occularity [to see what he could see]

I was born cross-eyed…My vision was thereafter fully corrected with lenses. Until four I could only see large patterns, houses, trees, outliens of people with blurred coloring. While I saw two dark areas on human faces, I did not see a human eye or a teardrop or a human hair until i was four. Despite my new ability to apprehend details, my childhood’s spontaneous dependence only upon big pattern clues has persisted.

R. Buckminster Fuller, from Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Bantam, 1969).

“I called for a girl in response to one of those [escort] ads once. It said ‘Unusual black girls.’ So I phoned and said, ‘Just what do you mean by unusual?’ They said, ‘Just what did you have in mind?’ I said, ‘Well, I’d like one that was bald with an astigmatism.’ ‘Well, we’ll see what we can do,’ they said. They found the astigmatism but no the baldness.”

“Why astigmatism?” I wondered.

“I’m terribly attracted to women with ocular damage.”

Brian Eno and Lester Bangs, “A Sandbox in Alphaville”