Читать книгу The Story of Looking - Mark Cousins - Страница 10

CHAPTER 2

DEVELOPING LOOKING: EYE CONTACT, MOVEMENT, LANDSCAPE AND EMOTION

‘Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion . . . Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.’

– E.M. Forster, Howards End

WE began by looking through the eyes of an early African Homo sapiens baby, then we imagined an ancient Egyptian infant. The first visual impressions of each were new, fast and impactful. Though such impressions are only traces and glances, their freshness and lack of precedent give them ballast. It is not long in our looking lives, however, before something more complicated than shadows or skies begins to draw our attention.

That thing is connection. We begin to see, in simple ways at first, how things relate to us and to each other.

Moving forward in history, let’s imagine a baby in, say, Australia in 1050 BCE. If she covers her eyes with her hands, she will see the world or a person disappear then appear again. She is disconnecting, then connecting. Connection will be a key theme throughout the story of looking, seeing, studying, staring, viewing and watching, but in this chapter we will consider four specific aspects of connected looking: how our eyes lock with the eyes of another; how we see something that has been in one place move to another, the two places becoming connected; how we look at landscape and, in doing so, see something of ourselves in it; and how we connect to others’ emotions. Each of these associations extends looking outwards. It creates an affinity.

Eyelines first. One of the artist René Magritte’s most revealing paintings is a close-up of an eye in which is reflected a blue sky with white clouds. It could be the eye of Yves Klein on that day on the beach when he looked upwards to sign the sky. But the title of Magritte’s painting – The False Mirror – sounds an alert.

As neuroscience can now show, there is something false in our understanding of how looking works. When we look, we do not objectively see what is out in the world. The art historian E.H. Gombrich tells a story to illustrate this. During the Second World War he was employed to listen to German radio frequencies to try to discover the Nazis’ military plans and tactics. The signals were crackly and weak, so he was not able to hear all the words in a sentence. From the ones he could hear, however, he was able to infer the rest. The sense allowed him to fill in the gaps, to make connections. It is now clear that from childhood onwards, we look in a similar way. Our eyes provide pieces of visual information to the visual cortex in the back of our brain, but we infer the rest from our experience of seeing. We learn how to complete the picture with the other seeing we have done. In fact, as neuroscientist David Eagleman describes, the amount of information flowing out of the visual cortex when we see is ten times the amount that goes in. So we are not just filling in small gaps, we are filling in most of the picture. We are projectors as much as absorbers. We see through knowing. People who have been blind for a long time, and then have surgery to make them see, report that although their eyes are now fully functioning, it takes a long time before their brain is able to make sense of all the visual data with which it is suddenly flooded. Looking really is a story, the story we tell ourselves based on what we see in one moment combined with what we know from all the looking we have done.

Our Australian Aboriginal baby, who saw the blurs, then space, then colour, very quickly starts making eye contact. She stares into the eyes of other people. In the faces of those she looks at most, she bonds. Recognising their eyes reduces uncertainty for the child, and in their smiles she intuits safety and, eventually, joy. She comes to delight in them. Novelist George Eliot called this ‘the meeting eyes of love’. In this Mexican clay sculpture, also from 1050 BCE, a much older child leans towards the adult, turns his head and looks up into his eyes. The man mirrors the gestures.

© Bruce M. White, Princeton University Art Mueum / Art Resource NY / Scala, Florence

The youth perhaps once held something in his left hand, but whatever it was, it did not distract either from looking directly at the other. We are drawn to their eye-lock. It is as if there is a line between their eyes. The line was made three thousand years ago, yet it is still alive with inquisition, with example. The man’s hand on the youth’s shoulder adds to the feeling that the latter is being guided into some sort of understanding. The boy is learning through the connection his eyes make.

The 1962 Soviet film Ivan’s Childhood is about a twelve-year-old boy looking at, and learning about, the brutal world of war. It starts with Ivan looking through a cobweb; then he goes into a field, turns his head, and the director, Andrei Tarkovsky, has his film cut to this image: square-on, symmetrical, filling the frame, no sideways glance.

