Seeing and Being Seen

I used to think that dressing up and going out in public to see and be seen was a vanity of sorts. A smallish and tolerable vice. I’ve changed my mind of late. Certainly there is a vice in ostentation, attention seeking, and overly sexualizing our appearances in public. That being said, how we dress, how we walk, where we walk…they matter...and can be implements of giving life to one another. Cumulatively, different subcultures dress and speak certain ways. I am not saying anything revelatory in that. There is another subsidiary level to this though: how we walk. Our gait, our, mannerisms, our gestures (along with our clothing and other decorations) have a communal and moral dimension. They reinforce certain spiritual and emotional realities for the person seeing and person being seen. All you have to do is look at the central place dance plays in religion, politics, and even warfare the world over. We as North Americans view dance as primarily recreational and romantic. This is an example of how hard we find it to see our bodies as political, theological, and supernatural instruments. This is also another reason why I like liturgy and various degrees of formality in common life. We are creating spiritual realities left and right, in everything that we do. There is nothing without some small ultimate significance. The promise of grace should help us to rest in this, not be troubled by it.

It’s easy enough to say that a person’s posture and face express how they feel, what they think, even perhaps what they believe. Once again, I’m saying nothing new in that. 

BUT,  I think those things also function reflexively. We not only express what we think, feel, and believe in our walk. We reinforce and cultivate them for ourselves and the people around us as we walk. Juxtapose the strutting walk of a thug and the upright posture of an assertive but un-threatening gentleman. Think about how it makes you feel. Think about how you feel about a community composed of members who do one or the other. The hung head and shoulders of a victim not only signal their hurt, but it will shape their vision of themselves, their self regard, and even their physiological reactions. Even if we can’t always articulate the inchoate message we’re communicating to others and ourselves, we are nevertheless expressing something very real. I root this idea in our incarnate nature. We were made as fully embodied creatures, not in the model of ‘ghosts in the machine’ proposed by modernity. Our embodiment is not an accident. Our bodies not only express ‘us,’ they shape ‘us’ because they are us. We are a natural/supernatural unity. Made for Heaven from the things of Earth. A metaphysical scrambled egg.

The ancients had a word for all this outward moral/aesthetic holism. It was called ‘countenance.’ For us it has come to be merely an archaic way of referring to a person’s facial expression. For the ancients, it gathered together what we might call the ‘energy’ and ‘feel’ of a person as a whole in a given situation, with the expression of the face given centrality. In our culture of great abundance and variety, I would include clothes and jewelry in this as well seeing as how we have so much choice and control over them.

I suppose the implication of this is that we should be mindful of how we dress and how we walk with one another. In embodying a countenance day by day, we are constantly becoming and helping others to become certain sorts of people as we see and are seen. We should love each other in our promenading together. May our sidewalks become sidewalks in the Kingdom.  We should walk with the oppressed and hurting (thoughtfully, carefully, without commodifying and emptying their culture’s artifacts and mannerisms), and be part of the renewing of their countenance even as ours are renewed. For me, that could begin by becoming less judgmental about the ‘thuggish strut’ I find so offensive. Perhaps I'll strut a bit myself. We’ll see.