Seeing and Being Seen

In my autobiography writing class at the Elmwood Jail this morning, I showed my students online pictures of the room where Anne Frank had slept during her nearly two years of hiding from the Nazis. A middle-aged dentist was her roommate, their narrow twin beds so close as to be almost imposing on each other. During class my head was full of pictures I had seen the night before when I went online to the Anne Frank House, a popular museum in the heart of Amsterdam. I did not know what I was going to say before I said it, which is sometimes how I do my best teaching, and sometimes not. I told my incarcerated students, none of whom had ever been to the Anne Frank House, that it was better to read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl than to visit the house. If you go to the house, I continued, tourists are ushered single file through the rooms. Everyone is wearing headphones, which stream pre-programmed audio files, and no one is seeing anything. “We don’t know how to look anymore,” I asserted.

As is my habit, I overstated things. I did not mean to disparage the museum, which I visited myself over 20 years ago, or even the audio experience, which is surely meant to educate and honor. But something did feel sad to me about tourists streaming through that space wearing headphones that played snippets of Anne’s writing or using VR goggles to get a “real” view of how things were. These things felt to me like a way to check Holocaust education off a giant list that we call Learning.

It seems to me that in the name of Learning, we empty the magic from a space. At art museums, I’m often elbow to elbow with people who are photographing paintings but not looking at them or holding forth about paintings and not looking. Or just not looking at all, absorbed by their phones. At the San Francisco Museum of Art, I once heard a young man disparage Mark Rothko’s painting, No. 14, 1960, saying, “whatever,” as he did a haughty walk-by.

This painting was, perhaps, the only painting I had ever really seen. I had stared at it for long periods of time on several occasions, any time that I could break away from my museum companions and wander off alone. There was no way to name what it made me feel. Maybe I liked most of all that it was beyond words. To hear the audio file about such a painting would inspire me to cover my ears. The painting was simply awesome, in the older sense of the word, and that awe could only be met with silence.  

After my class where we discussed Anne Frank, I was sitting at the optometrist’s office waiting for someone to bring out my new glasses. Hundreds of pairs of glasses stared unseeing at me. They were expensive, highly polished windows to the world, but what would they see? These eyeless glasses were a perfect metaphor for the gaze of indifference. The way those glasses looked at me, it was the same as how I felt when I saw college students shopping on their phones during my class. What are we really looking at, and what are we seeing?

What I tried to posit to my students in the jail was that Anne Frank started her diary because of an existential loneliness, a universal yearning for a “true friend.” Her diary, named Kitty, was her only confidant. Although Anne was social and had many friends, along with a loving family, she claimed to feel “completely alone in the world.” How could this be? But it was the same with me. I had everything a person could want in life, yet I often felt unseen, erased even in the presence of family members. Sometimes my heart ached with a poisonous loneliness that tipped dangerously into depression. I wondered aloud to my class if we all felt this loneliness as we traveled through life meeting and parting from people. Meeting and parting, life’s essential dance.

My father died over the summer. It was my whole life’s work to be seen by him, but I don’t think I ever was. And now, with his death, there is the final parting, the end of the possibility of being seen, and the complicated work of choosing how to see him. There is a box of old postcards and photos in my closet that I’m scared to open. Do I really want to see what’s there? Or do I keep the box sealed, move it again to another house, stuff it in the closet, the overhead, the basement? Do we really want to see the Anne Frank House, to really see the space where she lived in too much closeness and fear and dust and boredom and unwashed skin and declining hopes and a filthy tablecloth?

What does it mean to open one’s eyes? If we open them, do we open to more love or more horror? I can’t answer this. But I know it is time to put down my computer and sever the magnetic force field of its screen. What I can do is take the dogs for a walk and watch them see the world through their noses and really inhale all of it in.