It lasts only a moment, but startles. The boy looks into the eyes of a goat; the film-makers put the camera where the boy’s eyes are so that we look into the eyes of the goat too. We are the boy’s surrogate. It is often a shock to lock eyes. Children play a game to see how long they can look into each other’s eyes before one looks away, breaks the spell. Tarkovsky did not want his films to take place only in social realms. He wanted his characters to connect with nature and something eternal or metaphysical. The boy – and the film – looking at the goat immediately opens a portal into the natural world, and another type of subjectivity unexpected in war movies, which more usually deal with soldiers, commanders, tactics, heroics or suffering.

Looking at the eyes of this goat helps us see how the earliest humans saw. There were more animals a million years ago, and far fewer humans – in the African grassland savannah there were just two people per square mile – so those there lived much closer to animals than most of us do today. The first humans would have recognised this goat picture. They would stare into an animal’s eyes as a preface to killing it, perhaps, or to see if it was about to flee. Another kind of looking game. Do we see fear in the goat’s eyes? Does it see fear in us? Does it look like a beast, or like me? Is it possible to say that the first humans respected animals? Understood them? When they looked into their eyes, did they wish that they were them? Or is the stare too intense, embarrassing or short to allow such reflection? Maybe the thinking you do, if you do any, happens after the look has finished. Maybe the goat’s eyes are a false mirror. The moment is fleeting, but in his poem ‘Two Look at Two’, Robert Frost suggests the opposite, that it is rock-like:

A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them

Across the wall, as near the wall as they.

She saw them in their field, they her in hers.

The difficulty of seeing what stood still,

Like some up-ended boulder split in two,

Was in her clouded eyes: they saw no fear there.

The intensity, startle and portal of eye contact electrify our looking lives because they give us the sense of seeing into another consciousness. Artists have long understood this eye-lock voltage. It is often said that a painting’s eyes follow us around a room. As with the Mexican clay sculpture, the intensity of eyelines in paintings makes them seem present tense.

In 2010, the Serbian artist Marina Abramović turned the eyeline lock into a Homerian epic. For 736 hours, she sat in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, staring into the eyes of anyone who chose to sit in the chair opposite her.

In a public place, in the bustling modernist city of New York, where to hold someone’s stare on the subway can be seen as a threat or a come-on, Abramović stared into the eyes of other people the way Tarkovsky’s goat looked at Ivan, the way the early humans might have held the gaze of an animal. Her looking cancelled out the fleetingness of city life. Though the event was always observed, many people felt that she and they were the only two in the room, that their surroundings blurred. Some cried. In the documentary Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, we see that she cried too. Close-ups show how exhausted she was, and how moved. The relevance of the clay sculpture, the Soviet film or Abramović’s artwork to our story is not how they are depicted, but what they show. The sculptor, the film-maker and the performance artist are our surrogate lookers. They are drawing our attention to one of the earliest and most powerful aspects of the looking lives of an individual and of our species.

LOOKING AND MOVEMENT

Blur, depth, colour, eye contact: the child is learning to look, the species is learning to look. They are tuning into the visual world. It is a world that is not static, of course. What happens when the zebra or antelope we have been staring at on the savannah moves, or when the baby’s mother’s face moves away from her, into the world, so that it becomes part of a fuller picture? Looking becomes dynamic. It connects one place with another. It draws an imaginary line between the former place and the new place. Let’s imagine that the child or the hunter is static, and that they are surveying a scene. Their eyes have a lot to respond to: faces, colours, depth, brightness, movement. Muscles around the eyeball pull and push it in all directions.

In the next image, three young women are walking towards us.

That is what is happening, that is the action. But it is not all that is happening or even the main thing that is happening. It takes up no more than a twentieth of the overall scene. Instead, other things catch our eye. They dart to the red flowers on the left, up to the red of the large sign, and then to the red of the smaller, distant sign which is perhaps ten metres away but which looks as if it is on the same visual plane as the large sign. There is no ‘distant’ red here. All the reds are red, and so our eyes skip between them, connecting them, as if z-ness does not exist.

