#optograms

Kip Kardeşler (1902), hem duygusal ve politik bağlamı hem suç draması karakteri ile Jules Verne’nin (1828-1905) macera ve bilim kurgu külliyatında özel bir yer tutar. Subjektif bir değerlendirme değil bu; gelgelelim ilkokulda cep harçlığımdan biriktirdiğim parayla, kağıt kokusu beni oldum olası mest etmiş o eski kırtasiye dükkanından satın aldığım kitabın bende apayrı bir yeri olduğu da doğru. Romanın konusu, tek cümlede özetlenecek olursa, kazazede olarak sığındıkları geminin kaptanını hunharca öldürmekle itham edilerek Güney Denizi’ndeki bir mahkum kolonisine sürgün edilen Hollandalı iki kardeşin adalete kavuşturulması. Öyküde “katil kim?” tarzında bir gizem bulunmadığı gibi, bir dedektif kahraman da yok. Polisiye unsur, cinayet cürmünden ve faillerin adli tıp alanındaki yeni bir buluş sayesinde saptanmasından ibaret. Romanın odağı, suçun neden, nasıl, kimler tarafından işlendiği değil; üzerlerine korkunç bir suç atılı, masum insanların yaşamak zorunda kaldıkları hayal kırıklığı, çaresizlik ve öfke ile iç içe geçmiş dehşet. Polisiye yerine, “suç draması” dememi böyle izah edebilirim.

Romanın duygusal arka planında, denizci ve yazar kardeş Paul Verne’nin 1897’deki vefatının yattığını ileri süren kimi araştırmacılar olduğu gibi, bazı betimlemelerde örtük bir eşcinselliğin ifadesini okuyan yorumcular da var. İşin o boyutunu araştırmadım; fakat Fransız toplumunu vaktiyle ikiye bölmüş olan Dreyfus Davası’nın (1894-1906) gölgesinin romanın her sayfasına düşmüş olduğunu söyleyebilirim. Bağlantı o denli güçlü ki Dreyfus yaşanmasa Verne’nin böyle bir roman yazıp yazmayacağı spekülasyon konusu. Başlangıçta değilse bile sonraları Dreyfusçuların safına geçmiş görünen Verne, hayata ne yazık ki yüzbaşının aklandığını göremeden, ama dosyanın tekrar açıldığına tanıklık ederek veda etmiş. Verne’nin, İrlanda’nın bağımsızlığını desteklediği de biliniyor. Nitekim daha baştan yazarın “Olağanüstü Seyahatler” serisine dahil edilmesi gerekirken Kip Kardeşler’in İngilizce baskısının 2007 yılına kadar, demektir ki yüz yıldan fazla bekletilmesi, herhalde ancak kitaptaki olay örgüsünün küresel Anglosakson adaletsizliğini ima ettiğinden duyulan kuşku ile açıklanabilir. 2007! İnsaf! Merak etmemek elde değil; yanlışta inadı bu kadar uzatmanın acaba utancı büyütmekten başka bir semeresi oldu mu?

Kip Kardeşler’de düğümü çözen, tılsımlı sözcük optogram, yani gözün retina tabakasında oluşan imge. Bazen “görsel mor” diye de anılan rodopsin, retina çubuklarında mevcut olup loş ışıkta görmeye aracılık eden, ışığa duyarlı bir protein, bir fotopigment. Işığın rodopsin ile fotokimyasal etkileşime girmesi, dış cisimlerin görüntüsünün retinada sabitlenmesini sağlıyor. Optogramların çeşitli yöntemlerle izlenmesi ve/veya yeniden elde edilmesi tekniğine ise optografi deniyor. Optografide, bir fotoğrafı banyo eder gibi, göz yuvarının art yarısı kesilip alüminyum sülfat çözeltisi içine konuyor.

