Double Star

The Face: A Natural History
By Daniel McNeill

(Page 5 of 12)

"O! What a life is the eye! what a strange and inscrutable essence!" wrote Coleridge. Indeed, the eyes are far more than tools of sight, and we have just begun penetrating their glittery mysteries.

Nothing else shows thought like the eyes. They are the psychological center of the face, Pliny's "window to the soul," whose glow can speak intelligence and love. They are little pools of being, and they can bewitch us.

The eyes are as close as we get to seeing a mind. They can be dreamy, contemplative, vague. Elfride Swancourt's in Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes are "a misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface." Eyes can glint like laser pricks; one can "look daggers" at another. They can dart about like a trapped animal or twinkle with mirth. They can perform immelmanns of scorn. A look in the eye is human contact, and as Claude Lévi-Strauss found in India, can instantly spur beggars to solicit. Eyes can murmur sweet enticements; one can have "bedroom eyes." And when thought and feeling are absent, they can look hard as marbles, or even rubbery, like Popeye's in the Faulkner novel Sanctuary (1931).

Subjectively, we exist just behind our eyes, which form a transparent scrim on the world. We both oversee the outside and lie exposed to it. Hence the eyes are the most powerful and most intimate part of the face. In anger they flare, as if thought alone could scorch a target, while in shame people avert them, hiding the mind from view. And in delight and love the eyes sparkle, beckoning people to peer in. Indeed, lovers gaze into each other's eyes and feel a dizzy freefall.

The eyes seem alive, and when a razor slits an eye in Un Chien Andalou (1929), the audience always gasps. Photos of eye surgery are notoriously hard to look at. Some peoples have mutilated eyes from fear of their power. The Ainu of Japan dug a knife into the orbs of a slain bear to keep its spirit from seeking revenge, and the Parintintin Indians of South America ate the eyes of dead foes, to blind their ghosts. Images fare no better. Muhammad aimed first at the eyes when he attacked the idols in the Kaaba. During the Reformation, Dutch iconoclasts gouged at eyes in paintings, and when Easter Islanders toppled the basalt faces in their grim civil war, they methodically shattered the eyes.

For centuries many criminals believed murder victims retained an image of the killer's face on their retinas. Hence, after Frederick Guy Browne slew a constable on an English roadside in 1927, he leaned over and fired one shot into each of the dead man's eyes. Police caught him anyway.

The eye long seemed to mock evolution. How could such a splendid tool have appeared in stages? What good is half an eye? Yet the evolutionary stages are out in plain view. Protozoa have dotlike "eyes" or photoreceptors that register the mere presence of light. Limpet eyes have receded into pits. In abalones, the pit has almost closed over, forming a pinhole eye like a camera obscura. And squids, octopi, and most vertebrates have full camera eyes, with lenses that form sharp images. Using computers and cautious assumptions, biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger have estimated that an animal could go from a flat skin-eye to a camera-lens eye in 364,000 generations, or in most cases less than 500,000 years.

We possess two orbs, like every other sighted vertebrate except the four-eyed fish. Monoculars like the bloody Cyclopeans of The Odyssey and the griffin-fighting Arimaspi in Herodotus live only in myth. Even primitive worms like the half-inch Planaria, which dwells under rocks and in streams, have paired eyes. Two eyes show an item from separate angles, so it appears against a slightly different background on each retina. The brain assesses this discrepancy and thus gauges distance, a trick called parallax. Two eyes also provide backup. If some Odysseus drives a hot pike into one, we, unlike Polyphemus, have another.

The visible eye is about one-sixth of the entire ball, and its fascinating effect stems from its three interacting parts: white, iris, and pupil.

The white is part of the overall eyeball sheath, the sclera, which becomes transparent over the iris and pupil. Its gleam resonates with the teeth, and in a brilliant glance the two can seem to swap electricity.

Does it matter that it's white? Would blue suffice, or ochre? In fact, the ivory color is crucial. Since it contrasts with the darker iris and pupil, it highlights eye movements. If the sclera blended in with the iris, we would have trouble telling where people were looking and flail about socially.

