Recently, when a visiting friend wanted to rent it, I saw "Schindler’s List" again. I can report that a second viewing of Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal of concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth yields even more layers and subtleties. But Fiennes notwithstanding, I have to say that, for me, watching "Schindler’s List" has now twice been a vexing experience.

What irritates me about "Schindler’s List" is that it never gets beyond lamenting man’s inhumanity to man and celebrating triumph of human spirit, etc., when it could have thrown at least a quick light on something of consequence that apparently still baffles a lot of people—what Nazis were actually about.

Normally absence of serious probing into psychodynamics of egregious human behavior would no more disappoint me in a Steven Spielberg film—even one about Holocaust—than it did in a episode of “Hogan’s Heroes.” Spielberg is an enormously gifted filmmaker, but plumbing nastier depths isn’t something he does and you don’t go to his movies looking for that. (On contrary, you go in hope of retrieving a prepubescent innocence.) So I’d have no cause to make an issue of film’s limitations in this regard were it not for fact that Spielberg comes maddeningly close to giving his audience a glimpse of where Nazi’s were coming from. (You could say, in fact, that he gets to within just an inch or so of accomplishing this.)

I’m thinking of scenes in which Goeth shoots two prisoners from his balcony and then returns to his apartment and urinates.

In this sequence, Spielberg is demonstrating that most monstrous deeds issue from men just like rest of us, and he makes this point very nicely. The trouble is that everyone’s known as much since Eichmann trial. To keep this statement AND illuminate what it is that turns ordinary man into a homicidal maniac, all Spielberg needed to do was have Goeth, in place of urinating, sit down and move his bowels.

I’m serious. It’s shit, after all, that personifies hideous fate of decay and dissolution that nature has devised for everything corporeal. Shit approximates—and serves daily to anticipate—the condition our bodies themselves will wind up in. And it’s problem of which shit is emblematic, mother of all problems, problem of death, that “Final Solution” was, of course, addressing.

Let’s, just for a minute, try to acknowledge something that ought to be common wisdom—certainly after work of Ernest Becker. What makes world go around is, purely and simply, fact of death. The real, if usually unconscious, purpose of virtually all human behavior is to mitigate terror and panic anticipation of death induces; to, at very least, reduce trepidation that derives from very terms of existence to a manageable degree of fear.

I have reprinted this work, complete with original images, at http://www.wehner.org/3d/first/ .

What reader will discover is astonishing detail with which Professor Wheatstone - as he then was - approaches every nuance of minutiae of visual perception.

With almost every aspect of phenomenon of stereopsis accurately defined, Victorians could rush ahead - particularly after arrival of photography - with production of images that convey depth.

That human mind does not just play eyes over object to measure depth, but can appreciate geometrical form "at a glance" was proven by a simple and ingenious experiment by Wheatstone.

However, an aspect that has been largely overlooked is importance of SHORT-TERM MEMORY for further enhancement of stereoscopic impression.

There is at core of brain a sensory area known as "Limbic System" that gathers impressions from all input data and merges them into an overall "feeling".

Thus, sound, smell, visual appearance, mechanical feel and other facets of an object are all combined in limbic system for its overall cognition. The result might be called a NOUN.

Similarly, when one decides to walk one does not consciously activate every muscle in its correct sequence. Instead, one builds up a REPERTOIRE of movements - a LEG DRIVER in computer parlance - and learned reflex of walking need only be triggered. This reflex "software" resides in cerebellum.

Gnosisceptors (sensory nerves) feed back feeling of walking to limbic system. Thus, when our minds decide to walk, when our eyes see movement and our balancing mechanism records motion, and gnosisceptors in legs confirm leg action, we "feel" walking in our limbic system. Our walking is a VERB.

So verbs and nouns of our perception are created in brain.

It is an inevitable consequence of evolution that those animals that need precise close-up stereopsis have eyes that point forwards. Think of preying animals, lions and tigers.