[This essay is linked to, though entirely independent of, idiotic investigation the 3rd.]
“I want to talk about the tragedy of looking.”
–– But what is tragic about that?
“I am walking on the street; I spy the beloved; I am looking.
The beloved passes; time passes; I continue on my way.”
–– What is tragic about that? Aren’t you excited by the beloved?
“Yes, in the way that a photograph excites.”
–– Then talk of the “tragedy of looking” is meaningless. Or would you say otherwise?
“I would and I would not: when I see, I am excited. Just as, when I sleep and I look on a dream, I am also excited; but I exit a dream and the vision exits as well, and in wakefulness I regret the dream.”
–– Only an idiot cries over the dream. You haven’t really lost anything after a dream.
“Of course, I see that too. Of course, I know that; but again, it’s like a photograph: the beloved is just a ghost, both strange and terrifying at the same time. At one and the same moment their face excites and exits: the photograph is a shell. What else do our eyes give us but photographs? Why do we still look at photographs? To taunt ourselves? Even shells make a sound, and at least they do that!”
The conversation ends.
What is the tragedy of looking if it isn’t a tragedy of loss? Maybe it is one of loss, but then “loss” is not to be understood as ‘the loss of something once possessed’.
Truly, the loss of a possession is not tragic: “I lost my keys”; “I lost your address”.
(This is why the loss of a friend or a loved one is tragic: they weren’t possessions.)
Perhaps the tragedy of looking is the tragedy of never having had something.
Haven’t we forgotten that we regret our dreams? We think that only the loss of a possession is tragic; we’ve accepted that dreams aren’t possession.
What painful logic.
But then what about wakefulness? What about the things that I see right now? Shouldn’t I see them the way I see a dream? ––No?
What painful logic.
Like a photograph of someone that has long passed away, a ghost dressed absurdly with a face that is wrong; that is the same as looking at someone you love on the street, today, with skin and hair:
They walk by, an assemblage of photographs.
Vision acts as if it possess everything, but its tragic moment comes when it always fails to really give us anything.
It is the same with a photograph.
Nothing is yours, but you love things anyway.
Possession is a myth, but I pray for it anyway.
We still take photographs, frantically, as if trying to gather all the marbles that continually escape us, taking us further away from where they originally fell.
Like skipping from link to link along a chain on our way to the anchor of a ship, forgetting that we are already under water and on the verge of expiring.
Isn’t the tragedy of seeing like a pearl listening to the trillion gallon current knocking at its shell? Does the pearl weep to see the water? The pearl can’t let itself out.
––Only an idiot would sympathise with the pearl.
“But a pearl is not a person.”
idiotic investigations 