We are looking at a Siberian camel. It is lying on top of its folded legs, long-lashed eyes blinking slowly, wobbly lips frosted with green, contentedly chewing its cud.
“Look at her eyelashes,” a woman says to her friend. “She doesn’t need mascara.”
“Look at his lips,” a man says with faint disgust.
The camel lumbers to its feet and sways gently. Its expression doesn’t change and it doesn’t look away as –
“It’s pooping!” a boy yells. “Look at its poop!”
The camel strolls along the fence, moving towards a woman who calls to it. “That’s it. Come to me. Come to me,” she croons. The camel stops near her, murmurs its lips over a few strands of hay, swings its head to look at some unknown movement, some object of interest only to camels.
“He knows, he knows,” the woman chants. “He walks with the people.”
*
In the museum it is much more quiet. The rooms are high-ceilinged, the floors bare, the light cool and controlled. So are the people, mostly.
I stop in front of Domenichino’s The Rebuke of Adam and Eve and look. Adam is half shrugging, half gesturing to a cringing Eve while God swoops down to them, reclining on a couch of angels, a red silk canopy flaring above him.
“Driving them out of the garden,” a middle aged woman narrates to her friend.
The friend plays God: “‘Get out. You screwed up – now get out.’” They laugh and move on, their hard heels echoing on the bare floor.
A man looks for a moment, pauses, says: “Adam’s like, ‘I don’t know. Don’t look at me – look at her.’” Another brief laugh.
A child reads the title out loud. “The Rebuke of Adam and Eve. Mom, what’s rebuke?”
*
When the model walks in the classroom we are all disappointed. Too old, too fat, and – for half the class this too is a disappointment – male. His thinning blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail and a thick handlebar goatee obscures his mouth. He has crow’s feet and sloping shoulders and his deeply cut tank top shows the curve of his hanging stomach. When he shakes hands with the teacher and leaves to change, I imagine him either riding a Harley Davidson or sweeping a metal detector over a beach.
The other students, most of them barely in their twenties, all of them at least ten years younger than me, exchange glances. I look down at my block of clay.
When the model returns he is wearing a thin teal terry cloth robe and black plastic flip flops. He climbs onto the turn table in the center of the room, adjusts a cushion and sits on a wooden cube.
He shrugs out of the robe, which drops to the floor.
The room is silent.
*
“Mouna is not a shy woman,” the presenter says. “But she is not used to standing up in front of a crowd and being looked at.” I am in the crowd at the Adornment Pavilion at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival looking at Mouna. Mouna stands on stage, not used to being looked at.
When prompted, Mouna holds out her palms so that we can see the henna designs intricately stained into her skin. When asked she lifts the hem of her robe so we can see the cuffs of her trousers, embroidered with ornate silver vines. When instructed we look at her elaborate makeup, the kohl lining her eyes and extending her eyebrows so that they almost meet over her nose, the bright lipstick, the harsh lines of blush. But her eyes remain aloof, her gaze skimming over the tops of our heads, never meeting our own.
*
He walks with the people? No. This camel hasn’t walked with the people for years – possibly for his whole life. He walks separately from the people, not with them, not alongside them – as he might have in the deserts of Siberia. Instead a waist-high fence and a camel-deep pit keep us apart – but so does our gaze and our speech. We contain this camel – as well as all the other animals at the zoo – with words, narrating each and every action: “It’s looking at you … It’s getting up … It’s pooping!” Our words walk with the camel. It can do nothing without our commentary.
*
Later in the museum I walk into a room of Van Goghs and overhear the typical docent’s speech: “You can see he had a different world view from the impressionists. Notice the brush strokes … notice his use of color …” Notice his missing ear, I silently add.
But then I notice the word notice. At the zoo there was only looking at things – no “Notice that big pile of poop!” or “Notice how fat that hippo is.” The expert instructs us to notice but the people who walk though museums look. In the medieval wing: “Look at their floppy hats!” Of a painting of a painter painting: “Look – he’s painting it. Hey, look at that; that’s pretty good.”
Paintings are made to be looked at. They have no life outside of our gaze; we animate them with our words
*
When the model’s robe hits the floor he is facing away from me. All I can see is his back, an expanse of rusty body hair, the points of his elbows, and his surprisingly compact behind that almost disappears as he sits on it. But I can also see the faces across the room, the wide eyes flicking immediately to his midsection, looking first at what is usually seen last.
