The New York Hall of Science
Eli Rodriguez Fielder
They have always dissected the cow’s eye and they always will. The same procedure has been on the books at the New York Hall of Science for decades, serving generations of children in Queens. Every month, I imagine, a bucket of cow eyes floating in formaldehyde arrives at the loading dock in the back, probably from the same upstate supplier. In the nineties, children crowded around the white-coated dissector, who seemed much older than this teenager standing on a stage in front of my children, asking questions no one answers. But age is relative.
Now, the audience sits in rows with children on laps, watching live footage of the cow’s eye on a screen above the live event. The eye looks like an oyster pearl, only the shape indicates that it might be an eye. The act of preservation distorts the eye into a grayed out stone surrounded by fat and tissue. One of my kids asks, Is that it?
The Hall of Science has been updated with a new extension and layout set to indoctrinate children into the open-tables and brighter colors of the tech future. Like much of Flushing Meadows Park, the original building was built for the 1964-65 World’s Fair. Now, the extension obscures the original tower and its dated architecture, of which I have a fond attachment. Despite the new bright STEM-aesthetic, they kept some favorites such as the perspective illusion room, where as a child, I pretended to be Alice in Wonderland running back forth, growing big and small. The floorboards bear generational scuff marks. Children’s museums don’t age well, a constant battering of summer camps and tired parents who just want to let their kids loose for a couple of hours. We have passed through many cities and still encounter the same blue and green color schemes, bubble stations, and art rooms.
I whisper to my children that when I was young, you could get close enough to smell the eye. What did it smell it? Formaldehyde. What does that smell like? Like chemicals, sharp.
What a failure to use a word like sharp. Our language lacks words to describe scent, instead always explaining smell through metaphors of visual things, like floral. Or through taste, like buttery. Olfactory researchers want to do for scent what visual artists did with the color wheel, but the perfumary arts occupies a strange niche in the art world. One trying to parse through the chemical slippage between bananas and nail polish remover can get lost in the overlaps. I’m sure we have just as much variety in our perception of color; but we were raised on baby books indoctrinating us to reds and blues. This world is a visual one.
Formaldehyde smells rotten and clean at the same time. It’s thick in the nose and attaches to memory easily, conjuring an image for me of my high school laboratory. I’ve smelled formaldehyde relatively few times in my life, but I can conjure up the scent in my mind’s eye (nose?). It’s the smell of preservation, evoking the disturbing human need to stop things from rotting. It’s the smell of sheen, a gloss on meat, the way packaging on flat-pack furniture can inexplicably smell rancid. If I wanted to use a metaphor: it is the smell of getting tired in a museum.
Now, we smell nothing because instead we watch the dissection on the screen. The dissector attempts to close the gap through their verbose descriptions of every move of scalpel and tweezer, explaining what is fat, or nerve, or muscle. Incredible when people have this kind of trained eye, like ultrasound techs or birdwatchers. Yes, I see it, I say, looking for the flash of fetus-finger, but in truth I see nothing but static.
As they dissect, they sort the fluids, aqueous humor by the shine of the light and tears by the taste of them. A bundle of nerves, disconnected, are placed to the side. They speak to the role of the aqueous and vitreous humors, how these fluids protect the cornea and maintain the eye’s integrity. Gently, they prod the orb with the side of the scalpel so that the gelatinous mold bends under the pressure but does not quite break.
Jelly exists as an in-between state between liquid and solid in a branch of physics dealing with soft matter. Soft matter poses mysteries for scientists, like when would the ketchup release from the neck of the bottle? We don’t have an equation for this: the moment of release, or in the case of the cow’s eye, the moment of burst. Fluid seeps out but does not deflate the eye as I had imagined. Like so many science experiments, as my children have come to realize, the result is anti-climactic. They cannot revive the dead moths they find on the windowsills or turn their rock collection to diamonds with the compressions of their small palms pressed together. I remember their crestfallen faces when I picked them up after their first-grade science class. No explosions, no smoking test tubes. Thinly designed, safe experiments they could see right through. De-fanged science.
At home, they beg me for science experiments wanting to raid the cabinets for things to combine. I always regret when I relent and spend the afternoon fighting with them to clean up the baking soda, food coloring, flour, while I try to bleach out turmeric stains on the counters. The parenting style I imagined for myself was to leave my kids alone to learn, but this conflicts with the unexpected anxieties over their capacity for mess. A knot of triggers I refuse to untangle.
