Worth 50,000: Day Twenty Two - Seen and Unseen

[momebie]

We rely heavily on the eyes of others. We believe they can tell us if the other person is alert, interested, cagey, lying, and a hundred other gut reactions we form about people before even opening our mouths or giving them a chance to speak for themselves. When we can't see a person's eyes we react to them differently. Sometimes it's a person we trust, like a priest or a superhero and it's a relief to us that we can't see them calculating our sins and misgivings. Other times it's a person we don't trust, like a bank robber or a dementor, and it's all the more frightening for us. In those instances we take other cues and form a decision about whether or not we can be okay with the fact that we can't see the eyes that see us. But even in entirely mundane instances, we take the lack of eyes as a vague threat. It makes us uneasy.

How would your character react to an entity whose eyes they can't see? Is that entity likely to be another person, or something else entirely?



Write. Comment. Repeat.

Comments

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

They had a real fetishization of death imagery.

The Hidden Mother thing is a bit more explicable if you've ever tried to get a picture of a kid under six. And then realize if you wanted a picture of that kid they would've had to stay still back then for, like, eight minutes.

And then you want to kill yourself.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

That's what I was talking about at lunch with Em. In general we view the Victorians in a certain way. Buttoned up. Proud. Industrious. But they also did all of these things that seemed antithetical to the way we read the period. Which I'm sure happens any time people who've lived after try and encapsulize the essence of those who've lived before. Just as it happens every time you try and peg someone you don't really know. It's just easier to forget to imagine people complexly when you're looking at a whole era of them.

William Gibson has a great quote about that sort of thing, that I posted to the writing tumblr a while back:

If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation. Of course, we might be Victorians, too.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Goddamn I love William Gibson (and he's of course completely right). Do you follow his Twitter?

[momebie.livejournal.com]

I do! I haven't read very many of his works, only really Neuromancer and The Difference Engine, which he didn't write on his own. I definitely SHOULD, though He's one of my absolute favorite people to chinhands at over the internet. I could listen to him talk for DAYS. Bruce Sterling, his Difference Engine cohort, is another person I get like that about.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

He's one of the scifi authors who writes female characters I actually buy. (It's a short list.) I don't think I've read any Sterling!