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Googly Eyes
Winner of the
2009 Wallace Prize, administered by the Yale Daily News
by Anthony Lydgate ’10
The
clock has twelve eyes, one for each hour. Three and nine o’clock are green,
twelve and six are gray, and two is hazel. The eye at five o’clock looks as if
it’s just been on a bender; its iris is surrounded by a dense network of red
veins, and its sclera (the “white” of the eye) is pink with irritation. The
eyes are glued onto a standard-issue square office clock, black with white tick
marks. From their vantage point on the wall of the New Haven office of Mager
& Gougelman, Inc., the eyes can see several chairs, a small table with a
stack of magazines, and two paintings of churches. I am staring at five o’clock
when a man walks through the door to my left. He looks to be in his early 40s
and is wearing a white lab coat. His eyes are slate-colored, but will seem to
change every time I meet him over the next few weeks—something to do with the
lighting and the color of his shirt. Introducing himself as David Gougelmann,
he ushers me out of the waiting room and into the back.
Like
generations of his predecessors, Mr. Gougelmann is an ocularist, a maker of
artificial eyes. His corner office, high-ceilinged and small, seems to function
primarily as a storage facility. He apologizes for the mess, explaining that
his company’s New Haven branch is just a satellite; in addition to serving his
New England clientele, it must accommodate the paperwork and retired inventory
that flows out of the cramped headquarters in New York City. Though the
cardboard boxes piled on the floor say things like Crown Towlmastr III Roll
Towel Dispenser, they actually contain files—and eyeballs. The files consist
largely of appointment books and ledgers from years past, ruled beautifully in
red and blue, filled with minute cursive. The eyeballs are mostly made of
glass, which means they’re quite old. Though glass is no longer used to
fabricate prosthetic eyes, Mr. Gougelmann keeps these specimens around for
their historical importance; many of them were made by his forebears. The family
business, Mager & Gougelman, Inc., has been accumulating eyeballs for over
a century.
Though
the New Haven office is interesting for its clock and archives, little goes on
there in the way of eye-making. All the action takes place in M&G’s main office,
which is located at 345 East 37th Street in New York. I go there one
day in late October, taking the elevator up two floors and walking into Suite
316. In the waiting room, two Spanish-speaking women are poring over a Medicaid
form. There is a door with a sign forbidding the use of cell phones, and it is
from here that Mr. Gougelmann emerges. He is wearing the same boxy lab coat as
before; it makes him appear shorter and stockier than he really is. His eyes
look blue today, but his hair hasn’t changed: it is the same carefully coiffed
brown-gray, longer on the top than on the sides, with sideburns that curve
slightly forward. Sometimes Mr. Gougelmann looks up at the ceiling when he’s
answering a question, as though a committee in his mind is deliberating and
he’s awaiting the results. In these instances, he prefaces his responses with
the phrase “We’re gonna say…” Other times, he answers quickly and concisely.
Whenever I ask a particularly stupid question—“Why don’t you just paint the
pupil freehand?”—Mr. Gougelmann remains silent; he waits patiently while I
figure it out for myself.
In December 2006, a woman’s body is
found in Shahr-i-Sokhta (“Burnt City”), Iran. Little of her is left—a few
shards of bone, a fractured skull—but this is not surprising, since her
skeleton is as old as Stonehenge and the pyramids. What is surprising is the
contents of her eye socket: a small sphere of bitumen paste, a tar-like
petroleum derivative, inlaid with capillary-like golden wires. Though the eye
looks something like a chocolate truffle—far from real, in other words—it
is quite advanced for its time. Five thousand years ago, ocular prostheses were
usually glorified patches, painted pieces of clay worn over the eye. The Burnt
City woman, however, had enough money and clout to commission an in-socket
artificial eye. Though the prosthesis didn’t fit perfectly (there is evidence
of an abscess on her upper eyelid), it must have been a striking sight just the
same—a glittering chunk of tar in her left socket.
The
idea of wearing a foreign object inside one’s skull might seem bizarre to some
people. But as Mr. Gougelmann explains, not wearing anything in the place of a
lost eye would be even more unsettling. “It would be like walking around with
your mouth open,” he says. If left to its own devices, the cavity formerly
filled with an eyeball (also called a “globe”) eventually collapses, giving the
face a distorted and droopy appearance. Until about a century ago, there had
been comparatively little progress in the socket-filling arena. Though a tar
eyeball sounds strange, the millennia after Burnt City saw a host of even
stranger fillers, including aluminum, silver, gold, fat, platinum, silk, ivory,
cartilage, bone, catgut, sponge, wool, cork, rubber, peat, agar, paraffin, and
asbestos. Today, ocular implants are typically made of thermoplastics or porous
materials like coralline hydroxyapatite, which comes from sea coral.
