Blind to Reality.

I just showed Bethmouse some onboard bike footage from the TT. I find it scary verging on incredible. She had no reaction, none whatsoever. It was as if I’d shown her an invisible tadpole swimming in ink, or a small piece of unused blotting paper. I found it amazing that having no experience of what she was looking at made her almost unable to see it. It reminded me of a story that South American tribes couldn’t see the ships of their conquerors approaching because they had no reference for what they were seeing; also that 80% of our vision is cognitive postproduction. I experience something similar when I watch Glee or the Gilmore Girls, programs that Bethmouse can see in incredible detail. I am visually aware of something happening but I don’t have the postproduction to see it. So I can hardly blame Bethmouse for not having ridden a motorcycle. But that approaches my concern. When one has a highly developed postproduction capability to ‘see’ platitudinous drama on TV and relatively poor capacity to ‘see’ the real world, will the real world become invisible? OK one will see movement, discern faces, hear sounds but will one make any sense of them? Will one feel any inclination to be involved with it? It is after all dangerous, smelly, ugly and boring compared with America’s Next Top Model: One’s Citroen Picasso will never be a match for the cars they trash on Top Gear. The saving grace used to be having to mend the bloody things when penniless but they’re not even mendable now. One can only tow it into traffic and hope someone rights it off on the insurance, and watch Formula 1 while you’re waiting for the cheque to come through. Any necessity to come face to face with reality is departing as all roads lead back to the sensory equivalent of video editing. So maybe The Day of the Triffids was right. We will all go blind together. But only to reality.