The Jess Oppenheimer Story

The following morning, while shaving, I decided to ask the man standing next to me about his vision. I was prompted to do this as he was an acrobat, and I figured he must have excellent eyes. Pointing to a sign on the wall across the room, I asked him to turn away from it, then suddenly turn and look at it. He did.

“How long did it take the signs to come together?” I asked. He gave me a look I won't forget.

“There's only one sign.”

“I know there's really only one,” I assured him, “but when you turn quickly like that, and they separate, how long does it take them to come together? It takes a couple of seconds with me.”

He managed to convince me that he only saw one sign at any time and under any conditions, and this was shocking news to me-- a supposedly intelligent, grown man. I was delighted that I had found a defect like this in myself, assuming that it could be corrected, but how could I have missed it all these years? How is it possible that I never suspected, never complained, never spoke of it before? The answer, I guess, is that we tend to feel that all people see and feel things the way we do. At least, having nothing to compare it with, I assumed my vision was normal.

I began to think back now to all the clues which should have sounded warning bells. There were millions of them. I thought of the many nights, while writing radio comedy, that I had worked until five or six in the morning and then driven home on the winding road to my house in the Hollywood Hills. I literally had to hold my hand over my left eye as I drove up the hill because the eye hurt so much. I always thought I was simply overtired. After all, as soon as I had a good night's sleep, it didn't hurt anymore.

I remembered my early childhood and how some of these symptoms which I didn't recognize led to personality and character traits. On the evenings when the housekeeper was off, my sister and I were expected to dry the dishes. When I held a dish in one hand and watched it as I wiped with a rotary motion, the whole room spun and shifted in a confusing, then dizzying, then sickening manner. I was physically ill, and I showed it. My mother asked me if I was sick; I said yes and she told me to lie down for a while. A few minutes later my sister realized that she was doing the dishes by herself. She sent my mother in to see if I was still ill. Of course, by this time I was feeling quite well, and the first few times she came in to check, I told her so. This resulted in my being marched back to the kitchen to dry more dishes and get sick again. I soon learned that the thing to do was to tell my mother I was still sick, even though I wasn't. It was much more comfortable that way, even though my sister branded me a malingerer and knowing she was right, presented an uncomfort of a sort; but I could cope with it.

I thought of my early attempts to teach myself to play the piano. I had great difficulty, in fact I found it impossible, without counting the keys, to locate middle C. When I looked from one part of the keyboard to another, the entire keyboard shifted laterally in the opposite direction from my eye movement, and in a very confused manner. Then, when they came to a stop, one keyboard stopped while the other one slowly came into place. That is, almost into place. Just as it came up to make both keyboards one, I had to look away again. My weak eye, I now know, couldn't quite line up with the other. Thus I had to keep shifting my gaze to avoid the pain the weak muscle gave me when I tried to look at one spot.

I suddenly understood why I had never been able to look anyone in the eye, a fact which always bothered me. When I was talking to someone, my eyes would be darting around the room, stopping for a moment, but only for a moment, for that is all the eye muscles would allow without becoming quite painful and causing tears to flow, on the person's eyes, then off around the landscape again. I was painfully conscious that I was not looking at him, and that he probably thought I was shifty-eyed (which I was) and most likely dishonest. This separation of one part of my attention to myself while the other was carrying on a conversation often resulted in a mental block. I would be split between the two parts and unable to function in either. At the same time I would be acutely embarrassed by my seeming stupidity.

I recalled my early attempts to play baseball. When a hit came to me in the field (I never could play the infield – and they let me play the outfield only when no other player could be located), I saw two balls coming at me. Today I make jokes about this, saying I had four hands and two gloves so I caught both of them! But that is not the truth. In the first place, I could not follow the ball as it approached me. It started from the bat, and became two, and at this point I had to look away. However, I developed a fine capacity to judge the trajectory so I could go to the place where it would land. Perhaps I took another instantaneous glance or two as it was on its way. In any event, when it came down I was right there--- and usually missed it!

My mind leaped back to the present, and i realized my eyes were responsible for the terrible difficulty I had terrible difficulty in telling whether an officer was a Commander, Lieutenant Commander, or a Captain. The gold stripes on their sleeves ran together, am moved in relation to each other, so counting them was an impossibility.

