A look at the looker and the lookee

To see what we see

Recently, my writing circle read out an essay written by our writing coach. We all read the exact same set of words, but when asked, some said the essay was about grief, some said friendship, some heard generosity, some, a claim to space. We saw in it whatever we were primed, in that moment, to see.

Not unlike abstract art, that lends itself to interpretation, can be whatever we think it to be, encouraging us to look within even as we look at it.

And is it not the same with every other experience that passes through us? The thing that happens, let’s call it the lookee, is separate, and can be quite different from, how we, the looker, see it, from our individual perspectives, our unique lenses that are shaped by our childhood experiences, coloured by our fears, filtered through our biases. Like the way we internalise that less-than-spectacular appraisal at work as (yet another) confirmation of our not-good-enoughness, when it’s probably just the boss’s incapacity to be generous. Or when we visit our parents after months and they ask if we take sugar in our tea, we, even as adults, are immediately plummeted into the dark, familiar childhood abyss of not-being-seen, when perhaps the ageing parent was only trying to be considerate or worse, their memory has genuinely begun to slip, and will likely ask the same question a few more times before the chai is ready.

We’ve heard ‘beauty lies in the eyes of beholder’, we’ve been told ‘you see what you want to see’. How about, ‘we see what we can see’ ? And what we see reveals as much about the lookee, as it does about the looker.

As George Saunders says it brilliantly in ‘A swim in a pond in the rain’:

This mangled gap between objective and subjective reality is fascinating, because, by definition, we’ll never know what all it holds.

There is one place though, where the looker and the lookee do come face to face, quite literally - the mirror! Have you ever felt a fleeting flutter of surprise when saw yourself in the mirror, like, ‘Is that how I really look?’ ‘Is my left eye that much smaller than my right?’

What is that thing you see when you look in the mirror? Do you see your face, or do you see yourself looking at your face, which is looking at itself looking at itself, in an infinity loop?

If we could engineer a camera lens that could look in on itself, what would that picture look like?

Ouroboros, photo by COPPERTIST WU on Unsplash

Speaking of cameras, I’ve often wondered why, when taking a selfi, it takes wild horses to pry my eyes from my face and focus instead on the little dot that is the camera? Almost as if, as long as I keep looking at my face, I can hide that double chins and smile just wide enough so the overbite doesn’t stick out unfashionably. As long as we’re looking at ourselves, we can control how we present ourselves, turning our most flattering angles to the world. The moment we take eyes off to look at the camera, we fear we’ll lose control of the narrative. What is it? A basic distrust of the camera? Fear of our imperfections slipping out? Being judged harshly for them? That could also explain the mad rush to see the photo once it is clicked, the scramble to locate ourselves, squashed and squeezed between family and friends, to see how our picture turned out…still looking as good as we did when we were looking at ourselves, or did the nanosecond of looking away from the our face and into the camera make the left eye shrink again?  

If we don’t trust the very precise, mechanical phone cameras to see us as we see ourselves, what hope for the hundreds of eyes that see us everyday, with their own unique lenses…friends, not-so-friends, family, pets, strangers? And what hope for own eyes?

Perhaps this is not the right question to ask. Perhaps the answer lies in letting go of the notion of orchestrating our image to perfection and simply observing the different versions of ourselves as seen from all the different eyes, including our own. And rather than worrying about how we look to them, we might try to see what these versions have to tell us about them. And us.

May we be open to sanity and peace in 2024.

George Saunder’s wonderful book, A swim in a pond in the rain, is as much a lesson in writing as it is on how to read with intent. And this is his very enlightening, very enjoyable Story Club on Substack.