by John Wilcock

“We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.”
— Daniel Kahneman

“Cheshire Cat: “If I were looking for a white rabbit, I’d ask the Mad Hatter.”
Alice: “The Mad Hatter? Oh, no no no…”
Cheshire Cat: “Or, you could ask the March Hare, in that direction.”
Alice: “Oh, thank you. I think I’ll see him…”
Cheshire Cat: “Of course, he’s mad, too.”
Alice: “But I don’t want to go among mad people.”
Cheshire Cat: “Oh, you can’t help that. Most everyone’s mad here.”
[laughs maniacally; starts to disappear]
Cheshire Cat: “You may have noticed that I’m not all there myself.”
— from Alice in Wonderland

In Visual Terms…

It seems that my particular form of perceptual challenge is called homonymous hemianopia.

Hemianopia means blindness in one-half of the visual field. The most common form of this is homonymous hemianopia, which means that the vision loss is on the same side of each eye. Research shows that eight to ten percent of stroke survivors have homonymous hemianopia.

It’s as if when I attempt to read, I’m looking through a partially closed door into a room, or in my case, the page beyond. I fully well realize the completely furnished page exists out there, and yet I can only glimpse what’s behind the door by craning around the opening to get a peek. The term ‘hassle’ doesn’t do justice to qualify the exertion required to read across a single line of text.

This past week, I was evaluated by an opthalmologist for this condition. Confirmation of any diagnosis is now making its way through the healthcare system, and I will one day hope to have a more definitive understanding of this perceptual malady, as well as access to any and all available remedies. Meanwhile, my neck muscles are getting a real workout.
—JW

From the Archives: August 21, 2010

IT’S SAFE TO GUESS that the general public never hears about what really goes on in our hallowed halls of Congress — the wasted time, the hypocrisies, the idiocies, the basic indifference to and contempt for the ordinary people that these inflated, god-like humans display. Some hint of it is displayed in George Packer’s piece, The Empty Chamber, in last week’s New Yorker:

“In general, when senators give speeches on the floor, their colleagues aren’t around and the two or three who might be present aren’t listening. They’re joking with aides, or e-mailing Twitter ideas to their press secretaries or getting their first look at a speech they’re about to give…
“Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time-killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes…
“The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web…”

We don’t hear about what really goes on because there aren’t any reporters gutsy enough, or foolhardy enough, to tell us. There was one once in England, Bernard Levin, who was the first writer in modern times to pull back the curtain and show us what fools and knaves most politicians are. He was Arianna’s early mentor and companion, and so you might think that her Huffington Post could be a suitable place for such a similar ongoing exposé.

EATING JELLYFISH is what we’ll all be doing in a few years’ time if the depredation of the world’s fish population continues unchecked. This gloomy prediction comes from the Smithsonian which points out that in many places there are now more jellyfish (“brainless, bloodless and mostly aimless”) than actual fish. Many of the 1,000+ types of medusa are already eaten (dried and seasoned with soy sauce) in China and Japan and one research paper has termed it “the ultimate modern diet food.” Jellyfish have been proliferating so fast they have wiped out salmon farms, helped to exterminate the beluga sturgeon in the Caspian Sea, shut down nuclear plants by clogging the cooling equipment, and sting or kill thousands of swimmers every year. In the Black Sea, there are estimated to be 900 million tons of them (not a good place to swim). Their expansion is attributed partly to the fact that their natural predators have been almost fished to extinction causing jellyfish, says the mag, “to assume dominance in one marine ecosystem after another.”

TODAY’S NOVELISTS ARE avoiding writing about sex because they’re scared of winning a famous British literary prize, the Bad Sex Award, suggests Andrew Motion, one of the judges for the annual Man Booker Prize. “If there is one thing worse than a lousy lover, it is undoubtedly a lousy describer of the act of love,” says an editorial in the Observer. “Maybe “embarrassment now achieves what censorship used to.”

NOT BEFORE TIME, the concept of what’s known as “restorative justice” — rehabilitation rather than jail — is beginning to take hold here and there. “Some states and localities are…putting offenders to work to repair the damage they caused the community rather than simply warehousing them in prisons,” writes Sasha Abramsky in the Nation. Notoriously prison-tough Texas has been investing in such things as residential drug treatment centers, mental health facilities, halfway houses; Kansas and Michigan have followed suit. “All told ten states have embraced ‘justice reinvestment’ strategies,” says the mag, “reducing prison spending, investing a portion of the savings in a more effective anticrime infrastructure…The era of ‘lock ’em up and throw away the key’ seems slowly to be drawing to a close.”

it’s here…