By placing the dissection on a platform, the museum removes us from the mess. No smell, no unintentional squirt landing on my shirt, just events on a screen. Even with this distance, some people cannot stomach it. As the scalpel moves across the horizon of the eye, the parent in front of me reaches their limit and picks up their child and to leave. The child whines about having to miss out on the experience because of some adult’s weak disposition. As a veteran of the eye dissection, I can wait it out. The museum might mediate the gore, but I can still feel the incision across my own eye, which makes me think of how fragile humans are—a bag of jelly elevated by words like vitreous humor and plasma. I scan my children for evidence that they might be experiencing this somatic mirroring, but they have the poker faces of kids transfixed. Maybe it’s a grown-up thing. Although, one child usually does cries when the other gets hurt. As do I, and sometimes the dog joins us. I cannot see these invisible tethers, but they exist.
In a study from the early 2000s, participants watched images of other’s suffering and self-reported feeling sensations of similar pain, proved by scans of their brains. This study pinpointed what they then termed as vicarious pain, which describes the brain’s ability to send pain signals when watching another get injured. Under the auspice of pain research, this work has been linked to the importance of empathy in human evolution. When someone witnesses another getting burnt, they learn something about fire. But the cow’s eye is dead.
The sensation doesn’t equate to pain, but rather acute self-awareness of my own gelatinous composition. A future memory of a scalpel and formaldehyde that finds its way to my current moment. I don’t wince, but cringe. Later I will search for a word less emotional than empathy, but all I can find in my surface-level inquiry is mirror-touch synesthesia which seems more like a specific disorder than a common human experience. At least, I think it’s common to viscerally feel a scalpel in one’s own eye when observing animal dissection. The study proffered that only thirty percent of the population experienced vicarious pain. The other seventy percent felt nothing special.
I rest my head against the back of the child on my lap and wonder about early surgeries to eyes and how common it might have been to save one. I pull my phone from my pocket and surreptitiously write, look up first evidence of eye surgery. It’s hard to think of what herbal remedies or alternative practices could save a damaged eye before surgery. Folk remedies that thrived in communities isolated from places where surgical science was unavailable. A strange news segment clip emerges in my memory about an eastern European woman who used her tongue to clean out dirt and objects from the eyes of people in her village. She had done this her whole life, licking thousands of eyes of her neighbors. She looked like something from a fairy tale, complete with a headscarf and the kind of mouth that suggests a deficit of teeth, which I suppose would make her job easier. Our world will always listen to these stories, the thirty-second oddity inserted into a quieter evening to keep ratings going. But why did so many people in her village get so many objects stuck in their eyes? Look up eye-licking woman.
As the dissection pulls apart the grape skin of the retina, I think of eye-drops of vinegar to dilute cataracts or castor oil for infections. My father’s mother encouraged me to eat carrots for my vision, a proverb I repeated for my own children without much thought. Later, I found its origins in a British war campaign to get people to eat more carrots and watch the skies for planes. Look up truth about carrots and vision. My mother had a remedy she brought from Colombia for when my eyes would crust over with infection. When my own kids wake up unable to open their eyelids, I still brew the same tea for them. Look up chamomile and eye infections. My children grow irritated at my distraction. They pull on my sleeve and say, mama look up, forcing me to return to the screen of dissection.
Eventually, they begin to squirm on my lap while we watch the iridescent blue inside the cow’s eye, the tapetum. The thing that ruins photos of the dog, turning him into a red-eyed beast. In order to keep themselves safe, some insects and animals have evolved eye-like structures on parts of their bodies away from their vital organs, such as the tips of their wings. If they are attacked, they will be attacked in a place on their body that might ensure their survival. The peacock’s feathers spread with eyes like the apocalypse, which may deter predators from their fragility. This monstrosity of iridescent eyes also attracts mates. In the cow’s eye, the tapetum lucidum shines with the same oil-slick of the peacock’s feathers, enabling them to see better at night. Humans do not have a tapetum lucidum since we are diurnal. Although so are cows. Inherent in our design is the need for artificial light. If we had our own tapeta lucida, we might never have the need for candles.
My children have to ask me twice if we can leave before I respond yes. The cow’s eye is almost complete, but they are restless from sitting and want to play with a Cas Holman-designed section filled with cogs and frames. When we leave the museum, I point out the original building hovering in the background. It looms now with a multiplicity of tiny windows carved into the stone, like a lotus pod of eyes, the stuff of nightmares. As we walk to our car, I look over my shoulder and catch the building staring back, the somatic mirror of my memory.
