THE GAZE OF OTHERS

I couldn’t resist. I had to read them. The others. Theirs. I had to know what I was up against. What angle they would take. What lens. What narrative voice. What would ordinarily be a fleeting response paper had become somehow more vital, more formidable. There would be others. Not just my words, suspended in time and space and on my computer screen, glowing like newborn babies. (Or maybe it’s eyes of the parents that glow, as they stare greedily down on their creation.) No longer my words, they were communal now. I had just arranged them in a particular way. Nothing permanent. Not so much as a watermark. The words have their own history, independent of mine. Who knows to how many minds and mouths they’ve been born?

A strange sensation, as if my blood has turned to milk. A thumping noise in my ears and in my throat as I read. Some of them are good. Perhaps, better? My voice disappears, it is impossible to separate myself. I hold up the tiny pieces and look at them and try to reassemble them. But I’m no longer complete. There are pieces missing, pieces that I didn’t know I possessed. THEY have them, though.
This isn’t love, it’s magnetism.
Then it hits me: this mimetic desire, this theater of vanities is an ocean apart from pure, unaffected sensation.

Such is, in fact, the true cause of all these differences: the savage lives within himself; the social man lives outside himself; he knows how to live only in the opinion of others, it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he derives the sense of his own existence. (Rousseau, 136)

Of course, I am born into myself. A victim of circumstance. My imagination paints pictures, and my heart yearns for they and them and theirs. No different from the others, I suppose. Like Emma Bovary or that man from La Mancha. We all fall beneath it. Bending under the yoke. We try to make the stars weep by beating out tunes on our cracked cauldrons. After all, the Noble Savage is a conceptual device we use to evaluate our society. He never existed.

So I am going to be exposed. Not just to one pair of eyes, as before. To infinite pairs, perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps, it’s that uncertainty, that feeling of being watched, that disquiets me…