Aye-aye

I started getting obsessed with eyes around May 2009, when, after going to the eye doctor for a new prescripton for me specs, I got drawn into getting further tests done. As far as I know, that was the first time I've been subjected to the test in which they dilate the pupils using special drops, then blow air onto the eyeball, then shine bright lights onto the retina, all the while telling you the farm animal oh sorry patient to keep your eyes nice and wide open, when of course all your instincts, psychological and physical, are contradicting the dictatorial matron. This morning I went for another test, Campo Visual, Field of Vision, which is very tiring. It starts off fun, like a video game, but they make you do it for so long... Sadistic. As I was clicking away at the little handheld widget they give you, I second-guessed myself a lot: Am I really seeing the little white specks, or do I just think I am? Which reminded me that the brain and the eye are almost the same thing... Aren't they.

Here is an edited comment from Sir Fagpakit, from a paragraph he included in an "Email" to me:

The nearest I can come to explaining its effect is an image of myself waiting for a tram or something and being accosted by some delirious eye doctor delivering a rant at me which is disturbing and transfixing and seems initially to be scientific, and only on second thoughts, poetic.

The poem's fairly dense, I was quite deep in eye navel gazing mode. Thanks to Wikipedia. I should really donate some money to them, you know, before I go blind.


Eye

A throbbing sphere, complex muscle, worthy
of higher species. Appearing from afar sheer,
in fact its surface is planed into many intersecting
multi-faceted forms, a dodecahedron perhaps,
though not quite rigid, it breathes, chain-mail,
plate armour, armadillo shell. Expanding-contracting
the movement transmits information inward,
mantle to core, panelled outer layer to viscous
spinning iron amorphous control centre; for
gemstones are formed in high pressure conditions
thus it is no coincidence that when transmission
interrupts, the unrefined image projected is diamond,
the outer lattice accepting all manner of visual clues
at the loading dock, the wide mouth, before the many
soldiers go to work, fibre-optic, nerve-thin, housed
in enriched gels and liquids, sheathing the flight of
precious data along for deciphering, 360-degree
neuro-analysis and despite optimal lab environment
and unimagineably evolved encrypted chromasomic
festoonery, there is a blind spot where synthesis is
imperfect, light is eclipsed and ellipted, impeded by
simple mechanical constraints, obscured by position:
There's something in the way, reducing hyperspectral,
binocular, wide-angle know-how into dizzy blur,
yet though an aberration, a malfunction, invalid,
the result is lustrous, as the unaccounted-for pixels
fall between the cracks, dispersing in colour
and aurora, blur to borealis, spinning in infinity
arid sands of galactic eggshell time, dawn times a million
iridescent, whirlpooling magnetic dust-wind, ionospheric,
diffuse glow, self-exploding photon charge.