Viewfinder by Wendy Eisenberg

After a life of horrible eyesight, dryness, infections, astigmatism, harsh blurs, migraines, expensive and heavy glasses, discomfort with the ocean, and other seemingly benign minor grievances, I caved and got Lasik in the fall of 2021. Finally able to see the world unmediated, everything about my relationship to tactility, immediacy, and perception changed. I could no longer blame the distance and otherness I feel in this world on the too-fallible panes of glass or plastic that delivered the visual world closer to me. I had to write myself into clarity about the closeness I now felt to the visual world, how disorienting clarity can be.

Writing this song cycle for improvisers was a process of meditation on the concepts of vision, the visible, signs, viewpoints, eyes themselves. Looking. That strange, faintly colonial relationship between seeing something and thinking you understand it, believing that you own it, in a way, because you can see it. I read John Berger and Jacqueline Rose and Jonathan Crary. I remembered that Spinoza was a lens grinder and considered how that informed the incredible vastness of his concept of God. I thought about how Wittgenstein went to the movies almost every day. I learned a wild fact about Bach, which is that he died of complications after being blinded by a botched eye surgery at the hands of a charlatan, the Chevalier John Taylor, who also blinded Handel. The threat of darkness, of blindness, loomed around the possibility of healing; entering the meditative field post-surgery was my relationship to risk. What do we risk for the sake of the improvement of our lives? What do we lose when we can see things clearly? What stays out of frame, and what does it mean to us to finally see it?

When you get Lasik, you stay awake, and can see the light move as the surgery is performed. You are minorly drugged and numbed, then subjected to a completely unrepeatable structural film, the transfiguration of your own body part towards optimal functioning. A Biblical act in a bright white room, a faint high voice saying to look in certain directions as the surgery is performed, and a memory of 2001: A Space Odyssey; 15 minutes of the film of your own eyes.

This song cycle is a sonic reflection on the aftereffects of this new clarity, but I wanted to give the audience a taste of that sublime visual surprise, so I had the aptly named Richard Lenz, an incredibly gifted artist and photographer, devise visual projections. In his infinite material thoughtfulness, most of the images of his projections are non-representational. They take place within the camera, how the camera looks to and within itself, without a lens but only with light. I remain astonished by his creativity and resourcefulness, the use of cardboard for a lens, the reorientation of the camera from a documenter of things external to itself into a self-reflexive instrument, the use of the viewfinder as the creator of the image, not the searcher for it.

The working name for this album was Eye Music, axed both because it suffered from some alternately techy or selfish homophones, and because of the primacy of the viewfinder as the tool of omnidirectional reflection in both Richard’s projections and my own.As composer and lyricist, as artist or lover or friend, nobody, nothing projects truly clearly. Objectivity is a seductive myth, as wiggly as anything else that wants to be seen or understood. Since writing this music, I have begun to comfort myself with the notion that loving something does not require that what is beloved be understood. I would not have reached that notion without following this meditation on sight so deeply that it showed me the beauty of what is impossible to see.

wendy eisenberg is an improviser and songwriter who uses guitar, pedals, the tenor banjo, the computer, the synthesizer and the voice.

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