THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
002
WARREN ELLIS

Can you imagine being stabbed in the eyeball forty times? For fun? No, no, even better – for Art. And, of course, for The Future.

An acquaintance of mine has recently gotten his eyeballs tattooed.

Now, actual ocular decoration isn’t new. Contact lenses count, of course, and in Holland they’ve been doing decorative eye implants for three or four years, surgically placing jewels in the conjunctiva. Intraocular implants have been around for donkey’s years, of course, but it was only in the new years of the 21st Century that some Dutch surgeon muttered around a lungful of Red Leb, “I have thought of a way to bring more bling to this cataract surgery gig.” See, this is what we have to look forward to in the 21C. In previous years, people with too much time to think didn’t usually have access to high-end surgical tools, and when they revealed what they wanted to use them for, they were usually sterilized and locked up in a basement. But it’s only this year that someone could say to themselves, “I’ve got no fucking space left on my body now that I’ve had that map of the Isle of Man inked on the inside of my foreskin – it’s time to investigate how to get my eyeballs tattooed.” And then get it done.

Now, apparently corneal tattooing has been around for ages, covering up scars and leucomas and other disgusting shit. But it took Shannon Larratt, of the indispensable ModBlog and the BME online community of body-modification fanciers, to ask the question – what about scleral tattooing? Well, a specialist told him that tattooing your eyeball is basically dangerous and stupid. Shannon, being Shannon, decided that this was Condition Win and set out along with two friends to get stabbed in the eyemeat.

One of said cronies, of course, was Pauly Unstoppable, the boy who looks like his head has been attacked by three drunken carpenters and has occasionally been called “the man with the biggest nostrils in the world.” The funny thing about Pauly Unstoppable is that his facial modifications make him look somehow sorrowful all the time. He maintains he’s a happy guy, but every photo you see of him just makes you want to pat him on the head. Or give him some money.

Anyway. As documented on ModBlog in this month of July 2007, Shannon, Pauly and fellow gambler Josh had the whites of their eyes tattooed. Now, they’re not after fine detail. They’re after a blanket of alien colour: they want to stain the entire white of the eye. Forty needle strikes into Pauly’s eyes. Literally, some bloke poking a bit of metal into some other bloke’s eyeball forty times. Ah, but this wasn’t enough for Josh and Shannon. Josh and Shannon had their eyeballs injected with ink mixed with antibiotics. There is, on ModBlog, an oddly disturbing photo of run-off ink flowing back out of the syringe puncture. A man’s eye oozing blue pus.

That’s right. Blue. The Fremen look, from DUNE. Which is, as the original specialist told them, much more easily and safely accomplished with a custom contact lens.

So, is this just a staggeringly retarded thing to do? Well... possibly. I think the spirit of the thing is absolutely correct. Why have a bicycle and only ever ride it on the pavement? The body-modification community is doing important work in pushing the envelope of the human body. We’re only ever going to be issued one each, so we may as well find out what it can do. (Personally, I just like finding out how much whisky and wakey-wakey-stuff it can hold, but I never claimed to be hardcore.) So, yes, we laugh at people with permanently blue eyeballs, and Stelarc with the ear on his arm and Orlan and her surgically-grafted bone horns. But the point of these procedures is entirely serious – without these ever so slightly mental stab-o-nauts hellbent on wrecking their bodies in artistic ways, we’ll never define the edges of how the body can be made to look and operate. Already, bodymod homebrewers have given themselves a sixth sense by implanting into their hands devices sensitive to magnetic fields – feeling when they walk past hidden security devices, sensing electric motors. The stuff of science fiction, really, and perfect, even necessary, for these science fiction years we now find ourselves living in.

So, this Sunday, lift your hair of the dog to the mad scientists of the human meat business. And then think about being struck in the eyeball with a needle forty times for the sake of The Future.