The Wink

The Wink (from the archives)

Like all subtle facial gestures, the art of winking is an affectation learnt through experience. One isn’t born with the innate capacity to wink, rather, one earns the wink. We say that aging and experience are the conditions for the possibility of winking- things which can be imitated, but as with all imitations, nothing compares to the original.

To wink is, of course, the closing of one eye in order to signify something to somebody. The signified is usually an ‘implicit’ truth, veiled itself like the closed eyelid. It can imply a truth both too deep and/or too lurid for words- something better left unsaid. When I was a child, I noticed that winking was a masculine principle, reserved by aged and experienced men to convey messages of great power. I knew this because my mother would ‘blush’ and try to extricate herself from the site of the winking-act.

Winking is more than mere innuendo, though. It is a sophia, a measurement of truth actualized. It is the incarnation of wisdom seen with the Mind’s Eye. For it discloses the hidden and accomplishes what cannot be uttered without mistranslation. A wink expresses the obvious which has become forgotten: it is a call to remember that which is. Winking therefore is an acknowledgement of the two-fold nature of reality, and it bridges the gap between things as they appear, and things as they are.

In fact, true winking is a gesture of transcendence. One eye remains open, while one eye remains closed. The closed eye is the ‘winking’ eye, for it ‘twinkles’ the truth which resides alongside the realm of becoming. It intimates what is internal, and in suggesting what is internal to another, it expresses that which is shared by both. But, we may ask,”What is it that is shared by both?” We have already said that the wink is a reminding gesture, and what is shared should be in no need of reminding, right? Most surely,we may add, it reminds the other of what is not being seen, what cannot be seen just yet. It asks that one ‘turn a blind eye’ for a moment, to catch the unseen light behind the lid, to recall what is there. Still further we go and ask,”what is it that is to be recalled behind the closed lid?” For we are surely there now when we ask so fervently,”what is worth recalling behind the closed lid?”

That is just it, “What in the hell is he winking about?” There is a sense in which someone could ask this question and still not know what the wink is all about. Might the wink be something in which the winker alone has some fantasia, some solepsism in which he alone knows the images? Or might the wink itself cast doubt about the possibility of any knowledge at all?

I once knew a guy who could wink, and it was the true wink. You see, he’d been wrecked so many times that he finally could ‘see the light’. He would wink as he handed me the tumbler full of Scotch drink. “You’ll know,” he used to say,” You will know.”