New book review:
The Eye A
Natural History by Simon Ings
I don’t like how
Simon Ings describes how eye-sight evolves. He seems far too obsessed with his
mortality for my tolerance to bear and is verging on ‘mentally unwell’ –
perhaps it is his coping mechanism. He says that as you get older the lens in
your eye evolves it grows thicker via a process of sedimentation of layers of
dead cells and eventually deforms, muscle aside, and you would need artificial
lenses to keep focussing. I think that is a form of curable illness. Your brain
can direct development of your eye when you are a child to correct visual
problems so it can do it to you as a fifty year old. Bad treatment is the cause
of bad eye-sight and if Simon Ings were to discard his hang-ups about his own
mortality he would know that being an adult is no different to being a child,
sure ‘freaks’ still exist but it would also seem that the ‘biblical’ freaks
have taken over and we are all being subjected to the Devil’s own game for
life.
The author is
either deluded or extremely arrogant. His grip on reality is not uniform so he
must shallowly believe what he is being told without knowing what is really
going on. He is too accepting of his fate!
The author uses
a strange turn of phrase and presents his ideas in a thought-disordered manner
with an eclectic series of references from other sources.
A peasant who
made it in 19th century Europe by walking to Prague and being
friends with the poet and polymath Goethe is one of his heroes and it is from
this character we learn about the Belledonna a ‘cosmetic eyedrop’ used by women
to dilate and paralyse the iris. Also we learn about the vestibular ocular
response from how movement detected by your ears can affect your eyes. This
sounds bogus.
Simon Ings talks
about a lot of strange stuff that really doesn’t apply to me, he complains that
he has jumpy vision and can’t focus regularly and would need to un-focus his
eyes to maintain discipline of eye-movements which sounds odd.
This book is
written in a perspective too far removed from physics for it to be of any real
scientific value other than of a demented peasant’s ramblings in his quest to
find out about eye-sight. I would not take a thing he says seriously.
"It is
impossible to find upon the retina of a victim a portrait of its murderer"
Maxime Vernois, 1869,
this is a Frenchman working for the police by experimenting on animals. The
book leads you to believe that someone with the right skills would be able to
pull images off the retinas of the dead.
A lot is said
about trilobites and how it would have taken 400,000 generations to develop an
organ such as the eye (1 generation per year). Spiders have eight eyes with two
main eyes used for seeing. Different trilobites have different types of eye,
multi-lens eyes with one retina, eyes made up of thousands of tiny light
detectors, eyes that use mirrors to focus rather than lenses. Humans have the
most advanced vision according to this guy.
Humans could
have four eyes quite easily instead of two. Also our eyes could be developed a
lot from their current situation, with shielding transparent filters or
hardened armoured eye-lids. I think humans are designed to grow back but we
have fallen as a species in our awareness of how to heal properly.
The author admits
to being astigmatic on page 127 yet earlier in the book he says that the brain
can correct for genetic defects in children’s eyes allowing them to see
perfectly well as they grow older. There are some alarming figures about how
the majority of young people suffer from short-sightedness but only a small
fraction of the older people are affected. This would re-enforce my theory that
personality plays a huge role in eye-sight and it is not as the author would
suggest reliance on technology. He says that only 1 in a hundred in Nepal and
the Amazon are short-sighted and I would believe this as I once had perfect
eye-sight and an Optician by the name of Brad Abraham who I saw many times
treated me badly and said to me “You have good eye-sight now, far better than
average, but in the future you will develop astigmatism and you will become
short-sighted which will get progressively worse as you get older.” Sure enough
I am short-sighted but I have put the work in and my eye-sight is recovering.
It is like playing the game while on a 30 stroke burn on a rowing race up the
river. One would need to re-learn oneself, so it is a gradual process for me.
Instant fixes are possible but that is hard to enforce on yourself, I am very
disciplined and yet I fall victim to people messing with me. It affects every
aspect of your manner from your walk to how you see and interpret what you see
to how you think and react. I think it is incredibly dangerous to allow a
single optician to have more than one in a hundred of the patients on his list
as short-sighted. Most the time it is them messing you up in the hopes of
making money. If you ask them to correct your eye-sight and they don’t I
suggest telling the police and using the prescription they give you of anything
less then 20/20 vision as the arrest warrant. Probably writers knowingly make
books to damage the readers’ eye-sight if they are anything like the opticians.
One way around this is to live safely and trust the healthy people with nothing
wrong with them, and only take being messed with by the people who can actually
heal you. I am not Jesus but I will start treating kids like me with the vision
I had when I was younger I could easily read a number plate at 100m at dusk,
bang. I want to kill short-sighted people as they are all criminal paedophiles
and sadists (I think having my eye-sight messed with has made me a sadist, the
optician seems like a violent thug compared to my society).
This guy is
obsessed with an official schedule for a babies’ development, I know if you free
yourself from your bonds some people still grow to 20+ stone muscle with my
skeleton yet I am only 11 stone. I am sure I could see perfectly well at the
age of 4-5 months (before my sister was born) but if I use that personality now
the whole world is watered down. (After I saw Thor 3D I practiced watching that
film for a bit without the 3D specs and sure enough in the park afterwards I
encountered a couple of friends I did not know and my whole world snapped into
perfect focus – with two separate images landing on each retina!). Overnight I
am sure there are those who make you forget yourself or your mother treats you
badly from what the optician said about you and you have to throw off the
shackles limiting your sight.
Comments
Post a Comment