Just Looking
In Plato’s Republic, a shepherd named Gyges took a golden ring from a giant whose dead body spilled out of the fissure of an earthquake. At a gathering with fellow shepherds, Gyges discovered that if he turned the ring a certain way, others could not see him. If he turned it back, he became visible again. Using the ring, Gyges schemed his way into the royal palace, seduced the Queen, killed the King and seized the throne. To Plato, this was only to be expected. “No one would have such iron strength of mind as to stand fast in doing right or keep his hands off other men’s goods, when he could go to the marketplace and fearlessly help himself to anything he wanted, enter houses and sleep with any woman he chose, set prisoners free and kill men at his pleasure, and in a word go about among men with the powers of a god.” Plato, what a scared, suspicious world you evoked! Dangerous ifs lurked everywhere. Strangers had hearts of greed. Knowing others were watching, everyone moved with shoulders squared and tense. Why couldn’t Gyges instead have discovered the giant’s magic, laughed like Pan and kicked a comedy into motion? Blowing a signal on his pipes, he’d gather nymphs around him and entertain them with now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t antics. Imagine the complications of hide-and-seek when one player could turn his ring, vanish in a poof of dandelions and reappear in an impossible elsewhere. Instead of victimizing others through invisibility, Gyges could entrance them. Or Gyges could keep to himself, neither rampaging nor dancing to an audience. Unseen, he could watch people and things up close that would normally be shut away from shepherds and the hoi polloi. With no need for a spyglass or surveillance gadgets, he could hop gates, hitchhike on chariots or trains, open treasure chests to feel the cold sparkle of jewels, swipe tastes of delicacies in the best kitchens and eavesdrop anywhere, leaving everything as before.
* * *
I wish I’d had Gyges’ magic ring when I worked in China as an English editor in the 1980s. One weekend when a winter chill swept down from Siberia, I took the train to the gritty coal-mining city of Datong with a friend who worked downstairs as a French editor. Adrienne had thick blond hair, blue eyes like me, a much better knowledge of the local language and a guidebook that explained the history and iconography of the Buddhist relics in Datong’s outskirts, carved and painted within hillside caves.
There we coughed from air clogged with coal dust and ashes and had difficulty finding a place to eat that was not as grimy indoors as all the windows and surfaces outside. And though the grottoes were too dimly lit for Adrienne to read me the guidebook commentary, I took the whole expedition as a challenging, fun adventure – until we waited in the Datong station for our train back to our jobs in Beijing.
As we sat on a hard wooden bench, our eyelids drooping from fatigue, a semi-circular cordon of country people two layers deep formed about twenty feet away from us. Adults and children in worn peasant clothing stared at us silently with flat expressions. Not one of them joked, pointed or nudged the relative next to them with a comment. They just kept looking, as if Adrienne and I were moon rocks, objects alien to their world. Their indifferent, stolid gazes made me feel more like a stone statue turned up from the earth than like a person. I glanced at the clock mounted high on the wall and dreaded the hour and a half we’d still have to endure this unnerving situation.
A middle-aged woman in a railway uniform began bustling through the space the crowd had left open, then stopped. Sizing up the tableau, she crooked her finger at Adrienne and me. We followed her to a corner of the station into a windowless alcove with a door that closed. From the inkwells and piles of stapled papers, it appeared that here she and other railway workers wrote up reports. Relief at our temporary invisibility filled us, and we dozed until the woman returned. She escorted us to our train through a phalanx of peasants who watched like they’d been waiting patiently for the animated moon rocks to reappear.
* * *
I wish I’d had Gyges’ ring in Maui once at the municipal swimming pool where my husband and I swam when the ocean roughed up. On the doors into the scruffy men’s and the women’s locker rooms, signs said that children five and older had to use the locker room corresponding to their gender. Under-five girls could go in with their fathers and under-five boys with their mothers. In theory this policy sounded reasonable, but one day along with me and two other naked women showering after a swim was a boy who seemed like age four and eleven-twelfths.
Normally nudity in that setting felt relaxed and easy. But this boy, fully dressed, stood under the towel hooks and stared at me so long, so impassively that I finally hissed, “Stop it.” I turned my back to him and finished my shower without shampooing my hair. I dressed speedily and sat down in the sun within the pool enclosure to process what had taken place. I felt violated – and confused. Was I being ridiculous? Was the age-five cutoff point wrong? The boy seemed to be taking cold, adult-level pleasure in making me uncomfortable.