For
a long time, of course, artificial eyes were made neither of asbestos and
catgut nor of polyethylene and sea coral. For a long time, they were made of
glass, like the specimens in Mr. Gougelmann’s New Haven office. The practice of
blowing solid glass eyes appears to have begun in 18th-century
Venice, though it is generally accepted that the Germans perfected it. The
craft spread throughout Europe, quickly becoming the mainstay of ocularists. In
many ways, glass eyes were superior to what came before; they mimicked the
colors and general appearance of a human eye better than most other materials,
and were not rejected by the patient’s body. But they were also extremely hard
to fabricate, and could not be altered once they had hardened. As Mr.
Gougelmann put it, “If your glass eye maker was having a good day, you’d get a
good eye.” The 20th century glass eye, light and hollow, was little
better. It would sometimes explode in the wearer’s socket due to temperature
changes, like an ice cube dropped in warm water.
One
of the best descriptions of glass eye-making comes from the British writer Henry
Vizetelly. In his memoir, Glances Back Through Seventy Years:
Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences,
Vizetelly describes the office of a Parisian ocularist in 1868.
… collections of artificial eyes were
displayed in hermetically-closed glass cases for the admiration of visitors on
the look-out for a visual organ… Most of them were brilliant and so piercing
that they seemed to look through one. On one side were laughing children’s
eyes, next to them liquid-looking, love-sick eyes of young girls, languid eyes
of middle aged women, eyes with an amiable or sinister expression, severe
official eyes, then old men’s eyes that were slightly filmy.
Though the eyes Vizetelly saw were varied, the Parisian
ocularist’s clientele was singularly elite; these were people who “would no
more think of wearing an artificial eye of home manufacture than a pair of
gloves that had not come from Jouvin’s.” Though the masses generally couldn’t
afford glass eyes—as Vizetelly remarks, “we all know that superfluities are
not for needy people”—botched or secondhand eyes trickled down, and nice ones
were sometimes available for rental. Really screwed-up eyes, the “waste eyes”
that not even the poor wanted, were given to the only people who would accept
them without complaint: “that section which enjoyed the honour of being
embalmed.” In other words, they were pawned off on dead people. I do not ask
Mr. Gougelmann if he engages in this practice.
Another
peculiar habit of the Parisian ocularist was to employ a one-eyed manservant,
whom Vizetelly affectionately dubbed “Jean Polyphéme.” This “liveried cyclops”
received a custom-made glass eye as part of his service. When prospective
clients seemed anxious at the thought of getting an artificial eye, it was the
servant’s job to “introduce a knitting-needle under his eyelid, remove his eye,
and place it in the hand of the astonished spectator as unconcernedly as though
it were a shirt stud.” The idea was that if the ocularist could make a fine eye
for his servant, he could do the same for a gentleman.
There
are no liveried cyclopes lurking around Mager & Gougelman, Inc., and there
are no longer any glass eyes either (other than the curios in cardboard boxes).
By the time Mr. Gougelmann started apprenticing in the summer of eighth grade,
acrylic was the norm. World War II was largely responsible for this, as German
glass became scarce and plastics technology improved. (The War also accounts
for the missing n in the name of the
business; the Gougelmanns dropped it to avoid sounding too German.) Though he
began by sweeping floors and polishing color samples, Mr. Gougelmann was
painting eyes by eleventh grade, and sitting in on appointments by the summer
before college. He practiced his skills by making joke eyes for his friends.
These found their way into earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and guitar picks.
Some ended up in ice cubes, and one especially large one was used to adorn a
transmission shifter. As Mr. Gougelmann says, “Growing up in the business, we
put eyes in lots of places.”
