Elena Karina Byrne: “Voyeur Hour”

The poet is a voyeur and a self-voyeur.

Every year a new reality show appears, giving us a large keyhole through which we may peer at our Peeping Tom universe. Now, we are even offered programs about criminals being caught in the act of committing a crime. I stop inside the phrase “caught in the act.” I translate: I see a broad, red-faced fisherman with ancient hands born out of a Rembrandt painting, hauling up what has just been caught—great black nets full of shining fish. The net is moving because the fish are moving. The fisherman can hardly lift the moving weight of his grief: His wife has died. The act now becomes a metaphor. Then metaphor’s consequence re-enacts the exchange between seer and object. Mark Doty’s signature clarity says it: “Metaphor is an act of inquiry (not an expression of what we already know).” The poet’s process of looking is always an act of provocative inquiry.

Now consider what kind of person, chained to morbid curiosity, wants to watch a spectacle of men (caught in the act) being chased, dragged, beaten, shot, handcuffed, and taken away. There they are, two men running down a street, chasing another man. Now my heart is beating a little bit faster. I’m experiencing a kind of welcoming fear–– welcome because it appears fictional, at a distance. Mary Ruefle says “[f]ear is desire’s dark dress, it’s doppleganger.” I know this, in this moment, to be true. Because I was a sprinter in my high school in the all-state championships, memory’s furnace burns at the back of my head–– the adrenaline knows all its triggers. A Stanford University study showed that an image in the mind fires the brain in the same way that an action does. No wonder pornography is such a popular pastime. No wonder our voyeuristic culture turns to reality shows to convince itself that there is life beyond the confines of the living room, beyond the size of our eyes and beyond the taste of our own tongue. I am compelled to look, subjectively coerced into a relationship with the objective. Perhaps I am only an accidental witness, because now I am absent-mindedly looking out the window at the trees afloat in time, like the speaker in Tomas Transtromer’s poem “Breathing Space July”:

The man, looking up under the canopy of huge trees, bodily becomes what he sees, and in doing so, transforms his knowledge of the trees. “In poetry, seeing is meaning,” according to Donald Revell in The Art of Attention. Seeing is sometimes wish fulfillment too. The man transports himself, as the reader does. The poem feels perfectly primitive, something we all might be capable of, which might explain why the poet doesn’t make it an “I” poem, or why he uses the definite article the instead of the indefinite a. The man is both general and specific. Man can be any man, (all mankind?) but the man implies you, the reader, might be the man “who lies on his back under huge trees,” becoming a tree. Looking takes on a whole new concretized meaning.

What changes when looking is fetishized as emotion? Mary Ruefle, in her fresh wayward logic, says the tree is “very much turned on” in her poem “Goodnight Irene,” a vision held at bay by its tantric withholding pace, its circular argument.

Ruefle’s leap from the tree to the self is immediate, and visceral. The process, afforded by the use of an identifiable I, forces us to participate in the sensory experience. The sensualizing in no way dilutes the poem’s theorizing capability. The reader is allowed to feel as well as think. As a poet, in an almost involuntary state of perception, I have multiple options: I can deepen my observation. I can project my feelings onto the trees and anthropomorphize them, or, conversely, I can become the tree. Baudelaire describes how a poet sees: First, the poet observes physical properties, and then personifies those properties. Finally, the poet becomes the tree: “Simile becomes fact. In the tree, one’s passions, longings, or melancholy come to life; its sighs or trembling become one’s own, and soon one is the tree itself.”

After seeing live rhinoceroses multiply, running amok in the city, Eugene Ionesco’s fictional human characters in Rhinoceros become rhinoceroses despite their determination not to “capitulate.” Seduction and transformation share a primitive source place. Don’t poems often ask this of their readers? I love the story of filmmaker Antonin Artaud giving a lecture on the plague at the Sorbonne. Erasing that line between viewer and participant, he acted out someone falling ill with the plague. Anais Nin recounted the moment in her diaries:

