I just had cataract surgery done on one eye. It brings up many practical and philosophical questions. Walking down my street in the now-bright, clear November air, the trees on the distant skyline stand out in sharp relief. The gravel under my feet appears in pixelated detail. The very words on this page, also bright and chiseled now, give me pause to ponder the changes in my perception.
Veering heavily of late to the postindustrial and preindustrial visions of an alternative to our technocratic, transhumanist dystopia unfolding, am I now a hypocritical cyborg in disguise, or plain sight? Does it help to hear they did cataract surgery in ancient times?
I recall presenting on a sci-fi panel at a writers’ conference in 2015, on the strength of my novel of virtual reality, PsyBot—in which a computer virus programs itself into the operator’s mind through an AI-eye—and observing then how even old-school spectacles could be considered crossing the line from human to machine.
As I spoke, a new ceramic tooth recently had been cemented in place on my lower jaw, which the Mexican surgeon had enlarged, during the operation, with powdered horse bone.
The woman next to me in this week’s hospital preop room admitted to having an artificial knee, a hearing aid, and dentures, while she awaited her optical lens implant. And all of this replacement therapy doesn’t begin to touch the mind programming, the lens on reality that all of us peer through without even reflecting on the distortion from objective “reality”—if there is such a thing.
For example, is reality as it appears to my old left eye, now in contrast seeming filtered through a dull yellow film, or as it appears to my new right eye, exact at the specified long-distance setting but in turn all blurred inside of six feet? What about the correction of reading glasses, suddenly bringing that near-sight blur into temporary focus. What about the eye of the dog or hummingbird, the faceted honeybee or the deep-sea shark? Whose reality is real?
While the North American political camps see everything in red and blue, and the race-minded all in shades of black, brown, yellow and red, is it possible to opt out altogether, neutral and color-blind? They say idealists wear rose-colored glasses (or if your team wears orange, then tinted orange). The Buddhists and quantum physicists agree, reality is what you are determined or choose to see. In other words, just a word.
Back to the practical and philosophical dilemmas posed by that problematic concept, Civilization, where does my latest fork in the road bring me and us and a world in peril? Should I have said screw it, I’ll just grow old with grace and failing vision, content to have my visible world shrinking by the year, until my sight goes dark forever, the bottom line on the contract of living? Or should I have said screw it, I’ll just do what everyone does and opt for the modern while I can, before the bombs and banks, hurricanes and solar storms blow it all away?
Not to make too much of a personal choice… except as I dare to speak to our shared condition. And there is a certain integrity, or consistency required, when taking a stance with political, economic, cultural and logical implications. Or is it? Recall Whitman’s mystical opt-out: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.”
And since America’s bard confessed, “I sing the body electric,” we may as well confront the dual promise of that description, and choose our favorite rendition. Is it the electricity of the nanotransceiver, the 5G atmospheric poison soup, the electroshock reeducation chamber? Or is it the electricity of the river of life, the cells’ own chemistry, the cosmic code?
Somewhere in this riddle we get to choose. Or, if we discard even that pretense of free will, we just ride the wave, marveling at the granularity of sand and spray, the gift of this perpetual motion. Who’s to say if we’re right or wrong, doomed or saved in our navigation of ancient and modern, outer and inner worldview? It’s a matter of perception, and how to make sense of what we see.
