Going "Beyond"

Even with the 3D glasses sliding down my nose I had forgotten I'd been following their gaze to watch “Star Trek Beyond.” When the lights came on in the theatre and the glasses came off I immediately knew something had changed. Even in the dim everything looked different somehow.

Back in the ‘50’s I'd followed my family's gaze into the comfortably small, black&white world of our first television set. It had taught me where to look and how to focus in ways not even my grandmother's constant habit of show and tell could match. A camera, after all, is just another kind of guiding hand revealing where/what to look at and how to think/feel about what one is shown. And this two-month-too-early premie needed all the help she could get just to figure out which eye could be trusted to look through.

I was lucky to have the first art teacher of the airwaves, Jon Gnagy, to draw me out of that visual confusion. The simple geometry of his penciled horizon lines and vanishing points was my first introduction to the concepts of ‘near’ versus ‘far.’ His drawings explained "the shadow and substance" of my form and distance. What always remained out of reach, however, was the third dimension that it outlined and helped guide me through.


3D was like something out of the “Twilight Zone,” something mystical, mysterious. A place where somehow everyone else lived but I was not even allowed to visit. The lack of it stubbed my toes, misguided my grasp, and washed me out of NASA’s first Young Astronauts’ program. It became something to want –and blame– as it came to signify for me why I was doing so badly in school and felt so different from my classmates. I hadn’t even realized that I also looked different from everyone else, all wall-eyed and wobbly-brained, until the first day of first grade. Decades later it could still bring me to tears to sit unmoved as I watched others bob and weave to avoid the invisible ‘things’ that reached out to them from a movie screen.

But after reading of a man who suddenly gained stereovision for the first time in his life from watching a 3D movie ( http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world ).  I HAD to try it myself, don those cursed red and blue glasses again one more time. The modern polarizing version of those old cardboard specs did show me …something. But watching “Avatar” in ‘RealD3D’  I couldn’t quite process what that 'something' was. I suspected I was merely picking up cinematic cues for what had been arbitrarily decided to be the foreground, middle, or distance of each scene. And that 'something' hadn’t lasted once the undeniably beautiful film was over. Later incarnations of ‘IMAX 3D’ and 3D television hadn’t been much better. So again I despaired, assuming binocular vision was simply the prerequisite I would need but could never have.

But a month or so before “Star Trek Beyond’s” premiere I happened upon a casual mention in an article about virtual reality that simply read: “of course one doesn’t need binocular vision to see depth.” Wait, WHAT!? A quick Google search revealed that indeed it was true. There were studies to prove it:  http://pexlab.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2014/07/24/what-does-it-mean-to-see-in-3d/


Perhaps I could still somehow get a glimpse after all?

The effect of “Beyond” seemed more subtle from the start than “Avatar.” This time, instead of being distracted by the tech –constantly challenging myself about whether I was really seeing what I thought I was– I just settled in to enjoy the continuation of a saga I’d known and loved since I was eleven years old. By the roll of the credits, careening around planets and through clouds of star stuff, I was fully “engaged” and utterly delighted. Without hardly realizing it I had indeed been truly “transported.” But how would I know if this something was real if I’d never seen it before?

Firsts don’t happen every day of one’s life. You certainly can’t have them twice. I didn’t want this one to end. But how to prepare if, like others, I would forever see my real world differently?  I’d tried to imagine what that might be like. Tried to ‘see it’ via the music of a tone poem I entitled “Stereopsis.” Like hiking an audial trail into flowering valleys and up through forests of sound to mountain vistas it mused about what I had learned from the works of Oliver Sacks, "Stereo Sue" Barry, Temple Grandin, and Barbara Arrowsmith-Young.

From their descriptions, especially of Sack's own loss of his beloved stereovision and Berry's miraculous gain of it later in life, I had felt like I had at least brailed a landscape that I could still only hope to see. …Or would this all just dissolve away the moment I leave the theatre? Was I just fooling myself? Isn’t it all an illusion anyway?

