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The Ancient Art and Intimate Craft of Artificial Eyes

Eye makers for millennia have been trying to re-create the expressionist power of the human body’s most complex and emotionally meaningful visible organ.

They consisted of “an oval shell, exactly like half of a bird’s egg.” They “varied only in size and colour, the same piece being used for both the left and right side.” Such a primitive and simplistic design “gave the wearers much pain, produced a staring effect, and imparted to the face a repulsive aspect.” That device, we learn from the show’s intro, when Steve Austin is being rebuilt after barely surviving a crash of his test plane, connects by some cord directly backward into his occipital lobe. Visits to my ocularist from the time of my eye’s creation — which took two days — through every annual polishing have been long stretches of personal attention and care that seem increasingly rare in a medical world of high volume, crazy insurance regulations, and systemic stress.

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