From the signs, our eyes then spiral down to the girls’ reds – the dress of the one on the right and the satchel of the one in the middle. Thence we are back at the flowers. A clockwise, spiralling, visual journey in red. The girls walk in this image, but the colour takes our eyes for a walk, a different kind of walk, a walk on the surface that undermines, or rather, counterbalances, the girls’ walk. The other colours help corral our looking, like sheepdogs corral sheep. The pale-green fence blocks the left flank, and the dark building on the right ensures that our looking does not get lost on the other side. The black verticals of the telegraph poles trisect the scene, almost as if it is a triptych: as if the flowers, the girls and the enshadowed building are three separated scenes, three different times, combined. Yet the light reassures us that it is not – the shadows in all three fall leftwards. The image is from a film by Yasujiro Ozu, one of the great lookers. He understood that, from the earliest times, our eyes have seen things as surfaces, patterns, as well as actions in depth. In doing so, they are searching. Looking is always searching, just as Gombrich listening to German radio signals was searching.

In this image, taken eighty years ago, a woman is eating a crisp, or some kind of snack. It is an everyday event, and yet engaging. Her lips are so perfect – a sheared heart. They and the moment of eating are caught in what almost seems like a searchlight, as if she is someplace where eating crisps is illegal and she is doing so illicitly and has just been spotted. Or maybe she is in a cinema, near the back, and she has been crunching on crisps and someone’s complained and the light is the light of an usher’s torch, accusing her of breaking the spell of the movie? It is her eyes that make us imagine that what she is doing is not quite right. The light has not quite caught them yet, but they have flicked rightwards, alerted by some observer. They are not relaxed the way they would be if she was going to eat uninterrupted. If the light is from an usher’s torch, she would surely be looking at its direction. But she is not, so it is either not an usher or she is insouciant, which quickens the heart, gives her a spark, a hint of personality. She looks caught in a moment, but someone with an eye for such eyes and skin and such a mouth has worked hard to make this image so appealing.

That someone was film-maker E.A. Dupont, and the woman in the image is Gilda Gray, who was born in Poland, married at fourteen, became famous for her shimmy dance move, lost her savings in the stock market crash in 1929, and raised money for her fellow Poles during the Second World War. We can see none of this in the image, of course. Looking can seldom tell us such things. Instead, by gathering visual clues and connecting the dots, as it were, looking asks us to imagine what is not in the image. She bites the crisp, but then what? Is she caught? Does she skip onwards? We do not know. What kind of looking are we doing as we have these thoughts? We are doing detection looking. We are like police looking for clues. As we look at Gray, we are bringing our own knowledge, or our desires perhaps, to the scene, to make it come to life in space and time, to set it in a place, a building, and to extend it backwards and forwards in time, to the before and after.

The visual world has got an innate mystery. It is begging us to know it more, to flesh it out. Just as when we see old photos, archaeological sites such as Pompeii or a crime scene, looking on, we become Sherlock Holmes. We detect.

Let’s detect this moving image.

Instantly, we can tell that it is a moment. This is not an image that tries to present to us a season, or a week, or a day, or a morning. If we looked only at the muddy foreground, we might be able to think of such lengthy time frames, but as soon as our eyes clock the man with the gun running, just to the right of centre, we know we are seeing a second, or a split second. His left leg is moving so fast that it is blurred. In an instant it will be in a different place. As we look, we connect where it is coming from and where it is going to. His weight is forward, out with the only part of him that is on the ground, his right leg. If both do not move forward, he will fall.

And yet it is not he who really catches our eye; it is the man in front of him, who seems to be stopped, or twisting, or falling backwards – a ricochet man, as if Francis Bacon had painted him. The foremost man has been stopped in his tracks by something so forceful – we presume a bullet – that, as his body reels backwards, his clothes have yet to get the message that the advance is over. The man’s body is dying, but his clothes are still living. We connect the body and the clothes. We notice the difference between them.

