Forgetfulness - Excerpt

The eye, acquiring cyclopean proportions when seen reversely through the magnifying glass before it, is not still. It makes no grand or deliberate transits in any particular direction but it appears to be trained on a single object or isolated region. Its incremental and seemingly random shifts, then, are most likely involuntary. These are so minute, in fact, that at any lesser level of observation than this, they should not be considered motion. Rather, it might be said that the eye quivers in spite of itself, with life and in spite of life, in spite of the same life force that has trained it on its narrow field, that has mandated that it hold still and focus for the purpose of close observation, scrutiny, single-minded study. The eye quivers in a way that resembles the visibly unstable state of a still pool of liquid, struggling to maintain its stillness.

The gray-blue iris, like a soft sea creature beneath the aquarian dome of the cornea, also moves, though with a more calculated exactitude than the greater ocular structure. It moves economically and without caprice, as does the geometer. The circle at the center of the iris, the dark void known as the pupil, appears to be moving, but, in fact, the inside edges of the iris' striated membrane are contracting and relaxing, varying the magnitude of light information allowed to stream through the eye's lens and into the posterior chamber, to disperse through and illumine the thick jelly of the vitreous body, to bombard the retina's millions of photoreceptors.

All of this happens now.

The photoreceptors of this eye are fully operational, capturing an unending stream of data, light information-fragments, particles of form and color, distance and size-assembling a model of the world (of the object of observation, the isolated region) and sending it on for processing, recording, and analysis. For appreciation.

It may be noted that the iris' subtle movements also seem to encompass a number of additional corrections of the pupil in response to movements of the magnifying glass itself, as the latter is not wholly immobilized.

A two-dimensional, peach-colored polygon of light appears on the wet surface to one side of the iris, on the outside curve of the red-veined white of the eye, or sclera. A faint double of this same figure glistens on the outside curve of the cornea. The polygon, like the pupil, is subjected to continuous, though less precise transformations, mutations, not solely because of the micromotions of the eye and magnifying glass-or rather of the hand presumed to be holding the magnifying glass-but most likely because of an unseen changeable object or set of objects partially obscuring the source of the light: the branch of a tree, a passing cloud, a gradually lifting fog.