I am just now returned from a journey to the dark heart of the American dream. Las Vegas.
Work life brought me here to talk about my specialty. – How we understand each other in the unwired world of instant communications.
You see, I practice the art of perception. This job, my job, links people with people through a telephone screen held out in an open palm. Images flash to the screen so that people may see more of what other people see.
So, the screen itself is an eye. – A different kind of eye, to be sure, and one with its own peculiar lens.
Perhaps we never truly saw the world before we had such eyes as these. We must at least admit the possibility. How else do we explain so many screens held out in open palms today? – People not even watching where they step because the eye entrances them so. Ten years ago, were there any?
Here in Las Vegas where I came to teach about perception, I see these telephone eyes every place I go. Everywhere along the desert strip, unblinking eyes are held in outstretched hands or on selfie sticks that extend the hands’ reach. Thousands upon thousands. Stretched out in supplication, begging the communion of other eyes.
Yet these peculiar eyes also reflect back. We see ourselves in their silicate glass. And what do we see of ourselves when we look?
Perhaps it is as simple as this: We see are ourselves walking, hands held out, in the city we have built on sand. All along the desert strip, eyes gaze upon the city’s marvels and make a record, a photograph, a moving picture clip. Eyes peer up at salt pillars bearing the stone weight of glittering buildings rising in a city weaned on spoils of a captured river.
Here, we become the eye seeing itself. – Perception perceiving perception. Perception devouring itself. Giving birth to itself. Destroyer and creator all in one.
But it does not stop there. No, it becomes more than just a two-way mirror stare. More than mere Narcissus enraptured at a desert pool till he falls and flails in his own shallows.
The art of perception now is viral chain reaction. Eyes see eyes that see still more eyes. All gaze out under the brassy blaring sun. They look out at desert wonders electrified in a neon glow stolen from the imprisoned Colorado. And they see what others see of what others see.
Our new eyes see people watching us walk, and still other people watching the ones who are watching us walk
It is a marvel, all of it. Eyes see eyes that see fountains. And the fountains dance to the French charms of symphonic poems. Eyes see eyes that see Roman palaces. The imagined palaces of emperors who flattered themselves as gods. Eyes see eyes that see falsified skylines soaring upward. Manhattan fantasies and Parisian towers shrunk to scale and jammed in tight tourist space. Tight space better suited for telephone eyes.
All is hodge-podge, this city. It is a clashing crazy-quilt stitched together without care for rhyme or symmetry. – Patches of desire framed upward in steel and glass and craned high toward the cloudy trails of indignant desert birds circling for their perch near something not yet dead. The city drinks from pools filled with pilfered water that can dance a coquette chorus-line burlesque in air. The city, all of it, rises upward like a loud revelation still building itself toward the crescendo of a second coming amid siren wails and impatient car horns.
Eyes see eyes that see eyes. They see a black pyramid rising in the sands of the desert. It is guarded by a shape with a lion’s body and the head of a man with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, the gaze of a menace we cannot yet name.
And again, eyes see eyes that see eyes. We are entranced here in the city among its many eyes. – Not knowing which pair are real enough to address in a spoken tongue and not the keyboard clatter. Which way do we find them, the eyes that are real? Right or left, forward or back? There no longer is a way to know. Are any of the eyes even real?
It is a hall of mirrors. – Mirrors full of eyes seeing eyes seeing eyes. Among them all, there is the brutal gaze of the sphinx staring back to dare us with its riddle. We hear its pale words echo down the glazed hall.
“A sister gives birth to her sister,” the desert sphinx intones. “Who are the sisters?”
We look down to our telephone eyes, desperate for an answer. Desperate, lest the perception of failure devour us here in the dark heart of the American dream. Here in a city that fancies it can banish night inside unending day. Unending day lit with power taken from the jealous river that seethes in bondage to the east of garish Eden.
Robert Craig Waters 