Download OF HINTING WITH THE EYES

OF HINTING WITH THE EYES
AFTER verbal allusion, when once the lover's advance has been accepted and an accord
established, the next following step consists in hinting with the glances of the eyes.
Glances play an honourable part in this phase, and achieve remarkable results. By means
of a glance the lover can be dismissed, admitted, promised, threatened, upbraided,
cheered, commanded, forbidden; a glance will lash the ignoble, and give warning of the
presence of spies; a glance may convey laughter and sorrow, ask a question and make a
response, refuse and give-in short, each, one of these various moods and intentions has its
own particular kind of glance, which cannot be precisely realized except by ocular
demonstration. Only a small fraction of the entire repertory is capable of being sketched
out and described, and I will therefore attempt to describe here no more than the most
elementary of these forms of expression.
To make a signal with the corner of the eye is to, forbid the lover something; to
droop the eye is an indication of consent; to prolong the gaze is a sign of suffering and
distress; to break off the gaze is a mark of relief; to make signs of closing the eyes is an
indicated threat. To turn the pupil of the eye in a certain direction and then to turn it back
swiftly, calls attention to the presence of a person so indicated. A clandestine signal with
the corner of both eyes is a question; to turn the pupil rapidly from the middle of the eye
to the interior angle is a demonstration of refusal; to flutter the pupils of both eyes this
way and that is a general prohibition. The rest of these signals can only be understood by
actually seeing them demonstrated.
You should realize that the eye takes the place of a messenger, and that with its aid
all the beloved's intention can be apprehended. The four senses besides are also gateways
of the heart, and passages giving admission to the soul; the eye is however the most
eloquent, the most expressive, and the most efficient of them all. The eye is the true
outrider and faithful guide of the soul; it is the soul's well-polished mirror, by means of
which it comprehends all truths, attains all qualities, and understands all sensible
phenomena. It is a well-known saying that hearing of a thing is not like seeing it; this was
already remarked by Poleron, the master of physiognomy, who established the eye as the
most reliable basis for forming judgment.
Here, if you will, is a sufficient proof of the eye's power of perception. When the
eye's rays encounter some clear, well-polished object-be it burnished steel or glass or
water, a brilliant stone, or any other polished and gleaming substance having lustre,
glitter and sparkle-whose edges terminate in a coarse, opaque, impenetrable, dull
material, those rays of the eye are reflected back, and the observer then beholds himself
and obtains an ocular vision of his own person. This is what you see when you look into a
mirror; in that situation you are as it were looking at yourself through the eyes of another.
A visual demonstration of this may be contrived in the following manner. Take two
large mirrors, and hold one of them in your right hand, behind your head, and the other in
your left hand, in front of your face; then turn the one or the other obliquely, so that the
two meet confronting each other. You will now see your neck and the whole of your
backward parts. This is due to the reflection of the eye's radiation against the radiation of
the mirror behind you; the eye cannot find any passage through the mirror in front of you,
and when it also fails to discover an outlet behind the second mirror, its radiation is
diverted to the body confronting it. Though Salih, the pupil of Abu Ishaq al-Nazzam, held
a contrary view on the nature of perception to this which I have advanced, his theory is in
fact rubbish, and has not been accepted by anyone
Even if all this were not due to any superior virtue in the eye itself, yet the fact
remains that the substance of the eye is the loftiest and most sublime of all substances.
For the eye possesses the property of light, and by it alone may colours by perceived; no
other organ surpasses it in range and extent, since by the eye the bodies of the stars
themselves in their distant spheres may be observed, and the heavens seen for all their
tremendous elevation and remoteness. This is simply because the eye is united in the
nature of its constitution with the mirror of which we have been speaking. It perceives
those things, and reaches then as in a single bound, needing not to traverse the
intervening distance by stages, or to alight at halting-places en route. The eye does not
travel through space by laboured movements.
These properties belong to none of the other senses. The taste and the touch, for
instance, perceive objects only when they are in, their neighborhood, and the hearing and
the smell apprehend them solely if they are close by. As proof of that immediate
perception of which we have spoken, consider how you see an object that produces a
sound before you hear the sound itself, for all that you may try to see and hear that thing
simultaneously. If ocular and aural perception were one and the same, the eye would not
outstrip the ear.