When I discussed the incident with my husband, he mentioned that he’d been showering once when a little girl of around three was wandering amidst naked male adults in his locker room at the pool. “Why isn’t that child abuse?” he asked me. I wordlessly shook my head. “Don’t know.” He’d viewed the situation for its effect on the child, I noted. Though he’d wrapped his lower body in a towel and then hotfooted out of the locker room as soon as he’d put on street shorts, he hadn’t felt exposed so much as worried for the girl.
* * *
Another Gyges tale has come down to us from ancient Greece. In Herodotus’ Histories from the fifth century BCE, Gyges was a trusted bodyguard to King Candaules, who loved his wife and considered her the most beautiful woman in the world. The king wanted this assessment confirmed by letting Gyges see his wife naked. “But master, I believe you,” protested Gyges. Reassured that the queen wouldn’t realize he was looking, Gyges agreed.
The king’s wife did glimpse Gyges slipping from his hiding place, however, and despite her fury at both the king and Gyges for this plot, she said nothing. Later she summoned Gyges and gave him a choice. He must either kill the king and take the throne himself or be killed for having seen what he should not see. Gyges decided to live. With the wife’s assistance, and the Delphic oracle’s later blessing, he killed King Candaules as he slept and then ruled over the land with the queen.
Herodotus didn’t moralize about Candaules’ kinky quirk, which brought about his death. Perhaps he felt readers would sympathize with the king’s understandable weakness. After all, what good is owning a valuable painting if no one knows you have it, having secret wealth you can never spend, possessing a rare talent that has never been publicly acclaimed or feeling a superlative love that no one envies? Someone else seeing and judging helps. Yet what about the woman’s anguish: Did scheming her husband’s death and crowning Gyges king undo her humiliation and rage at being displayed at her most private and vulnerable?
* * *
When I write I’m disembodied and invisible to the reader. Without needing a special ring, I’m pure thought. I can speculate, hypothesize, remember, reason, wonder and juggle words as if they’re sparkly firesticks. Through the magic of the written word, others encounter my ideas. They can smile in appreciation, marvel at my stupidity, click prematurely to the next blog post, experience a shift in a concept, scoff like a pundit, formulate a comment, read me aloud to their partner who’s munching bagels and cream cheese – all when I’m not there. Being looked at is something we humans instinctively react to. Whether it’s a glance, a stare, a leer, a wink or a lover’s rapt gaze, someone else’s seeing ropes us into a shared world with complicated dynamics. In neither Plato’s nor Herodotus’ story did Gyges yearn for freedom from others’ scrutiny. But I enjoy such freedom tremendously, even if it’s a temporary, partial or illusory liberation. Unseen I’m not captive to the opinions or controls of others.
* * *
If only I’d had Gyges’ ring in a recent incident close to home! When I’d just started a five-mile run on country dirt roads, a rangy young man bumped out of the driver’s seat of a parked pick-up truck. Clean-cut, earnest, he held a cell phone face up as if it were a disappointing report card. I assumed he was lost, needing directions. In the rural hills where I live, postal addresses don’t match the boundaries of towns, and visitors can get confused. “You know the lot on Old Main Road that has a chain across the drive and a ‘No Trespassing’ sign?” he asked. I thought and nodded. He extended his phone. “Is this you?”
On his screen, a woman wearing a black running shirt and gray gym shorts stood in front of the chained driveway he’d mentioned. Me, yes. “I never went in,” I told him. “I didn’t go past the sign.”
“What were you doing?” he pursued. In our local towns, private property starts twenty feet from the center of the road. Perhaps I’d encroached onto his land, strictly speaking, though I’d stayed on the public side of his do-not-enter sign.
“There was a weird white shape in the field,” I explained. “I wanted to see what it was. A boat, covered up.” He gazed at me, unimpressed. “I was curious, that’s all,” I added in annoyed self-defense. ATVs had been roaring around in his back woods, he said. Come on, I’m a hooligan? I took off, incredulous. When my run reached the spot in question, I stopped. Hunting with my eyes, I detected a walkie-talkie-sized object with a stubby antenna hanging ten feet up off a tree.
Curiosity can violate people, when intense or hidden lookings treat us as if we’re objects. But curiosity about things – where is its harm? Before the no-go chain and sign showed up, I’d actually run by hundreds of times and wondered about the old white cabin beyond the young man’s field, peeking out amongst tree trunks and leaves. It seemed mounted on stilts, an oddity much more tantalizing than a covered-up boat. If I could turn a doodad on my finger and become a wisp of wind, I would have explored. And now, without Gyges’ ring, just looking threatened to become a crime.
* * *
The author of essays in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue and NPR, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com/). Her fiction has appeared in Yankee, Writers Forum, Flash Fiction, Bright Flash Literary Review and New Stories from New England. She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).