“The
business” has been around for 158 years, ever since Swiss immigrant Peter
Gougelmann founded it in 1851. Though it has grown and shrunk amoebically over
the decades, Mager & Gougelman, Inc. continues to be one of the most famous
makers of artificial eyes in the world. Its clients have included Peter Falk,
Joseph Pulitzer, Helen Keller, and several thoroughbred racehorses. (There was
also nearly an old Central Park Zoo lioness, but she “reverted to youthful
vigor” upon the ocularist’s entry into her cage, and was therefore never
fitted.) One article from the New York Daily News even alleges that the Gougelmann name is responsible for the phrase googly eyes. This
is an etymological claim with which other sources, most notably the Oxford
English Dictionary, disagree. Besides, the whole point is that Mager &
Gougelman, Inc. does not manufacture googly eyes, which are defined as “large, round, and staring.” They
tailor the eye to the patient, easing the transition back into normal life and
scrupulously avoiding what Mr. Gougelmann calls the “mannequin effect.”
“To
the one eyed golfer all greens are flat.” According to George Godber’s November
1987 letter to the editor of the British Medical Journal, the “one eyed
individual” must engage in a number of compensatory behaviors, including:
reaching nearly to an object quickly,
but feeling for the last few inches; always touching the cup or glass rim
before pouring into it; constantly turning one’s head and watching for kerb
edges or raised paving stones; always feeling with one’s foot for the height of
the first step down; never hitting across the line of a moving ball, whether at
cricket, tennis, or squash.
Other concerns include transitioning to spectacles when
“one’s aging skin fails to hold the monocle reliably,” and circumnavigating
half-open doors so as to avoid walking into them.
At the most basic level, loss of
stereoscopic vision means a damaged sense of depth perception. But the trauma
of eye loss is also accompanied by a wide range of psychological problems. Some
patients react apathetically, says Mr. Gougelmann, while others seem suicidal—he often refers people to therapists. (This may be why the American Society of
Ocularists recommends studies in “communicative skills and applied
psychology.”) For those who have lost both eyes, the difficulty is of course
even greater. Many of the associated effects are relatively predictable—decreased mobility, difficulty with the techniques of everyday living, the
possibility of unemployment and financial insecurity. But there are also
ramifications that sighted people might never expect. Many of these are
enumerated in Father Thomas J. Carroll’s Blindness; what it is, what it
does, and how to live with it. Though the
book is far from recent (one chart makes reference to “professionally recorded
33 rpm records”), its psychological insights remain relevant. Some blind people
experience a loss of kinesthetic pleasure, the satisfaction of seeing
themselves moving “against a background of nonmotion.” There is also what Carroll
terms a “loss of obscurity,” the inability to blend into a crowd. For many
blind people, the most profound and tenacious loss is a constant feeling of
incompleteness. It is perhaps no accident that the surgical procedure for
removal of the contents of the eyeball is called evisceration, suggesting that the eye is at least as important as
the liver or the spleen.
Even
for patients who have come to terms with eye loss, the idea of wearing a
prosthesis can provoke anxiety and fear. From the online forum of the Royal
National Institute of Blind People:
toni9101 said on 24 August 2008 at 11:25 PM
My optician has told me that i have to
have a prosthetic eye… i am so scared of having this operation and wonder if it
will be the best thing to do or shall i just leave it? Will i be able to do
normal things like swimming having a shower, lifting things—will i be able to
drive? Will my eye look normal will it move with my other eye there are so many
things i need to know has anyone else been through this?
The answer to toni9101’s question, as Mr. Gougelmann would
doubtless say, is that a plastic eye can do all of the things a natural eye can—except see. An artificial eye’s verisimilitude and motility (ability to move)
will depend largely on the patient’s physiology, on the state of his tissue and
muscles. But even a patient with extensive trauma and an immobile prosthesis
can expect some relief. Tinted lenses and thick frames go a long way;
self-confidence goes further, as nicolawyatt, one of toni9101’s respondents,
proves. A neighbor of hers, she says, has a prosthetic eye—but he still
“seems to get the girls lol.”
Mr.
Gougelmann takes me to see his lab, which is in the back of the New York
office. My first impression is that it stinks; my subsequent impression is that
it’s tiny. Mr. Gougelmann has to go see a patient, so I am left in the room
with his brother, Andrew, who is at his workstation polishing a finished eye.
(Andrew is the one who made the New Haven eye clock.) I spend some time looking
around, not wanting to disturb him, and it is then that I become aware of the
origins of the smell. The desks are strewn with hazardous materials—a jug of
Sunnyside Denatured Alcohol Solvent, several canisters of Blazer Triple-Refined
Butane, globs of Winsor-Newton oil-based paints, a number of seedy-looking
bottles simply labeled monomer—and there is no ventilation system to speak of. When I ask Andrew whether the
smell bothers him, he seems surprised. The fumes have become such a fixture
that he doesn’t register them anymore; it’s only after he returns from long
weekends and vacations that they become noticeable.
