The Brier Plans a Mountain Vision Center

      When an optometrist announced the opening of a practice in the county seat, the Brier considered opening his own Mountain Vision Center.       He knew there was a need, knew the many problems of his neighbors:       Love was blind.       Justice sat winking at cousins in the jury box.       Men undressed mountains with their eyes.       Dollars signs caught the eyes of children—and held on.       Some were so far-sighted they couldn’t see now for later.       Others couldn’t see later on for now.       And still none saw further than ridge-to-ridge.       Some suspected the ocean was a tall-tale.       A girl who actually saw the ocean on vacation came home disappointed.       Nobody saw any way out.       Anyone who took a backward glance was apt to step out in front of a coal truck.       People saw smokestacks in their neighbors’ eyes but not the stripmines in their own.       So many folks saw double: one eye squinted so they could like themselves; the other wandered, looking about to see if other people liked them.       Some had no eyes at all, saw everything with someone else’s.       They saw through everything and into nothing.       Out looking for the woods, they walked into trees, over highwalls.       The Brier pictured himself in his Mountain Vision Center, standing in a white lab coat, like in an ad for aspirin, pointing to the writing on the wall.       He wouldn’t post bare facts, the naked truth. Blind in the blizzard of their senses, dazzled by the light of now, people would only look away, shading their eyes with a hand.       Anyway, facts were like a woman: never so naked as when seen beneath a revealing dress.       The trouble was, the things folks saw every day, and things they said themselves, they never saw or heard at all. But what they saw or heard without surprise would astonish them if they read it.       He’d show them familiar facts—but caught up in a vision that made things strange and new, that way of looking that made a cloud against blue sky a whale on the ocean.       They liked play-acting, tricks and sleight- of-hand. If he could work with a needle convincingly enough, they’d see the thread that wasn’t there.       Instead of charts with letters large and small, he’d put up newspapers, poems and stories. He’d post the news—beside the news that stayed news. Have them read it off to him, as they might cards with rows of numbers. He’d have them add up poems and stories, and legal notices of intention to mine, like columns of figures, and so count all the sums they were.       He’d recommend exchanging rose-colored glasses for poems that made gentle contact with the mind’s eye, like a soft lens, lining up then with now, now with then, news with news that stays news, like front and rear gun sights.       He’d have them step though the door of a poem or story, as if into a dark projection room. Like children running back and forth in front of a beam of light, they’d see leaping shadows of themselves, their own dark shapes on a screen.

      If they became visible to themselves, the things they saw and said every day, without surprise, would astound them.       Someone’s eyes would narrow with suspicion that something very different from what seemed to be happening was actually going on. Something . . . a shape that had no name. Then someone would name the shape. Then everyone could see it who could say it.       They’d see the hand that was supposed to guide everyone’s self-interest, invisibly, was tipping over mountains, scooping up land, and reaching into their pockets. They’d see they dangled from strings held by that hand; see that it had a face and corporate body, and sat in a boardroom tapping its foot to the jig they danced.       They’d see they were moving along at sixty minutes an hour on a mountain road, into a future that was a mirror with no...