Jumping back to the schoolyard, I recalled my early attempts to rid a bicycle. I was able, after a long period of trying, to ride all right as long as I was moving in a straight line and traveling rather fast. Curves were a big problem, I was never able to master one little maneuver which all the other fellows handled with consummate ease. This was to ride a bike between the uprights of a basketball backboard. These uprights were almost four feet apart, but nine times out of ten I ran into them instead of going through. In a much more complex and confused manner than can possibly be told, there were four uprights instead of two, which made three possible passageways and I had no ability to choose the right one, since they constantly moved in relation to each other.

I had a moment of anger at my parents. Why had they let me grow up like this? Why hadn't they done something about it? But almost immediately I knew that they had tried to do something about it. I had been to many doctors – eye doctors and general doctors and internists - because of getting nauseated so easily. Invariably, following an examination, they patted my head and said I was a good strong boy with nothing organic the matter with me and that I should play in the sun and not worry so much. Even the eye doctors. I do not remember taking any fusion tests, but one of my eyes was 20/20 and the other 20/10, and it is my opinion that they weren't as conscious of fusion than as they are today.

A sudden thought burst on my mind. I had looked through stereopticians in old days. They fascinated me, I had even talked about the remarkable effect they had with people who were viewing at the same time. Stereopticians had a definite effect for me. Somehow the prisms must have given me some small measure of stereopsis. But I only spoke to my fellow viewers in generalities: how wonderful they make things look; isn't that an interesting effect, or landscape? It was semantics. The other people were thinking (oh, why didn't they say it? I might have caught on!) that the stereoptician was wonderful because it make things look just like life, while my interest came from the fact that they made things look weird, unnatural, and most unlifelike.

That morning I went to the infirmary at the Coast Guard Base. They had no facilities for treating my vision problems, but they gave me permission to see a civilian doctor. I went that afternoon. The doctor checked my eyes and told me I had an extreme horizontal muscle imbalance. (This is interesting to me because there never was a cosmetic problem. To the observer, my eyes were not out of line.) He also told me that I had never seen third dimension. I gave him a terrific argument at the time, but of course he was right. I based my argument on the fact that I could pass tests such as the boy scouts give for judgment of distance, et. I now know that, although I could get the results roughly even with the average normal boy, I did it by an entire set of judgments which had nothing to do with depth perception. Had the target been isolated in space, I would have had no way to even approach a guess. He gave me a set of exercises and told me to do them religiously, at the same time categorically stating that I wouldn't, that no patient in his experience had ever kept them up long enough and relentlessly enough to achieve a real cure. In his experience a slight improvement resulted in so much more comfort that the patient figured he was normal and discontinued the exercises. He also explained a little of the physiology involved and told me that my brain used one of the more usual methods of coping with the situation; that is, if it had crossed one eye, or suppressed the vision in one eye, or alternated the vision from eye to eye, then I would have been comfortable in a world without third dimension and might never have known I had a problem. But my brain accepted both these highly acute images and tried to deal with them and couldn't. Everything I looked at had a “ghost' image which was only slightly less clear, or I should say less strong or bright, than the real one; and each time my eyes moved the two images separated and then came together (almost) again.

That very morning I began orthoptic exercises. I am still doing them today, 21 years later. And my eyes are still improving. I begin to see what he meant by saying I wouldn't keep it up. After crossing a thousand exciting horizons, each of which I though must be the ultimate, I realize there are many more ahead.

Little by little my eyes improved. I was able to get superposition while stationary, then while moving, then steropsis while stationary, an then while moving, although not in a locked-in sense. It came and went, and when a conscious effort to hold it was not made, I reverted to my old muscle habits. When I first experienced stereopsis in a machine – it was a wire circle which suddenly became a sphere – a most distinct memory flashed into my my mind: When I was in college at Stanford, a group of us drove to Los Angeles for the USC football game. We spelled each other on the driving. Please don't ask how I was able to drive – again- I used a different set of judgments and was very, very careful – the fact remains that I took my turn at the wheel. At about four in the morning a very frightening thing happened to me. I was driving a long with everything seeming normal, to me, when in an instant everything before me changed. I can now tell you what it looked like in terms you can understand; I could not understand then. The whole vista suddenly took on a strange aspect. It was on one plane horizontally as far as I could see. The road was flat and stretched out and into the distance before me; the trees suddenly rose on both sides, standing in space; the hood of the car took on a shape and stood up from the road. I could see all these things at once and it was a most terrifying and weirdly uncomfortable feeling. It was like a fairy wonderland where everything appears unreal. I didn't like it at all and had to shake my head roughly several times before I went back to what (to me then) was natural. I said nothing of it to anyone, fearing, I must admit, that I might be losing my mind.