The flammables are scattered among
the usual tokens of office life: form letters, family pictures, themed
calendars (one puppy, one classic car), and a wayward bag of Mrs. Cubbison’s
Onion & Garlic Restaurant-Style Croutons. Altogether, there are five
workstations, only four of which appear to receive regular use (the fifth looks
like an abandoned dumping ground for eyes). The lab is barely large enough to
hold everything. It consists of two rectangular areas, the top of one joined to
the bottom of the other by a small crosspiece. One area contains the
workstations, and the other has an array of polishing and casting machines.
When
they’re not scurrying between exam room and lab, the ocularists take time to
work on their eyes. David Gougelmann’s desk has a three-tiered carousel that
looks like a tiny lavender wedding cake. It has little holes on each level for
tools. The tiers are filled with various drill attachments—there are grinding
stones like thimbles, brushes like Brillo pads, and metal bits shaped like the
onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Next to the carousel is a white ceramic
tile covered with tufts of paint. David Gougelmann uses orange, green, black,
white, two shades of blue, four shades of yellow, and six shades of brown.
Andrew likes to keep his palette cleaner, so he has fewer colors (only four
shades of brown). Unlike his brother, Andrew prefers to polish eyes at his
workstation rather than at the wheel in the back, so there is a cratered block
of rouge on his desk. It looks like pink Swiss cheese.
Modern artificial eyes are not
spherical. Patients’ sockets are filled with either their natural blind eyeball
or a tissue-covered implant, so they have no need of anything to replace the
globe. Because of this, ocular prosthetics come mostly in the form of the
scleral cover shell, a piece of plastic that sits just behind the eyelids. Like
a contact lens, it floats on top of the globe and, to some extent, moves with
it (some implants even have a small peg that connects to the shell in order to
improve motility). Unlike a contact lens, however, the scleral cover shell is
opaque and quite large, fitting over the entire visible part of the eye. The
shell is made from white acrylic and has all the aesthetic characteristics of a
natural eye—iris, pupil, veins, tint.
The first step in making a scleral
cover shell is to take an impression. When injected into the patient’s eye
socket, ocular impression material has the consistency of pancake batter. Like
Bisquick, it begins as a white powder. Mr. Gougelmann combines the powder with
distilled water, mixing with a spatula to create a thin paste that he promptly
pours into a large syringe (no needle). Behind the patient’s eyelid, he places
the fenestrated acrylic tray, a turtle-shell-shaped piece of plastic with a
tube protruding from the center—it sits against the patient’s globe. Mr.
Gougelmann fits the syringe to the tube and injects the batter; if too much is
injected too quickly, it goops out of the overflow holes in the tray, streaming
down the patient’s face. The impression material goes in cool and sets for
several minutes, hardening and absorbing moisture, slowly warming to body
temperature. When it is removed, it leaves the underlying globe feeling gritty
and temporarily dry. The impression is firm but squishy, like the white of a
hardboiled egg. It perfectly mirrors the shape and contour of the patient’s
globe.
A cement-like liquid is poured
around the rubbery white impression, creating a stone mold that separates into
two halves. Mr. Gougelmann then mixes up a batch of scleral dough, a white
material similar to sculpting clay, which will provide the base for the eye. He
packs the dough into the mold, then cures it with heat and pressure. It emerges
as hard plastic. When I ask Mr. Gougelmann what this thing is called, he says,
“We’re gonna say… the scleral piece.”
The
scleral piece is fitted to the patient. Mr. Gougelmann may go back and forth
between exam room and workstation several times, grinding the piece to the
desired proportions. This is the hardest part, since the shape will determine
how the prosthesis interacts with the underlying tissue, and therefore how
normal it looks. Once he is finished sculpting, Mr. Gougelmann uses a blue
marker to draw the outline of the iris, carefully matching its size and
orientation to the sighted eye of the patient in front of him. He places a
small dot in the center where the pupil will go. Then the scleral piece goes
back to the lab.
Mr. Gougelmann casts a new scleral
piece, this time with a dark “iris button” countersunk into it. The iris button
is a small plastic cylinder that juts out from the center of the eye,
indicating how the pupil will be pointed. Mr. Gougelmann “exposes” the iris,
grinding down the button he has just inserted. Now he has a white shell with a
dark plateau in the center. This is where he will apply the paint. For
inspiration, he uses color samples, eyes previously fabricated by apprentices.
