Learning to See

The light that shined in darkness wasn’t only the Star of Bethlehem.  It was also a pre-war opaque projector manned by a guy who looked like Mr. Magoo.

Aloysius Weimer was, to my 20 year old eyes, a fossil.  He would walk down the hallway of the old Science Building at U of D in his gray suit, his back bent so his head with its fringes of white hair would be out there in front of the rest of him, as if it were scouting for the rest of him.  He wore glasses that magnified his eyes, giving him an owl-like look, making it seem that he was alien to the light of the hallway.  His gait was a kind of slow-motion falling forward from one foot to the next, his suit jacket open and his white shirt bulging just a bit at his belt, his bow tie suggesting a wit and a flourish lurking beneath his schlumping exterior. 

Under his right arm, filling the length of his rumpled sleeve from his hand to his armpit was a black leather folder, maybe 18” x 24”, the corners and edges of posters and matted photos protruding past its open zipper.  Those posters and photos would be the day’s fare in the windowless auditorium designed for projection of images on its 12 foot high screen in Dr. Weimer’s “Introduction to the Plastic Arts” course.  “Plastic” referred not to the polymer stuff that we recycle now, but to forms of art that we can touch – painting, sculpture, architecture, for example, as opposed to music.  “Introduction to Music” was the other of the two Fine Arts courses taken by all U of D students, generally only because they were required for graduation.

Entering the room, he would flop the folder onto the black stone countertop that spanned its front, behind which the teachers would pace as they lectured, writing on the blackboard behind the white screen that could be pulled from the high ceiling by a cord.  The seats in the room were in rows that rose toward the back, amphitheater style.  He would scan the room, left, right, up, down, with those owl-eyes of his, then open the folder and slide the first of the images into the horizontal slot in the large black crackle-painted opaque projector that seemed like it had been in the room since it was built in 1926.  Its bright light would shine on the image from the top, casting its likeness on the big screen, a likeness that could only be seen when Dr. Weimer reached over and shut off the lights.  Now we were in darkness, our pupils gradually dilating enough to distinguish the building, or painting, or room that was pictured there, as Dr. Weimer lectured and pointed to featured on the image.  In the anonymity that the darkness gave us, it was easy to sleep, and I soon developed the habit of nodding off and catching only snippets of his lectures, aroused perhaps as he turned on the lights to switch photos. 

And it was an accident of such a chance arousal that gave me one of the greatest insights of my college years.  I discovered my desire to really see.  After the first few days of the course, we had become accustomed to a certain dance that Dr. Weimer would do, a precisely timed process of turning on the lights, sliding out the picture from the projector, taking the next image from the black folder, putting into the slot, then reaching over to turn off the lights, and launching into this enthusiastic lecture before our eyes could even adjust to the image on the screen.  Perhaps it was the deviation from this precise timing of this dance that made me alert in the moment that he stood before Michelangelo’s Pieta projected on the screen.  What I noticed was that he just stood there, looking at it like we would look at a sunset, stilled, unmoved by time.  I don’t think it was more than ten seconds, but in his stillness and reverence the time expanded, and it surrounded me – the time, his stillness, his reverence.  In that expanded moment, I looked at his face, illuminated by the image as his owl-eyes gazed at it, and at the gray image of the woman cradling her son’s limp body, and then back to his face. In that moment, I knew that I didn’t see what he saw.  I didn’t see what stopped him like that, what brought him to such awe.  

I didn't see what he saw, but saw that he saw. And there in that big, dark room where we all sat because it was required of us, I found aspiration, and took in the seed of a desire.  I wanted to someday see something as he saw the Pieta, to be stopped by beauty, to be stopped in my tracks, to be stilled by awe.   

I was, in his class as in most, a mediocre student.  I continued to sleep through much of his lecture there in the darkened room, and to fail to recall from the textbook or my sparse notes the facts or concepts that he would ask for on his tests.  I suppose I ended up with a “C”.  But in that dark room, from the little man with owl-eyes that looked a bit like Mr. Magoo, I learned to see.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.