Cycling last spring, I noticed the trees had eyes. Once I started noticing them, I found disembodied eyes everywhere: on money, hands, walls, doors, stained glass in churches, and hanging from branches on more trees. It feels like they're following me.
Evil eye charms in Turkey
Disembodied eyes are often featured in the art of people suffering from schizophrenia. The experience of schizophrenia, I read, often involves a breakdown or dissolution of the boundary between one's own self and the external world. For example, one symptom of schizophrenia is that internal thoughts present themselves as external voices.
The art of schizophrenia sufferer Louis Wain can be read as showing this blending of the individual identity (in the form of a cat) with the external world.
The way the background in these paintings seems to resonate with the subject, as if the subject is dissolving into the environment reminds me of some of the paintings of Vincent van Gogh.
Perhaps artists with schizophrenia include disembodied eyes in their work because they are an apt graphic symbol for the experience of breakdown of boundaries of the self, the merging of the observing self with the surrounding universe.
In a moving Ted Talk, Jill Bolte Taylor describes the experience of having a left-hemisphere stroke. Dr Bolte Taylor recounts how the merging of self with the the universe was experienced as a euphoric epiphany.
"I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there."
Dr Bolte Taylor's language is spiritual, nearly religious. Before van Gogh was an artist, he had a career as a religious evangelist. Perhaps the religious experience of becoming one with the universe is much like the schizophrenic experience of losing one's boundaries of self. This may be why disembodied eyes appear regularly in mystical and religious art.
Buddhist eyes in Nepal
Egyptian eye of Horus
Islamic Hamsa
Tentacled eyes in Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome Jeremy Thorpe
The disembodied eye also shows itself in some notable secular circumstances, maybe in an attempt to coopt the aura of enlightenment:
Masonic eye of providence
US dollar bill
Since last spring, when I first noticed it beside the cycle path, repeated sightings have confirmed my suspicion: the disembodied eye is following me. I think it's trying to tell me to be more respectful of those with mental illness, and less respectful of those claiming insight to the mind of God.
Keep your eye out.
If your interests include theory and philosophy, please check out my other blog.
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