I absolutely love these poems and all
the different themes they bring up, and I look forward to exploring them all in
class on Thursday. But for the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on the
idea of the self as fiction.
So
many of Xie’s poems deal with the relationship with your interior and exterior
self, as it relates to the nebulous idea of your “true” self, whatever that
means to you, though in her interview with Mariam Rhamani, she states that the
self is a fiction, and that idea has stuck with me for the past few weeks.
Visual hierarchy refers to the arrangement or
presentation of elements in a way that implies importance. In other
words, visual hierarchy influences the order in
which the human eye perceives what it sees. This order is
created by the visual contrast between forms in a field of
perception.
The above
is the quick Wikipedia definition that comes up for “visual order”, which is
the title of for me, one of the most thought-provoking poems in the book. After
reading Visual Orders, I started using
it as a frame in which to read about the rest of the book. The rest of the
poems I read after Visual Orders I kept
thinking “oh yeah, that’s like what she talked about in Visual Orders”. And I guess my mentality for doing this is similar
to the Wikipedia definition of a visual hierarchy, I was imposing a map of
where the eye is drawn. Where did it go first, where did it linger, where did
it return? To the visual orders themselves:
The
concept of visual hierarchy is based in Gestalt psychological theory, an early
20th-century German theory that proposes that the human brain has innate
organizing tendencies that “structure individual elements, shapes or forms into
a coherent, organized whole.” The German word Gestalt translates into “form,”
“pattern,” or “shape” in English. When an element in a visual field disconnects
from the ‘whole’ created by the brain’s perceptual organization, it “stands
out” to the viewer. The shapes that disconnect most severely from their
surroundings stand out the most.
Visual
hierarchy is an important concept in the field of graphic design, a field that
specializes in visual organization. Designers attempt to control visual
hierarchy to guide the eye to information in a specific order for a specific
purpose. One could compare visual hierarchy in graphic design to grammatical
structure in writing in terms of the importance of each principle to these
fields.
This
definition is applicable to my understanding of the poem Visual Orders and Xie’s razor focus on what it means to see, and to
be seen. How does she deconstruct the “innate organizing tendencies” posited by
gestalt theory? Visual Orders pulls
our habitual means of self-perception apart, demonstrating how the self really
is a fiction.
[1]
Harvest the eyes from the ocular cavities.
Complete in themselves:
a pair of globes with their own meridians.
Instantly
beginning with the deconstruction of our own face, separating the ‘eye’ from
the ‘I’. I think it’s important that
they become not one all-seeing eye, but rather a pair, with their own
meridians. A further separation of the self, maybe, that each of our eyes sees
differently. We rely typically on the synthesis of the separate images of our
right and left field of vision, our right and left brains. fun trivia: what we
perceive in our right eye is processed in our left brain, and vis versa. Same
for all body sensations: what goes on in the right side is processed in the
left brain. Harvesting both eyes then, detangles them from the right-left and
left-right paths of perception.
[2]
What atrophies without the tending of a
gaze? The visible object is constituted by
sight. But where to spend one’s sight, a soft
currency? To be profligate in taking in the
outer world is to shortchange the interior
one.
Though this assumes a clean separation, a
Zero-sum game.
For
more on the tending of the gaze, please refer to the poem Tending, and the metaphor of a chaotic interior garden in which: “One
self prunes violently / at all the others / thinking she’s the gardener”. I
mean, what can I possibly say to that? All I can picture is looking in the
mirror and my reflection looking back going: “I don’t know either friend, it’s
got to be one of us though right?” But how can it not be both of us?
[3]
To draw ink-lines across the lids
To dip into small pots of pigment
To brush two dozen times
To flush with water and tame with oil
To restrain and to spill in appropriate
measure
To drink from the soft and silvery pane
To extract the root of the solitary so as to
appear
[4]
Describe how the interior looks.
Cloak the eyes.
Close them, and seeing continues.
[5]
The seductions of seeing ensure there is
that which remains unseen. Evading visibility
is its own fortune. If to behold is to
possess, to be looked upon is to be fixed in
another’s sight, static and immutable.
[6]
She leans toward the mirror for self-study.
The body canted.
What gets left out?
Uneasy depths.
The fine, lithe needles of the mind.
Endless conversation with no listener.
That
there is now a ‘she’ in this poem is interesting, and the gendering of vision
is touched upon in the interview between Xie and Rhamani. To be seen is to be
consumed, and the gendering of sight clarifies who is being consumed and who is
doing the consuming. Evading visibility, as a woman, however that’s done
(through dress, through silence, through not occupying certain spaces) can
become a means of self-preservation, in a society where women’s bodies are
often treated as consumable by men.
[7]
Self-consciousness anticipates an excess of
seeing. It’s incessancy.
Lacan writes, “I see only from one point,
but in my existence I am looked at from all
sides.
[8]
Gazed upon
I loose union with the larger surround
Broken from the trance of camouflage
Back
to the gestalt visual hierarchy, once an object is made distinct from its surroundings,
it disconnects from the whole. To be seen then, is to be disconnected from the
whole of yourself, to be fractured. To be seen from all sides, while only
seeing one point, is kind of unnerving. There’s an imbalance of power between what
is seeing and what is being seen.
[9]
The acquisitive, insatiable I.
A disembodied eye cannot be confined
to the skin and to what it holds captive.
Inversely, to be unseen against one’s will is
to be powerless.
to be denied a reflection and to be locked
Out of a self.
[10]
What persists down the generations?
The shape of the eyeball, translated by
genes.
Mine are long like my mother’s and her
Mother’s—who was all
but blind.
[11]
Ancient optic theory dictates that the eye
sends out rays, which touches the object of
sight. When the visual ray returns to the
eye, the image is impressed on the mind.
To see, then, was tactile.
That we are touchable makes us seen.
In
keeping with the eye as a consumer, as something predatory, there’s the
conflation of touching with being seen. Thinking about the eye as something
penetrative as opposed to a passive recipient of visual stimuli feels more accurate
a description of what it’s like to be seen. How can you avoid unwanted contact if
to just be seen is to be physically touched? Again, the balance of power is not
in favor of the seen, but in the seer.
[12]
Sight is bounded by the eyes,
making seeing a steady loss.
The presence of the unseen is vaster
than that which is exhausted by vision.
We inhabit this incoherence.
[13]
Look at how I perform for you
Look at how you perform for me
An eye for an eye
is how you and I
take on forms in the mind
[14]
Her gaze breaks each time
at the same place.
There is no reversing—
didn’t she know?
She has to go at it from the side.
She has to keep circling.
Okay,
so I love this poem. I love the psychological and philosophical problems that
it raises. I love the final image of constant motion, of never quite being able
to pin down a definite self. Going at it from the side, always a blind spot.
The self as a fiction that has to be retold over and over, never seen in its
entirety.
