JK Fowler

“Photons, you see, are those tiny elementary particles that constitute the most basic unit of light and all forms of electromagnetic radiation. Without them, we would not be able to see.” He looks around the classroom to see if anyone is listening. Not one but three people are nodding off in dramatic fashion against clenched fists, pens poignantly steadied, tips against paper as if, in their sleep, they will take notes. “Photons are light in a most basic sense and what we see are the reflections, scatterings or absorptions of those photons as they interact with objects in the outside world. What we see, we refer to as the visible light, one of the seven possibilities on the modern conception of the spectrum of light.” A pen is dropped. It slams against the tiled floors, the sound reverberating against the concrete walls. He pauses and begins to think of those first days of his teaching when it all seemed possible. He was going to push the boundaries, expand the limits of the minds of men and women alike, blow up old conceptions of the world and egg students on to offer new ones. But here he was. The guy with the puffy fro in back chats with his latest girlfriend, the blond woman with the pink ‘fuck-me’ dress in the front chews on her gum like she’s a cow chewing cud,  the young man with black hair and a solid uni-brow plays on his hand-held PS2. Disinterest marks the minutes of their lives in his class and he balefully continues unabated, teaching of the very matter which constitutes their lives and his.

“So what does this all mean? Why should you care? Well, maybe you shouldn’t as it seems some of you don’t. But I would propose the following: we see only 1/7th of the spectrum of light. All around us, every single day there exists light which we do not see. Of that 1/7th, we do not even see all of it as some of it is either absorbed into the objects, scattered beyond our vision, lost to somewhere else. Think about this and then think of the fact that when you see, you do not see but objects in a way, see you. What does that do, to say this?” The boy in the green sweatshirt and the frumpy corduroys seems to listen intently, leans forward in his chair awaiting the professors rhetorical reply. “Well, I would say it offers a damn good idea towards complicating the notion of human agency. Think about it. If objects act upon us, act upon our eyes, and offer us our visible world that everyday we work with, live in, operate against, where is our agency, how does that idea that we humans are the actors upon this world really hold up? What does it mean that in our daily lives, we operate while seeing only a fraction of a fraction of the possibility of vision, that the vision that we do see is comprised of millions of tiny photons and that even then, most of those are lost or filtered out by our eyes?” Now on the edge of his seat, the boy in the green sweatshirt looks intensely at the professor. His face is strained, the veins in his forehead protrude by what seems to be inches. The boy’s lips tightly pressed together, he stands and lets out a fart that slams against the professor’s face, weaves toxic gases through the nostrils of his fellow classmates, and settles into a grimy soup that wafts through the singed air.

The professor pulls the chafed stool towards him, gracefully takes a seat and ponders the many limitations on vision.