'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:
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.
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