As we look at this image we look into movement, into time and death. The man is a French soldier. We are in Verdun in the northeast of the country, in 1916, during a 303-day battle in which an estimated 714,231 men died, as our man seems to be dying. Even his moment seems to defy gravity or space – that contortion, that blur. We look into his face in this image, and what do we see there? The pity of war distilled? Or a guy in his twenties, with a moustache, who had a life back home, but which is expiring as we look at him?

This image sucks us in. It is easier to look at it when we hear that, despite often being published as a photograph of a real soldier dying in Verdun, it is actually from a re-enacted movie, Verdun, souvenirs d’histoire, released fifteen years later. So much about the image convinces us that it is not fifteen years later, that it is from 1916, and a split second in 1916. More than anything, what convinces us is the motion blur, which is the shot’s relevance here. If we had been in Verdun, our eyes would have been darting all over the place, to look for safety, to try to get a sense of the atrocity. And yet it is unlikely that, as a result of such rapid, zigzagging looking, we would have experienced motion sickness.

Look up from this book, and then around you. Connect your reading world with the world that immediately surrounds you as you read. Let your eyes dart about. In doing so you will take in several visual moments per second, yet this will not disorient you. When we first film moving imagery, with a video camera or mobile phone, we tend to pan the camera in a similar way, quickly and from one moment to the next, but when we look back at it we are struck by how wobbly it seems, how uncomfortable it is to watch such movement. The camera is right; everyday looking is jerky, it is an accumulation of rapid visual impressions that should overwhelm us. And yet they do not, because our brain learns to compensate for the motion blur. It is a great image stabiliser. On the savannah grasslands, our hunting ancestors might have seen a zebra they have speared suddenly reel and die, the way the Verdun soldier reels. Their brains would have stabilised the image.

Perhaps our brains are too good at this. There is nothing stable about a man dying from a gunshot on one of history’s worst battlefields, so the image overleaf is right to be unstable, blurred. And in the twentieth century, painters sought new ways of depicting motion seen by a static observer. Life was speeding up, especially in cities, so in this painting, The Cyclist, completed three years before Verdun, Russian Futurist Natalia Goncharova gave the front wheel three visual echoes, the back wheel four and the man’s back four.

Things this fast, she is saying, would be in more than one place at once in the painting. They connect several spaces. We see where the cyclist is, but also where he was. The composite image, the layered looking, allows us to see movement.

LOOKING AND LANDSCAPE

Our baby grows up. History moves on. Imagine, now, that we are looking through the eyes of this child strapped to her father’s back in a Mexican sculpture from CE 900. She looks up and smiles.

As her father walks, she sees movement. She has seen a lot, this kid. The world has pulled into focus for her, and become chromatic. She can easily track her parents’ movements now, and has seen distance and looked into the eyes of animals. Her brain has learnt how to stabilise movement. Her looking life is well under way. Next we should consider her encounter with the visual world of emotions, but before we do so, let’s have an interlude, as journeys have interludes. Let’s imagine her seeing the natural world’s tableaux, what we call landscapes. As she is jogged along on her father’s back, or around his shoulders, she will see such tableaux, this girl – growing spaces that have form. She will be on a guided tour of the visible world. At first she might see like this:

Beneath growing things, which will give her a sense that these yellow flowers are reaching. When she sees this . . .

. . . she will feel that everything – the thistles, the trees – is reaching that upwardness in nature that we will see all our lives.

She will notice gradation in colour and space. She will begin to feel extended by these landscapes.

And that snow, when she first sees it, is like a beach in that it reflects light upwards, under her chin.

She will see that in nature there are accidents of positioning and colour, which you could call form.

In her life, she will sometimes encounter form in nature that will astonish her because of its symmetry or fanning, its design and display.

She will start to notice how colour and space combine with form and light.

And will perhaps think that she is in the most splendid place in the world.

But there will be more. She will happen upon sheep by a river, which kick up dust in a way that will remind her of all sorts of looking – into a goat’s eyes, Leonardo’s sfumato, Goethe’s colour wheel.