Every five minutes he rotates a quarter turn, and twenty minutes into the session I am faced with his bristly chest, his hanging stomach and what sat immediately beneath it – his enormous penis.
I blink and look away, at his arm, at the clay arm I pretended to work on. I don’t want the people across the room to assess my face the way I had assessed theirs, but most of all I don’t want to blush. But God it’s huge. It lies like a sultan on a fleshy satin cushion and as the afternoon passes it relaxes and – unbelievably – uncoils further.
Break is called, the model puts on his robe and his flip flops and the class flees to the hall and the steps outside. There, in clusters of two and three, they whisper; those who are alone flip open their cell phones. All look furtively back at the art room as they describe the naked body of the man they have been looking at for the last half hour, their tones ranging from scorn to fascination.
I hold myself apart from these conversations, keeping my words to myself. I don’t want to talk about what I have seen – especially with strangers. I don’t want to feel like I have to talk about it. It was a naked man. No more, no less. But later that day, during a longer break, when the rest of the students leave to buy a sandwich or a cup of coffee, I pull out my cell phone and made my own call.
*
Mouna’s gaze does not meet ours, but why should it? When the presenter/interpreter speaks in English all Mouna hears are sounds, punctuated occasionally by her own name. After awhile she stops responding to her name, trusting that “—— Mouna —— Mouna’s ——” is as benign as “As a woman from the southern part of Oman, Mouna wears a such-and-such head scarf. You can also tell from the embroidery on Mouna’s sleeves that she is from Salalah.”
The Folklife Festival is in Washington DC and people from all over the country are there. We make quiet comments to our friends and family – “Look at that embroidery,” “Look at her bracelets,” “It must be hot under all that” – until the time comes to ask questions.
“Do you have to cover your head?” Yes, the interpreter says. If you leave your house without covering your head it’s like you’re not fully dressed. “Don’t you find that restrictive?” No. It’s what we do.
“How do you clean your clothes?” We wash them, the interpreter says. “Do you use washing machines?” Yes – if it’s cotton. If it’s silk we get it dry cleaned. “Dry cleaned! You have dry cleaners – the same kind we have?” Yes. A smile.
“Are there meanings behind the patterns?” No, she says. We just like the way they look. “Really? I find that hard to believe.” Really. Another smile.
Having visited the Adornment Pavilion before, many of these questions sound dumb to my now educated ears, but I remember wanting to know the same kinds of things on my first visit. I had been afraid to ask. Now, though, I start wondering what these Omani women think of American women who are amazed that they have washing machines and insist that each pattern on their clothing has meaning. The stitching on the back pockets of my jeans doesn’t have meaning, nor do the stripes on my t-shirt. What are we looking for through these questions? And what do the Omani women hear in them? What do they see?
*
Is the Siberian camel looking at you? I want to ask the crooning woman. Or only at a shape that’s making foreign sounds and meaningless gestures?
I leave the camel and go to the Ape House. A small tribe of gorillas is on display. One paces in front of the glass, one picks through a pile of fruit and grasses, one has its back to us, and one sits removed from the rest, high up on a rock outcropping – a female with rich brown eyes. My gaze meets that of the sitter. I think we are really looking at each other. I want us to be really looking at each other. I want her to see that I am different from the other people here – the boy pounding on the glass (despite the sign that says not to), the woman who grimaces and says “It stinks in here,” the teenager who laughs, pointing – “Look at its tits!” I want her to see sympathy and understanding in my eyes, that we are two primates separated by only a few twists of a chromosome – and a wall of shit-splattered Plexiglas.
The gorilla’s gaze shifts an inch to a spot just above my ear – a spot she stares at just as intently, just as soulfully – and I know that to her I am no different from any other moving sound-making shape on this side of the glass.
*
In the museum, Rembrandt looks back at me. Not when he is a young man, but in his Self-Portrait 1659. It is as if he is trying to communicate over 300 years and 3000 miles. The painting is dark, with rich hues of brown in his clothing and his eyes, a slightly duller brown for the background. From these dark surroundings emerges his face, framed by twin clouds of silver hair and a faint goatee under his shadowed mouth. But all of this acts as another frame – a frame for his eyes, which shine out of all this darkness with a pained warmth. I can feel the weight of his stare, the weight of experience behind his stare, and I feel that he is trying to tell me something, even if I’m not quite sure what it is he is trying to say.