In days to come I was to learn, however slowly, that the space world consists of planes and corners; and people and things actually stand out vertically and have contours. I'm certain my wife never wants to hear me say again that I thought all women were flat until I go stereopsis, and then I married the first one I saw.

As I worked longer and longer on my orthopics, the world began to stand still more and more. My attention span grew longer. My brain was no longer so kaleidoscopic. I practically had to say, in dealing with an idea, I'll think some more about that one the next time it comes around. As I progressed through superposition, almost always to stereopsis sometimes, a calmness inside was apparent; and I started to be able to do something I had never been able to do before – to gaze at something – to look at one spot and keep my eyes looking at that spot in a relaxed manner. The beginnings of this were quite thrilling, and I'm getting better and better all the time, reveling in the thrill of looking people in the eye. Which brings me to a rather remarkable development. As my space world began to take form with relation to sight, a similar effect became apparent in sound. I was becoming stereophonic also, and in the same relationship as the sight.

Before the improvement began, I could not tell where a sound was coming from. I could not carry a tune, and I could not listen to music. I could hear it, but it did not become music to me. I will explain this later. For now, the important thing is that, to a great degree, sounds began to have a position in space, instead of happening at my ear. That is right, happening at my ear. When I heard a sound, let's say a bugle, loud, I would hear it right at my ear, as though the sound was happening in my eardrum. If it was a sharp or very loud sound, I would hear it as though the eardrum was an overloaded speaker, with a harsh edge of distortion to the sound that was physically painful. In any event, it would have no position in space. I knew it came from my right side because it was loud in my right ear. I would then identify the sound and look for it, but my senses did not tell me where it was in space. Similarly, if it came from my left side, I would hear it in my left ear. Seemingly, if there were two sounds at the same time, I would hear one with one ear and the second with the other ear, but I did not fuse them; just as I did not fuse the vision of the two eyes, but tried to keep track of them independently, with dire results. I could feel a shifting from one ear to the other. I remember, no too long ago, sitting for great lengths of time, listening to the tick-tock of an alarm clock and trying to keep both sounds coming from the same source. The tick came from one side, heard by one ear, and the tock from the other, heard by the other ear. More correctly, the sound came from no place in particular and I heard a tick in my right ear and a tock in my left. After lengthy trying, I could get them to fuse so that they were not heard in my ears at all, but inside my head, and they then suddenly had a position in space, as did the whole room or whatever I was looking at. I used this same system, unfortunately, in listening to music. One ear, for instance, hearing the singer and the other the accompaniment; or in the case of a duet, one ear listening to the baritone and the other listening to the soprano; or in the case of an orchestra, one listening to one part of the orchestration and the other to another part. The main concern is that in no case did they fuse into one percept inside my head, so I did not hear harmony. I could listen to one part of a chord or another, but not to the chord as a unit. What I was not listening to was there, but sort of ignored as it had no relationship with the part I singled out. Much the same as the ghost image in sight. As the vision improved, or I should say, as the mental ability to handle the images from the two eyes improved, due to the lessening of muscle imbalance, so exactly did this aural condition improve, and voices started coming from peoples' heads, and from loudspeakers, rather than having a separate existence (even though I knew, of course, where they came from).

Is it not possible that a more direct analogy exists between the ears and the eyes than is normally thought of? For instance, the ears have a little understood ability to concentrate on one sound while blocking out others, as is evidenced by the fact that we can listen to one person speaking in a noisy room filled with other conversations, or pick out and listen to one instrument in an orchestration. If it is possible for one to grow up without the ears fusing, isn't it possible for each ear to focus on a different part of the entire sound picture; thereby presenting the same kind of confused aural picture to the brain that the eyes do when they are in imbalance and confuse the brain because each is looking at a different picture?

