The Wake

“People just don’t understand. If everyone would just close one eye for one day, maybe then they would fully realize the 2-D hell that I inhabit,” sculptor Edmund Auch laments. A single stream of tears rolls down his right cheek.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me. Sometimes I say stupid things on account of the eye.”

Auch is a true inspiration. Rejecting what society has deemed appropriate one-eyed careers (like pirate or ruggedly handsome soap opera star), Auch has decided to tackle his lack of depth perception head-on.

“I try to look at the bright side. I see this void in my head not as a disability, but rather a gift that has provided me with an entirely unique artistic perspective. I save a lot of money on contact lenses and Visine, and I’m at a 50 percent lower risk of developing an eye tumor. I bet that would be horrible…”

Auch’s asymmetrical face twists in uncomfortable remorse as he recalls that fateful day when he and “lefty” parted ways. “I was 10, full of 10-year-old dreams of hitting the next home run in the big game.” But after a freak accident with a Red Ryder BB gun, Auch’s batting average was soon dwarfed by the average number of times he “whiffed it.” But Auch was not easily defeated by his inability to gauge distance and momentum. With a seldom-paralleled bravery, Auch picked up the pieces of his broken field of dreams and reassembled them, defying all odds to pursue one of the world’s most three-dimensional of disciplines: sculpture.

Auch went on to describe his triumph over monoscopic vision in the world of 3-D art in moving detail, but unfortunately I folded that portion of the interview into a paper airplane. He totally didn’t see it coming.