It's a clean well-lighted eye.
It will outlive me.
It beams entropic innocence.
It lives on magnetic media.
It can be sent over the phone in a few seconds.
It is uncontaminated by snots, blood, shit, or sweat.
It hovers above pain, breath, touch.
It exists in pure light.
Prints give only a corporeal reference.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
Two paradigms scuff and jostle under the streetlight, assumptions hardened.
Do you know that a clever infidel in Mainz is duplicating sacred texts by a mechanical stamping method?
Can you bring such an image into the gallery, into a frame, under glass, and not be embarassed for it, wilting and degraded, cut off from nourishment?
A billion displays are winking at us, bemused.
--------------------------------------------
When Cathy and I were in Greece we learned that the people in the villages where we were staying believed in the evil eye. As outsiders, we were sometimes suspected of being carriers of the dreaded force.
We didn't know, but the worst thing we could do in this situation was to give a compliment - it was a sure giveaway that evil was afoot. We wondered at the blank stares that we received upon commenting on someone's beautiful children.
The antidote or protector against the evil eye is the blue eye. You see blue eye amulets for sale in stores, people wear them, put them on their kids -- it's a tiny ceramic eye on a chain, or a blue stone of some kind. You also see them hanging from motorbikes and farm animals.
The best of luck to everyone, Ed Atkeson