurse, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, and have been successfully used in her own country and in the United States. Under the old method of treatment the paralyzed muscle groups were immobilized by means of splints and plaster casts. Sister Kenny will have nothing to do with these devices. Instead, she makes use, from the first onset of the disease, of a variety of techniques aimed at relaxing and re-educating the affected muscles, some of which are in a spastic condition of over-contraction, while others (incapable of moving owing to the spasm in neighbouring muscle groups) rapidly “forget” how to perform their proper functions. Physiological treatment, such as the application of heat, is combined with an appeal to the patient’s conscious mind, through verbal instruction and demonstration. The results are remarkable. Under the new treatment, the recovery-rate is from seventy-five to one hundred percent, depending on the site of the paralysis.

Between the Kenny method and the method developed by Dr. Bates there are close and significant analogies. Both protest against the artificial immobilization of sick organs. Both insist on the importance of relaxation. Both affirm that defective functioning can be re-educated towards normality by proper mind-body co-ordination. And, finally, both work.

[1]	See Appendix II.