Emily has just made a delightful post to her blog on the subject of Ella's jumping harness.
And while I was watching it a strange thought went through my mind. Ella must be close to being the most photographed child of all time, using both still and video media. I wondered what she thinks of people with three eyes looking at her, two of the eyes in the normal position and one sprouting from somewhere near the viewer's forehead. It conjured up for me an image of the Greek cyclops (plural, cyclopes) who, in Greek and later Roman mythology, was a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead. The name is widely thought to mean "circle-eyed". Hesiod, Homer, Euripides, Theocritus, and Virgil all mentioned the cyclops in their writings, so the myth, if that is what it is, had considerable legs.
Then things took a dangerous turn. I recalled Raymond Kurzweil's famous book The Singularity is Near (Viking Press, 2005) in which he foresaw the imminent need for humans to be re-engineered with extra A-V and data storage or processing capacity to deal with the masses of information heading our way. Perhaps in Ella's lifetime people will be turned into living cyclopes with cameras incorporated in their foreheads alongside the extra CPU and terabytes of storage wired into their brains. Suddenly I had a another even more interesting brainwave. When I'm riding my bike some vehicles pass dangerously close to me and one day might hit me. If I became a cyclops with a camera lens for the central eye I could record my journeys and provide compelling evidence against the hoon who knocked me off my bike at their trial for attempted murder.. Better still, I could spare myself the surgery necessary to become a cyclops by installing the camera in my helmet.
I wonder what Ella would make of all that!
AS
No comments:
Post a Comment