And, on that savannah, she might glimpse her future solitude.

In doing so, in seeing her emotions symbolised or reflected in things outside herself which are, in reality, indifferent to those emotions, she will be projecting. She will be connecting to the tableaux of the natural world. Throwing a line from our inner world onto the outer world, like a boat throws a line onto the dock as it arrives in harbour, is something people will always do. It is what E.M. Forster meant when he wrote ‘only connect’.

If we do not grow up in a city, and are alert whilst looking at the natural world, we will come to learn how to read a landscape, its habits and revelations: the green flash at sunset; the fact that if you lie on your belly to watch the sun dip below the horizon, then jump up exactly as it does so and you see another moment of it, you are proving that the Earth curves; a holly bush is less prickly at the top because its grazers cannot reach up there; hydrangeas change colour, from blue in acid soil to pink if the ground becomes more alkaline; if you see a secondary rainbow, its colour sequence will be the opposite of the first one; shadows are always slightly blue because they are gently lit by the blue light from the sky; when the Moon is a crescent and if we can see the pale remainder of it, we do so because it is being lit by the Sun’s light reflecting from the Earth, so called ‘earthshine’.

Seeing each of these things will help us understand the natural world and feel part of it. Such looking changed as human culture underwent a series of revolutions. For nomadic people, an expanse of desert or grassland was something you moved through according to the seasons, in search of pasture or animals to hunt. Come the agricultural revolution, land was what you settled on, cultivated and marked off as yours. The space you saw was the thing you worked and, if you were lucky, owned. Then landowners began to think of land and landscape, not to be worked but to be admired. It was art, it was picturesque. Come industrialisation and capitalism, further and ongoing detachments took place: workers crammed into cities, and what was outside cities – the countryside – was seen from a distance. Landscape became estranged, it was no longer readable as nomads or farmers would read it. It caught the eye as before, but had become an object of desire.

LOOKING AND EMOTION

The most affecting looking connections a child makes as it develops are to the emotions of others. It enters the world of visible emotion. In New York, people were moved by Marina Abramović’s simple stare, but what happens early in our lives when people who are clearly feeling something stray into our field of vision? Maybe they are far away and their back is turned:

In this painting Pablo Picasso does not show us the woman’s face, but we can read her body language. Her head tilts left, on top of the child, and her left shoulder drops to create a scoop in which to hold it. Her body language is inward; she is hugging the child so tightly that we see nothing of her arms. The mood is blue, the pain is blue. The background, what is in front of her, is empty or obscured. As we look at her we might imagine that she has closed her eyes. She seems to cast a shadow on the ground, but also up the wall on the right, as if she is in a prison cell.

Which perhaps she was. Picasso had been visiting the Saint-Lazare women’s hospital-prison in Paris in the period before he painted this, and a close friend had, a year previously, committed suicide. It is hard not to read solitude and despair in this picture, and, by not showing the woman’s face, the painter leaves room for us to project emotions and scenarios onto it, to connect what we feel to what she feels.

Kenji Mizoguchi, whose misty lake scene we encountered earlier, understood this. Like Picasso, he portrayed women in his work more than men. In one of his best early films, Osaka Elegy, the woman, Ayako, has family problems so is forced into having an affair with her boss. In this scene, like the mother in Picasso’s painting, she turns her back to us to hide her pain, but stands upright, holding herself together.

We see this and are moved. We are not confronted with her sadness head-on, and so there is room for ours. But what if the suffering person turns around to face us? In this Mayan figurine from CE 600–900, the crying woman seems lost in herself.

Her eyes are closed and her right hand covers her left eye, a double enclosure. Yet she is not trying to hide from us. Her sadness has taken her beyond shyness, and so her chin is raised slightly, as if she is coming out of a spasm of tears. As we look, we think that this woman will survive. She is not crumpled. She has poise.

