4 eyes

Looking back now I marvel at all the years I chose to see the world through disks of glass, peering through prismatic lenses so finely ground and polished. Those glossy optics inter-mediated my experience, framed my perception, protected me, an artificial eye between me and actual experience. As a photographer, the camera always dangling from a sling over my shoulder actually affected my posture with its ubiquitous, weighty presence, causing a slight slouch, a stoop, a very subtle listing to starboard. For many years that camera shaped my world and gave me focus. And quite literally reshaped me in the process.

Then of course I moved on to a different type of lens, a screen, whose cathode rays have now bombarded me for decades, whose plastic frame has provided a window through which I can interact with the world, can take it in, can stand witness, behind which I can hide. The voyeur needs the glass, the safety of the separation from the subject. But it's often hard to see how such things affect us, how they change us, how their very presence makes us something other than what we are without them. The glass is transparent, but not invisible.

Rudy Project Rydon

Now here I am, struggling to adjust to a new set of glass partitions whose strange disorienting parallax I must somehow come to integrate into myself; a prosthetic augmentation of my decaying senses that promises to restore what has through the years been lost, but which will in so doing fundamentally alter me. This new part of myself, this new way of seeing, of acting and being will take some adaptation. Even now, on this first night, I can sense the neurons rearranging themselves to accommodate the odd liquid pane through which I will ever after view the world. From this point forward I will be irrevocably changed. From now until the end of my life I will be a man who wears spectacles.

So if you see me staring vacantly off into space, idly staring out a window like a child in the back seat on a cross country road trip, don't just assume I am lost in my customary stupor. I may be engaged in re-configuring my brain to navigate a newly discovered world or merely marveling at the astonishing variety of textures in the road surface.