I spy with my little eye

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When the doctor found the freckle, I was just about ready to give up. It was on the retina of my right eye, and all the way in a far, far corner, so that the ophthalmologist had to peer in at a sharp angle, while I had to strain to look as far to the side as I could without actually moving my head. But when we got things just right, she could see it. A freckle on my retina. Two or three months earlier, I’d gone through surgery for skin cancer — a malignant melanoma on my left forearm — and I figured this was that all over again. Some mutant melanin-producing cell had gotten out and set up residence in my eyeball. Was it a freckle or a mole? Either way, I was fucked.

For the next two weeks, I mentally prepared to part with my orb, which was, to my surprise, not all that hard to do. As lovely as my big blue peepers are, they don’t work that well. My vision has been bad for more than four decades, though not so terrible that I can’t wear contact lenses. (Some of my friends have it much worse.) In recent years, too, I haven’t been able to get the contact lens prescription exactly right, so I’m always either squinting at one thing or tilting my head one way or another to find the proper focal length. Maybe switching from stereo vision to mono would make things easier?

So I started to imagine what might replace my eye. Because the idea of a plain old glass eye did not appeal to me in the slightest. A Borg-style implant would be fun, if unwieldy — surely it would protrude in awkward ways, rubbing against books or mirror if I leaned in too close. An eye on a spring would be amusing… for about five minutes. Ideally, I’d have a digital display put in, so I could design custom eyes to show the world or flash messages (“I have friends everywhere”) or casually hypnotize whoever I was speaking with. Whatever it would be, I wanted it to be a far cry from my wonky organic matter.

But then I went to a specialist, a retinologist. First his staff strained to locate the freckle, which really was as far to the edge of the retina as you can go, and when they succeeded, they passed me to the doctor, who did likewise for several minutes — and the second he finally spotted it, he relaxed. “You were born with it,” he told me. It’s not cancer. There was nothing at all to worry about.

I walked out, elated, found myself passing by a gelato shop and popped in for a snack. And as I slurped my fior di latte and frutti di bosco, my elation turned into, well, a kind of disappointment.

More after the ad…

It’s not that I wanted to lose my eye. In general, I would like my body parts to stay attached to me and remain in good working order. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that’s not always possible. Things get damaged, whether from age, accident, or neglect, and sometimes they need to be fixed or replaced. Most of me is still there, as far as I know, but I’ve seen friends and family lose bits to the scalpel, and I know my day will come, too. Fantasizing about what might replace those bits is my way of coming to terms with the inevitability.

So yeah, I want an upgrade! They exist already, in limited forms. If you have cataracts, as my mother did, a surgeon can remove the discs of your eyes and put in plastic replacements that correct your vision to 20/20. Thing is, they won’t do the surgery unless you have cataracts, because I guess, like, “First, do no harm” or some shit.

Meanwhile, a group of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, have created contact lenses that allow the wearer to perceive the near-infrared spectrum. Okay, they only tested on mice — imagine them putting tiny contacts on little rodents! — but they definitely have humans in mind, claiming they’ve developed a version that would allow “humans to distinguish multiple spectra of NIR light, which can function as three primary colors, thereby achieving human NIR spatiotemporal color vision.” When I was a really little kid, I used to tell my Grammy — my paternal grandmother — I could actually see her in Connecticut from our home in Massachusetts because I had “bionic eyes.” This could be that, only in near-infrared!

What does near-infrared even look like? I don’t know, but that’s the point. Technology doesn’t just have to enhance our existing senses — it can give us new ones. People implant strong magnets in their hands, supposedly to develop a sensitivity to electromagnetic fields, sort of akin to the way that night-migratory birds can “see” those fields. Dolphins can sense electrical currents in the water, and they and other animals use echolocation to understand their surroundings — a skill that humans can learn as well. (But not me.) Then there’s this woman, Tilly Lockey, whose forearms were amputated and replaced with bionic arms that she can control even when they’re detached.

All of these fall under the rubric of transhumanism, whose lofty goals include eliminating disease and extending our lifespans through technology, propelling evolution and changing the nature of what it means to be human. Frankly, I find transhumanism to be a bit boring and preachy, not to mention elitist and occasionally eugenicist.

Worst of all, transhumanism as a movement seems to leach all the fun out of these technological advances. My thinking is: Wouldn’t it just be cool to see magnetic fields? To sense, in some unfathomable way, electric currents in the air? To send your unused hand scrabbling around to scratch your back or your balls? Forget about elevating the meaning of humanness — let’s just transform the day-to-day into a realm of new, weird, amusing possibility. Let new human grace grow from that, from decades of that, rather than expecting the technology itself to deliver revelation and understanding with a single click.

My disappointment at getting to keep my eye, then, was also about once again being required to live in the present day. Always, as far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live in the future, whatever “the future” meant. Sometimes it meant X-wing fighters and the USS Enterprise¹, but lately it’s vaguer — a time that simply exists after all this crap right now, an era when we’ve gotten over the apocalyptic tendencies that beset us and moved on to, well, something easier, gentler, calmer, smarter, better. I want to see a world that is fundamentally different, to know we’re on a track that will lead us elsewhere, but as I get older that future feels ever more out of reach, so instead I fantasize about Borg eyeballs and robo-fingers. If I could have them now, I would have dipped my toes — my long, skinny, often ice-cold toes — into the world of tomorrow.

But for now I sate that hunger with science fiction, most recently Alien: Earth, where humans, androids, cyborgs, and synthetic beings clash with goopy, gory off-world monsters like a mineral-chomping “fly” and a bizarrely charming little octopus that has spent most of the series embedded in the eye socket of a sheep. I’m not sure I’d quite want to invite it into my own skull, but it does know several digits of π, and it appears to hate the Zuckerbergian tech trillionaire who’s been keeping it locked up, so who knows? Maybe we’d get along! Oh, Grammy, if only you could see me now! 🪨🪨🪨