I often use a descriptive term which I call “Point of Consciousness”. It is very delicate to try and describe what I mean. We all (I think) have a place, or a point, inside of us which is really the location of our conscious mind. This is the spot you refer to when you say, “I said to myself”. I call it the Point of Consciousness. My Point of Consciousness was always outside of and differentiated from me. I have great respect for the person who first said of someone, “He is out of his head”. That fellow knew what he was talking about. I can tell pretty well now, from reading and feeling, that what I really meant was that I had no body image. “I” existed completely apart from my body. The two were not locked together any more than the sound of a voice was locked into emanating from the speaking person's head. My Point of Consciousness wandered. It had a bad habit of standing away and looking at me, but since it was the essence of me, I was both with my body and apart from it, looking at myself, or judging my actions, or telling myself what a fool I was making of myself.

This lack of relationship between different parts of what should be seen in a visual field was very apparent in my school work and in art appreciation. In studying maps, for instance, I was never able to get a good relationship of the positions of the various states or countries. Since I was unable to see a group of states at one time with any clarity, I never knew the pattern; just as composition in pictures escaped me because I never saw the whole picture clearly at one time. In the case of maps, if I was studying Texas and Oklahoma, my impression would be formed from a succession of individual looks which never put together into a whole. Thus, I would be able to tell you that Texas came to a point at the bottom, or that it had a little offset at the top, and that Oklahoma was at that offset; but I never mentally or physically saw these two together, fitting into each other in one comprehensive or composite impression. While writing this some other examples come to mind. In watching a chorus line on the stage, or a ballet, I would always single out one person to watch, never getting the picture of what the group was doing.

A fascinating study for another time would be to try and test the particular integration of eyes and ears as they relate to various talents and types of personality. At different times, depending on whether I am seeing well or not, and to what degree, my personality goes through changes. I find that when everything is working quite well I feel a tremendous surge of vitality. It is easy to move, as contrasted with it being a very considerable effort to move when things are not right. It is not only easy to speak, or sing, but I have the ability to control my voice, make it do whatever I think -- accents, etc., are simple, true and effortless. I feel this must be what the talented actor or entertainer must feel like. There is boundless energy. At other times, when things are not so good, I feel the opposite -- retiring, quiet –- a listener. It is a great effort to move, such as getting up from a desk when someone enters the room, or to speak, particularly for any length of time, as I fight my voice and quickly get uncomfortable and even hoarse.

And the person who spends his life integrated improperly will never be able to understand either others or himself. He will assume that the state of affairs is normal and feel inferior because others seem to have the power to achieve in spite of the burden. I have been able to change and see the difference. Perhaps it may help to free others. But this is a much more serious problem than anyone realizes, and that is recognition. I don't fault my son when he comes home discouraged because at school the class had to run a lap and he literally couldn't make it around the track. He had to stop and rest and then walk the rest of the way. I fault the teacher who made up the ironic penalty that the last one to finish had to run and extra lap.

This matter of control which both sides gives one imparts a mental control also. I was a coward, with all the name, until I got some results with my eyes. Then the cowardice decreased in relation to the improvement. I can vouch for the truth of the old saw that the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once. Out of my experience, however, I give no credit to the hero. His courage is something that is built into him, that he doesn't think about twice, and certainly never goes through any mental anguish over. I can talk because I have had both experiences. It is not enough to point out that a boy who, every time he got into a fight and was the recipient of a thorough thrashing, would avoid fights. This again ignores the confusion of the fight itself, the blind inability to do anything about it, and the pain. It does not take into account the ways the same result, and, with a vivid imagination, the feeling of the pain over and over again. I spent most of my youth hating myself for the demeaning things I had to do to keep from taking physical punishment. Later, when I started to feel integrated about so many things, I have been put into physically dangerous situations and not only didn't give it a thought beforehand, but when I had to actually engage in it, I realized that my sensation of pain and its tolerance were completely different from what they had been. Before my emergence my tolerance of pain was extremely small. As little a thing as someone slapping me on the back would be intolerable. It would seem to blot out everything else so that I was only conscious of the pain. It bore, I just this moment realize, a relation to the whole space situation! The pain was not located at my back, or at a finder. It did not have a position of space away from my brain, although I knew if it was my back or my finger which was hurting. But just as a voice happened at my Point of Consciousness and blocked everything else out. Even something which would have ordinarily been easy to handle became intolerable. Somehow if it had stayed at its point of origin, I would have been able to handle it correctly. I knew because now when I am hurt it does stay put, and I can tolerate many times more of it.