William Gass, in his inexorable book On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, pairs concepts of longing and melancholy in a sweet abstract Rorschach test of creative conjecture: “The blue we bathe in is the blue we breathe. The blue we breathe, I fear, is what we want from life and only find it in fiction. For the voyeur, fiction is what’s called going all the way.” Now think about how the catch-phrase, “you are what you eat” gnaws at the body image, the psyche’s leg bone. The phrase adjusted, “you are what you see,” seems to indicate more than mental osmosis. It declares an act of polymorphous engagement, asking for an empathic imagination to ignite. Emerson’s chameleon self believed this: “We become what we think about all day long.” Following Artaud’s example, performance artist Chris Burden shoots himself in front of an audience; another time he crawled across broken glass until the hands and feet of witnesses (we, the audience) hurt. Without the counterpart on-looker, (without the voyeur as poet) the act, for the philistine, is merely self-mutilation. But the act defined by the artist, is conceptual art. He embodies his own metaphor, leaving no breathing space between perception and imagination, between self and other self, between artist and spectator. The viewer is held hostage and as a result, there’s an ambush made on the thought process. Burden, the performer, is inviting us to look and feel uncomfortable ––he compels us to be involved in visual intrusion, to be a set of voyeurs. Inevitably, that discomfort forces us to see something unpleasant in ourselves. I was only a child when I saw his LA performance. He covered himself in a tarp in the middle of the street until the police came. I felt like I had just gotten off a rollercoaster. Someone in the audience asked rhetorically, “Wasn’t that cool?” My pre-teen mind wasn’t so sure about that. “Coolness” aside, I knew something new was now part of me, the conceptual performance I was there to “see,” and felt oddly privileged in doing so. Since then I have stepped off many art and poetry roller coasters, understanding that gravity does not begin in the feet, but in the eyes and in the gut.

The two opposing instances of looking, the involuntary and the voluntary, crossover, cross-pollinate within fact and fiction, within the personal, and within the aesthetic. Artist John Baldessari, in a recent interview, said that we all have specific, personal “hierarchies of seeing,” not only asserting that there perhaps is no such thing as objective perception, but also showing us how our perception is specialized, categorized, and most poignantly, desire-driven. We’ve all heard the story: Ten different people witness an accident, and then tell ten different versions of what occurred. The etymological versions of “I see” exponentially unfold as personal semantic experiences. From the hierarchical vantage point, the witness, artist, writer and filmmaker all use an intuitive eye to seek out analogous images and metaphorical relationships with what is seen. My summer mind first sees the light rising from our ocean’s afternoon glint, moving between new shrub leaves, finally emerging from the keyhole illumination of a bee’s inebriated flight. My winter mind knows the moon’s ruined washbasin face, a doll’s graveyard-darkness under the bed, the lover’s pupil opening over the raised thigh. This freedom of the eye follows the mind’s sight-intuitive track. In “The Snowman,” Wallace Stevens convinces us that “One must have a mind of winter/ To regard the frost and the boughs.” This is one reason why I am a writer: because I long to master and change the ways in which I see. As artist Robert Rauschenberg once said, “I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them.” Countering habits of seeing solicits the overturn of our visual memory that continually haunts what we consider to be the familiar physical world. But the physical world for the poet is never familiar.

From a conceptual standpoint, can a poet examine himself seeing and “lose sight” of himself in the poetic process? Interrogate subjectivity in order to overthrow it? Artist Jenny Holzer, in her best-known work, the Truisms, wanted to disengage herself from the art object. Like the voyeur, mastering the art of invisibility, artist and poet first try to remove themselves from the picture. For the voyeur, the “seen” self invites a ruinous collapse of identity and an unwelcome bridge to the object of desire. Holzer says: “I always try to make my voice unidentifiable.” Her language-conflict attempts to be a place for genderless, anonymous truths “created through contradiction.” We hear Woolf here: “anonymous was a woman.” A painted, projected, carved colonnade of words appears in public spaces, such as electronic billboards and signs, sides of buildings, utilizing that perceptual crossroad where an ambiguous architecture of messages, truisms from our culture’s self-imposing mouth, enter our everyday experience. Clichés unite what we know of ourselves with what we know of others in the realm of a linguistic comfort zone. Yet, it’s interesting to note that the cliché also creates an echo and a propagandized distance between truths: between yours and mine. Holzer, like the poet, desires to overthrow language expectation. The reason why Holzer’s work resonates so profoundly: There’s a sigh (a sign) of relief every time we encounter the familiar in the cultural marketplace/contact zone (billboards, magazine ads, commercials), even when we’d prefer to identify ourselves as a unique, singular “I” among the insistent genderless “we”. The archaic Greek word for “I” means light; yet Theodore Roethke, in his poem, “In A Dark Time” introduces the idea, “in a dark time the eye begins to see…” that intuitive eye begins to see. After being placed somewhere inside the subject’s dark physical forest, the speaker then asks himself, and us, “which I is I?” We can’t avoid seeing through the “I,” as well as the eyes. Arthur Rimbaud said, “For I is another,” Je est un autre… Another, and anonymous? Some say the “I” is always fictionalized. Yet the I-beam is upholding identity as a non-fiction. Former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan finds the first person pronoun “I” intrusive. Perhaps it is just protected by some physical/observational distance, a self-created invisible domain, or the anonymous-personal voice coveted in our culture? As with poetry, the first person “I” soon becomes Idea. So, we watch and we experience our own paradoxical anonymity in the process of seeing and writing.

