Dead Things Don't Have Eyes
Formation and Story
Somehow it’s 8 PM, and there’s a sink full of dishes even though we ate out of the freezer tonight, and we heated it in the microwave. And by we I mean the kids, because eating has been difficult lately. Not eating disorder hard, just “I never quite feel like eating will solve the problem.” Whatever the problem is.
I had dinner with a friend last night. He reached out because he’s struggling through a breakup. He just needed to just talk, so we met up for dinner. We had Indian food, and I brought the leftovers home. The kids and I woke up to saag paneer, naan, and chicken biryani for breakfast.
Today our class talked about Sylvia Wynter’s essay from 20031 where she talks about how humans have been thinking about ourselves in the same way structurally for hundreds of years. In the western world, one perspective has dominated how we tell our histories and how we describe what it means to be human beings.
I have written about my kids for years. I love to describe their personalities and record memories that showcase who they are. Well … they showcase who I perceive them to be. Like Cheetah’s first joke. She was in pre-K, and we were driving home from picking up Lima Bean from kindergarten. He told one of those long, elaborate 5-year-old boy jokes that end up feeling more like a Tourette’s episode than humor.
The joke started about seven stoplights from the house. In Houston traffic, that’s a twenty minute drive. “Hey Mom.”
“Yeah Bud?”
“What do you uh. What do you call, Hey Mom?”
“I’m listening; what do I -”
“Hey Mom, what do you call a piano that, No Wait. How does um,” He tapered off, lost in thought for a few seconds. I kept watch in the rear view mirror; we were parked at a light anyway. “Oh!” He popped up, “Hey Mom!”
The light cycled. We’d driven fifteen feet. I gripped the steering wheel until I felt my fingernails scratching my palms, but I avoided interrupting him.
“How does a piano tell you something very important?”
I pulled through the intersection under a yellow light. “I don’t know, how?”
“IT LEAVES YOU A NOTE.” The traffic stopped again. My car sat on the 20 foot space between the railroad tracks in front of me and the six-lane intersection behind me. I barked out a laugh and said, “Oh my God, Dude. That’s so corny,” and we lapsed into silence. The cars ahead of us inched over the railroad tracks, and my mind wandered away to think about dinner and marital discord.
“Hey Mom.”
Cheetah’s tiny voice zapped me back to reality; our turn to cross the tracks loomed ahead. I wondered whether I would be able to drive across them without stopping; if I couldn’t make it, I’d incur the wrath of 800 gun-wielding Texans behind me by refusing to cross the tracks until I could clear them. All this shot through my mind in milliseconds, and Cheetah plunged ahead without waiting for me to ask for more.
“What do you call a hohwse wif no eyes?”
I blinked and glanced in the mirror. “A horse with no eyes? What do I call a horse with no eyes?” I’m pretty sure the bafflement came through in my voice.
“Yes.” she said, solemnly. “What do you call a hohwse wif no eyes?”
“Uh,” I chuckled nervously. “I don’t, uh I don’t know, what?”
I felt the tracks rumble under my wheels as she stared out the window, eyes focused on the church ahead, and said. “Dead.”
I sucked in my breath, and she went on, “because dead fings don’t have eyes.”
The unholy guffaw that left my body.
You now have a really solid sense of my experience of both of these children. I tell these stories and plenty of others like them at family gatherings, on stage, and right here in my Substack. Every person they interact with, even their conceptions of themselves, incorporate these kinds of stories. They’re told with admiration and affection and love.
My kids barely remember the actual events. They have a self-conception, an inner life so much more expansive and creative and rich than these cute little stories, but these stories disproportionately (compared to their inner experience) affect how the world interacts with them.
Every story we tell, especially the true ones, have this impact on the subject’s lived experience, and every story teller brings her unique perspective to the story.
Wynters takes this idea and scales it to historical sociological proportions with particular focus on The Western World. From the Middle Ages on, the people who told the stories of (western, Euro-centered) humanity were well, you know. Men. They understood themselves to be unique and special, and they told a story where beings’ differences were emphasized. They described man divided, on a different “tier” from God. Then they pointed out and examined what appeared to them to be God’s division from creation. This informed how people thought of themselves in relation to creation and creator.
Then the Renaissance and the Reformation used that same divided structure to describe the world and other beings in terms of Rational Thought and Everything Else. The structure carries forward again when the same perspective—the men recording and interpreting their moments in history in real time—turns away from pointing out the distinction between man in the Cosmos and begins pointing out the distinction between men and everyone else.
Even the way they talked about people gave away their perspective. All people were described as men. Our society came to see itself as “man” and “everything else.” And that colors every person’s experience of self and even of reality.
In her essay, Wynters proposes that we look for a way to tell our stories that allows for more than just Man/Other in its structure. In class we talked about this need in context of the development of AI, which is being mathematically trained on biases that we only barely understand that we have. AI needs the versions of stories told by women, by people of color, by immigrants, unhoused people, refugees, ChildlessCatLadies, ascetic monks, goat herders, suburban dads, autistic people, folks with disabilities; all these voices are humans, and without all these voices, AI will be fed a version of reality far inferior to the one we actually get to enjoy.
Years later, Cheetah heard me tell a friend the story. When I delivered the punch line, my friend hollered as expected. Cheetah popped her head around the corner and said with all the seriousness in her Wednesday Addams little soul, “Yeah, but now I know better. Of course dead fings have eyes. I don’t know why I thought that.”
Sylvia Wynter. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2003. The Michigan State University Press. pp 257-337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015