Letter #17: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes

The Horror of the See-Through World

Welcome back, me Boy-o!

Now I can finally stop singing “It’s Angkor Wat!” to the tune of “It’s Too Darn Hot!” I thought it would drive me mad.

Your trip does sound instructive. “In the eerie inner chambers of Cambodia’s ancient Hindu temples, you will often find… an abstract hybrid of cones and polygons that is supposed to stand in for the supreme cosmic being.” And, “When they make contact with human consciousness, these eternal life forces take many forms.”

Are these forms real, or mere creations of our minds? That’s our question, but the experts can’t help. “We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities,” griped the mystic psychiatrist Carl Jung.

Isn’t this to miss the point though? Reality is always and everywhere a collaboration of perceived and perceiver. In the comment section to your post, our subscriber Bruce H. Matson reminds us of the wise words of C.S. Lewis: “’You can’t go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

Some years ago, when I was working in the film business, a producer asked me to pitch a remake of the 1963 sci-fi horror movie “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.” My pitch was precisely this. The horror of having X-ray eyes is that you’re blind to everything that matters. You see right through the beauty of the world. How can you even love a woman when she’s nothing but bones? And since beauty is truth, what are you left with? An abstract hybrid of cones and polygons? This is hell! No wonder it’s too darn hot.

Before you left, we were discussing the preservation of the human in an onrushing age of technological trans-humanism. Nowhere is the danger of x-ray eyes greater than when we turn our eyes on our own bodies.

Bodies are funny. They do things we don’t always want them to do. Gender us. Impregnate us. Kill us. When science busies itself staving off sexual maturity or pregnancy or even death, how can we not begin to feel that our bodies are other than ourselves, that they are strangers to us? And if our bodies are, so is all the world. “Little we see in nature that is ours,” as Wordsworth said. “We have given our hearts away.”

The one real test of spiritual truth is faith over time. I may have only thought I loved your mother once, but after forty-five years, believing is seeing. Now I’m sure. If we replace Jungian unknowing with faith, over time we learn to see what all the world and our own flesh are showing us. Not an abstract hybrid of cones and polygons. A living God, in whose image we are made.

Your loving — and still living — Dad.