“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.”
– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)
There is a certain pain that accompanies reflection. The shards of the world are turned inwards in the form of painful splinters; a slicing through not the web of reality, but rather the mechanism of seeing. A magnifying glass quantifies and enlarges an image, but the spectator does not construe meaning from what is magnified. Our myopia is disrupted by a splinter: the knowledge of suffering and coming to terms with it. Only then can the illusory spectacle be shattered, and the magnifying glass be aligned towards our erroneous worldly arrangements.
The flaw in vision, becomes the conduit to vision.
Splintered Eye 