Magritte’s man in front of the mirror sees the back of his own head. When I look into the mirror of the poem, I am trying to see something that is not there looking back, perhaps Plath’s woman’s other face “that replaces the darkness” in “Mirror” or perhaps Wallace Stevens’ proverbial “Nothing that is.” It’s an inverted/inward orientation and as poets, we map out our own appearance and disappearance there–– we are unwitting collaborators as spectators and we are impelled to watch the other self-watching. Some of the most compelling poems achieve this sense of the “other” telling us something we do not know about ourselves, which is so necessary a component in the process of finding an “I” we can recognize. Rimbaud’s ghost once again asserts poetic knowledge, becomes conscious of itself in self-knowledge, that “one must be a seer, make oneself a seer…and the supreme Knower!” One of my favorite artists, Sophie Calle analyzes and takes on the role of the viewer, the spectator, and the persons being watched, all “unwitting collaborators” in her brilliant recorded exploitations of the public. Her photo-text works are concerned with appearance and disappearance, seeing and being seen (“M’as-Tu Vue?” / “Do You See Me?”). Her work uses stalking (for example, following a man from Paris to Venice), and surveillance as live performance, to record the actions of the pursued and pursuer. She maps out “evidence” as she investigates her own life and behaviors, violating assumptions of selfhood.

Who can imagine a better sounding board for the unsteady psyche than actor Peter Sellers’ character in the film Being There? His words become metaphoric transparencies for everyone around him. When the happenstance-love-interest, Eve, stops to ask what’s wrong during the heat of passionate, yet oddly objective kissing (a couple simultaneously kisses on the TV), Chauncy replies, “ I like to watch.” Not for a moment suspecting he means the TV, she is at once embarrassed and pleased by his voyeuristic impulse: “Oh, oh, I see.” That phrase, I see, of course, colloquially means, “I understand.” So a new mutual relationship has been set up for the two characters in the film, and for us, the onlookers, who delight in our secret knowledge of the real situation. Eve begins to masturbate for him behind the four-poster curtain and under her clothes. We can’t “see” how this unfolds, except in our imaginations. Language, working as an emotive, erotic tool and as an art form, has a way of seeing from both sides, a way of playing the part of absence and presence, viewer and subject; there’s an almost accidental “being there” in time.

Intense seeing inevitably becomes voyeuristic. The object of desire, at a physical distance, soon becomes “larger than life” and has control over the viewer. As Heidegger warns: “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of the man.” Language, too, being physical, resides first in the body, hence, containing its erotic charge, then pushes us toward some cognitive, intuitive direction, and directs our process of seeing like a lover. The poet-as-voyeur calls on language not merely or even mainly to “describe” the thing seen but to address it–to engage in a dialogue-correspondence with the object of desire, even if the thing under observation is language itself. The onlooker, using language to translate what he or she sees, intensifies the process of observational attention–and, indeed, definitively shapes it. The voyeur’s dialogue, of course, only exists in the domain of obscurity in the mind, in a kind of private oblivion. The intense seeing, in the poetic act of re-creation, becomes voyeuristic because the object is now distanced through a perfected subjectivity.