19. yüzyıl sonları ile 20. yüzyıl başlarında, ölümün beklenmedik, ani bir saldırı veya şok sonucunda gelişmesi durumunda, kurbanın gözünün yakaladığı son görüntüyü retinasında bir optogram halinde kaydettiği inanışının yaygınlaştığını anlıyoruz. Bu inanış, zaman zaman adli tıp pratiğine de dökülmüş. Bazı cinayetlerin aydınlatılması ümidiyle, o dönemde kimi cinayet kurbanlarının gözleri çıkarılıp saklanmış, fotoğraflanmış, optografiye tabi tutulmuş. Optografinin gelişmesinde ve popülerleşmesinde, bu alandaki ilk bilimsel çalışmalara imza atan Alman fizyolog Wilhelm Kühne’nin (1837-1900), pencereden dışarıya baktırırken önce kafasını gövdesinden, sonra gözlerini kafatasından ayırıverdiği albino tavşancıklarla gerçekleştirdiği acımasız deneylerin payı yadsınamaz. Kühne, retinadaki imajın asıl odağı olan noktanın (fovea centralis) insanlarda çok dar olması nedeniyle, beklenen fotoğraf kalitesini homo sapiens ile elde edemediyse de tavşanlarla ulaştığı sonuçlardan memnun kalmış ve bu sonuçları güzelce belgelemiş.

[I must first specify that the following text is but an attempt at extending investigations into last images during a lecture-performance in Romanian held in Arad on the 18th of Oct 2014 (while speaking out of – what to all purposes looked/functioned like a black box)]

“Curiously, it is true that I know of no examples of eyes once lost and then regained.[…]their loss is always a secondary adaptation” Richard Fortey, Crystal Eyes, Trilobite:Eyewitness to Evolution 2000

“If a human were magically transported to any random spot in the cosmos, within seconds he’d die 99.99999999999999 percent of the time”. Philip Plait Ph.D., Introduction, Death From the Skies! These are the Ways the World Will End… 2008 

“The portrait of the universe would we be of its nonexistence, that is to say, should a photograph be taken of the origin of the universe, that photograph would consist in part of that universe not being there[…] nonexistence would be entailed.” Iain Graham Grant, The Construction of Matter and the [Ultra]Deep Field Problem 2014*

This is about the quest for the last image. When we first think about last images, we would justly think about the last image archived on our own mobile phone gallery, or the last camera in sync or upload with our FB, Dropbox, Pinterest, Flickr, Tumblr account(s). Searching for the last images will carry us farther away than those postponed decision to de- or activate a manual/automatic re-sync. It will reach out for the last shutting of the final shutter.  Before the last flashlight of the last lightening burst into incoming blaring light or final darkness, it won’t really matter if the eyelid is closed forever, because no visible light will excite the last unresponsive dead optic nerve. Within reach of the last glimpse of the last image – open and closed eyes will be in perfect sync, they’ll both be as starry and white. This last image is also about the last possible image in the known universe. This is the Ωmega Image - the blue-shifted recording travelling back in time to us from the postanthropocene. What does a dedicated postcard sent from the Heat Death of the Universe look like? Sorry to say, but nearly every message arriving from the farthest future is not a promising one for the ones concerned. It would mean that the image would arrive too late for light-sensitive tissues to be still maintained by the initial bodies that originally developed them. While numerous eyes developed along the '100-fold path to Enlightenment', all those photon-trapping layers of pigment, all the myriad different types of apposition and superposition eyes, the arthropod compound or camera-type corneal eyes of land vertebrates were also made to be lost. Evolutionary blindness is not a blind alley of evolution or just unhappy individual vision-loss during a single lifetime – but a persevering adaptation to darkness, discarding a newly senseless organs at a time when sight will be a burden and seeing ineffectual. Blindness – as an adaptation to murky and opaque worlds, precludes any Ωmega images. One could say even that the loss of seeing organs – is a precondition for every formation of last images. The Last images will then be images still formed by the eyes of all those numerous beings and species that would develop their own blank stare in a separate and convergent way. The Ωmega image would be the image formed before the first eyeless common ancestor. Last images might arrive at a time when all kinds of image-processing apparatuses might be extinguished or permanently shuttered. The tΩmega Image comes from such a distant epoch, that those who sent it will have ceased existing, because their epoch ceased existing, because their museums, their archives ceased existing, because most probably their civilization hasn’t transmitted anything in a very long time, because probably their world doesn’t exist anymore as they knew it, because even their sun doesn’t burn as it used to so as to bleach their long lost prints and emulsions.

Last images might suffer from a variety of Fermi paradox in a rapidly expanding universe, in which we might still yet wait for such a message to reach us, while in the cosmic meantime, it might have ceased to be of any concern to the initial senders, and will potentially outlast their last attempt at sending it. Or conversely, the last image after First Contact – might be, as Ariel Williams wrote in his non-Hollywood and very realistic Alien-invasion reconstruction - an image of xenoforming the Earth. This last image of xenoformation will record directed extinction of most earthly species and ecosystems(including man) that are likely to not only be inedible but downright incompatible, poisonous or virulent to the chemical/molecular foreign newcomers.

