Eye Level and the Self as Fiction

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.