A peculiar property of my eyes when they were in their worst condition was to immediately spot something out of place. This does not seem to add up with the problem, but I could walk into a room and immediately would be conscious of where two panels of wallpaper didn't match, or a spot on someone's clothing.

Another visual situation I remember distinctly was a problem where two lines, each moving, crossed each other. For instance, watching a person walking across in front of me, I found I had to watch one leg and then the other, and then the first one again, switching each time a step was over. It is only very recently that I can gaze at the field the two legs are in and see them both moving as one piece. The effect I used to get when the legs crossed was that of being attracted to the point at which the lines met; that is, the point at which the leading edge of one leg met the trailing edge of the other. As the legs came closer and closer together, this point moved downwards. Then when they crossed and started getting further and further apart, this point moved upwards. This prevailed whenever two, lines of any sort passed each other. It may have been a midline problem. I don't have the least vestige of it when my eyes are right. It was as though each eye was focused on a different leg, therefore a different plane.

I remember in college that the usual position of ease when the fellows stood in the hallways and corridors was leaning back against the wall at an angle. I could never do this for any length of time at all without having a most uncomfortable feeling, as though I was pressing hard against the wall, and soon my right back muscles would hurt. I recall another time when I went to a doctor and told him how uncomfortable I was in bed, as I felt that my head was pushing against the pillow as hard as it could, as my back was stiff as a board. In both these situations, it seemed to me mow, I could not rest in balance, but my right side had to work all the time to keep me balanced. Since the left side was ignored and the muscles all relaxed, the poor right side had to push against the wall to keep me from falling over, and my head and back pushed against the bed to give me a feeling of being in balance. In dancing also, I recall painfully, I could only get by, and at that could only turn or move in one direction -- and the right back muscles would start giving me pain. Many times I was literally dancing with tears in my eyes to continue the whole dance with a desirable partner, or to keep from having a girl feel offended if I said I could not dance any longer. I also had similar balance problems in simple situations like going around a corner in an auto. I used to have to reach up with my left hand and hold on to the window post if I was making a left turn to keep my body from going to the right. Indeed, I drove much of the time with my right hand pressed against the seat to balance myself. And in walking alongside of someone, I invariable veered off to the right and bumped into him. I also invariably blamed him for bumping into me. Today I can walk straight without thinking of it, and in making a left turn my two sides compensate together and keep me erect and in balance without any effort or knowledge on my part.

I won't even go into the effect of alcohol on me. Early in the game I gave up even trying to drink with the fellows. It had a most uncomfortable reaction in which I started to lose authority over the few controls I had at my command. There was no exhilaration, just more confusion and nausea. I take a drink occasionally today, and it has a pleasant relaxing feeling, but even so I don't think I have more that eight or ten drinks a year.

A note regarding the looking-on sensation with vision. When I looked a person in the eye it really was exactly that. I locked on to one eye or the other and there was a great empathic reaction on my part. No space existed between us and we were almost like one. It's very hard to explain. I also had the feeling when at a lecture that, when the lecturer's eye was looking directly at me, he was seeing me and only me out of the entire audience. Not knowing what it was to look at an entire audience. Not knowing what it was to look at an entire audience as a unit without fixing directly on one person, I felt the lecturer had the same experience. As a matter of fact, when I have lectured -- and I have only accepted these dates out of an internal “dare”, to prove to myself that I could do it -- I invariably locked on to one person in the audience and couldn't look away. Incidentally, most of these lecture dates were at colleges and for the theatre arts departments on the subject of television comedy writing. I invariably told the students that the necessary prerequisite for a comedy writer is a major psychological maladjustment in childhood. I qualify eminently. The point being that, unless there is some stress which permits you to observe and operate from a platform off the norm, there is no basis for humor. Essentially, comedy writers hate society. This profession gives them a safe, well-paid method of baring people's weaknesses and mistakes, of making fun of them, of demeaning them. I wonder sometimes whether, as I grow more normal, or go sane, I will still be able to write comedy. I hope so. However, if I find I can't write a lick, I can always become a producer.

Author: Jess Oppenheimer, producer of the "I Love Lucy" Show

(Permission to copy granted by author for use in training professional personnel working with children who have perceptual disorders)