Detecting gaze direction is a vital ability and our brains have special wiring for it, a weathervane for glance. It tells us whom individuals are looking at, focusing on. Hence if we see that a person is angry, we know whether he's menacing us or another. When we enter a group, this skill rapidly builds a social map, showing who is heeding whom. One scientist suggests this "attention structure" quickly clues us to hierarchy and fosters social coherence. It organizes us.

Our sensitivity to eyes yields other boons. Gaze implies one's next movements, and thus can signal purpose or desire. For instance, gorillas in the zoo will look to an object they want, then beseechingly toward a human. We say "with an eye to" and "with a view to" to denote goal, and the Zulu phrase isa liwela umfela ugcwele, "yearning reaches the impossible," means literally "the eye crosses a flooded river."

In fact, eye movement sends a constant stream of messages, and it may lie at the core of the striking eloquence of the eyes, as we'll see. But without a backdrop like the white, this language would simply elude us.

Between white and pupil lies the iris, a chromatic ring. It is not one flat hue, but a riot of spots, wedges, and spokes. Its color also changes from pupil to perimeter. Each iris pattern is unique, and experimental ATMs are already using them to identify customers.

The jumble of hues in the iris can make eye color a matter of opinion. Novelists have shamelessly exploited this latitude, ballooning interstitial tints and using the results in a subtle color-code of character. For instance, yellow eyes invoke the feral. The Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein's monster have yellow eyes, and Rosemary's baby has orbs of golden yellow, whites and all, with black-slit pupils like a cat's. Gold hints at greed and allure. Balzac endowed the miser Grandet with such eyes, and the bisexual houri in his The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1835) has eyes of "living gold, brooding gold, amorous gold." Gray eyes suggest inscrutability, and bedeck such fairly opaque characters as Homer's Athena, Flem Snopes, Lolita, Buck Mulligan, and Bartleby.

Colored contact lenses opened a Pandora's box, enabling iridescent eyes, mirror eyes, square pupils, written messages over the entire cornea. They allowed designer eyes and FX specialists exploited them. For instance, Linda Blair's vivid green eyes in The Exorcist lent an extra jolt to her possession. Today, computers can make actors' irises change color and even show little films.

The iris is actually a pair of muscles, the most beautiful ones in the body. They work like a camera diaphragm to change the aperture of the pupil, letting more or less light reach the retina. One set of fibers radiates out from the pupil. If you enter a dark theater, these marionette strings pull the pupil open. The other fibers coil round the pupil like a noose. Return to the glare of sunlight and they contract, shrinking it. Without the iris, we would often be blind.

We come at last to the black heart of the eye, the pupil. It is the object of the iris's embrace and the opening onto the wonders of the retina. One out of every five people has pupils of different diameter, which can actually change size independently and alter the balance in a few hours. Blue-eyed individuals possess larger ones, on average, than brown-eyed. The pupil is not uniformly circular in humans, and in animals it varies from the keyhole slit of the lemon shark to the horizontal blob of sheep or cattle. Shape doesn't matter. They can all control the amount of light entering the eye.

In people, the pupils take on an extra role. They are profoundly expressive. These obsidian disks widen not only in dim light, but before an image that excites us, as shrewd poker players and bargainers know. Men's pupils dilate when they look at photos of sharks and female nudes, women's when they see pictures of babies, mothers with babies, and male nudes. The pupils mirror our level of awareness overall. Fear, surprise, joy, anxiety, loud noise, and even music will expand them, and boredom and drowsiness shrink them.

We tend to like those who care about us, so big pupils attract us. Researchers showed men pairs of photos of women identical in every way except that retouchers had enlarged the pupils of one, and found men preferred her but couldn't say why. Hence dark eyes seem romantic. Rochester and Hester Prynne have deep black eyes, as does Lotte in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Our pupils reach peak size in adolescence, almost certainly as a lure in love, then slowly contract till age sixty.

The eye dances with profound little messages, the source of its life. Movement and pupil size are two of these signals, and a third is even subtler.

© 1998 by Daniel McNeill

About the Author

Daniel McNeill is a bestselling author and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Face. Mr. McNeill is the principal author of Fuzzy Logic, which won the 1992-93 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. He has written numerous other books and articles on high technology, and his work has also appeared in fiction, travel, history, law, and education publications. He lives in Southern California.