Excerpts from Eyes by Hand:
Prosthetics of Art and Healing
When Michelle Strauss began painting my eye in 2009, she said her goal was “perfect congruence,” the prosthetic eye an exact copy of the natural eye it would sit next to. She planned, for instance, to replicate a freckle that’s on the iris of my real eye. She would paint it in the same place and of the same color, mars brown. My goal, I had been half thinking, was to be made as symmetrical as a butterfly. I once heard of something called Marlene Dietrich lighting. Most actors look better lit from one side or the other. Dietrich’s face was so balanced she could be lit dead center over the bridge of her nose and would look stunningly etched from any direction. I didn’t have quite those unrealistic illusions. My nose would remain crooked, my smile lop-sided. Anyway, as Michelle pointed out, two natural eyes belonging to the same person rarely, if ever, match exactly. Just as with the rest of the face—earlobes, contours of cheeks, thickness and growth direction of eyebrows, wrinkles—small differences abound from one side to the other. Michelle had a collection of magazine photos proving that even models have two different shaped eyelids. One of her own eyes, she said, is a smidgen higher than the other, though that seemed like something she may have noticed and had anxiety over as a teenager and had long since assigned to its proper place of insignificance. “But as soon as you lose an eye and you come to get a new eye made, suddenly that is the most important thing, that they are exactly symmetrical,” she said. “Even if they weren’t before. I’m like, Go look at an old picture.” Later, I would run across a series of photographic portraits exploring the asymmetry of human faces in an unambiguous way. The photographer, Alex John Beck, first took straight-on shots, then, for each subject, created two edited images. In one, he copied the left side of the person’s face and mirrored it onto the other side of the face’s middle axis. In the other, he did the same but with the right side of the face. The resulting two images—each perfectly symmetrical—are significantly different. Jaw lines are narrower or wider. Eyes are more widely open or more narrowly shut. Ears are higher or lower. Since Beck worked mostly with models, there was a higher natural symmetry to the original faces than would be the case throughout a general population. In fact, some edited images did not differ all that much from their original portraits—as, apparently, Marlene Dietrich’s would not have. Most, though, provided surprising revelations, and the eyes were often key to how the two edited images differed. One set of images is of a man whose right eye turns inward toward his nose, a misalignment called esotropia. The image that mirrors that side of his face shows him bilaterally cross-eyed—a presentation that would make many people with whom he interacts uncomfortable and uncertain of how to look at him. The image that mirrors the other side of his face shows him with two eyes looking straight ahead, a “normal” appearance that would not invite any questioning whatsoever. Another pair of images were made from a portrait of a man whose face is so naturally symmetrical that the edited images look as if they could be used for one of those “Spot the Differences” puzzles. A few strands of his short hair stand up in different directions. One picture shows more freckles on his neck. The real divergence between the images comes from the eyes—not in where they’re pointed or in their size or color, but in their energy. The image mirroring the left side of his face is “just a little more vacant,” Beck said. “One side is completely present and alert and getting ready and interested, and the other side is half asleep.” What I realistically wanted for myself, I actually knew, was “a harmonious visage,” that enticing nineteenth-century phrase from Auguste Boissonneau. Harmony is not necessarily symmetry. I’d previously learned that lesson from a late-twentieth-century furniture salesman. My wife and I were trying to buy some chairs to go with a cherry dining-room table we’d found at a garage sale. We assumed we wanted cherry. The salesman had said, “No, you don’t want them to match; you want them to blend.” Possibilities became infinite, and we bought light oak chairs that blended wonderfully.
In the early weeks after I’d gotten my prosthetic, a cashier at the supermarket told me I had beautiful blue eyes—a normal kindness among two strangers facing each other briefly. I thanked her and immediately asked if she could tell which one wasn’t real. She was as confused as if I’d offered to present my eyes to her on a plate, a St. Lucy appearing in line to buy the week’s groceries. Tapping my eye with my fingernail didn’t help. She chuckled awkwardly. I don’t know what story she might have told to her friends that night. Other revelations went better. I was in conversation about eye colors with three people I’d just met, and one of them described mine as “smoky.” There was no obligation to divulge the actuality of what she was seeing. Color was color, whether a pigmented iris or layers of paint. Yet I so wanted to share, even while suspecting my own motives. To brag? To startle? Maybe—the purest impulse, if I could elevate it—to commune over something extraordinary outside all of us? I tread more softly than I had with the cashier, in case the talk didn’t want to go that way. But they perked up like those people who cornered Michelle Strauss at parties. “No way! No way!” they said repeatedly. They laughed at having been tricked, stifled screams when I tapped my eye. I stopped before turning myself into a circus act.
