Tools & Eyes – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week on the Wednesday Blog, how we enhance our vision with innovation.
When I was 5 years old, I remember one Spring afternoon as the Sun was beginning to set when my friends and I were still at our school in the Chicago suburbs out climbing on the playground. I was near the top of the play structure when I saw a car pull in and a woman climb out of the passenger’s seat. I recognized the car and the figure coming towards me and excitedly climbed down from my perch to greet my Mom, thinking she’d gotten off work early and was coming to pick me up at the end of the day. As I got closer to the woman, I was shocked to see it wasn’t my mother but someone else.
Two years later, during my first March in Kansas City we had state-mandated vision and hearing tests in school at which time I was sent home with a note for my parents that my vision was poor enough to require glasses. I got my first pair on 20 March 2000 at a shop in Oak Park Mall and have remained bespectacled every day since. It amazes me somewhat that I remember the day like that, or that I can remember it was a sunny 56ºF that day, yet there you go. I’ve probably gone through 20 or more pairs of glasses, or speclaí as they’re called in Irish, in the years since. For a while I was getting a new pair each year, though in recent years I’ve deferred that insurance benefit to use it only when I absolutely need new frames.
Still, one recurring feature of the quieter moments in my life since that sunny Monday just after the turn of the new millennium has been that my world changes each night when I set my glasses aside to sleep. For the longest while I would have dreams in which dimensions didn’t match my expectations––rooms that were long and slender and filled with cartoonish clutter, buildings that seemed comically curt in their width that I could surround them with the fingers of one hand, held up before my eyes.
These visions remained in my dreams alone until after our move to Kansas City. In those first bespectacled years I began noticing my dreams seemed to come to life before my own eyes on those nights when sleep evaded me, and I lay awake without my glasses for hours on end. Lights and colors seemed to blend in unfamiliar ways, echoes of things I knew from the daytime danced before my eyes when I should’ve been asleep, and shapes never were quite what they seemed.
Without my glasses, the eyes I use to behold all that I have known in these last 23 years, that reality seemed to burn away on whisps of air. I’d imagine the faces of people I knew into being before my eyes and see them in strange ways that my limited vision could allow. Yet throughout this process I found all of this strange, for I knew what these faces and places looked like. My eyes and my mind could not work together as they once did now that my eyes relied on lenses to see.
How then would we react if all the creations we’ve devised were taken from us and we were left with our natural abilities alone to survive? Without glasses, my world would be quite different. I would likely have known my parents’ faces differently than I do now. The course of my career is as much defined by my access to information thanks to the internet and computers as it is by what was available to me as a child in the early 2000s when I had a computer that was linked to a far less interwoven internet. How would we’ve handled the pandemic differently if we lacked the quick transportation between continents, let alone the ease of spreading information within our own countries to stay at home, wear masks, and such in 2020? Certainly, air travel helped spread the pandemic across the planet faster, yet to the rest I’m unsure what to say.
In the middle of the last decade, I grew so used to my transatlantic connections that seeing those largely stripped away in 2020 left me feeling this sense of isolation that reminded me of the incomplete interpretation of the world by my unspectacled eyes. I grew further and further distant from my old life and developed new attachments here domestically that I’d not noticed before. For one, I stopped watching Doctor Who in 2020 and started watching Star Trek, moving from a show produced in Wales to one in California (and now also Canada) as my main source of escapist entertainment. Now again, having physically returned to Britain, my mind keeps returning there during the quiet moments.Yet those memories are inherently incomplete, filtered by a vision begotten by wishful intent to return to something long left behind. Like my moments each night gazing out before I drift off to sleep on a scene lacking clarity yet filled with enough quirks to keep me focused, and yes entertained. After all, what are our memories for but to keep us company in those quiet moments, a sort of built-in cinema in which the documentary features are about our own pasts, the blockbusters those stories we create just for ourselves. Some of those will find their way onto paper and maybe out into the world for others to one day read. Without all of the tools we’ve created, those stories would take much longer to travel far, and would see their fullest life in their original telling for us alone.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 