The Mind’s Eye
This is the piece called The Mind’s Eye that featured on RTE Radio1 last night. A wee bit of flash fiction about memory. I hope you enjoy.
Posted at 11:19AM, Tuesday July 19th, 2022:
To whom it is of concern,
Do you think the mind’s eye loses focus over time? Like the way standard eyes do? Does age force your mind’s eye to recoil, to blur, to recede, to fail, essentially? Is that something that happens?
Like, is there a scientist in a lab somewhere, as we speak, toiling away to make some sort of corrective contraption for the mind’s eye?
And if there isn’t a scientist doing this currently, should there be? Is that a job we should collectively assign? We could have a referendum. We could go door-to-door and ask people if they think saving the mind’s eye from the decay of time might be a good use of our finite resources.
We might even set up an award, a bursary, funding, even, to incentivize a generation of scientists to make something akin to corrective glasses for our mind’s eye, so that as we age, we don’t forget things or lose focus, or begin to misremember, or think we’re in a place we’re not currently in. A cure, as such, for common ageing of the mind. If there really is an eye up there, why isn’t there something like laser eye surgery for this particular eye?
Should we have a vote to see if this eye is worth saving like all the other eyes, for which we go above and beyond for?
I only ask because when I was much younger and during times when my love was very far away from me, I could still picture her perfectly for years if needed. Her image, crisp, her voice, crystallized. But now when she is even gone for just a handful of minutes at a time, her face begins to blur and smudge like ink. The sounds of her words fade and distort like old CDs.
And this is how I know, I think, that the mind’s eye ages, and I was just wondering if we could do anything at all to fix that?
I await your response,
M.