Since each apprenticeship lasts for 10,000 hours, there is quite a large
selection—about 80,000 eyes. Of these, one might match a given patient’s iris
closely, one might have a similarly yellowed sclera, and one might have the
same vein structure.
Mr. Gougelmann perches eyes in
progress on what he calls a “toadstool” (actually just a bottle cap packed with
sculpting clay). He mixes and dilutes paints in an “inkwell” (an upside-down
shot glass). He begins laying down striations of oil-based paint on the eye,
mixing it with a substance called molypoly (pronounced Molly-Polly) that
hardens almost instantaneously. Each layer, though paper-thin, will help to
give the impression of depth and richness of color. He punches a pupil from a
sheet of black paper, gluing it onto the center of what will be the iris. He
pulls apart strands of red cotton, placing them on the sclera and adding
wiggles with his paintbrush to simulate veins. When the eye looks right, Mr.
Gougelmann puts on the finishing touch: a thick coating of acrylic. This will
round out the eye, magnifying and lightening the details he has just painted.
He polishes the eye using progressively finer gradations of pumice and rouge.
The gloss he establishes will help to make the eye look moist (patients with
dry eye syndrome sometimes request duller finishes). The final product takes
three or four visits to perfect, and will fit the patient for five to seven
years. Some people can go months without ever removing their eyes, while others
must do so every night before bed; it all depends on body chemistry. Whatever
the routine, the process for insertion is always the same. It calls for a
suction cup and some lubricating drops, and is described succinctly on Mager
& Gougelman’s website:
- Dip the open end of the suction cup in water
- Place the suction cup on the color of the prosthesis
- Rub a “wetting
solution for lubricating” on the surface of the prosthesis
- Lift your upper lid by the eyelash margin so that there is a space between the eyelid and the blind globe or tissue covered implant
- Place the top of the prosthesis… underneath the upper lid
- Release the upper eyelid
- Depress your lower lid and place the prosthesis behind the lower lid
- Squeeze the suction cup to release from the prosthesis.
By the time I leave the New York
office of Mager & Gougelman, Inc., the wind has picked up and it’s colder.
The sun is perfectly aligned with 2nd Avenue, shining down its
length and shedding light even on the storefronts beneath scaffolding. As I
walk, I think about one of the last things Mr. Gougelmann showed me: the case
of novelty eyes. Instead of a normal-looking iris, these bear an image of the
client’s choice. There is a cat, a dog, a turtle, a heart, a rubber ducky, a
bald eagle, a smiling moon, and a skull and crossbones. One eye is mottled to
look like a golf ball. Another, ordered by a patriotic bartender for the Fourth
of July, has a tiny American flag. Yet another eye carries the image of an
8-ball, and belonged to a professional pool player. Mr. Gougelmann tells me
about a man who asked for a Nike swoosh. When the sneaker company wouldn’t pay
him for advertising, he had the logo removed. A for
rent sign went up in its place.
Where a natural-looking eye helps
the wearer blend in, a novelty eye demands attention—there is no illusion of
normalcy. Because of this, novelty eyes are usually meant for special
occasions. The 8-ball once appeared on espn. The turtle, a symbol of some kind of club, crawls out only during weekly
meetings. The skull and crossbones go with a patient’s Harley, and are worn in
the brisk air of the open road. Though the images they carry are showier and
more exciting than a humdrum iris, novelty eyes are just like regular
prostheses. In fact, Mr. Gougelmann usually makes them by painting over an
outdated eye that has recently been replaced. The result is a kind of
palimpsest, with the patient’s chosen image placed over his old iris. A thin
layer of paint, measurable in fractions of a millimeter, separates the flashy
from the understated.
Of
course, the bulk of Mr. Gougelmann’s output is natural-looking rather than
novelty. The steady stream of browns, blues, hazels, grays, and greens is
punctuated only occasionally by the image of a pointy-eared Doberman. Most of
the eyes around the office look the same to me. But I find myself wondering
whether Mr. Gougelmann isn’t more discerning. Two conventional brown irises—this one with traces of copper and burnt sienna, that one with tinges of
mahogany and sepia—might look identical to the uninitiated. I bet Mr.
Gougelmann can distinguish them in the blink of an eye.  |
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