The Eyes Have It

When the spaceship landed, the beings that got out were, well, hard to describe and I'm not going to. The main point about them, as we slowly came to understand was that they only had one sense, sight. So we called them The Eyes. The couldn't feel, or hear, smell, or taste, only see. They didn't understand hunger or cold or music or even dance although they could see it.

We tried to teach them our written language but they spoke and apparently thought in geometry. When we brought in our best mathematicians to try to talk to them we still only understood a little of what they had to say and they made it clear that they didn't understand us.

They could not see love, they could not see hate but they could see the results of both in a way. All that they saw was babies and killing. They asked why we would kill our own babies. They could see things like poverty, but they could not understand it. "Why does this person have so much while this person has so little?" they would ask. They saw only what we did, and not what we said about what we did

We could not translate cruelty, or kindness, they reproduced asexually so even family was foreign to them. We could not even explain prejudice even though we had always assumed it was about how beings differed in the way they looked.

We showed them Art, but pictures of humans or trees did not interest them. The feelings the Art represented did not mean anything to them.

We showed them scenic wonders and they replied that they understood the laws of physics well. If we were trying to explain gravity and such by sowing them Niagara Falls we were wasting our time, they knew all about gravity.

We showed them maps, but only the geologic ones made any sense to them. Dividing the world into countries, states, counties, cities, districts, townships and neighborhoods didn't make any sense they said. According to them we were obsessed with dividing thing s into smaller and smaller bits. The way we organized government and work and most of our lives into managers and bosses and committees and teams and supervisors is all quite unnecessary. It was bad geometry. They just didn't see it.

We showed them architecture, but they didn't like our architecture. We ended up explaining how it evolved and that led to religion and wealth and government and other subjects that they had already said didn't make any sense. Clubs, jobs, religions, sports, gangs, business, rock and roll bands, and any other form of social organization were all just forms of self imposed government. They didn't understand why we couldn't all just think for ourselves. It was about communication and exchange of ideas with each other, not dominance and subservience. They pointed out that we had a government of some kind for every grouping of people bigger than two. At this point the translators didn't have the heart to bring up marriage.

We tried to show them our finest scientific achievements but they said most of it was wrong. We were just babies when it came to anything that counted. To them.

Eventually The Eye people said that we were very stupid and they left. They said they were sorry they came.

We were very embarrassed. We began to look at ourselves differently and were ashamed. The first sentient beings ever to visit and they didn't think much of us.

Then everybody that could, went away to brood, and most of them ended up making love to each other with all five senses and then they felt much better about it.

You can see that.