118: What You Lookin’ At?
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Hephrodite, the goddess of love, is looking down on Earth one day, spots a mortal woman named Psyche, who is so beautiful, Aphrodite's jealous, sends her son, Cupid, down to Earth, to destroy her. Cupid sea Psyche naturally falls in love with the woman his mother hates most in the world, only surprised about that part of the story is they're not all Jews. Cupid marries Psyche, but he doesn't want Psyche to know that he's a god, he thinks it'll ruin things, she won't love him for who he is in his heart, she'll just love him because he's famous and powerful. So he makes her promise to never look at him, they have this passionate love that takes place entirely in the dark, but her girlfriend's talked to her behind his back, they tell her that if he never wants her to see him, must be because he has something to hide, must be a monster. So she comes to him at night while he's sleeping with a lit candelabra, and she sees him there. He's naked, he's perfect, he has wings, he's beautiful, and she's just about to go when some wack someone of the candles falls on him and he wakes with a start and their eyes meet. He sees that she's betrayed him, she broke a promise, she got it his love, she wanted to see, and the god's punisher, this, I say to you, is somebody who works in a medium radio where you never see anything, this is what seeing is all about, right there. We do not listen to our hearts, we doubt, and then we want to look. And seeing is about something else, it's about power. I checked with an actual humanities professor and this is what he told me, Richard Kyan teaches at Cornell. The power of the look to dominate and even destroy it is a very old story in human history and may have biological origins when a dog, for example, looks directly in the eye of another animal or a human, as if to stare it down, that's a certain sign of hostile feelings, a sort of challenge, a prey lead to aggression. It's an ancient rule he says, it's why slaves don't look in the eyes of their masters, it's why you don't meet the eyes of a king, why you bow in his presence, it's why parts of British royalty, even today, prefer not to be seen in public, not to be photographed, even after Princess Diana became the most photographed woman in the world. And I mean, the monarchy itself on Queen Elizabeth in particular has long sort of felt that it was on the contrary more sort of appropriate to the monarchy and perhaps even necessary to its survival, that it appear less than public. I think that's one of the reasons why they were so sort of alarmed by Diana. I mean the gall in France believed powerfully that, you know, leaders should be little seen and rarely, rarely heard, that the power that comes from the invisibility. I've been thinking a lot lately about why somebody would pay 30 bucks to come to a theater and see a show that you can get for free on the radio. And I think that this is the very reason, right here, on the radio, invisible, we are just too powerful. Seeing us, seeing anybody that you hear on the radio, it makes them human size. Which seems like a healthy thing, actually. Well, from W.B.E.Z. Chicago and Public Radio International, it's this American life, I'm Ira Glass. Today, bringing you a co-production with WNYC in New York, a live show from Town Hall in New York City. Today on our program, as hundreds of people watch us do the show, our theme is, "What are you looking at?" Stories of what it means to be seen and to see, act one, American goth, the story of
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