Discarding “Terracentrism” in regard to Interstellar Message Composition raises a few interesting questions about Ωmega images, as has been noted by others such as Seth Shostak at the Communicating Across the Universe Workshop organized by SETI Institute recently. Instead of strictly selected curatorial content (as in the Golden Record case) redundancy and bulk seems to be a better and newer solution when communicating with presumably “vast and deep” intelligences. Then, there is always the fear that all this redundancy and even transmitting across deep space might give us away to the wrong kind of listener, that it might transform our initial Interstellar Message Composition into an Ωmega Image Composition.      

BRIEF HISTORY OF OPTOGRAPHY & ΩMEGA IMAGE COMPOSITION

In a sense Ωmega Images are building up on of what has been termed in the 19th and 20th century “Optography”. The history of Optography starts to record last images at the level of personal physiology - practically the last images registered on the retinas of individuals from particular (exclusively at the time) mammalian species before their biological death, before the white of the eye would expand and take over the whole eyeball. Before the eyes roll back. Optograms are methods to extract the last living sequence, the last sequence seen and perceived by that particular member of that particular species. Thus these last images were considered necrorealistic giveaways about the particular conditions of death or why death came so suddenly. Optograms might also be the last images before the camera lenses crack, before you loose contact, before the screen goes dark and transmission stops. In an Ωmega Image Composition context – they might be Last Contact not First Contact events. The primary 19th century last image is seen by the albino rabbit before it gets decapitated with his head fixed to the barred window and then covered by German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne so that natural pigment rhodopsin would accumulate. Then its eyeball extracted and sliced to be imbibed in a substance able to fixate the last Ωmega image. Optography is almost always a provoked terminal event, it doesn’t just record sudden death, and from it’s origins it is almost a prerequisite to having the source subtracted. Erhard Gustav Reif killed his children and was guillotined in 1880. His last image – the only human last image, a drawing based on a human optogram is a geometric object with a jagged side that was interpreted as being the last image of the deadly object he saw before his brutal decapitation: the blade of the guillotine.

In contrast with optograms, Ωmega Images anticipate what appears as the most improbable death (on the individual or even species level) seen trough the eyes of human and non-human beings before the last big meteorite, the image before the last gama ray burst, the last image before the 700km/h pyroclastic flow hits, before oceans boil and continents melt back into magma ocean, the last image before the gravitational tidal torque caused by galaxies colliding.

TROUGH THE EYES OF THE CRASHED GOD Horror Express from 1972 was a classic horror movie running on Romanian National TV in the 90s, probably all of you who were ‘lucky’ to watch it, do remember it. I was profoundly impressed by this flick that stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing set on a trans-Siberian train crossing tsarist Russia in 1906. Briefly, a group of anthropologists/scientists discovers a frozen exemplar of a missing link, a sort of apelike creature that after thawing up – reveals itself to be an ancient extraterrestrial entity. This entity has been left stranded on Earth after crash-landing there, being obliged to transmigrate from one body to the next across the eons, moving from sensory apparatus to sensory apparatus along evolutionary lines and morphologies. A trapped entity swapping photosensitive tissues during millions of years in the ultimate search for aeronautic knowledge and lift-off! It’s not just anamnesis, it jumps from body to body assimilating entire ontological and epistemological  dimensions, accumulating the experience of all the variegated lifeforms that it inhabited while being stranded on planet Earth. For humans trapped in one body, this cohabitation with proto-human ancestrality is regarded as unbearably inhuman. Crucial, the idea of a Total Memory of the Universe exists because an Ωmega image exists that has been drained and recomposed out of all previous memory storage’s, sucking all experiences accumulated by all those bodies it has inhabited.

