See Me
“There are none so blind as those who
will not see.” –An English Proverb attributed to John Heywood,
1546, with origins potentially rooted in Jeremiah 5:21.
As a
teenager, my favorite movie was Dream a
Little Dream. I knew every line. My best friend, Tammy, and I
put a tape recorder up to the television to record our favorite
exchanges of dialogue. At the time, I didn’t analyze my obsession with
the film, believing it had something to do with “The Coreys.” But I
remember loving the elderly couple in the film equally as much. The old
man writes this quote on the chalkboard in his study—“There are none so
blind as those who will not see,” and he repeats it to the other
characters.
Today my favorite films include The Matrix Trilogy, Fight Club, American
History X, and the newly added, Avatar.
It was while watching Avatar with my family, though, that I began
noticing this recurrent theme. I was drawn to the movie’s use of the
greeting “I see you.” The character Norm Spellman instructs Jake Sully
on the custom emphasizing that its use goes deeper than “Hello.”
I
then began thinking back to the literature I’ve felt similar ties
to—Plato’s “Cave Allegory,” Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and “Antigone,”
Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” and Hyemeyohsts Storm’s, “Jumping Mouse.”
There
are two possible approaches here. I could explain the way the concept
is found in each, which I know I personally would find satisfaction in
doing, but I’d have to assume that you may not have read/seen all the
works in question. That might not only be time-consuming, but I’d also
run the risk of losing the concept under the plot explanations.
The
other possibility is that I focus on the concept and only allude to its
use in the various works—but you’ll then have to trust my interpretive
assertion of the concept’s existence within each.
The concept
then:
It’s the belief that there is a layer of existence not
readily discernible to the man or woman who goes about life simply
living—taking things as they appear to our conscious selves. In
philosophical terms, those persons who concern themselves only, or
mainly, with the phenomenal world (the world of matter—those things we
can see, hear, taste, smell and feel).
Some people, however, and
in all the above named pieces, select people, come to realize that this
is an artificial layer of existence. Neo, in The Matrix, is that select person. Others discern the
existence of an “other reality” and aid him in reaching the ultimate
plane, but it is only Neo whose physical blindness in the last
installment of the trilogy (and I’ll try not to get side-tracked here by
my temptation to talk about the symbolism of a trilogy and Neo’s
companion’s name, Trinity) allows him “to see” the real Matrix.
What
the Wachowski brothers called The Matrix, Plato called The Forms.
Example: Take a moment to look around you and inspect the chairs
surrounding you at this moment. Does the chair you are sitting on
contain a back? Does it have a cushion? How many legs? Are there many
different kinds of chairs in your home, office, place of business?
My
guess is yes. And yet, we call each of them a “chair”—which chair
represents the true concept of chair? Now, when I use this exercise
with my students, one student will always point out the utility of the
object—a chair is any object we can sit on. I then sit on the nearest
table or desk and ask if I have suddenly turned it into a chair. Of
course, the answer is no, so he or she will modify—no, no, it has to be made to sit on.
Then I
begin listing the many objects made for the leisure of our bums—couches,
and stools, and benches, and lounges, etc. The game could go on for
hours, but what Plato says is that there does exist somewhere, the
perfect “form” of chair that the concept or representation of chair in
the phenomenal world is imitating. (Incidentally, this is the reason
Plato and Aristotle are accused of hating poetry—because poetry’s
imagery further imitates what is already an imitation of “the real.”)
Here’s
where things get complicated—why this interests me so much, and why I
seem to have been drawn to it for so long. At one of the former schools
where I worked I approached administration about a concern I had about
the school’s students of color. I felt their individual needs were not
fully being addressed. The response I received was in essence “At this
school we are color-blind. We see students, not minorities. To focus on
our minority students would be to exclude the majority.”
When
people see me, they usually see a Latina. Unless, of course, I’m in a
room full of Latinos—then I will most likely be seen as a gringa. People’s failure to see me
has caused me a great deal of stress. I don’t walk around with that
stress daily, and I can often focus on myself as simply an individual,
but this determination of refusing to see an individual (to willfully
choose color-blindness) is to strip the person of a layer of his or her
true self.
Let’s approach it a different way. Culture and
environment can influence blindness of concepts. For instance, if I live
in a place where there exists only one computer within a 50 mile
radius, I will most likely be without the concept of Internet. For me,
Internet is non-existent. It exists somewhere—out there—but it is not a
part of my reality, and certainly not a part of my vocabulary.
If
I live in a place where biting into an apple too slowly may bring about
an accusation of being a seductress, I will most likely be without the
concept of autonomy. It still exists, but not for me. For me, my every
move must be filtered against the norms and regulations of my present
reality.
When we use a basic term like chair, we notice the
chair’s uniqueness. We know that while we are using the general term we
are also seeing the chair’s wheels—or its four legs—or its fabric. It
would be illogical to tell someone, “I only see chair. For me, there is
only one chair. I see no discerning qualities.” Of course you see the
fabric’s texture, its color, its size, its legs or lack thereof!
This
insistence on the idea that people should be color blind to insure
equality actually strips individuals of their discerning qualities—and
therefore eliminates our obligations to meet individual needs. Does this
chair need to be pushed or picked up? We all treat chairs with rockers
differently than we do those that fold and transport easily.
I
want people to see me. I wonder what it must feel like to use that
phrase, “I see you” and mean “I see the essence of who you are.” I want
people to see my bi-racial features. To recognize my uniqueness. For
only if we first see the phenomenal aspects of a person can we even hope
to travel to the next plane and see what lies beneath, beyond.
There
are none so blind as those who will not see.