The Persistence Of Vision

'ThePersistenceOfVision' is an excellent and disturbing ScienceFiction novella by JohnVarley?, about life in a commune of deaf-blind people out in the New Mexico desert, perceived through the eyes (and, moreover, skin) of a five-sensed visitor. The reader starts with the assumption - almost axiomatic - that it is the inhabitants of the commune who are disabled, but over the course of the story, come to realise that, in this context, it is the visitor; in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is truly blind.

The central concern is language: deaf-blind people have neither spoken nor written language, nor sign language; instead, they communicate through touch, and they have multiple levels of sophistication. The visitor, after stumbling on the commune, is taught 'handtalk' (the InternationalManualAlphabet?) by a sighted child of the commune (who functions as his psychopomp throughout), but soon realises that the communards do not use it amongst themselves; rather, they use 'shorthand', essentially an ideographic manual language, where touch symbols indicate concepts, rather than being used to spell words. This language has an expanded form, 'bodytalk', where the whole body becomes a communicative surface, both for transmission and reception, allowing incredibly complex patterns of meaning and nuance - a true body language - in which talking blurs into other body-contact actions such as shaking hands, hugging, and having sex.

However, there is yet another layer of language on top of this, which the narrator describes as Touch; Touch somehow combines bodytalk with ad-hoc patterns of meaning, generating a sort of context-dependent metalanguage piggybacking on bodytalk. As Varley's narrator puts it:

Touch was what they spoke to each other. It was an incredible blend of all three other modes I had learned, and the essence of it was that it never stayed the same. I could listen to them speak to me in shorthand, which was the real basis for Touch, and be aware of the currents of Touch flowing just beneath the surface.

It was a language of inventing languages. Everyone spoke their own dialect because everyone spoke with a different instrument: a different body and set of life experiences. It was modified by everything. It would not stand still.

They would sit at the Together and invent an entire body of Touch responses in a night; idiomatic, personal, totally naked in its honesty. And they used it only as a building block for the next night's language.

In other words, the LispLanguage made flesh.

There is a final stage of communication, beyond Touch, known only as '* * *', which is inaccessible, and even inconceivable, to those with sight or hearing; it apparently reaches full expression with the transcendence of its speakers from bodily form. This is presumably equivalent to the nirvana of SmugLispWeeniedom.

There's also something about MouseGestures in there, i'm sure..


Also (and originally) the visual phenomenon that causes perception of images to linger, allowing for the perception of continuous motion in visual sequences (tv, movies) that exceed the flicker fusion threshold; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision

Also the name of an extremely popular ray trace program, see http://www.povray.org

When i were a lad, our mother always used to tell us "WikiIsNotaDictionary!", but i suppose times change.

Oh, I agree, but once a page exists for some other reason, there's no harm, and some benefit, in mentioning other meanings -- particularly since I merely provided URLs with a terse explanation, rather than trying to provide a full description.

I see this as pretty much the same thing as my note on PeterDeutsch mentioning there are two famous people by that approximate name, not just one.

In this particular case, also, the visual phenomenon definition is not one that is known to everyone, but is presumably the source of the title of the novella, so I would think it particularly relevant to mention.


The (quasi?) utopia described in Persistence of Vision is very typical of utopian literature. Bleak and oppressive, and portraying this bleakness and oppressiveness as positive qualities. The reverse also happens as when people portray the lives of immortals as boring and dissolute.

The reality is that deaf-mute people live in a bleak world. Their consciousness, their minds, are greatly reduced from the lack of perceptual experience.

Surely the thesis of the novella is that they live in a rich world - in some ways, much richer than ours, because of the richness of their communication? that we are essentially shut off from each other (intentionally, if nothing else - who doesn't hide some secrets?) - whereas in this "utopia", you aren't and can't, which could be seen as wildly scary, but is also what enables the utopia to be utopic?
...The concepts they can grasp are reduced, their thoughts are constrained, their ability to perform analogies is curtailed, their creative powers are sharply diminished.
Alternatively, think of ants. Individual ants are not very intelligent, indeed perhaps not at all, and act very simply. But collectively they manage to do amazing things - I've even heard of the suggestion (inspired by Wolframs ANewKindOfScience - doesn't he even suggest stars in a galaxy might have a similar property?) that the hive (? anthill?), collectively, can work like a single brain, with the ants being equivalent to the neurons. (The difference is that the unit of awareness is the human brain or the ant, not the neuron or the anthill). Is it possible, therefore, that the incomparably stronger (if the story is to be believed) binding of the communers into a community might not have a similar effect? At the least, POV's thesis is surely that the increased intellectual stimulation they can get from each other makes up for the lack of stimulation from the outside environment.

The problem with that thesis is that their society becomes a completely self-referential system, cut off from reality. There are all kinds of problems when that happens. In art, you've got Modern Art. In architecture, you've got postmodernism. In literature, you've got PoMo. In the case of a society, these problems would include 'poverty', 'primitivism', 'underdevelopment' and so on. Contrast http://www.theyesmen.org (conceptual artists) and other Situationists with detached artists.

Neither Smalltalk nor Lisp derive their richness from having powerful metasystems. They derive their richness from extensive libraries and frameworks that deal with real-world (ie, external) problems. The language of Touch would be like that; a language with a powerful metasystem and nothing to apply it to.

Persistence of Vision is the opposite of sour grapes and a more defined version of grass is greener ....

You shouldn't believe for a second that Varley believed in what he was portraying, particularly since the the ultimate point was to Transcend to another, utterly ineffable, plane of existence. It's just science fiction.

It makes certain points that I considered thought-provoking (not all of which were realistic, mind you), but note that Varley hasn't plucked out his eyes, which speaks for itself.

I can enjoy things like Star Trek without buying into the particular future they paint. Fiction is about willing suspension of disbelief.


CategoryBook (not really a book Yes, it is, since it was collected in a Varley anthology of the same title There is a book with the same name as the novella, but the novella is not a book - no more than the capital of France is in Texas! Yes, but the page title refers to both. Well, not originally, but i suppose it does now.) CategoryScienceFiction


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