I struggled the empty popcorn bucket into the trash then squinted out into the glare of the hallway. The entry I was standing in extended out before me across and into the theatre opposite like sections of an old-fashioned telescope that had been unnested and pulled out at length. I stepped out into the corridor between and was astonished by its volume and the boundaries that created it. I strode toward the exit to join my friend Kathleen who’d made a beeline for the bathroom. My arms and legs felt extra long but I was afraid to look down at myself for fear this new sense of size and space would wear off in the process.

I came to a stop before a huge pop-up display for “Ben Hur.” I’d passed by it on the way in hardly registering that the horses and chariot were separate and extended out from the advertisement behind it.  Now I was weaving and bobbing crazily in front of the display trying to explain to Kathleen how it looked so strange to me. I didn’t just KNOW that the huge, flat white horses were not part of the flat background graphic behind them. I was perceiving it, EXPERIENCING it!

Even the little elevator that came next seemed miraculously full of space around us. It was as if I was suddenly aware of the air itself as a shape. In the lobby below it occurred to me I could test this new sense. Grasping things at arm’s length directly in front of me had always been a hit and mostly miss proposition. Now I didn’t need to correct my reach at all.  On our way by I could touch the top of each stanchion that marked the queue to the refreshment counter. Dare I believe this?

The sun-dappled interior of the mall was like stepping out into a cathedral. The apex of its skylight yawned three-stories high overhead. Its vast hallways extended out in all directions in a riot of lines and colors and people. The feeling was exhilarating, intoxicating.

Walking past counters in Macy’s, dodging around displays just to enjoy the spaces between, I passed before a floor to ceiling mirror and stopped dead. How many times had I absent-mindedly walked face-first into one of these in a public place, excusing myself to my own reflection? Now for the first time I could SEE it was not like the room around it. I looked past its edge at the ‘near’ of the perfume counter and the ‘far’ of an escalator beyond. Dimensions the mirror clearly did not have. Wow. Mirrors are flat!

I checked my strabismus in the reflection. As Kathleen had confirmed a moment before, if anything I was more wall-eyed than ever. By this time however, I was too giddy to care. I wove back and forth through the shoe department as if it were a ride at Disneyland. Kathleen lagged far behind, disavowing ever knowing me.

I paused between the inner and outer doors to the parking lot. If a mirror is flat, why isn't the view out the windows flat too?  Before Kathleen had caught up so I could ask, the summer heat trapped by all the surrounding glass reminded me to breathe. What I’d actually started to do was hyper-ventilate (another first). The giddy sensation was now bordering on light-headed dizziness. Bursting out into the fresh air outside didn’t help at all. All of it –all at once– made me feel like I’d again drunk from the bottle in “Alice in Wonderland.” Everything loomed huge and I felt lost among cars, and trees, and walls, and whole flotillas of clouds sailing by. Luckily, a magnificent turkey vulture, beautiful at least in flighted silhouette, was wheeling directly overhead. It gave my attention sanctuary, a point of reference for where ‘I’ was amidst all the confusion.

Up, down, sideways and into Kathleen’s car panting like a long distance runner.

The drive home wasn’t quite so pleasant either. Looking straight ahead was like those dolly-zoom sequences in Hitchcock movies when the camera is moved backwards or forwards while its zoom lens is dialed in the opposite direction. Trying to only look off to the side didn’t help either as every indentation between cars or trees or buildings drew me in over and over again in rapid succession. For the first time in my life I got car sick. I finally had to close my eyes whether I wanted to or not.

Well into the evening I was nauseous and it took two days for the headache to wear off. But it was worth it.

Now even in the familiar surroundings of my home I find my attention constantly being drawn to the floor, my gaze drawn across it, past the furniture and up the walls, to stop at the ceiling’s edge. Now these rooms are more than just containers of objects and memories, they are also the boundaries of another dimension. Space, my final frontier.