Shame
By Julian Lass
2018
I can make someone turn round and feel looked at. A man is walking along the street opposite my window, and I think I recognise him, here I am sitting in my upstairs window. I stare hard, is it the person that I know, at least, I know him a little, should I open the window and shout ‘here I am?’. But what is his name? For the moment, as I struggle to remember the name of the person I think I know, I concentrate on his face, and he turns, looking for something, someone. Is he looking for the someone who is looking at him? In that moment of turning he is answering a call, a summons that is not subject to analysis, for how could one measure that summons? In that moment of turning he is wondering who is looking at him. And as he turns, the turn enacts a feeling, as if all the possibilities are whittled down to just two: either he feels that someone is looking at him, or he is imagining it. And as I look at him, I wonder if this is the man I know, or whether I just think I know him. In this moment where I am struggling to remember his name and debating whether to reveal my presence to him, here I am sitting upstairs at the window, I also feel a sudden shame: the one sitting at the window lost in thought, the one who will call out to this man with a feeble voice, ‘hi, it’s me.’ Drawing attention to myself in this way, breaking the silence of this quiet street, the shame of realising it is me who is being exposed, revealed. And what will he think of me? Will others hear my call to this man whom I barely know, a casual acquintance I meet once a week at my swimming pool where we see each other in our barest nakedness, at least I think this is the man, and here I am worried about revealing myself from my upstairs window, because if I don’t call out I will remain anonymous, we will not have to say hello to each other in the pool changing rooms and we will be swallowed into the days and nights of our different lives, not have to give in to the naked desire to be liked. But as this man walking in the street turns, puzzled to feel as if someone is looking at him, still aware that there might be someone looking at him, a little prickling on the back of his neck telling him that someone is indeed looking, he decides to ignore it, turns back to his day ahead, and continues walking along the street. The time in which this all happened? A heartbeat.
I have observed this happen before, and others speak of it, it doesn’t happen when we will it to happen, but when we find ourselves unwittingly staring at someone, not seeking them, but looking at them absent-mindedly and yet intently, our whole being totally caught up, absorbed, as it were, in the process of not really knowing who it is we’re looking at. How can it be that one can make another being turn round? Is it because we are in their peripheral vision, is it the instinct of a million years of evolution that tells us that we are being stalked, preyed upon, watched? Or is it, as I like to believe, while knowing that it cannot be true, yet hoping that it is indeed the case, that there is some sort of telepathy at work between two living beings, and with the right conditions, and the right angle of thought, a thought that is fully absorbed in itself, as if light-waves were reflecting from a lens at an acute angle, yes, if these things line up at precisely the right moment between these two living beings with separated lives, there can exist a moment where we become nailed to one another, where an alignment of forces over which we have no knowledge and no control, leap across the gulf of self-hoods and cause someone in the street to turn around to look for the presence of another. And there I am at my window realising that something has happened, an unknowable something, something wonderful, a mode of communication that seems telepathic, is not measurable by science, is communication by means other than the known (tele-pathy, I read, is a touching at a distance). So I wonder whether there aren’t other non-measures of communication, equally mysterious, which we cannot know. A ‘touching’ of another’s shame, for example? This touching is not anything we can understand in virtue of an immediate bodily awareness (gesture, posture, facial expression, tone of voice). Perhaps it is nothing at all. Perhaps only your thoughts brushing next to mine on this page.