What's Cookin, Good Lookin?

Madonna once said that we live in a material world. It seems mostly, however, to be a visual world. And my world has changed considerably this week.

School officially started this week, complete with roll sheets, first-day lectures, student e-mails, course advising and the rest of my real life as a working mother. Gone are the halcyon days of editing manuscripts at the coffee table while my infant son lolls on the rug. Now it’s the nanny, a tight schedule that puts me back at the house by three, late nights and early mornings. My son has learned to crawl and I find him in improbable places about the living room. No longer content to get himself stuck under the couch, I now find him wandering off the blankets and rug to skitter on the hard wood floor and approach the threshold that divides the front room from my study.

Can you say “baby gate?”

Ours is set up at the wide doorway between the foyer and the front room and looks something like the barrier that sets off viewing spaces at the zoo. My nanny is a painter by calling and I came home to find her painting away, my young son curled in her arms, watching. Another day, he was listening to a Johnny Mercer cd and intently watching from his blankets while she etched some fine lines onto the canvas in black ink. He’s getting “watched” all right, but I suspect he’s doing a lot of watching back.

It reminds me of our first Sunday in Harrow, a northeastern suburb of London where several other middle Georgia faculty members and a passel of students found ourselves in the Summer of 2005. Harrow is home to Harrow school, a prestigious prep school where George Gordon, Lord Byron attended, wrote some of his earliest poems and buried his daughter Ada. The boys there dress in Harry Potteresque slacks, sweaters and robes, especially to attend church on Sunday. We were sightseeing at their school with a herd of young college women who’d taken the Sunday tour, some slightly hungover, up the hill and through the old buildings, some of which had been used in the filming of the first Harry Potter movie. As we were passing the church, the boys were released from their services and came flapping like a murder of crows out of the doors to find that their school had been over-run by college women. I’m sure a few of the seniors thought God had answered their prayers for something more inspiring than just the Harrow countryside to look at. The ladies for their part, gazed right back, stunned and fascinated by these serious little boys in their robes. Both unfamiliar creatures sized each other up from across the cobbled street, ogling and being ogled right back.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan developed an idea about seeing and being seen that he called the desire for the Gaze. In Lacanian lexicon, this is always capitalized and means that deep desire to be seen and recognized, to be claimed through vision: the desire to be desired through viewing. Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” flips this around to discuss the desire inherent in the act of looking. She does it on purpose, but the desire to see and be seen seems elemental. Even my young son wants you to look at him, to notice him and pay him attention. Even if your vision is otherwise engaged, he wants to be seen.

He also wants to see. He has a yen for lovely women and is an unconscionable flirt when his gaze is returned. He tucks his head, he bats his eyes, he smiles, he giggles. He is a mere 6 months old yet understands the pleasures of looking at and being seen. I suppose this is not so odd. it is with vision that we make our earlier associations with others of our kind, that we know our world (though to many babies, an item is just as likely to be tasted as it is to be seen). I'm definitely curious what I will see in my young son as he continues to grow from infant to baby to child. My pleasure in seeing him is never daunted, yet it will be a very different creature that I see here soon, as my return to school and work changes forever who we are together.