So, can we distinguish between subjective participation and objective observation found in poetry? Can observation and self-observation co-exist–or is “observation,” in an “objective” sense, excluded by the very nature of the creative act? Language is, after all, translation. In this solipsistic process, the poet’s task is more subjective interrogation than objective description. The creator-self is overhearing the “I.” Flaubert insisted: “If you participate in life, you don’t see clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much.” It comes then as no surprise that when George Sand accused Flaubert of providing nothing but desolation, he responded, “I cannot change my eyes.” Forrest Gander’s essay-like book of poems with Sally Mann’s photographs comes to mind: Eye Against Eye. He says, “seeing is synaesthetic” and it is “also ekphrastic.” John Ashbery paints this seductive dilemma in his poem “Faust”:

This is not merely a clever metaphorical tautology. It is a proposition of how the many-eyed creature of the mind, especially the artistic mind, sees from several vantage points. There’s the eye, the window, the painted window, the phantom’s eye caught in “cold daylight reappearing.” It also engages our ear (aesthetic earshot!) with the tympanum drum echoing in dawn’s twilight unfinished painting. The writer, artist, filmmaker, all enter a playground of correlations, using both voluntary and involuntary fields of perception. “Like Peeping Toms, we peer in at a trembling vulnerable image, the frame a cinematic lens for optimal scopophilia” according to art critic Tara McDowel: “Optimal” seems to be the operative word, implying that, just as with sound, sight can be edited for optimal value. For example, when the object of desire is absent, the seer wants to see what’s not there, and so imagines (fictionalizes) what it might be. The voyeur, in part, creates his own painting of what he sees in the phantom window “behind him,” and in the window in front of him.

We want to merge with our sensate world and our imaginations at the same time. We, the readers, the writers, the viewers, we, the voyeurs, actually want to stand on the edge of the cliff of consciousness. Some of my favorite poets and favorite artists provide this marvelous linguistic and imagistic vertigo. I’d gladly stand on that edge of the cliff to read and re-read Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson again. Emily Dickinson being one of the great self-voyeurs, knew there was “Ransom in a voice,” a voice kidnapped inside a room of the heart and mind, finding a way to see outside. Nothing is so self-evident as fugitive desire. The tongue, before it begins “looking” is trapped in the mouth. The ear is a prison-place, and so too, prized: the poet seeks no escape. Dickinson, in her home, was at once protected and constantly in danger, at once so close and far away. Her exile consequently enabled her to see from all sides:

Yet Dickinson knew this sight was somewhat imperfect and challenged by isolation and time’s “broken mathematics.” Because, “[s]urely, such a country /I was never in! “(17) was one of the many places to which she returned; Dickinson’s “vast” adventuring imagination started from a small, familiar geographical space at home. Viewers and readers, during creative exile, find ways to journey away from home via an unfamiliar route. Like a newfound voyeur, with the intensity of a singular focus in mind, we become ritualistically dislocated, curious strangers in exile from ourselves. James Tate writes, “You are the stranger that gets stranger by the hour.” Now the voyeur’s challenge becomes a geographical act of self-inquiry.

Artist Tony Oursler, whose work includes video, sculpture, performance, and installation, offers up rooms full of strangers, shapeless cloth “bodies,” creatures with blank faces upon which video faces are projected. Here, the animated, disembodied heads and conflux of recorded voices draw us in dangerously close; the distressed figures pull us into their psychological paradoxes. They are mentally ill, over-sexed, sexless, subjugated, injured, iconic…surrendering a poetry-like language Oursler himself describes as “orgasmic babble.” In Oursler’s piece, “Getaway #2,” a female “person,” lying on the floor under a mattress, yells, “Hey, you! Get outta here!” In a surreal mix of comedy and tragedy, between familiar object and unfamiliar image, we become fictionalized/real participants. The despair is instantly transferred, and the moment, as with poetry, as an immediate act of translation, is now ours. The exaggerated figures feel so convincing that the audience becomes an unwitting voyeur in Oursler’s constructed horror story. You really “wanna get outta [t]here!” confronted by the fate of your own thinking, your own comfort, your sense of the truth, even by your sense of time. In Oursler’s piece, “The Watching,” a museum visitor can take turns speaking into a microphone at the gallery entrance; the visitor’s voice is broadcast inside the gallery from one of the cloth-person doll-like bundles. There’s a second eye and ear. The participating audience becomes performer, object of observation and viewer. The inanimate creature comes to life, startling each passerby because the stuffed artwork addresses each one personally (for example, it knows what they are wearing). Once the jig is up, the interacting parties, in different rooms (demarcated boundaries), nervously laugh. A kind of truth-telling ventriloquism is set up. Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, ix declares that he regards “truth as a divine ventriloquist.”