We would find it painful to look at a real woman crying, especially if she was someone we knew, so art in most cultures has allowed us to look at such sadness in a surrogate way. In Christianity, paintings of the lamentation of Christ – for example Giotto’s extraordinary fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel – depict those around the dead Jesus Christ in a wailing spiral, as if sadness is a vortex, a seen thing that spirals outwards.

In almost all of the lamentations, the bodies are shown full length, but many artists have felt that the discretion of Picasso and Mizoguchi in only showing the back, and the body language of the Mexican sculpture and the lamentations, were all too oblique. They wanted us to look directly, closely, at human faces to read the emotions in them. This silver-plated iron mask was found in Homs, Syria, and dates from the second millennium BCE:

The mask might have been worn in combat, but it is the teardrops that catch our eye. The central one below the man’s left eye is pulled downwards by gravity, into a globe, but on either side of it is another one – spherical, like a dew drop. Unlike the Mexican woman, this king’s tears do not seem momentary. They are stylised, as if a lifetime of sadness is being suggested. The face is not wrenched. It is in repose, the mouth slightly open like the eyes are slightly open. Looking at this face, we seem to see not the onslaught of emotion, but its memory.

In the twentieth century, when the Danish film-maker Carl Theodor Dreyer came to show the religious trial of the fifteenth-century French-woman Jeanne d’Arc, he did so by filming his actor – Falconetti – mostly in close-up. Here, as in the Syrian mask, tears fall from an unadorned face, seen almost square-on.

When we get to the late nineteenth century in our story, we will see that the close-up was one of cinema’s most distinctive visual strategies, but at this stage let’s imagine that this is not a still from a movie, but a moment seen by our developing child. She reads this face. The downcast eyes are not appealing directly to her for help. The muscles around the mouth and on the forehead are not contorted. The lower lip drops slightly. There is quietude in how the tears drop. The storm has passed, though another might be on its way.

It is important for us to learn to look at emotions for evolutionary reasons, of course. We need to be able to see if someone is going to help us or hurt us. But looking at emotion is not only self-interested. Take this painting, Susanna and the Elders, by Ottavio Mario Leoni.

The woman has been accused of adultery by the two men. She is condemned to death, but is eventually released when the men cannot agree on where the adultery took place. In the painting, though she is almost naked, Susanna is not perturbed. She looks up at the men, reaches out; she wears a pearl necklace, her hair is up and her make-up carefully applied. The scene is calm. She and the men seem to be discussing her fraught situation with relatively little emotion.

Then look at the same subject painted by Artemisia Gentileschi.

This Susanna turns away. Both her hands are up, gesturing to the men that they should leave her alone. Her brow is furrowed, the redness in her cheeks shows upset, shame maybe, and her hair is down. The first painter saw the subject as a theme, a discourse, a morality tale to consider. Gentileschi sees pain, perhaps abuse. In the first picture, the moment could go on for some time; in the second, Susannah wants it to end as quickly as possible.

Gentileschi is looking in a precise way. She was only seventeen when she painted the picture, and the records suggest that she had been raped a year earlier. As most painters until this time – the early 1600s – had been men, many artworks had a tendency to downplay the suffering in such mythic stories, or to present them in such a way as to allow the men who looked at them to imagine themselves as the men in the scene. Gentileschi does not quite allow this. She directs our eyes past the discourse, below its bonnet, into the suffering. She is putting herself in the position of Susanna, asking what she would have felt, closing the psychological distance that the story otherwise affords.

In other words, she is empathising with her, she is connecting. At its best, looking allows such empathy. It makes us travel along the z-axis, out of our own experience, into someone else’s. It requires an element of self-loss, a dialling down of our own mental noise and rooted subjectivity, in order to dial up the other’s. Our eyes are disembodied. Looking at the pain of others is a key way in which we counterbalance the centripetal force of being us with the centrifugal ability to see how they see.

