Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Qupperneq 202

apart from each other, our puny eyes suffice only for domestic par-
allax, the tools within our grasp, or possibly the choreography of
the farmyard, the recalcitrant sheep and hens. Many years ago I
acquired a device like a pair of spectacles on a stand, with which
to look at adjacent and overlapping aerial photographs of the ter-
rain I lived on and see it in stunning three dimension, with deep
rolling valleys and high peaked mountains rising towards me. The
photographs I used were taken at two-thousand metre intervals, so
that the apparatus showed me Iceland with eyes which were two
kilometres apart instead of three inches, and the depth of the val-
leys and height of the mountains became cosmic indeed.
Cartographers have long since taken advantage of our visual inad-
equacy and invented a new perspective in their maps, an almost
goethe-esque manipulation of colour and shadow to bring out the
depth of valley and height of mountain on the flat printed page.
This is what we do normally when we look further afield, extrapo-
lating from the vision and touch of our immediate workspace. For
glancing up the valley to gauge the weather, or watching for Mars
to go retrograde, the images on our two-dimensional retinae are too
similar in each eye to enable us to perform the fast Fourier trans-
forms we use to chop onions or thread needles. For most of what
we see, we might as well be looking at a flat surface, drawn in good
perspective. One wonders whether perspective was not invented by
a one-eyed artist.
Perspective requires a horizon, a bounding circle – the greek
word here is horos, a boundary. The circle of the horizon is also a
two-dimensional figure, its immaterial perimeter parallel to the
plane of our eyes, as long as we stand straight and eschew moun-
tains, which promote vertigo. ‘Immaterial’ in that the proper epi-
thet for perspective is vanishing; in temperate Western societies,
bounded by trees and buildings, horizons are rarely visual. Instead,
as we shall see shortly, they have become powerful metaphors
referring to the invisible limits of our thought, the lonely islands of
our modern consciousness.
Digital photography – very unfortunately named as we shall see
when I start talking about fingers – poses thorny problems for hori-
zons. My digital camera takes photographs composed of 1.2 mil-
lion pixels each. given that each pixel has a finite number of pos-
THuMBIng THrOugH THE InDEX
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