WANTED: Voyeurs

I have to admit, I've been feeling kind of silly and embarrassed by this blog. I haven't told most people that I am even writing one, even though I LOVE composing each post and reading all of my friends'. There is something intoxicating about being able to watch people's lives from some distance. I track my friends blogs, and though I track them as myself, they don't write those thoughts for me, but for a public. I like reading the formed thoughts: edited, re-read, spell checked. I am finding that the people I love are even funnier, more intelligent and more eloquent than I knew, and I love being a part of their audience. It's like watching a one man show: something intimate and anonymous.

When I see Penny performing on stage, as she is the person who I am lucky enough to see on stage more than any other, I feel like I know her best in those moments. And perhaps that is true for all artists: one's best self emerges when he or she is acting, composing, painting, consciously aware of each movement of the hand, each tremble in the voice, each sweep of color, not with judgment, but with simple sight.

In the movie, Shortbus, by the ridiculously brilliant John Cameron Mitchell (who wrote and directed Hedwig), it is said that, "Voyeurism is involvement." I think this means that to simply watch, to pay attention (thanks Iris Murdoch!) is the epitomical way to be inside the world, to be one's self, to love and to affect change. And I also think it means that to be involved in another's life you have to watch them as if they were your favorite movie, with love and attention. I, for one, feel that no experience I've had was really anything until I told someone else about it (hence the reason everyone knows I peed myself while sleeping in Gretchen's bed at Tanglewood).

Last night, while bouncing Gretchen and Eric's wee Philip to sleep on the exercise ball, Philip kept staring at the light fixture on the ceiling. Eric says it is because the fixture looks like a nipple but I think (I hope) that he is just looking to look. He is too little to do anything about what he sees; his body is not yet ready to reach for it, so all he does is look. I tried it when I fell asleep last night. Just staring at the ceiling. I felt comforted, because there it was. The ceiling. And there I was, eyes open, alive to see it.