To understand this more, let’s jump to the year 1543, and the deathbed of a sixty-nine-year-old Polish man. As he lies there, into his hands is placed a copy of his book, The Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs. He came to write it because he, like many before him, looked at the paths of the planets in the night sky and was puzzled by how complex the orbits are. Most of the patterns of nature are simple, yet the Sun, Moon and other heavenly bodies did not move in simple ways. Why? His explanation was a leap in understanding, a centrifugal thought, arrived at by himself and other thinkers before him. The orbits look complex because we observe them from where we happen to be, on planet Earth. If, instead, we stood on the surface of the Sun and looked from there, the paths would look much simpler because . . . the planets orbit it and not us.

The Polish man’s name was Mikołaj Kopernik, better known as Nicolaus Copernicus. He is in the hall of fame of looking because his work introduced humility to seeing. Maybe, because he was from Poland at a time when the Mediterranean was thought of as the centre of the trading world, and Venice the centre of that centre, he was less inclined to buy the idea that we are at the heart of things and others are peripheral. He did not have a colonial imagination. Maybe the centre’s elsewhere, he and others said (or nowhere). Copernicus taught us that From where are you looking? is one of the best questions we can ask. He dethroned the Christian Mediterranean.

Dethroning is part of empathy, and neuroscience helps us understand it more. Two Italian researchers, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, monitored the brains of monkeys when they did a task, and then the brains of monkeys who simply watched the task being done. They found that the same bits of brain lit up in each case. You use the same part of your brain when reaching for a peanut as you do when watching a peanut being reached for, though the latter is much smaller, about 10 to 20 per cent of the former. Doing and looking at doing are, in brain terms, similar in kind.

The implications of such mirror neuron activity are still being debated, but in principle the discoveries show that looking at another person’s emotions can make us feel those emotions, though less strongly. This is common sense, but it explains why Gentileschi’s painting is different from Leoni’s, and establishes the role that looking can play in social cohesion and multicultural interaction. The bigger question becomes how looking-inspired empathy interacts with our other behaviours and instincts. We look at this image of someone begging on the streets of Dublin at the time of Ireland’s economic crash.

Is it a woman? Do her clothes make us guess that she is Eastern European? Old? We see the snow and her gloves and the fact that she seems to be sitting on a rolled up cloth and we feel her coldness, her plight. The image is helping us understand the pain of others. But this is a cropped photograph. Reveal the full picture, and we are troubled in a different way.

The women on the left have nice warm clothes and handbags. They are not looking at the homeless person and seem to be keeping as far away from her as possible. We as onlookers can empathise in two ways here, especially if we identify with the women on the left who would hate to be the woman on the right, and who share her space, but who are psychologically very far away from her. This is a picture of empathy tension. The three metal structures which brace the bridge seem strange bracket metaphors. Our eyes cross the image as they do, connecting left to right.

The ambiguity of the above picture raises the issue of the opposite of empathy: aggression or looking for a fight. In this famous moment in the film Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro looks at himself in the mirror and asks ‘You talkin’ to me?’

But it is not really a moment about talking. Printed as an image in a book like this, we obviously do not hear the dialogue. We see the confrontation, the burning eyes, the held stare. Just as looking at Abramović brought tears, looking can bring fear. People in dangerous places learn not to make, or hold, eye contact with potential aggressors. Doing so can make the aggressors feel invaded and challenged. De Niro here is looking for a fight, rehearsing a fight. A line in Shakespeare’s Othello – ‘This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven’ – captures the violence of a look.

This is just a fragment of a nineteenth-century Congolese nkondi. Though its eyes are barely there, the open V of the eyebrows and the forward head give us a sense of the aggressive intent of the piece. Its stare was meant to scare: in this case to keep people away from a place where bodies were buried. The mouth is very similar to De Niro’s, more open on one side, the beginning of a snarl. The nkondi and Travis Bickle, De Niro’s character, say, Go back or there will be trouble. Do not proceed!

In this chapter the looking life of our developing child has proceeded. The way we see has acquired vectors, directions, bridges. We looked at the eyes of other living things; from place to place to see movement; to the natural world to see message and story in it; and to the feelings of our fellow human beings. We have become detectives in the visual world. The story of our looking grows. Now it is time to look at ourselves.