From an alien perspective, from the perspective of the inhuman visitor, this can be the only perspective able to endow cohesion trough existential succession, to provide a inter-somatic flesh bridge across the geological epochs of an entire planet and for all life evolving on Earth. This hypothetical being can allow a multi-species stream of consciousness that can regroup all encountered beings in both a phylogenetic and photographic succession. This is the price of continuity. It can extract the optogram recordings of those species developed in deep time, across unimaginable gulfs, inaccessible to us without the intermediary of the fossil images absorbed by an unearthly alien entity mimicking its hosts. Also, more importantly perhaps, this brutal discarding of bodies across millions of years is the only way to accumulate the necessary experience that allowed the emergence of mindedness from non-mindedness; an experience that would eventually permit the evacuation of planet Earth. In this excerpt from the Horror Express movie human beings are watching the ocular liquid extracted from a former ‘victim’ or ex- host of the extraterrestrial – a human body trough which it has passed, a body sequence that has retained the collective memory of all those absorbed species-specific lives transported along eons.

Looking trough the microscope we see an existential slide-show of what this entity has seen, some admittedly blurred images that show the Earth watched from the sky trough alien eyes. The inverse succession trough humans back to unicellular organisms is a sort of cosmic rewind, each image subsumed in the next one, from eyes to the non-eyes of protozoa and bacteria towards an image unseen and fallen literally from the sky, some sort of Pale Blue Dot Ωmega image seen from the perspective of the sky-fallen. The ΩMEGA IMAGE, the last image is not the last image of Earth evacuation, but of planetary shipwreck. This otherwise banal horror movie, makes an important leap of faith identifying the Ωmega image as exotheologic quanta, as THE instance of extraterrestrial theology and also of alien Last Contact as theology(even if witnessed trough the other end of the telescope - the microscope). That is why the terrestrial superstitious Ωrthodox monk, a clichéd Rasputin lookalike, who lives this cosmic plunge is transfigured, wants to host this entity but is ultimately unworthy because an aeronautics engineer is always a better vessel. Indeed this faded and overlooked lofi theurgy, introduces the incontrovertible proof that foundational ultimate knowledge will always be based on some last image as proof of a secular eschatology, on that disturbing fact that there is indeed a pre-human, a human mindedness independent proto-imagology and that it’s a Ωmega Pale Blue Dot avant la lettre image that anchors all the ulterior jumps from body to body, eye to eye, mind to mind till the end of time.

THE 400 MILLION YEAR OPTOGRAM: as seen trough the trilobite lenses

This is one of the photos retrieved by the paleobiologist Dr Kenneth Towe at Smithsonian during the 1970s in his paper while working on his Trilobite Eyes: Calcified Lenses in vivo paper. This is an Ωmega image for me, just considering it as being the last image seen trough the lenses of a being that has disappeared nearly 250 millions years ago, before ‘the great dying’ of the Permian – Triassic (Pr-T) extinction event, when 90% of all species disappeared. It has arrived to us from a time even more disastrous than the famous 65 mil yr threshold that made our camera-eye mammalian visions so popular. The Phacops trilobites are long-lost wondrous beings that have lived about 400 million years ago, anticipating in their eye-design what Dutch scientist Christian Huygens(1672-1695) and French polymath René Descartes ‘discovered’ much later – an optical cure for spherical aberrations. All trilobite eyes have an extraordinary propriety, they all had mineral lenses made of a pretty common crystal called calcite. The calcite has the same proprieties as glass, it is transparent if it doesn’t contain any impurities, but with the right impurities built-in it can even correct eventual optical illusions and impediments inherent in the atomic structure of the material.

This material exists in a non-biological form, but these calcite lenses were produced by the body of these trilobites, although we’re not really sure trough which exact developmental pathways. They had practically eyes made of rock; mineral eyes. Our eyes contain structures called crystalline but they are really non mineral, they are cellular structures. Richard Fortey recounts how Towe used the beautifully preserved organic lenses of an extinct trilobite specimen of the Phacops group to photograph the building next door from the Smithsonian – the FBI building. I believe this is the most unsettling image (and definitely for all NSA spooks or for the other intel agencies) from my small, incipient collection of Ωmega images – the one Ωmega image that would drive Edgar J Hoover over the edge, his building seen trough the crystal eyes of an non-human being, extinct 250 millions years ago. Part of these ramblings across the universe is also the somewhat prophetic and admittedly funny one – an Ωmega image recorded by Towe trough the lenses of the Phacops. And maybe you can actually make out trough the complex trilobite insect-like eyes a series of 1973 smiley faces, future emoji seen by an entity dead long before any camera lenses, chatrooms, webcams or CCTVs. This Ωmega image is also the distant proof that these eyes had capacities very much like our own of looking forward into time – seeing images of arrivals, mostly deadly arrivals, by being able to fathom what was approaching and how fast.