Section today was exciting, I thought. We had Dr. Faustus puppet theater, and then we had a good discussion, and I even managed to close it all off with a sententious explanation! You know things are going well when you manage to achieve sententiousness.
Then tonight I went to the Children's Literature Reading group, and we had a really invigorating discussion about The Secret Garden. It's really too bad that I love everything about the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries except the novels. (Dickens is an exception.)
Meanwhile, I became actually overwhelmed with a strange sort of excitement and longing when I was walking downtown this evening, and looking at people's lighted windows. I have always denied that the pleasure I get out of this has anything to do with voyeurism, but I realized tonight that this denial is perhaps somewhat disingenuous. I think that what I love -- or part of what I love -- about looking in lighted windows is the sense I get of being inside the house but invisible. I am there in the house -- and I imagine that I am in the rest of the house as well -- but I am not there. I am only the viewing of the house -- as initiated by the way the window frames the scene inside -- my subjectivity, and certainly my body, cease to matter or even to be present. In a way, when I look in windows from the outside I become a sort of ghost, a gaze without a person, absorbed by the physical world without absorbing it.
This is also in some sense what I love so much about trespassing and about entering abandoned buildings. Abandoned spaces have lost their human meaning, in a way. Since buildings are almost entirely defined by their use-value, once they stop being in use, they stop being buildings, in a way. They are ghosts of themselves. When I enter one of these buildings, then, I, too, become a ghost -- a ghost of the former use of the building, or a ghost of human interaction with buildings at all. And that is precisely how I want it.
That sense of being a ghost also goes with my passion for hotels and airports -- spaces in which no trace of the personal, of the I, is relevant, because they aren't personalized spaces. They're transitional places, without individual human characteristics, and so as a human in them I become only an image of humankind, a ghostly reflection of all the other people who have been here before and will be here after. And again, I want that. I am thrilled by it.
Why? Why do I want to be a ghost in the world? And am I unique or close to unique in this? I can answer the second question quickly -- I do not think I am. I think that my delight in self-ghosting is quite common, in various ways, which I'm too tired to parse out right now. As to why my particular psyche gravitates so strongly to ghostly voyeurism? Eh. I'm afraid the answer might make me uncomfortable. So I won't try for it. For now.
Then tonight I went to the Children's Literature Reading group, and we had a really invigorating discussion about The Secret Garden. It's really too bad that I love everything about the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries except the novels. (Dickens is an exception.)
Meanwhile, I became actually overwhelmed with a strange sort of excitement and longing when I was walking downtown this evening, and looking at people's lighted windows. I have always denied that the pleasure I get out of this has anything to do with voyeurism, but I realized tonight that this denial is perhaps somewhat disingenuous. I think that what I love -- or part of what I love -- about looking in lighted windows is the sense I get of being inside the house but invisible. I am there in the house -- and I imagine that I am in the rest of the house as well -- but I am not there. I am only the viewing of the house -- as initiated by the way the window frames the scene inside -- my subjectivity, and certainly my body, cease to matter or even to be present. In a way, when I look in windows from the outside I become a sort of ghost, a gaze without a person, absorbed by the physical world without absorbing it.
This is also in some sense what I love so much about trespassing and about entering abandoned buildings. Abandoned spaces have lost their human meaning, in a way. Since buildings are almost entirely defined by their use-value, once they stop being in use, they stop being buildings, in a way. They are ghosts of themselves. When I enter one of these buildings, then, I, too, become a ghost -- a ghost of the former use of the building, or a ghost of human interaction with buildings at all. And that is precisely how I want it.
That sense of being a ghost also goes with my passion for hotels and airports -- spaces in which no trace of the personal, of the I, is relevant, because they aren't personalized spaces. They're transitional places, without individual human characteristics, and so as a human in them I become only an image of humankind, a ghostly reflection of all the other people who have been here before and will be here after. And again, I want that. I am thrilled by it.
Why? Why do I want to be a ghost in the world? And am I unique or close to unique in this? I can answer the second question quickly -- I do not think I am. I think that my delight in self-ghosting is quite common, in various ways, which I'm too tired to parse out right now. As to why my particular psyche gravitates so strongly to ghostly voyeurism? Eh. I'm afraid the answer might make me uncomfortable. So I won't try for it. For now.
Labels: abandoned, ghosts, liminality, space
0 Responses to “ghostly voyeurism”
Post a Comment