ICYMI (reading the post this video is about) you can read it riiiiiight here 👉 “The Last Picture Show.”
If you’d rather I read it to you, I am happy to do so.👇 Reading commences as soon as you hit play. Enjoy!
Notes from the Captain
Crew, I see you.
The first time I learned of the science of Optography, I was curious. The somewhat fanciful notion that at the moment of your death, the image of the last thing that you see will be captured and imprinted on your retina grabs the imagination.
It sure did mine.
The last thing that I see—what will it be? Ah, who cares.
Once you get into the viability of ever seeing that image—reproducing it in some way so that it could, in theory, help you identify a murderer—it becomes more like a bridge too far of believability. Is an image captured by your retina? Maybe. Can it ever be fixed in a permanent way and looked at? At scale? Efficiently? For a viable reason? Ima say, unlikely. But I can see why folks would want that to be true.
I jokingly call it pseudo science in the video. But am I joking. Well, it did help further understanding of how our peepers work.
Links below dive you into the study and exploration of the field, (some of which I get into in the video), and some general debunking. Check it out. Like I said. Fanciful notion. Great plot point in sci-fi.
Your eyes. The cameras of our lives.
Now, all that said and me being me, I used the optography to take my brain in another direction with last week’s post, using my own imagination to ponder beyond my last sight and make a plea for focusing on what really matters—how we look to others. I hope you didn’t find it too morbid. I wasn’t in a morbid mood, and I really don’t care to waste any time thinking about how I’ll leg it off this planet.
I’ve got things to do. Many, many important things!
I do notice that the older I get the more I think about how many more years I may have (not in a morbid sense, but in a way of motivating me to do things, which perhaps you still find morbid), and the opportunities we are given to grow and evolve while on our timelines.
Don’t waste any time on that timeline predicting what the last thing you will see will be. First, last—focus on the now. Now is all.
Now is now.
See you in the daguerreotypes.
🫡 Your Captain.
Thangs from this episode…
👩✈️ Optography
Here is a basic primer on Optography and how it came to be.
Some things to read
“I Spy, with the Back of My Eye, a Murderer (or Not)” - McGill University
“Optography: The Science of the Last Thing You See” - via Neatorama
This was the first thing I ever read about optography and the thing that started it all! (Meaning me writing the post). As I always say, ideas can come from anywhere.
“Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Man’s Eye” by Arthur B. Evans, Science Fiction Studies.
A lot of the quotes in my video are from this article. I hope I quoted from it correctly. This is the abstract.
Abstract.—A popular belief during the late 19th and early 20th century held that the image of the last thing seen at the moment of death remained imprinted forever upon the retina of the eye. It was called an "optogram." This belief developed concurrently with rapid advances made in photography during this historical period, and was seemingly validated by certain scientific experiments in ocular physiology done in the 1870s. Looking for the "photo in a dead person’s eye" soon became an accepted police investigative procedure and an established touchstone of much turn-of-the-century SF and detective fiction. In later 20th century literature and film, a modern variant of the optogrammic photo emerged: the dead brain itself was now "read" using high-tech scanners to record the deceased’s final vision (or thoughts) before death occurred. The goal of this article is to examine this pseudoscientific literary motif, its origins and evolution, and to show how science fact can sometimes become science fiction and take on a life of its own in the popular imagination. (ABE)
In today’s BTS video, I read a bit of text in double time, and now I’m second-guessing if I should’ve done that. It’s actually from the footnotes of the above article on the validity of optography, and some expansion on the power of rhodopsin. I’m including it here if anyone was frustrated by the speed of my jibber-jabber and actually wanted to hear what I was saying. Again, all of this is in that article.
“It is a very romantic idea but, for a start, under normal daylight conditions there is very little rhodopsin in the retina; it is only used for dawn, dusk, and night vision. It would be pointless to try to recover an image unless it had been formed under conditions of low illuminations, rod vision not cone vision, and there would have to have been no been no illumination of the eye from the moment the image was seen to the time of fixation on the retina. Even the best images that we can see by nocturnal vision actually depend on quite small local differences in the concentration of rhodospin which would be enormously difficult to measure without using the sensitive neural apparatus of the dead eye to detect it (don’t even think it—the retinal nerve cells die within minutes of the cessation of blood flow).”
“Optograms, Autobiography, and the Image of Jack the Ripper” Craig Monk, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall 2010)
Some good nuggets in this one—specifically as it relates to Jack the Ripper—but alas, is only a 14 page preview from a bigger work.
“…if we understand daguerreotypes, early photographic images, as simply a means for "fixing the images of the camera obscura" (Benjamin, "Little History" 281), one might see why people would compare the retina with a daguerreotype plate, its surface at death never replenished and so its final image never replaced.”
What’s a daguerreotype exactly? See below 👇
👩✈️ What is a daguerreotype?
Photography is amazing. I simplified the magic of it horribly in my video. Time. Chemical reactions. Fixing the image. Now THAT’S a metaphor for life.
Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about daguerreotypes.
The sitter must remain completely still. No fidgeting!
👩✈️ The Last Picture Show
Clever title for last week’s post, Janeen. Really firing. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that this movie was made the year you were born. This tragedy—both of us—aging like fine wines. Sorry. Just made myself laugh.
“Something that had seemed permanent is shown to be transient.” - A.O. Scott talking about the movie 👇. Or is he talking about Optography?
👩✈️ Pseudo Echo Appreciation Post
This will only make sense to people who watch today’s video. Funky Town (last link in this section) was the first Pseudo Echo song to break through internationally, reaching #6 on the Billboard Charts in 1986. Do charts even matter anymore?
Anyhoo, Pseudo Echo were/are more than that cover. Here are some songs I loved as a teen from before Funky Town. The New Romantics/New Wave-era style makes me smile. I’m not saying I had that, but mid-80s Janeen was one hell of a thing.
Gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me.
Ok. That’s it. I’m sure there was more but I can’t find it now. Thanks for listening/watching and sharing this week. If you want to comment on any of the concepts in last week’s post—or just in general—feel free to leave a comment for the Captain (it me.)
Janeen 🫡
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple
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