It’s not just the exile of alienation and doubt that motivates the voyeur to keep experience at a distance, the poet to take the “I” out of the equation, or the artist to dissolve identity. There is a voracious hunger, what Susan Sontag called “a predatory embrace of consciousness,” which functions like double doors opening out onto a hidden room full of windows (the unconscious). The feeling of being in control, however active, always seems temporary, and, like so many emotional uncertainties, pushes us down the slippery slope of identifying who we are, toward that unrecognizable darkness. We find ourselves in a curious position, inside the vernacular of looking, where discourse seems to be a key reflexive response to feelings of both belonging and alienation, creating a kind of epistemological doubt. Poetry’s intimacy becomes also, paradoxically, anonymous, “here into presence, there into absence” as Heidegger would also say. Here the poet as voyeur stands comfortably in a meditative absence. Dan Beachy-Quick’s speaker occupies this absence/presence in the poem “Lines”:

The writer sees his own scar, sees the “heat in the sky” and even the unseen “absence” in the shape of “clouds/ Down on the field.” The reader travels from the small scar to the expanse of sky and field in one physical instant. By the hour, every day, whether by picture, narrative or lyric, the bloodstream of images comes down a long line of human experience, riding in Jung’s boat of the collective unconscious. The waters are both beautiful and treacherous there: If we are to feel something, to let ourselves, while seeing, swallow the hourglass, and travel “betwixt and between,” travel in and so transform a cinematic, hallucinatory rite of passage, then we know what it is like to stand in that field. Beachy-Quick’s sense of liminality not only implies proximity, but a sense of motion slowing down, time always moving forward and back, asymmetrically, as in film.

Baudelaire once conceived the poet as an incipient camera. Theo van Doesburg envisioned film as “optical poetry.” Leonardo da Vinci said painting “is a poem that is seen” and poetry “is a painting that is heard.” Andrei Tarkovsky, who made films and wrote poetry, loved the coupling advantage of the two. There’s an observation space of hearing words “paged,” awaiting motion. Clearly, one of the things they share is that certain rhythmic vantage point of seeing-in-motion. These “motion pictures” use the accumulative force of images hinged to one transformative ingredient: language. Language is seeing, and by the very nature of its self-making, it is seeing-in-motion. Let’s see Rilke’s Tenth Elegy, what

Everything in Rilke’s poem (this translation is depending on gerunds of course) is active, actively happening before “him”: the “weeping,” the “flowering” and the “bird cutting across” the timeless gaze of sorrow’s “pastured herds.” Or is it?

Whether we stand inside or outside ourselves, our relationship with time is intimate and is inevitably, seeing-in-motion. Percy Bysshe Shelly coined the phrase “suspended animation,” a concept well worth carrying into the next century. Action is suspended as time slows down and overlaps in a locale familiar to the voyeur. The event horizon boundary has been established, pushing the onlooker closer to the object of desire. But distance divines desire. The poet, as voyeur, may have to project, to look from a preferred distance in order to metaphorically covet what’s “there.” In that moment, a new time construct is created, what Rene Magritte called a “dream for waking minds,” a shifting consciousness in hurried motion. The dream is the process of the waking imagination, also suspending time. This time/language/image flux exists in forms of art and film, and certainly exists on the bystander stage of the Internet. Yes and yes, “looking and looking causes time to open” –– and looking creates longing.

A Pushcart Prize winner, her publications include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Verse, Kenyon Review, Volt, The Dublin Review, Colorado Review, TriQuarterly and Denver Quarterly. Her books include: The Flammable Bird (Zoo Press / Tupelo Press), MASQUE (Tupelo Press), and the forthcoming Squander (Omnidawn 2016); she’s just completed Voyeur Hour: Meditations on Poetry, Art and Desire.