When I’m in Michael Strauss’s office, we talk about all kinds of things, from sports to being fathers to the impact of his work on my life. But here’s my experience as a patient in that office, whether for a polishing or a much more extensive eye-making: I come out feeling more cared for, more seen, more healed (each time, amazingly) than I’ve ever felt after a visit to any doctor, after any hospital stay. This is not to dismiss the exceptional care I’ve been fortunate enough to have gotten elsewhere when I’ve needed it: the surgeries, the physicals, the vaccinations, the drugs to ease the pain of kidney stones, the stitches and prescriptions and cleaning out of impacted ear wax. Nor is it to diminish the sincere concern and attentiveness my primary care physician has shown during the twenty years I’ve been seeing her. I’m lucky that every lump and tightness and weird patch of skin I’ve asked her to diagnose has been innocuous, that I’ve so far dodged the catastrophes, that my visits have been mostly routine. But she’s beholden to the pinball-like demands of her field, attending to one patient after another from morning until evening, treating whatever condition or disease or accident or worry someone brings through the door, for all parts of the body and mind, and referring patients to specialists when they need more extensive care. That reality probably lands the duration of my times with her pretty close to the eighteen minutes that research shows primary care physicians in the US, on average, spend with each patient. Here’s a story Michael about how the making of eyes can transcend the technical, the simple providing of a product. He was in a store buying a lantern before the arrival of a big storm predicted to bring power outages. The man who waited on him had an eye that was shrunken and barely visible. Michael knew he risked offending the man by calling attention to his eye, but he spoke anyway. “I think I can help you,” he told the man. “You think you can help me?” “With your eye. I don’t mean to pry or anything, and if you’re not interested just tell me and I’ll just go another direction. But I can help you.” Michael gave him his card, explained what he did for a living—that he makes not only prosthetic eyes that replace eyes that have been removed, but also scleral shells, which are thinner and fit over shrunken eyes and don’t require surgery. “Are you serious?” the man asked. He said he’d never heard of anything Michael was describing. Michael told him they did free consultations. He offered to pick him up if he needed a ride. “And we sat in the aisle and probably talked for I bet twenty minutes or half hour,” Michael told me, “about how he was divorced, fifty-two years old, been in and out of jobs, trying to hold a job, always in the back of his head thinking when he met somebody: Are they looking at my eye or are they looking at me? When I go for an interview am I not getting the job because of the eye? Am I divorced because of the eye? It was so emotional right there in the aisle, and I’m shocked that it ever went down that way. I said, ‘Come to the office. I can show you what I can do, and we can go down that road if you want. I’m willing to work fourteen hours just on you to show you that we can do what I’m telling you we can do.’” The man did come to the office. Michael made him a scleral shell that matched his good eye, gave a balance to his face the man hadn’t had since he’d injured his eye when he was three years old. He became a regular, returning for polishes, for a replacement as needed. “Every time I see him,” Michael said, “it is right back to being in that aisle talking. For fifty years he’d lived his life knowing that’s just it, that’s the way it is. He’d said, ‘You know, I’ve accepted who I am and what I look like.’ But he also couldn’t help feeling embarrassed for his family members, or for the woman he was dating and eventually married. He said, ‘I knew she loved me, and I knew it had nothing to do with the eye, but whenever we went to a restaurant I always wanted to be the best I could be for her. And here I am with a damaged eye, and they’re looking at my eye, and I’m always questioning whether they’re thinking: Wow, she could do better with somebody else. Why is she with somebody with a damaged eye? After he got the scleral shell, his oldest daughter was getting married, and he said, ‘You know what? In pictures it’s always been: this is my eye and this is the way that it is. But now when my daughter gets married and we have pictures, I don’t have to worry about people going, Why does your dad’s eye look like that?”
