Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

REGULATING OUR LOOKS 65
Staring, as we saw, is curiosity’s vehicle. Disobedient looking at a forbidden
sight especially gets you into trouble. Pandora loosed the afflictions of the
world because she could not resist peeking in at them. Lot’s wife turned into
a pillar of salt because she had to have one more look at the gruesome wreck
of her home. An anxious over-the-shoulder double-check cost Orpheus his
beloved Eurydice. Seven murdered previous wives assailed the curious eyes
of Bluebeard’s new wife as she entered the forbidden castle chamber. Eyes
that will not behave seem to be our undoing. Seneca warns rightly that curiosity
is an affliction in which the eyes run away with the mind. Plutarch’s officious
Lamia stores her eyes in a jar at night and puts them in again by day
to gawk at the affairs of others. Staring is evidence of temptation in Christian
thought. For Augustine curiosity is the sin of lusting with the eyes and
the first move toward the deadly sin of pride. Evil, he speculates, might be
avoided simply by shutting “the doors of his eye,” but perpetually the eyes fly
open anew, overwhelmed by curiosity. Erotic or pornographic books were
known as “Curiosa” in late nineteenth and twentieth-century England. 2 In
this tradition, staring is a visual vice, a defiant delinquency met with harsh
censure.
Curious looking may be a path to noble discovery, as we have seen, but
equally so it seems to be a route to catastrophe or triviality. What makes
inquisitive looking threatening or heroic is also what makes it feckless. Staring
is the opposite of keeping your nose to the grindstone. As a craving for
stimulation in search of a target, staring is at once purposeless and purposeful,
at one moment intrusion and the next idleness. One person’s remarkable
scene is another person’s mundane landscape. To stare, then, is to barge into
someone’s place. As such, curious looking is meddlesome, prying into someone
else’s life. Staring is visual snooping.
CIVILITY AND DECENT BEHAVIOR
Staring puts us in one another’s faces. Contemporary America has responded
to this uncomfortable exposure in part by fortifying the bulwark
against staring bequeathed to us by the Western tradition. A web of regulations
aimed at mitigating staring’s interpersonal and social threat arose
in American culture from its beginnings. Codes of propriety abound that
attempt to spare us from being both starers and starees. Our mothers’ emphatic
importuning against staring gets its authority from a long line of
conduct manuals that detail proper behavior for looking at one another.
George Washington inaugurates these cautions in his collection of “Rules of
Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” in which he