Cosmic Serpent of Looking: What Lurks Beyond Eyesight
To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat. — Maurice Blanchot; The Madness of the Day
We find a way to see, even when our eyes fail us. Eyes close and the crowded darkness rushes in. If they remain closed, another darkness comes, deeper, before dreams show us worlds that see themselves, never mind the how. Homer saw the future of literature beyond his blindness, Borges, too, but the Argentine admitted the existence of the labyrinth of the mind’s eye. Music creates internal worlds, forests built on rhythm and haunted by solos, vocal or otherwise. Paintings invite the eye to leave behind perspective and enter the impasto-world of passions frozen in time. Books guide the eyes through words that make the peripheries dissolve, before we become those words, as much as they become us. Seeing comes in many forms, through various organs and means that have no name, no apparent source. Beyond the veil — a veil as thin as an atom, or as vast as the Universe — imagined worlds, teeming with prospective life, full of creatures beyond good and evil, lurk. Access to this place is beyond the capacity of eyes. And yet we search for a way to see. In that search, what was sought might look back.
When you think the night has seen your mind That inside you’re twisted and unkind Let me stand to show that you are blind Please put down your hands ’Cause I see you — Velvet Underground
Don’t look… No matter the circumstance, those words tend to snake through the ears and eat their own tail by the time it’s too late. ‘Look’ is carnivorous, a verb that consumes its past and future, like a Cosmic Serpent with a sole purpose. Whether it’s the horizon’s secrets beyond the mountain, or the imagined worlds licensed professionals told us would make us mad to dwell on, looking is the apex predator. Pluck out the eyes and the blind one will become a Seeress, the king a solver of Oedipal riddles about himself. Bats navigate the night through the dark-bright images seen through their ears, while dogs sniff atomically, drooling at what died before they were born. The hound knows that ghosts haunt every step we take. Only the squid knows what the crushing darkness looks like when nobody else is looking. Only the artist knows what they find beyond the veil, after those re-remembered faces look back. They were always there and so was that imagined world, since ‘they’ is predetermined by ‘world’. Like an interstellar telescope directed inwards, we look beyond the known of our own minds. Through the black holes of horror and the supernovas of shining discovery, even solipsistic nothingness, we look.
This city has lost a certain hold inside It feels so worn being chained here to this life I’ve been around and seen one hundred scenes Where those who dare to tread the wheel One day find out what’s behind that hill — …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Source Tags & Codes
Over the hills and far away has nothing to do with topography or space. If it does, it’s simply coincidence. Traveling the world for a lifetime means nothing, since humans are not sponges and most are already sopping wet with assumption. Looking is an action of the mind, whether eyes are involved, or not. Oftentimes, the visual world is a distraction, a false creation, as far as the artist is concerned. Dig as deep as you want and you will not see. Fly to the limits of the atmosphere — the half-light of the world — and you will not see. Depth, real depth, is never measured by the darkness, just as the pinnacle is not where it appears. There is a zenith buried deep in our brains, a cosmic storm raging eternal, crushing depths where even the squid looks away, singularly, a place beyond the veil. It’s a placeless place that is only seen when They look back.
Hayden Moore