As I sat in the lab of Ruth Müller-Welt, a fifth-generation ocularist in Stuttgart, Germany, she pointed out a diploma hanging on the wall to my right. I hadn’t noticed it, because it was on my blind side. But once I turned to look, I saw it was actually hard to miss. It was an award given to Adolf Müller-Welt, Ruth’s great-grandfather, for winning the gold medal for eye-making at the 1910 World Exposition in Brussels. The diploma was probably three feet high and five feet wide, covered mostly by an image that looks to have been drawn originally in pencil or charcoal. A naked man is standing tall, facing to the right, with a hammer and a book tactfully held in his right hand, a cloak over his left shoulder but not covering much else of his trim body. There is a female angel with breasts exposed and heavy-duty wings, placing a laurel crown on the man’s head. There are other female angels, and two other men, each raising a hand in honor. Below the image are these words: SOUS LE HAUT PATRONAGE de S.M. LE ROI DES BELGES Group III – Class 16 – Allemagne DIPLOME DE MEDAILLE D’OR Décerné a Monsieur Müller-Welt, Adolf Collaborateur de la Maison Müller Sohne (F.-Ad.), a Wiesbaden. There are signatures from various authorities, including Le Ministre de l’Industrie et du Travail. It is a diploma appropriately impressive for a gold medal at a world exposition. I asked Ruth how all-consuming it must’ve been for that building to be, for generations, not only the location of the family business but also the family home. Ruth’s great-grandfather, Adolf, the gold-medal winner, had first moved his family into the house when his kids were teenagers. Her grandfather, Otto, moved across town when he got married, but his son, Jörg, moved back into the house when he got married. Jörg and his wife had raised Ruth and her three sisters in the same rooms. It was all one, Ruth recalled. She and her sisters ran through the business space all the time, where her father and grandfather were working together, to get to the swing set in the backyard, because it was easier than going out the front door and all the way around. Conversation in the house was often about the business they lived amidst. Ruth’s dad would bring up work all the time, and her sisters would say, “Oh shut up, can’t we talk about something else besides eyeballs?”
The November 1911 arrest of Baron Von Schoenewitz in Hoboken, New Jersey, “threw much light on the glass-eye business of the country.” According to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Von Schoenewitz, who’d lived in Hoboken for years with his wife and family and had been a “striking character” in town, what with his handsomeness, his blonde curly hair, and his blonde mustache, had arrived home the previous Monday aboard the steamship New Amsterdam, which had sailed from Europe. Other passengers on the ship had conferred upon the baron “all the honors due a gentleman of that rank.” And yet Von Schoenewitz was no baron. He was, in fact, as the article put it, “generally known as plain Bruno C.L. Schulze.” The one honorific he could claim, because it was given to him by U.S. Customs officials after they raided his office at 511 Washington Street and found 14,000 artificial eyes—all meant for human use, as opposed to those for dolls, and all made in Germany—was “’king’ of glass-eye smugglers.” Schulze claimed his office was a factory for the manufacture of glass eyes. The feds determined it was a blind for Schulze’s smuggling operation. Schulze’s scheme had worked like this: He hired several employees of the German line steamships to convey the eyes across the ocean, then carry them off the steamers “by several methods” to a printing office on Bloomfield Street run by a Schulze accomplice, whom the feds also arrested. From that hidden stock, Schulze supplied “oculists and opticians all over the country,” at discounted prices that put some other dealers out of business. Over more than a decade, he smuggled in an estimated 100,000 eyes. The Daily Eagle summarized his financial strategy this way: There is a duty of 60 per cent. on artificial eyes. Germany practically controls the trade. Only a small number are made in this country. In the glass eye trade ordinary stock is sold at $60 per 100 eyes. When they are sold in lots less than twenty-five oculists and opticians pay $2.50 apiece. Those that are made by special order cost considerably more. By evading the 60 per cent. duty, the Hoboken dealer was able to undersell other dealers in the trade, according to the customs men. Artificial eyes of all types come under the tariff schedule as decorated glass. Schulze was convicted of the smuggling, and the 14,000 eyes seized were sold at auction for twenty-four cents apiece. A few months later, the United States District Attorney’s office in Chicago filed United States vs. 2,659 glass eyes against the Geneva Optical Company, based in upstate New York but with an office in Chicago, for buying eyes from Schulze, despite knowing they’d been smuggled. Those eyes were eventually sold at public auction as well. “Want a Glass Eye? Officer Has 2,659 to Sell” was the headline of one newspaper article.