A Day of Altered Vision

~

21.March.2003

Written from yesterday, the day the bombs began to drop from midday Aus time

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My eye draws perspective lines - radiating out to touch the focus of what I can see - as I look around, they are as fixed rigid poles that follow my gaze without a seconds confusion.
I see with extramission - my eye reaches out to touch an object and it is sucked inwards to me burning its image firmly on my retina - a process I see clearly step by step, consciously seeing or feeling its progress towards the final interpretation in the mind of what it is I am witnessing.
I have finally learnt how to see with the Renaissance eye and also the Medieval eye
I watch a chair with my perspective lines around it and then as I watch it I flip the image over in a somersault in fast movement, I can repeat this as much as I like with the same realistic vision, the chair itself flipping round and round infront of my eyes, seeing it and not merely imagining it.
I have the control to manipulate what I see, to alter through my eyes and not my mind what that object does.

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The sky is grey and smokey, it may just be the smog but it seems an echo of Baghdad, the sky knows, understands what is happening, and reflects this knowledge back to us. My eye, my seeing, cannot quite compete with the skies determination to show the smokey haze from a location far away yet intrinsically linked to my current surroundings because of politics that have allowed our nation to become so embroiled in this maelstrom of fire, punishing a mere possibility of a crime. Perhaps too I see a flickering of flames burning on the horizon but the sky's vision is stronger in this, perhaps it is because this is something beyond control

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That night I take out a mirror, it's dark and only poorly lit by a nearby light, but I catch enough light to see as I try looking for an eyelash that has got stuck in my eye and is irritating me, they're always falling out on me. I'm having trouble finding it when I look and search and suddenly see scuttling across the white of my eye and into my pupil a speck of an insect. I squirm in horror before looking down at the mirror flecked with greasy spots, perhaps it was just an illusion, but I swear it was real...

Perhaps just an illusion, but surely it was real.