But Rembrandt’s gaze is not a separate gaze, like that of the camel or the gorilla. Those gazes are independent from mine – even if they pass over me with indifference. The gaze of the art is reflective, as the gaze of animals has become. Art shows me back to myself – and me to you, and you to me.
Do you laugh at Adam and Eve Rebuked? Do you play God? Or do you stand back silently, listening to others talk, saving bits of what you hear to mull over later?
When you stand in front of Rembrandt, what does he tell you?
Whatever you read in his gaze, like the gorilla, he’ll look at the next person to walk by his frame – the bored teenager, the struggling art student, the recent widow – in exactly the same way.
*
Does the model ever look back at me? Yes.
Occasionally I meet his eyes when he is on the turntable, usually when I am working on his head or face, sometimes (disproportionately often, it seems to me) when I am working on rolling a bit of clay into a penis or flattening a ball of clay, like a jelly donut, to rest it on. Whenever our eyes meet, we both quickly flick our gaze away.
On break we all stalk the halls of the art building or sit outside, stretching, in the sun. During these breaks the model often eats Goya chocolate wafers and I try to fit this detail into the lives I imagine for him – the Harley rider, the beachcomber – but without success. An unseen boundary seems to separate him – the one who has been naked – from the rest of us, protected by our clothes. When our eyes meet outside the classroom I quickly drop my gaze, duck my head and pull the corners of my mouth into that flat, tightlipped smile that never fools anyone. I know how it must look. I don’t want to appear cold, distant, uncomfortable – but I am. I want to keep that distance between us more than I feel the social need to connect.
Back in the classroom, his nakedness begins to lose its allure. We are busy trying to replicate his shape in clay and it matters less and less what his shape actually is. The teacher points and says, “See the line of his shoulder” or “See how his calf muscle curves” or “See the angle of his knee.” That I can do; I can see his shape and understand how it can be reflected in my own sculpture. But I can not find a way to see the person who inhabits those lines and curves and angles. In the classroom or outside, naked or clothed, I can not do it.
*
Mouna never looks at me. When she is on display in the Adornment Pavilion she doesn’t look at the crowd there, but above our heads towards the crowd outside. It is hard to tell if she is looking at anything, or only standing in suspension, waiting to be released from the presenter’s droning, her incomprehensible spell.
Later I see Mouna dancing as part of the Al Majd Ensemble, a traditional dance troupe from southern Oman. Immediately I notice that she only really looks at the other female dancers. In fact, all the female dancers only look at each other. The male dancers prance and whirl around them, smiling with bright eyes, inviting them closer with a soft word or a swoop of the head but the women stay nearly immobile, each waving a corner of her robe at hip height, eyes fixed to the floor or deliberately staring into the middle distance. Is this part of the dance? Or part of the culture? I don’t know. There is more than the language barrier between us.
When the presenter had asked Mouna to show her hands, her cuffs, her makeup, she used the phrase “You can see …” This both invited me to look but it also implied a hope of engagement, that some kind of exchange would pass between us, the observer and the observed. I could physically see the henna on her hands, but with the interpreter’s help I could also see how and why it was applied. Watching the dancing I can see the motions and gestures, but I can’t see the motives behind them. I am on my own.
But of all the Omani women I see, the image that stays with me is one of a masked Bedouin woman. I can look at her – her black robes and her busy hands, a dark velvet mask covering her nose and upper lip – but through this mask I can’t see how she looks back at me. I can see her eyes clearly, but nothing else – no expression, no gesture, no words.
I know that she is looking out at the world and at me in it, but I can only guess at her thoughts. She might be looking at my bare arms the way I would look at a woman’s nipple peeping out of a bikini top. She might see my cropped hair as a punishment, a rejection of womanhood, a sign of mourning, a mark of liberation. She might think of my freedom with envy or distrust or pity. Or does she look at me with a more reflective curiosity, as I look at her?
I have no way of knowing what is behind her mask, any more than she knows what is behind my bare face. We are two people with nothing between us but distance, a distance bridged only by looking, being looked at, and trying still harder to see.
“On Looking” was originally published in The Massachusetts Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
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