Looking

Looking and seeing are more complicated than merely opening your eyes and casting them around. Our thoughts and sense of purpose direct all looking. “We are either looking at something, looking away or looking for something. Of course, there are the other kinds of looking that involve looking forward to something, which is an abstract concept of looking.”(45) When we are looking around, everything we see is affected by our thoughts, our individual backgrounds and experience. So why do pictures of sideshow freaks or other kinds of spectacles make us so curious that we must look and stare? I think it is because we feel it could be dangerous, it seems wrong, so if we can have a good look and no one knows, we won’t fear being judged by others. During a time in history when it was common to go to a sideshow or some other vaudevillian type of entertainment, people didn’t think twice about what they were looking at. Their ‘entertainment’ had been presented to them as fun and or educational, scientific even. I expect they thought they might have learnt something.
“Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism”.(46)
I understand this in a way that becomes overwhelming. For example, I am sitting at my kitchen table looking at the debris. I look at the phone and see the face of the person who I want to call me back. I look again and see the newest phone number inserted in the window used for numbers, I’ve had the same phone while living in three different houses, and in my mind see where the phone used to live in each of those houses. My phone is just a Telstra issue phone. Without even knowing, the phone turned into my friend and then took me back to my old houses. If I look around at everything on my kitchen table, each object can do a similar thing. This is why it is an overwhelming concept.
When looking at an object, the kind of processes the eyes engage in become part of a process that leads to a kind of dream. You may start imagining yourself using that object. So it seems the eyes are vehicles in dreaming and imagining. The object itself actually metamorphosis’s into a string of objects and situations.
Vision is a more analytical and anatomical process of the eyes, that is important to actually looking, even though this has a limited influence of perception. I have problems with my vision, and I don’t wear my glasses all the time. My stigmatism allows me to see the world with all the sharp edges taken off. I can see objects clearly, but often without any internal detail. For example, I can see a tree and its leaves, but I cannot see each individual leaf. My vision problem also affects the intensity of colour that I see. It can be assumed that everyone sees differently, and that is not even taking into account any experiential or emotional factors that influence sight.
Why do we look?
When I want to stare at a person, I don’t want them to know, as I do not want them to feel uncomfortable. To spy is a comfortable position for all parties. When confronted with unusual people, children stare until an adult notices and tells them to stop, it is considered rude to stare. This conditioning works very well, as adults we tend to be very polite and generally take a short, but intense look at those who are either very beautiful or extremely unusual. We have trained our selves to take in information at a rapid rate. We have to look. What the brain does with this gleaned information is debatable. I feel as though a classification and ranking process goes into affect. ‘Is that the strangest person I have ever seen? The most beautiful?’ there is also a comparison making process, ‘that person is very fat, am I that fat?’ It is though as humans we are on a quest to see as much as possible, it is like a permanent research assignment on humanity.
Freak shows allowed people the permission to stand and stare and examine to their hearts content. If you didn’t have long enough the first time, you could pay and look again. In contemporary society it’s really not acceptable to follow people around and look at the all day long, so TV is a way of participating in a similar way to freak show audience. For example, the Michael Jackson documentary produced by Granada Television featuring correspondent Martin Bashir (aired during 2003) gained such high ratings that it had an encore presentation. People, (myself included), were compelled to watch, and to see and hear this generations most famous freak. The act of looking in this circumstance involved an element of bewilderment, how could a person deliberately make himself look so strange and deny the fact? The process of seeing can provide comfort and can hurt. Seeing Michael Jackson transform from an attractive Afro-American man into vampiric and doll-like hurts the eyes, one wants to close the eyes and turn away. Looking and seeing are similar, but not the same. Looking skims the surface and allows us enough information to get from one point to another. Seeing gives us understanding and feeds the imagination.