Light

Because the front part of the eye is curved, it bends the light, creating an inside-out and upside-down image on the retina, which is how we see reality. The brain eventually turns the image the right way around. What inspires it to do this? How does the brain know which way is up, if the eye doesn’t? What is the ethical divide between up and down?

Wittgenstein asked a student if the sun went round the earth or the earth went round the sun. After the student answered, Wittgenstein asked, “But what would it have looked like if the opposite were true? It would have looked the same. Observation is no guarantee of truth.”

What is the extra information provided to the brain which causes it to doubt what the eye observes? Is observation just subjective, altered by an arbitrary brain away from what is actually seen?

This poem is certainly too clever to be true, or maybe it’s just too true to be clever at all.

Although I wrote it in 2010, I thought my rewrite of it was significant enough to count its being revivified in 2021. I’ve taken this approach with a few other poems as well. You have to respect their début down that curving staircase, but they also have a right to a second act, to a rentrée.